The Harpoon Office

Intelligence Ring — Corsair Coasts#

"Every chandler's boy in this harbor has a second employer. The question is only which Office branch is paying him." — Corsair captain, unnamed

The Harpoon Office is the Corsair Coasts' distributed intelligence service, operating through the mundane infrastructure of harbor life: chandleries, ropeworks, customs houses, tide-registry clerks, and the porters who shift cargo between ships. Its agents do not look like spies because most of them are not spies first — they are tradespeople and functionaries who sell observations alongside their ordinary wares. The Office aggregates this stream of small intelligence into harbor movement reports, cargo manifests, naval disposition summaries, and political gossip sold to pirates, city-states, and distant thrones willing to pay the asking price.

No one is certain whether the Office originated as a field station of the Umbra Magni's Gray Laurel, a forgery created by Reach merchants to spy on their competitors, or something that simply grew from the habits of harbor people who were already selling secrets informally. The Office encourages all three theories. It has no central headquarters, no senior officer with a confirmed name, and no operational philosophy more specific than that information is worth more than cargo and spoils less in transit.

Adventurers wishing to sell the Office something usually find a buyer within a day of asking in any working harbor. Adventurers wishing to buy something discover that the price scales precisely with how badly they need the information, a fact that implies the Office already knew they were coming to ask. It is not wise to attempt to rob an Office broker — not because of any visible guard, but because the subsequent professional interest tends to be expensive.