Bank of Haudh-Gwenn

Haudh-Gwenn has one bank, and it is the financial heart of the town: loans, debt, land titles, and the major trade notes all move through it. It is quiet, cold and immensely powerful, and money moves in Haudh-Gwenn because the bank allows it to move. It does not advertise. Not many people know it is there and it prefers that, since occasionally a fool comes in to steal a thing or two and it does not end well for him.

The House

It is built of the same dull, metal-veined Mól stone as the town hall. Inside is an atrium: three teller windows in the far wall, a door beside them for the clerks, and another immediately to the left, reinforced, very old and very ornate. The ceiling overhead is flat for the first dozen feet and then opens into something like a cathedral. In each corner of it a hobgoblin is carved out of the wall itself, in a different posture, and each of them contrives to hold a ledger in one hand and a corner of the ceiling in the other.

The flat part is a floor, and the floor belongs to a gallery of seats like a choir loft. Two men sat up there when the party first walked in. One had a crossbow in his hands and the other the strap for one, and both had a clean shot at anyone standing on the floor below. A half-orc a little over six feet stood by the door. Nobody spoke, so a visitor heard his own boots and became conscious of them. The teller was a hobgoblin in a clerk’s dress, well turned out but not fine, with an open ledger in front of him written in a language a stranger will probably not read.

The stone is worth as much as the guards. Electrum runs through Mól walls and stops anything melting through them, and the bank’s walls would stop it too.

Getting In

An unknown depositor is a risk the bank is taking with no collateral against it, so a stranger needs a sponsor: a name, and that name’s own accounts, pledged behind him. The Valiant Few were let in on two things at once, the sponsorship of Elliot and their reputation as the company that had just broken a slave trade, and the teller was frank that the second mattered. Conversion costs a copper a head. Five gold held for a year begins to draw interest and the interest pays out monthly.

What a depositor leaves with is a writ, a paper stating what he holds, which can be carried to partner banks in Bardh and to the closely set banks nearer home and drawn against there, the ledgers balanced between the houses afterwards. It is meant so that a traveler need not carry his money on his person. Destroy the writ and the money simply stays where it is, locked. The first accounts the party opened were logged on the 8th of Orie, AYR 671.

Its guards are elite and privately hired by the council, and are not the town military and not the muscle anyone else in Haudh-Gwenn can hire. A vault can be taken under one name with rights of transfer to another, which is an old merchant’s habit and, once, the only reason the party kept anything at all.

Whose It Is

No two answers to that question have ever agreed. Haudh-Gwenn’s own description calls it a council-run bank managing the city’s finances. The teller Celic, asked outright with the party’s money missing, was frightened and apologetic and forbidden to answer; what he would say is that the ownership is local and deliberately hidden. What the party pieced together afterwards is that the Grayeras controlled it. And what Naevora Grayeras told them years later is that the council disposes of it outright.

Her account runs like this. Sarro Rashid ran the bank fairly and built the town’s close trade with Peredhel out of it, and made enemies as the council’s voice of reason, and was ousted. The council handed the bank to Beltran. His tenure was brief and chaotic, and it was precisely the window in which the party’s accounts were quietly emptied as defunct to pay for the operation at The Crack. For the debacle he was kicked upstairs to captain of the guard, and Johanka Materai took the bank. Whent, who was in the family’s house for thirty years, told it differently: that Beltran was voted in more or less out of boredom, after his father pushed him to grow up once the slave ring collapsed. The appointment was announced publicly either way.

Sarro did not give up the bank willingly. A bugbear crew under Daric took the councilman’s family, bound and gagged, out of town on a wagon months before anyone connected it, and a second company was paid through a broker to make them disappear, tucked away rather than killed. That is what made him cede it.

Three people have told how Materai came by it after that, and the three do not fit together. A broker of the Silver Web had it that Sarro lost it to her directly, after his family were taken and after some incident at a warehouse. A week of Mikhail’s own digging turned up that she had never run a bank before in her life and was handed one recently, either because Beltran removed the previous banker or because she blackmailed her way in, and he noted at the time that this was not what the Silver Web had told him. Naevora’s version puts Beltran’s own tenure in between the two of them.

Campaign Updates

The party opened accounts on their first visit, five or six gold each, and Aldo amused himself by opening and canceling one over and over while Mikhail tested the acoustics with his lute and was shushed by armed men.

They came back the following winter to a different building. Eleven guards or more, swords already drawn, one of them carrying a greatsword on the floor of the atrium. Koa’s account was closed and the gold in it taken, declared defunct; about a dozen accounts were closed the same way, Edrick’s among them, and the party lost something near eighteen gold between them. A closed account is not honored through the partner banks either, so there was nowhere to take it. What survived was the gems, and only because Yullen Gemsmith had lodged them under his own name with transfer rights out of an old man’s caution. Celic could not say who had ordered it. The party left threatening to spread word that the bank was not safe, and Mikhail set about writing a slander song cycle on the bank and the Grayeras, to be performed only once the three of them were clear of the city.

They never got the money back. Eleven weeks later they were down to about three gold between three of them, and long afterwards they were still taking writs rather than coin on a hundred and fifty gold’s worth of business, specifically because they did not trust the place.

Others fared differently and not consistently. Gwenivere Velmont, warned to go and check, came back downcast but reported that nothing of hers had been touched; later she counted six gold lost when Beltran’s people redid the bank. Both statements are hers. Elliot, who had sponsored the party into the building, came out of that same winter deep in debt to a loan from it.

By the time Haudh-Gwenn stood close to open revolt the bank was frozen. Withdrawals stopped behind a council writ, with the guard on it heavier than ever, in a town where shops were closing early and people were disappearing. Materai was by then lending the city’s own money cheaply to nobles to buy the council out from under Beltran, because she owed him her seat and hated owing it, and she kept a book on every noble she lent to. Its records go back at least sixty years and are consulted: she tested a stranger’s cover at her own soirée by observing that no Breen had banked in Haudh-Gwenn in sixty years, which was true.

What became of the building through the riot, and whether the freeze was ever lifted, was never written down.