At nine o’clock tomorrow morning, four people will sit down at a table in the upper chamber of Guild Hall and assume responsibility for Bobington’s spice supply. They are not, by any conventional measure, prepared for the task. But then, no one has done this before.

The Spice Crisis Committee — Haroun Nazari (chair), Simeon Kade, wholesale broker Marta Engel, and Guild trade secretary Alistair Ferris — was named on Saturday following last Thursday’s unanimous Guild vote. Their mandate is both simple and impossible: manage the city’s dwindling spice reserves through a crisis whose duration no one can predict.

The Numbers

The numbers, such as they are, are not reassuring. Preliminary estimates suggest the Guild’s combined reserves could sustain the city for eight to ten weeks at rationed levels — a figure that depends heavily on how one defines “rationed” and whether the Kaelmar Strait remains effectively closed throughout.

More immediately concerning: Engel, who as Bobington’s largest wholesale broker tracks inventory with an accountant’s precision, estimates approximately forty pounds of velveroot remain in the entire city. Before the crisis, a busy restaurant kitchen might use two pounds in a week.

The Eastern Spice Index closed Friday at 347, its third consecutive daily decline and down from the record 356 reached on Wednesday. The modest easing reflects the Guild’s rationing announcement and cautious diplomatic optimism rather than any improvement in actual supply.

The Cap

The 250 per cent price cap — no Guild member may charge more than two-and-a-half times the spice’s price on 10 February, the last trading day before the crisis fully took hold — takes effect Monday morning. It covers approximately eighty per cent of Bobington’s commercial spice trade by volume, representing the Guild’s membership.

The remaining twenty per cent — non-Guild independents, private transactions, and whatever enters through informal channels — falls outside the cap’s reach. Marsh-Pembroke understands that several smaller merchants have already been approached by restaurateurs offering premium prices for off-book purchases. Whether the cap will hold in practice depends on whether the Guild can maintain collective discipline under mounting financial pressure.

Kade, proprietor of The Willow Table and a committee member, has himself been adapting his restaurant to the crisis. He pulled his signature braised lamb shoulder a week ago when velveroot ran out and describes his approach as “honest adaptation — not pretending we have what we don’t.” Whether his fellow restaurateurs share this philosophy remains to be seen.

The Audit

Wednesday’s stockpile audit will be the committee’s first concrete act. Engel is expected to lead the inventory process, coordinating with Guild members to produce a comprehensive accounting of what remains in Bobington’s warehouses, cellars, and storerooms.

“The difficulty,” one Guild source explained, “is that merchants have strong incentives to understate their holdings. If you declare forty crates of saffron bark, you may find yourself obliged to share. If you declare twenty, you keep the difference.”

Ferris, as trade secretary, will serve as the committee’s administrative officer and Foreign Office liaison — the latter role having taken on unexpected significance since the Guild’s 67-signature petition was hand-delivered to Chancery Row last Thursday.

The Diplomatic Question

The petition asked that spice trade concerns be included in the Kaelmar quiet channel talks. The Foreign Office responded with characteristic opacity: concerns “will be considered within the appropriate diplomatic framework.”

With the first Soren-Hale session expected Tuesday, the committee faces a question it cannot answer on its own: should Bobington’s diplomats raise the spice trade with Delvaria, or would doing so complicate a process that is already fragile? Nazari is understood to believe the former. Not everyone at the Foreign Office agrees.

In the meantime, the committee will do what committees do — count, allocate, enforce, and hope that the world beyond the Guild Hall doors arranges itself favourably.

The shelves, for the moment, are growing lighter.