Baku

Baku is the Drowsy Duchess of Faith, the second rank of the Chantry of Tranquility and the senior masked figure most of Haudh-Gwenn will ever deal with. The party met her as the Duchess and have called her that ever since, which fits her office. She is not the Slumbering Queen, who is the order’s head and a separate person entirely.

Background

Nothing about her predates the hospital: no family, no birthplace, no age in years, and nothing written down about how she came to the order or what she was before it. The first anyone saw of her she was already senior in it, already masked, and already deciding who got to work there.

Her office is one of a pair. The Drowsy Duke Hospitalar, Müde, holds the other, and beneath the two of them run the Comatose Counts, the Inert Knights, the Torpor Keepers and the Dreamers. She is named a chief physician of the order. The way the work actually divides between the pair of them is the other way about: Müde oversees the medicine, and Baku takes the faith and the mind, which is prayer, counsel, night terrors, and whatever ails a person where a bandage cannot go.

She crossed the party’s path first as an interviewer. Mikhail came to the hospital wanting to volunteer, and she wanted to know whether he was squeamish, whether he could read and write, and how many days of seven he would give her. He offered five and she took him, to begin before sunrise the next morning in the plain garb the order would provide. Somewhere in it she remarked that big hands make good healers, and his flat report that he had once stabbed a hyena with a sword got a chuckle out of her that nobody has heard from her since.

Appearance

Gray robes and an off-white mask, as everyone in the order wears, and neither of them like anyone else’s. The mask is worked so finely and so smoothly that shadows crossing it keep suggesting expressions that are not on it, and the robes are cut from a cloth the rank and file do not get. Standing, she is imposing, and people mention that before they mention anything else.

The mask has come off once, in the fourth season, in the Slumbering Queen’s empty chambers and for Mikhail alone. Underneath is an aged hobgoblin. That is the whole of it. Her coloring, her height and her voice have never been set down by anyone who has seen her.

Personality

Blunt, and to the point, and not much interested in softening a refusal. Asked whether the Chantry would help against Beltran, she said the order gives no free aid to any side in any fight, and then let slip that its members can be hired at a discount by whoever asks properly. Asked to treat Dwayne’s nightmares she said no: the wards were overwhelmed and the order short-handed, and that was the end of it.

She keeps her grudges in plain view and does not let them run the room. When Mikhail came to her after a season in which she had been jailed on his party’s account, she told him what she would do to his tendons, and then made tea. She would not let him cast anything in a hall full of witnesses either, and sent him off with a written address, some old supplies to collect, and the advice that he leave the robes at home.

On what the Chantry gives, she is precise and unhelpful in the same breath. Its gifts are rarely objects. What arrives is more often a nudge toward a person or a choice, and it arrives the way a dream does.

Relationships

Nothing about the succession was ever formalized, so Baku stands next in line for the vacant seat while Müde holds an equal say and the hospital itself, and everything that has happened to the order since turns on that gap.

On the Queen she is careful. The Chantry’s aim, she says, is not to imprison her. It is that her existence requires a fuel source that cannot be abided, and the order has no better answer than that yet. She has agreed to hold the quarrel until Beltran is dealt with, and calls the party common enemies rather than friends on the strength of it.

Gwenivere Velmont is a friend of long standing, which is what put Baku in a cell. She rode south to the Crack herself with the Comatose Countess to manage a withdrawal she had no obligation to attend, met Gwen warmly, and was then told that Gwen and the missing Slumbering Queen share one body. She was staggered by it: the Queen had not been seen in Haudh-Gwenn for the two months Gwen had been at the Crack. What she said next about helping her friend was phrased carefully enough that Leon Yaegar drew his sword and walked her to a cell. She was let out again during the festival of Shahid, and she has not forgotten either half of it.

With Mikhail there is something closer to a teacher’s patience. She warned him that Beltran’s guards were hunting him over a missing guardsman, gave him the run of the Queen’s empty chambers as a hideout so that someone would notice if the Queen came back, floated an eventual invitation to join the order and said in the same breath that it would not be under duress, and declined to lend him a mask.

Current Role

She has spent the fifth season and the sixth running two hospitals in one town. The Duke gave two thirds of the beds and the whole of the priority to Beltran’s guard, which kept the doors open under a man who was taking the city apart. Baku’s answer was to open a second hospital in a poor quarter and not tell him, where the healers wear ordinary clothes and no masks at all.

She carries the order’s worse news as well. The dream catchers are unbinding, the sleepers in the wards wake haunted and some of them weaker than they lay down, and two have died. Beltran’s people tried to plant spies among the staff first, and when that failed began injuring townsfolk to get their own through the door as patients. The healers sent out to treat his army after the gnoll fighting heard whispers in the field and went over to Orsugo as the Chantry of Purification, under a Burning Duchess. The one who came back had robes burned into their flesh past saving. That Beltran and Orsugo are working the same side of the board is common rumor in the town, and Baku personally doubts it.

She is still in the wards at Haudh-Gwenn, with one bargain outstanding: the party fetch her something, and she sends two trained physicians, her dos amigos, to the raid when the raid comes. What she wants fetched was never written down, and neither side has moved on it.