Death and Taxes
“Death and Taxes: Sigil’s Civil Authorities,” from the Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Foreign Dimensions series of informational pamphlets by Lazlo D’Almazy.
Since the Lady’s War, Sigil’s government has been an orrery of compromise.
(Helpful Note for Travelers: two events are popularly called the Lady’s War, so whenever someone refers to the Lady’s War, ask which they mean. The first event called the Lady’s War is that which marks the beginning of the calendar: the Lady of Pain’s arrival in Sigil twelve hundred and thirty-three years ago, when she slew the God of Portals Asokar and assumed rule of the city. The second event called the Lady’s War, and the one referred to herein, was eight hundred years later, when the Lady of Pain cemented Her rule over Sigil by dissolving the Great Guilds.)
The destruction of the Guilds, which had been the basis of Sigil’s political system for millennia, led to massive social upheaval and ultimately the creation of the modern Factions, sixteen years later. The Cabalism Treaty, codifying the responsibilities of the Triad of Order (the Harmonium to enforce laws, the Fraternity of Order to pronounce sentence, the Mercykillers to execute sentence) and their allies (the Fated to collect taxes, the Sign of One to disburse those taxes), occupies a position not unlike our own Chart-patent D’Impost, D’Leis, D’Deveres. Unlike the Chart-patent, the Cabalism Treaty was formally ratified only by the leadership of those five organizations; the ten other major Factions and dozens of minor ones were never asked to endorse the document.
Thus the legitimacy of the Triad of Order’s rulings may be called into question, but the agency responsible for determining the legitimacy of treaties is the Triad, and ultimately might makes right in Sigil. This morally bankrupt system is indicative of, rather than as might be hoped an aberration within, extraplanar culture at large. The wary traveler is advised to maintain due caution at all times!
The Triad’s courts are the city’s venue for contract disputes and those crimes which threaten the city as a whole: crimes of violence, fraud, and treachery. Again, the agency responsible for determining the jurisdiction of the Triad is the Triad. It shouldn’t for a moment be assumed that the five Factions which declared themselves Sigil’s government hold absolute authority over the city, however. Rather, each district and block is claimed by one of the many power groups that coexist in the city, each with their own rules, laws, and taxes. Most of these power groups predate the Cabalism Treaty and few enjoy the Triad’s intrusions into their day-to-day activities. Power in Sigil is heavily decentralized, and while the Triad collectively is stronger than nearly every other power bloc, their plurality remains an extreme minority; they “rule” with the de facto consent of the governed and to overstep their bounds would result in uprising, repudiation of the Cabalism Treaty, and perhaps armed conflict.
This same balance of power has led to Sigil’s relatively low taxes and laissez faire economic system. If taxes in a particular district are too high, the citizens of that district are free to flee into neighboring districts, though the definition of “too high” varies inversely with the local government’s footprint. Ask around!
Wait, the wary traveler might interject, did not you write above that the Cabalism Treaty declared the Fated tax-collectors and the Signers tax-spenders? And yet each little local city-state collects their own taxes? Stroo! Every year a legion of assessors descends upon the city, assigning each piece of real estate a value and demanding a percentage of that value from the property’s owner or owners of record. In the not-terribly-uncommon event that no owner steps forward to pay, the property is seized by the Fated and auctioned off. Since the property values are assigned solely at the discretion of the Fated assessors, the process is awash in corruption, from simple bribery to extortion to every year a few assessors turn up floating face-down in the Sigil Reservoir.
Nevertheless a sizable amount of “jink” (on the order of eighty tons of silver a year, give or take a half dozen tons) makes its way into the city’s coffers. Most of this money is spent funding the activities of the Triad, and the remaining disbursed by the Signers into various “miscellaneous projects” such as upkeep on the city’s few nonprofit public buildings, dredging the reservoir, keeping The Lady’s Ward clean, and other public works. On one notable occasion, after a string of lawsuits and fines failed to resolve the issue, the Signers saw fit to hire the Brazen Knives, a yugoloth mercenary company, to invade the Greengardens district of the Guildhall Ward and depose the self-proclaimed Tribune of Peace, who had insisted his Church of Peace was not subject to temporal law.
As a result of that, and occasional other, big-ticket expenditures, Sigil suffers a long-term debt of approximately three hundred tons of silver, owed to various extraplanar banks (principally but not exclusively the Glacial Finance Corporation) and unlikely to be paid off within the next century.