The Steel is what Feldians call the trade in professional violence, and everyone in that trade: standing mercenary companies, freelance veterans, siege engineers, drillmasters who train a market town’s militia for a fee and move on. It has no commander and no banner. A company that takes contracts is the Steel. So is the one-armed man in a village who teaches the levy how to hold a line, and gets paid in beer and grain for it.
Companies and the Hall
The working unit is the company, and companies are private concerns. Some are a dozen riders and a cook. The largest field several hundred, own their own horses and baggage, and have outlived three generations of the families that founded them. Grenzmark is the heartland — the march has fought every neighbor it has, and a duchy that never quite stops needing soldiers ends up producing them for export.
The Mercenary’s Hall in Grenzmark is the nearest thing to a center. It is not a headquarters. It is a building where contracts are negotiated in the open, copied into the Hall’s books by clerks who charge for the ink, and where disputes between a company and an employer are arbitrated by whichever old captains happen to be in residence. Their rulings have no legal force whatsoever and are obeyed almost without exception, because the alternative is to be read out — named aloud in the Hall as a company that broke faith. Two houses in living memory have survived being read out. Neither is still hiring.
The code
Fulfil the contract. Do not turn on an employer, however tempting the moment. Honor the terms when the conditions change and the terms have become expensive.
Mercenaries will explain this in plain commercial language if you ask. Reputation is the whole of the asset. A company with fifty years of clean contracts commands three times the rate of one with the same numbers and no history, and it gets first refusal on the work worth having. Behind the accounting sits something the companies rarely say outright but clearly believe: that soldiering well is a craft, and that a professional who does it badly has failed at something real, regardless of who was in the right.
What the work is
Caravan escort for Coin merchants. Garrison and coastal watch in Seehaven, where a southern sail on the horizon is a permanent condition rather than an emergency. Militia training in the grain towns of Kornfeld. Bandit clearance, which is steady, unglamorous and occasionally very bad. Reconnaissance and survey work for dukes who want to know what is on the far side of a border without asking officially.
And duchy against duchy, when it comes to that. A company might ride for Grenzmark against Steinmark one summer and for both of them against raiders the next. Nobody involved finds this strange. The Steel sells a service, and the service does not come with an opinion.
What it knows
Companies trade intelligence the way merchants trade prices. Who is mustering, who has stopped paying, which pass is held, which lord’s levy would break at the first charge. Much of it is bar talk and some of it is worth a great deal of money. A captain looking for work knows more about the military condition of Feldia than most of the men who govern it.
Reputation
Ordinary people regard the Steel with a mixture of relief and unease that varies by how recently a company came through. A veteran on the road is a hard man with a trade, and that trade is not farming. But mercenaries in Feldia have a longer record of being paid and going home than of turning on the country that hired them, and the companies work hard to keep it that way.
There is one subject that empties the good humour out of the Hall. Agents from Eisenmark have been hiring — guarding works and supply lines, good coin, paid on time. Several men who took that work came back after a season, quit the profession outright, and would not say why. They tell other companies not to go. Nobody has produced a better account than that, and the contracts are still being offered.