Beltran's four lieutenants

They were named in one breath and never assembled again. Asked who Beltran Grayeras would put in charge of a thing, and who stood closest to him besides Whent, Orvayne gave four names: Zarif, Rain (which is Rainan Marr), the clerk Davi Solt, and Tazrih. The question had been operational rather than curious, and the plan drawn out of the answer was to take them off the board one at a time. In the party’s own shorthand: the spy, the socialite, the bookkeeper, and the muscle.

Four was what Orvayne answered, not a fixed establishment. Boras kept the books beside them without being counted; Venros was brought in later to watch Tazrih and to watch the men who watched her; Orvayne was called a lieutenant himself. By the end the party was counting the tier as six names and subtracting from that.

What sorted them in the end was not rank but the sword. Rheem, sitting at Beltran’s own table behind a borrowed face, came away with the fact everything after it turned on: of the four, only Rainan Marr violently wanted the Wraithblade Khopesh for himself. Tazrih and Solt sat near it nightly and desired nothing. Zarif was not touched by it at all. Six figures around Beltran carried the sunken, dark-ringed eyes when they were first counted, though Solt’s turned out later to be plain exhaustion. Beltran, for his part, kept their weekly schedules and their days off written down and sent to Orvayne, including which nights Zarif would need carrying home.

Zarif

Alone of the four, Zarif left nothing written about him on his own. What is known of him comes from a week Aldo spent watching him, an evening Rheem spent in his employer’s dining room, and the night the party took him.

He was a soldier before he was anything else: grim, disciplined, with military service behind him, and Beltran brought him to Haudh-Gwenn personally rather than finding him there. Aldo’s week put him down as a Hobbin, half human and half hobgoblin; Rheem, reading the table much later, took him for a big hobgoblin. Neither reading was ever confirmed. His work was the guard and the merchants. He ran something close to martial law over the city’s armed men, and he ran it by suppressing key figures rather than everyone, picking the ones whose breaking would ripple outward through the rest.

He was the only one of the four the blade never reached. Clear eyes, no rages, a servant rather than a believer, and therefore, in the party’s reading of him, buyable. What held him instead was a buried story. He had killed a young man in a drunken duel, a nobleman’s son by one telling and a visiting diplomat’s by another, and Beltran had made the matter disappear. That cover bought a loyalty the curse never had to.

He also drank, twice a week and heavily enough that Orvayne’s written instructions included seeing him home, and that is the seam they went in through. Rheem wore Orvayne’s face, Casper ran as the bait and drew him into an abandoned building, Mikhail put him to sleep, and he woke gagged and bound. The party argued a long time over killing him and kept him instead for what he knew, rolled to the keep in a barrel and held there, and meant afterwards for The Crack, no court in Haudh-Gwenn being fit to try him. Rheem wore his face for a long while afterwards, and that cover held until his blood-soaked armor was recovered in the street and the city learned he was gone. What became of him after that was never written down.

The Other Three

Rainan Marr was the political fixer, running blackmail and smears through proxies for the deniability, aloof to the point of being unreachable, and the worst hollowed of them.

Tazrih was the spymaster, a hobgoblin woman keeping her office in Ashtara Walnut’s old estate, with ties into every underground crew in the city and the only work among the four that nobody else could have done. The party judged her the most dangerous of them. Beltran, who suspected her of a plot she had no part in, evidently agreed.

Davi Solt was the clerk, more reserved than the others, the one at the table writing everything down, and the only one whose tired eyes were not the sword’s doing.

Campaign Updates

The doctrine set against them was to remove the hired watcher Venros first, because a mind-reader would see through a borrowed face the moment he met one, then Zarif and Tazrih in quick succession, with Rheem and Aldo wearing two of the faces so that nobody would visibly go missing. It survived contact about as well as such plans do, and it emptied the tier anyway.

None of the four was standing with Beltran when he died. Rainan Marr was tortured to death on his order, and it was Rainan’s testimony, given after death, that baited him into the street where he was killed. Zarif was alive and a prisoner. Tazrih was innocent, purged anyway, saved by the party without ever learning it, and gone from Haudh-Gwenn toward Vigil with Garik after burning her own base and having two freed prisoners killed to cover her trail. Davi Solt was talked out of his front door with the words Rainan sent us, stabbed by looters, brought back by Aldo, and walked out of the riot toward Westwood beside Rheem, who was wearing the dead man’s face and his cleaned clothes. He had already burned every one of Beltran’s blackmail ledgers to keep his own name out of them, which is why no paper survives anywhere naming who Beltran owned.