The Merchants of Athas

Every city serves as the headquarters for at least half-a-dozen merchant houses, and several times that number maintain trading emporiums within the city walls. Usually, these trading emporiums are located in a particular quarter of town, where a purchaser can buy nearly anything that Athas has to offer if he knows where to look. Merchants are not citizens, for the nature of their work dictates that they maintain contact with a wide variety of societies (which makes our sorcerer-kings distrustful). Instead, merchants are granted longterm licenses to reside in a city, and in return they donate large sums of money to public works (i.e., to the sorcerer-king). Merchants are one of the few classes that the bureaucracy is careful not to harass. The templars have learned that if they try to intimidate or blackmail one merchant, they will find that everything they wish to buy from other merchants has inexplicably doubled in price or vanished from the market. Technically, merchants are not permitted to read or write, but they are allowed to keep accounts. I should note that most houses have highly developed methods of "keeping accounts." For all practical purposes, most merchants can both read and write in the secret language of their houses. Not surprisingly, jealous templars spend a considerable amount of energy trying to prove to the king that the keeping of accounts is, in fact, a form of reading and writing. For additional information on this subject, I have included a more complete description in the section entitled Merchant Houses later in this chronicle. Elven Merchants Some elven tribes earn their livelihoods as traders. Usually, they are less established than the merchant houses, so they sell their wares in crowded bazaars located on the edges of the true merchant quarter. Elves have a reputation for smuggling and selling banned goods such as spell components. (By the way, if you expect a merchant to guarantee his product, it is best not to buy from an elf).