Mongrel Company

Coin, and nothing else¶

The Mongrel Company is a mercenary host stitched together from deserters, criminals and sellswords with nowhere else to go. They fight for pay, not cause. Their loyalty lasts exactly as long as the coin holds weight, and they are honest about this in a way most employers find refreshing right up until the contract lapses.

Discipline exists when enforced. Law is followed when profitable. To those who hire them the Company is a blunt instrument, and to those who face them it is a reminder that violence needs no banner.

Coldcamp¶

The Company has no country and one fixed address: the wintering ground it returns to when the season ends, which everyone including the Company calls Coldcamp.

It is a town in the sense that ten thousand people sleep there. It has no charter, no magistrate and no walls worth the name, on the reasoning that walls suggest something inside worth taking and the Company prefers not to make that suggestion. What it does have is the muster roll, the paymaster and the surgeons, and those three things are the whole of the institution. A captain who loses his company keeps his place in Coldcamp. A captain who loses the paymaster's confidence does not.

No god, no grudge¶

The Company keeps no faith. There is nothing to convert, nothing to offend and nothing to appeal to, and a governor cannot buy their conscience because the invoice would come back marked as an unrecognised item.

This is not philosophy. It is recruitment policy. A host assembled out of every people and every deserting regiment on the map cannot afford a god, because a god would mean a quarrel, and the one thing Coldcamp cannot survive is its own men discovering a reason to hate each other in winter.

The most useful enemy on the map¶

They stand twenty points below neutral with everyone, which is the mildest hostility any power records, and the reason is straightforward: they are the only power in Valdrin that can be reliably turned.

If the Company is raiding your coast, somebody is paying for it, and the useful question is who and how much. Outbidding them is a legitimate defence policy, it is cheaper than a campaign, and it has ended more wars than any wall ever built. The Company keeps no grudge about being outbid. It regards the practice as a compliment to its pricing.

Meeting them¶

Read the contract, not the men.

A Company siege lifts the day the money stops, a Company garrison holds as long as the money lasts, and both facts are stated openly to anyone who asks. The governors who have come to grief against them are almost all governors who assumed there had to be something else going on underneath.

What the rolls record¶

Standing with other powers¶

Denied to its settlers¶

This people never builds: Wood Gatherer, Grove Shifter, Deep Mine.