The Masters of the Bazaar

"Are you quite sure you want to know this?" Beyond this point lie major spoilers for Fallen London, Sunless Sea, Sunless Skies, or Mask of the Rose. This may include endgame or major Fate-locked spoilers. Proceed at your own risk. You can find out more about our spoiler policy here.

"The Masters of the Bazaar - Mr Wines, Mr Spices, Mr Veils and the rest - speak in high-pitched whispers, and under their concealing cloaks they seem winged or hunchbacked. Fallen angels, stunted pterodactyls, mobile colonies of fungus? They dismiss all personal questions with an airy wave of their gloved hands."

"The Masters apply peculiar customs duties: to fish below a certain size, to green ribbons but not red, to speckled eggs but not plain. Perhaps their strangest tax is a heavy duty on stories of love, but it only applies to stories leaving the Neath..."

The Masters of the Bazaar: it's hard to describe these cloaked, slightly creepy things as anything but, well, alien space bats. They call themselves Mr, but they may not really be men. There are eleven titles, but two Masters take up four of them, and the rest have one apiece for a total of nine total Masters. Oh, and there are a few other titles that aren't really Masters, empirically speaking. Confusing? London is generally that way...

An Introduction

"Authority is what's left when the money runs out."

The Masters of the Bazaar are in near-complete control of London's trade economy. Each Master oversees a certain form of trade; for example, Mr Iron oversees the trade of metals and weapons. The Masters may seem united, but in truth, many of them run independent (and sometimes incompatible and clashing) schemes that occasionally span far beyond the scope of London.

The Masters generally took on similar jobs and roles in the previous Fallen Cities; for example, they were called Khans during the time of the Fourth. As might be expected of these beings, the Masters are thousands of years old. Don't ever mention the Second City in their presence, however; they will all react in different but unanimously negative ways.

The Masters as a Group

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

• 
  Mr Apples (Mr Hearts)
• 
  Mr Iron
• 
  Mr Cups
• 
  Mr Mirrors
• 
  Mr Spices
• 
  Mr Wines
• 
  Mr Veils
• 
  Mr Fires
• 
  Mr Pages
• 
  Mr Stones
• 
  And who might this be?

The Masters' Artifacts

Everyone has treasures they'd like to keep under wraps, and the Masters are no exception.

The Crimson Book

"The most stirring, the most wretched, the most savage tales of love and loss are here entombed. It has passed through fire and flood to rest in your hands. Leave it sealed... for now." The Crimson Book contains the most 'savage tales of love and loss' and has 'passed through fire and flood'. This indicates that the Crimson Book may have been written long before the Fifth City; perhaps it is still being added to today? The Masters have allegedly assigned a group of Special Constables to specifically seek out and confiscate any and all copies.

Masters' Blood

"The most grandiose trophy an anarchist might aspire to. Was it shed in battle, or given as a gift?" Masters' Blood has many unusual and unique properties that separate it from normal blood. It is a far deeper red, is cold to the touch, and contains a song: 'an unending fading ring like black space struck with a fingernail.' It also emits a constant low vibration, and if left on a shelf, other items will physically move away from it.

Veils-Velvet
"If Mr Veils shed hair - if blind orphans collected, carded and spun it over the years - it might just look like this." Little is known about Veils-Velvet aside from this quote, which would explain why this fabric is so incredibly valuable.

The Sceptre of Mr Wines

"Topped with a black ruby miniature of an unknown crown, this bronzewood sceptre represents all the authority of some far-away kingdom and its once and former king." A symbol of power that once belonged to a king. The Scepter of Mr Wines is as heavy as lead, covered in frost and talon-marks, and is topped with a jewel from a faraway land. Mr Wines doesn't like looking at it much; maybe it's just insecure.

What Lies Under the Cloak

"...everything I've ever told you was a lie. Except this. Mr Spices, Mr Iron, the rest, aren't the Masters of the Bazaar. They're its pets."

"The second source is A Rhyming Revelry, a slim book of nonsense rhymes written by a once-celebrated cellist. He was, for a time, a favourite at Mr Wines’ revels. One rhyme concerns eleven pilgrims who travelled from a cold and windy waste. It enumerates each of the reasons the pilgrims were unwelcome in their homeland."

Mr Apples / Mr Hearts. Art from Sunless Skies.

Based on two controversial sources, one called On the Origins and Descent of the Masters and another called A Rhyming Revelry, we may reveal the following information.

The Masters belong to a species native to the High Wilderness called Curators. These oversized space-bats hunt in the space between stars, often alone. On occasion, a group of Curators may band together to boast of their hoards and trade deals, and may fight amongst themselves for supremacy. Curator chiefs are described as "victorious, merciless pedlar-magnates."

In the grand scheme of things, the Masters of the Bazaar weren't Masters at all. Rather, they were a group of misfit criminals who joined forces with the Bazaar to escape "misfortune, failure, and fruitlessness."

The Crimes of the Masters

A Rhyming Revelry provides hints about the crimes of the Masters, though which crimes correspond to what bat are based on conjecture and guesswork. The circumstances given in A Rhyming Revelry are:

• Hoarding (Stones)

• Light-bringing (Fires?)

• Impersonation, and the delivery of false testimony (probably Cups or Apples/Hearts, by process of elimination)

• Perpetration of the crimes of knife and of candle (Iron?)

• Idleness, and the dwelling-on of dreams (Spices?)

• Runtery, aberration (Eaten)(though also all of them)

• Pursuit of a Treachery (Apples/Hearts for the Treachery of Breath, or Cups for the Treachery of Clocks)

• Failure and defeat; a fall from king to beggar (Wines)

• Glass-whispering. And worse: charity (Mirrors?)

• Truth-strangling (Pages)

• Violation of the Order of Days, “which determines the hour of the hunt, the feast, the council, the bargain, and the slaughter” (Veils)