Captain Torr

Background

He came out of Ravenhold, a tight-knit port in Vala at the north end of Peredhel, and he kept a ship. What he built out of it was the Ten Lashes.

The ring ran to exactly ten and no more: a captain and nine equals, ranked by the count of lashes inked on the arm, each replacement marked in turn to show what he had been made. Torr wore the nine. The trade was people. Captives taken out of Amulta in the mountains moved downriver in reused crates through warehouses that had been paid to look elsewhere, past guardsmen who had been bought in the river towns, Dan in Loshev among them. They were held in a cave outside Haudh-Gwenn and sold on south toward Meshtes. The operation owned almost none of it. It paid for the weak link in each town and used what was already there.

Torr was not the name he was born with. Walter was, and he liked the other one for the joke buried in it: a captain called Torr is a captor. Nobody inside his own ring knew more than that. A man who had worked with him for a long while did not know his surname and did not know where he was from, and said plainly that the captain was not somebody to share. The name he went into the ground under was one his own people learned on the day he died.

Appearance

He was always the best-dressed man standing anywhere near him. On the Forven docks it was fine clothes; at the auction camp it was leathers cut better than his crew’s, and the party picked him out of a fighting line on that alone. A cat-o’-nine-tails was inked on his forearm, the mark of the ring, done by an artist working out of Haudh-Gwenn who went by Raven and whom Torr called she. What Cleven Gemsmith counted on that forearm in Forven was five lashes. The rank the ring gave him was nine.

He carried a saber at the hip, well made and probably prized, and rested his hand on the hilt while he talked. The rest was voice. Ravenhold’s accent is unlike anything else in Vala, and it was the accent, not the tattoo, that let Mikhail tie a crew of bandits outside Loshev back to a captain he had met once on the docks at Forven.

Personality

The Ten Lashes remember their founder for an iron will and an unrelenting cruelty, and nothing he did argues with them. He had traveled far enough that a conjured figure of light thrown up in front of him did not move him at all.

At the cage-hall door, asked to surrender, he asked in return how many the party were willing to let die. He answered himself with one and cut the throat of a captive chained to a seat. Then he said blood, and did it twice more. One of his own crossbowmen went green at it, and Torr pointed the sword at him and told him he was next.

Relationships

There was a man above him, often in the camp and never named to anyone, for whom the whole operation was really run. That was Beltran Grayeras, who bankrolled the ring out of the wealthiest house in Haudh-Gwenn, fled the camp on the night it fell, and went untouched for a long time afterwards.

Beneath him stood the nine, and it was Ashtara Walnut who gave the ring entire once she was taken: herself, Dan in Loshev, a man they only ever heard called the Trapper, Zahir, Xylum, the warehouseman Julius Anguil and the captain of the guard in Forven, and Gleb Meadows away east in Veren.

The connection that set everything after it in motion was with a man who never worked for him at all. Cleven Gemsmith had been sent north to find Captain Torr. Mikhail met the captain first and was offered a place on his boat with the words what’s one more. He took the offer for a trafficker’s, refused it, and went to warn Cleven off. Cleven went to confront him instead and was gone by morning.

The Camp Raid

The party reached Haudh-Gwenn on the 5th of Orie and went in before dawn on Sarieday the 6th, 671 AYR. The buyers were not due until the following night, the 7th, and in the event the party kept that appointment in his place.

He was already finished when he did the last thing he did. Disabled, barely able to lift the blade, he turned and put it into the one captive who had not been chained with the others, which was Cleven, and dropped himself in the act. Koa broke off the killing to get an alchemical dressing onto the boy, and it held with nothing to spare. The body was rifled for the cage-hall key, which Torr had been carrying, and kicked in the face before they left the hall.

One tally of that night’s dead counts a Peren merchant killed by his hand. Nothing more about the man was ever written down.

Campaign Updates

The ring dissolved with him. Ashtara was exiled, the roster was read out and written down, and what was left of the ten went loose in Forven and Veren rather than into a cell. The money above it was named the following day and stayed out of reach for years.

What he actually left is smaller and has proved harder to put down. Three chained people died in that hall in front of the party because he chose to kill them, and the failure is the one the company keeps returning to. Koa, standing in that same room long afterwards, said that Torr himself had been nothing, and that it was the people who were forced who haunted him. When Rafi read out the Valiant Few’s deeds at their honors, the ending of Captain Torr’s ring was on the list, and Mikhail named the slaves and Torr when asked what had mattered most. Much later, waiting for a fight he was frightened of, Mikhail traced the whole of his hatred back to standing in that hall and watching.