The business of managing a shortage is, in its essentials, the business of counting. How much do we have? How quickly is it leaving? When does it run out? The Merchants’ Guild of Bobington spent Saturday answering these questions, or at least assembling the people whose job it will be to answer them.

The four members of the Spice Crisis Committee were formally named on Saturday afternoon. The committee, authorised by Thursday’s unanimous Guild vote, will hold its inaugural meeting at Guild Hall on Monday morning at nine o’clock.

The Committee

The membership reflects both commercial experience and institutional weight:

Haroun Nazari, the Ashbury Lane spice merchant, will serve as committee chair. Nazari’s family has been in the spice trade for three generations, and his warehouse — which carries over thirty varieties of eastern import — is the largest single spice holding in the city. He has already imposed purchasing limits on eighteen of his thirty-two varieties and has estimated that his current stock, under rationed conditions, can supply existing restaurant clients through mid-March.

Simeon Kade, proprietor of The Willow Table and a Guild member of fourteen years, brings the restaurateur’s perspective. His establishment was among the first to publicly adjust its menu in response to the crisis, and his advocacy for what he calls “honest adaptation” — acknowledging scarcity rather than disguising it — has been widely noted in the trade.

Marta Engel, a wholesale spice broker with offices on Threadneedle Lane, handles the largest volume of Guild-traded spice by weight. She has not previously appeared in these pages but is well known in the commercial quarter as the woman who knows, at any given moment, the precise quantity of velveroot remaining in the city. The answer, as of Saturday, is approximately forty pounds.

Alistair Ferris, the Guild’s trade secretary, will serve as the committee’s administrative officer and liaison with the Foreign Office.

The Inventory

The committee’s first substantive task is the shared stockpile inventory, scheduled for completion by Wednesday. All forty-three Guild members who voted for the rationing framework have committed to disclosing their current holdings of the twelve spices tracked by the Eastern Spice Index, plus an additional nine varieties commonly used in Bobington’s restaurant trade.

Preliminary estimates, assembled informally over the weekend, suggest that combined Guild reserves may sustain rationed supply — that is, supply distributed under the committee’s allocation framework and subject to the 250-per-cent pricing cap — through mid-to-late March. Beyond that point, the situation depends almost entirely on whether the Kaelmar Strait reopens to commercial traffic.

“The numbers are not comfortable,” Nazari told this newspaper. “But they are better than rumour. Half the anxiety in this city comes from not knowing what we have. By Wednesday, we will know.”

The Cap

Enforcement of the pricing cap — under which no Guild member may charge more than 250 per cent of the pre-crisis price for any eastern spice — begins formally on Monday. The cap, which applies only to Guild members, covers roughly 80 per cent of Bobington’s commercial spice trade by volume. Non-Guild merchants and private importers are not bound by it, a gap that Nazari acknowledged with visible discomfort.

“We can only govern our own,” he said. “But the Guild’s reputation matters. If our members hold the line, the market will follow. If they don’t, we deserve what comes.”

The pre-crisis prices against which the cap is measured are those published on the Bramblegate Exchange on 10 February — two days before the Delvarian naval buildup disrupted strait passage. Under the formula, a spice that traded at 20 florins per pound on 10 February may not exceed 50 florins. At current market levels, several varieties are already near or at the ceiling; the cap’s practical effect will be to prevent further escalation rather than to roll back existing increases.

The Foreign Office Petition

The Guild’s 67-signature petition, delivered to the Foreign Office on Thursday by Guildmaster Hadrian Voss and Nazari, requested that spice trade access be formally included in the agenda of any Kaelmar diplomatic proceedings. The Foreign Office’s response — that Guild concerns “will be considered within the appropriate diplomatic framework” — has been interpreted within the trade as politely noncommittal.

With Count Viktor Soren now installed at the Delvarian consulate on Ashbury Lane and the quiet channel talks expected to commence next week, the Guild’s petition acquires additional urgency. The spice trade is, in financial terms, smaller than the copper question that dominates the commission’s deliberations. But it touches more households more directly. Copper is an abstraction for most residents of Bobington; the disappearance of velveroot from the grocer’s shelf is not.

“Copper builds tramways,” said Marsh-Pembroke’s colleague at the Exchange this week. “Spice builds dinners. Ask which one the city notices first.”

The Eastern Spice Index closed Friday at 347 — its third consecutive daily decline from the record 356 reached on Wednesday. Whether that easing reflects genuine supply improvement, Guild-induced confidence, or simple exhaustion is a matter of some debate.

On Monday morning, four people will sit down at a table in Guild Hall and begin the work of turning forty-three merchants’ private anxieties into a shared plan. It is not glamorous work. It is, however, necessary.