Qepi Sandelyx was a contract-jurist of Bestacia, one of the Goshwen scholars the gnomes are known for, and the one who made Corwen Hostling's bargain enforceable. The tariff caps were the easy part. The hard part was the escort clause: writing a mutual-defense obligation precise enough that no member could later claim a raid on a neighbor's convoy was someone else's problem. The language Sandelyx settled on still governs how the Alliance council rules on which losses the members are bound to answer for.
Bestacia sent no soldiers to found the Alliance, and it has none worth the name now. It sent a lawyer. The cross-state notaries who came after Sandelyx built a whole tradition on the kind of binding she wrote, one that in time outgrew every national god and crystallized a daemon of its own. Her clauses have held longer than several of the navies that were meant to back them.