Kishuntar holds the office of Harbor-Reeve at Nadang, the largest of the northern ports, which makes him the man Gorath deals with when it deals with the Tamadrezan coast at all. Reeves are not soldiers and not magistrates. They are the local notables the empire lets keep order in the villages it does not bother to garrison, on the understanding that order means the tribute arrives and the ships are not interfered with. Kishuntar has held the post longer than any reeve before him, and he is very good at it.
His central work is the navigation fee. A northern village that wants the Slavewatch patrols to be somewhere else on a given week pays into a fund, and Kishuntar carries that money down through the passes to the fortress, where it lands in Helmo's ledger and Tribune Volso's so-called comfort fund. The fee began as a smuggler's convenience, a way to move untaxed fish and contraband past the garrison. Kishuntar set the rates, took his cut, and kept the books so clean that Slavewatch came to treat him as the one reliable thing on a coast it otherwise despised. Gorath believes it owns him. The money is steady, he never raises a complaint, and he wears the manner of a man who would sell his own grandmother for a clear profit margin.
That manner is the most careful thing about him. Years ago Kishuntar understood a fact that has not occurred to anyone at Slavewatch: a fee paid is a fee paid, and the garrison does not check whose feet are in the gap it sold. The same patrol-blind window a village buys to run contraband will just as well pass a column of escaped Drasnians. So he routes them through it, in the slavers' own paperwork, on the slavers' own schedule, charged at the going rate so the books stay ordinary. The Moon Road's most valuable asset is the channel Kishuntar runs for the people the Road exists to defeat.
A fee paid is a fee paid. Slavewatch never asks whose feet are in the gap they sold me. — Kishuntar, to a Moon Road conductor
The arrangement survives only as long as no one looks at the timing. If Helmo ever cross-reads the fee-dates against an escape, or a captured conductor gives up the reeve's name, Kishuntar dies and the whole northern accommodation dies with him. So he can never be seen to care about anything but his cut. The resistance in the north counts him a collaborator of the worst kind, and he lets them. The handful of people who know what he actually does can be counted without using a second hand.