Grøndar Kaldmar has never offered Trømgodd a charge worth witnessing, and he does not intend to. Among a people who measure a life by the wounds the rite-armor leaves on the way into a Nashua line, that alone marks him. He runs the other war. From a counting-room below the Warcouncil chambers of Levke he moves money the Strømgodden pretend they do not have: bribes for Tamadrezan harbor-clerks, passage laundered through the slavers' own paperwork, payments to the Drasnian conductors who walk escaped slaves out through the Moon Wilds. He is the covert hand behind the Moon Road, and almost no one in Levke says his name with respect.
What drives him is Grømnuul, not Trømgodd. A dwarf sold to Gorath is a dwarf whose name never reaches the long-table fire, whose ancestors stop being recited the year he is taken. Grøndar decided long ago that getting one Drasnian home to a hall that will speak his line is worth more than a thousand glorious deaths on the Nashua front, and saying so aloud made him a kind of heretic. The hawks on the Warcouncil, Brynja Vornmar loudest among them, call his work a disgrace: gold where there should be a charge, patience where there should be a host. He lets them say it. He has freed more Drasnians with a ledger than the Strømgodden host has freed with three centuries of glory, which is to say none at all.
He watches Gorath for one thing only. Emperor Veramus is sixty-three and cannot name a clean successor, and a contested election would split the legions long enough for a Drasnian rising to matter. Grøndar has spent years positioning for that morning, seeding coin and contacts so the Road can carry a flood instead of a trickle when it comes. His one operative who truly matters sits in Tamadrez under a false trade, Sigvar Dnyhak, feeding Levke's gold into the network and waiting, like his handler, for the empire to stumble.
A name that reaches no fire is a death we lost. I have stopped counting wounds. I count names. — Grøndar Kaldmar, to the Warcouncil of Levke