The Three Coins and the Sangold Flow

The money of the world falls into three grades. The iron coin runs in the markets; one of them buys two lumps of coarse bread. Its rim is stamped with the Ironhart antler-pattern, and it passes just as well once the pattern is worn flat. The silver mark runs in the large dealings of nobles and the Church; its fineness is tested by the Mint at Ironhold, and once tested a fine mark is struck on it. The tomb gold is used only for the rites and for coronations, and not many are struck in a year; striking it privately is a capital crime, and even holding one has to be declared.

The dies for all three coins are in Ironhold's hands. The right to strike coin is the hand this dynasty keeps pressed on everyone else — the Crimson Flame's soldiers' pay, the Deepwood's taxes, the Blacksea's ransoms, all of it has to be turned into Ironhold's money at the end before it counts for anything.

Testing coin has a craft of its own. On a silver mark you look for the fine mark struck by the Mint, set in the third division of the rim; the position is moved once every five years, and which division it has moved to is known only to the money houses and the tax officers. The tomb gold does not circulate, and its form is different as well: round, without a hole, one face stamped with a seven-tined antler, the other left blank, weighing 1 tael 2 mace, and every hand it passes through has to be entered in a register. Iron coins in the markets wear worst of all; on one that has been in use a dozen years the antler-pattern is only a faint ring, and a stall-keeper can rub a thumb across it and know the metal.

The Sangold League is the one exception, and the one danger. It holds exchange, credit and transfer across borders; the silver of the seven realms moves back and forth in its ledgers, and a sum can travel from the desert to the icefield without one cart being harnessed on the way. Yet it cannot strike a single coin. A power that can move all the money and cannot make any, and a dynasty that can make money and is shorter of it every year — that account will be settled sooner or later.

The Sangold men have a saying of their trade, copied onto the last page of their contracts for generations:

Money knows no master, only collateral.

So when a Sangold banker can place 5,000 silver marks on deposit directly in a princess's court, that is not a loan — what he is staking is which side that princess will stand on later.