Coking Guild

The Coking Guild is an important organisation in the Eleven Cities which ring the Sea of Jars. They hold a virtual monopoly on the production and distribution of coke, a commodity of pivotal importance in the production of steel. This makes them a wealthy and influential enough institution to be considered one of the "member guilds" of the Commercial Guilds which operate much of the enterprise and industry of the cities.

History

The Coking Guild is one of the youngest of the member guilds recognised by the Commercial Guilds, being less than a century old. This is because the technology for producing coke itself is only slightly older than that. Coal has long been known in the Eleven Cities, existing in numerous small deposits around the Alluvial plain. It was interesting to look at but too fragile to work as an artistic medium, and while the peasantry of the plain had long ago discovered its potential as a fuel the labour-intensive process of extracting it from underground, as well as its disagreeable fumes, rendered it cost-ineffective in relation to charcoal or simple firewood. Villages near some of the more easily-accessible deposits made constructive sidelines selling consignments of the fuel to alchemists studying fire, but otherwise coal was largely discounted as a curiosity.
Roughly 150 years ago, however, the advent of the blast furnace created the need for fuel which would burn at very high temperatures. Experiments by alchemists, most notably the Alchemist's Guild of Dypholyos, led to the reassessment of coal as a fuel and, via further research, the refinement of coal into coke. Demand for this fuel led to something of a resource rush as ownership and exploitation of the accessible coal deposits on the alluvial plain suddenly became points of contention. The Commercial Guilds, seeing the obvious business potential of the new fuel, leveraged their existing influence and expertise to set up several substantial mines in pertinent areas of the plain and set up logistical chains required to transport the aggregates to ovens in the cities where it was rendered into coke. This material was then transported to furnaces where it is used in the manufacture of steel.
Although blast furnace technology swiftly spread throughout the cities, the number of such facilities remains small due to challenges and expenses involved in their construction. This limits the market for coke, but the operation of the furnaces that do exist creates a steady demand for the fuel. The Commercial Guilds therefore set up the coking guild as a permanent, semi-independent operation within their organisation, overseeing the operation of the southern mines and the transport of their product to coke ovens in Loros and Chogyos, its conversion into coke, and its transport to markets in other cities. The coking guild is therefore the only one of the major member guilds to have been set up as part of the existing bureaucracy of the Commercial Guilds rather than absorbed into it from outside.

Operations

The Coking Guild currently operate about a dozen coal mines around the Alluvial plain, mostly in the far south of the region. These operations are small, typically turning out only a few hundred pounds of coal a day each, and most operate primarily on indentured labour provided by the Commercial Guilds. A significantly larger number of paid labourers are involved in a system of cart lines which are used to transport the coal to coke ovens in Loros and Chogyos, where skilled professionals in the employ of the guild turn it into coke. This network notionally delivers coal to a coke oven every two days. In practice, every third day is more usual, though anything less efficient than that is considered dilatory. The Guild work with operatives of the broader Commercial Guild bureaucracy to improve efficiency, and their actions in doing so are known to extend to very assertive disciplinary action against lax employees. 
No coal deposit large enough to merit the sort of industrialisation the Coking Guild practices currently exists in private hands, and they take steps to preserve their monopoly. Most of the tiny deposits which villagers used to mine on behalf of alchemists have been tapped out, and operatives of the Guild investigate reports of other such deposits and offer respectable prices - made more attractive by their ability to pay up immediately - to absorb the coal into their operations. In Pholyos, stories abound of strongarm tactics in such negotiations, though independent accounts of such things actually happening are hard to come by.