The Wardens

The marked passages are patrolled under the Standing Council’s authority by crews the Council does not employ. The Wardens are contracted squadrons out of Hound, mixed in nationality, paid by the season, licensed at Darsen and watched from there, and they are the only armed force the system operates in common. Nobody designed it this way and nobody proposes to change it, because a standing fleet would have to belong to somebody and there is no somebody the rest would accept.

Belonging to nobody is the point. A squadron is crewed from four moons at once, so a Velyrian vessel can be stopped by people no Velyrian court can reach, and that single fact is what the arrangement is bought for. Crews carry service markings and their own squadron devices. There is no crest and there is nothing standing behind them to appeal to.

Their authority ends where the marking ends, and the Wardens keep that line more strictly than Caldrin does. Off the charted route they may not search, a captain who has crossed it is simply gone, and the crews mind this considerably more than the arrangement does. One search beyond the line would finish the whole thing inside a year, and every Warden can name the officer who nearly managed it.

So the lanes are the safest ground in the system and everything a short way off them is policed by nobody whatever. The Council has understood this for four hundred years. Extending the marking is the only remedy anyone has put forward that does not require a fleet, and it is proposed at intervals and funded at none of them.

The Faithful are what that costs, stated plainly enough that the crews resent it more than the Council does. A body that sabotages Deep infrastructure and now and then kills a Summoner works a short way off the lane and has never been a Warden matter in its history, the approaches to the Deep being Kharadi corridors with no marking anywhere near them. Velyr proposed putting squadrons on those corridors, Velyrian money being exposed to precisely the interruption the Faithful threaten, and Kharad declined inside the sitting. Both governments understood what was on offer, which was crews from four moons in passages Velyr has never been permitted to see. The argument for extending the marking is made again after every incident, by people who can predict its funding exactly.