The Caernathi Family is the older of the two great criminal syndicates said to work the streets of Vedycaer — and, until lately, the most powerful. Where it shows its face in the open it wears a red-wolf sigil and the manners of a respectable venture company; what it is rumored to do in the shadows is another matter.
Street talk credits the Family with a smuggling ring, a protection racket over the Old District’s merchants, and a quiet trade in looted Caernathi relics spirited past the Empire’s tax-collectors. It is said to keep its ground in the Old District — the Thieves’ Quarter is called its own — and rumor ties it to the Mink and the merchant Lucius Furlan, though nothing has ever been proven.
As thieves’ guilds go, the Family is reckoned a genteel one: it favors a bribe over a blade, and a pliable official over a dead one. But the old relic-trade has thinned as the ruins are picked clean, and the Family has been losing ground to a hungrier rival.
The turf war
The Family and the upstart Sewer Rats have been circling each other for years, and the quarrel does not always stay underground. Blood has been shed between them — bodies turned up in the sewers near the old catacombs, and now and then a mutilated corpse washes up on the riverbank. It has not yet broken into open war, but the city can feel it coming.