Cazzik

The Seal of Forven

Cazzik held the captaincy of the guard in Forven and was one of Captain Torr’s nine lieutenants in the Ten Lashes. What the ring bought with him was traffic. An agreement stood between Forven and Harad that cargo carrying Forven’s seal did not have to be checked again downriver, so the captain marked slaver freight as inspected and it went past Captain Jack and on into Haudh-Gwenn with nobody opening it. Jack took the goods for clean. Keeping him off the trail was separately paid for, and it was the captain’s job.

Julius held the warehouses at the Forven end and the captain held the road out of them. Ashtara Walnut set the whole arrangement out in the hour she bought her way clear of the organization (S1E11), and her advice on how to take the pair was that Julius would squeal, because squealing was what Julius was for: put on a hook, he would draw the captain in.

What she did not give them was a name. For that season and most of the next, the only thing the party had to write down was the captain of the guard in Forven.

Before the Captaincy

He had not always been a local. He was an adventurer first, one of a sellsword band out of Peredhel with a reputation for getting a job finished and finishing it ruthlessly, and the friends he made in that life were still reachable when he wanted them.

Jack of Harad, briefing the party on how to handle an arrest, said there were stories about the crew he used to run with, and one of them was that he and his old mates had taken a wyvern in the mountains once, for coin. His advice followed from it: allow the man no leash at all, keep him near enough that he could not slip away, and put the case to the Forven council with him out of the room, because a resourceful man who got loose and got word to his friends would be the end of it.

The House

By the time the party reached Forven with copies of Ashtara’s documents (S2E23) the arrest had already been tried and had gone wrong. Two of his old crew had come into town not long before it, one a magic-user and one simply good with his hands, and the house the guards entered was trapped. Three of them died and a fourth nearly did. The one who lived came out with his leg torn open and was still bandaged when the party met him. Cazzik went east into the woods with the two of them, and the guard lost another man following.

There was talk on the Forven council of paying adventurers to hunt him. It collapsed on the objection that they would only be buying his own friends a few beers to sit in the woods and laugh.

His wife Lenore stayed and worked for him. She brought the party to a tavern to ask them to look at their evidence again, and her account of the house was that the traps were ordinary precaution: the band had made enemies over the years, Hunter had been the one who set the place up, and nothing tells a man that the people breaking into his home are the guard. Asked why a captain of the guard had run rather than clear his own name, she allowed that he could have, and admitted he had not been sober. She would not accept copies of anything and left for Harad to see the originals, which put her and the party on the same boat. Below deck, making small talk, she gave them the band: Blackguard Jack, Bruno “Bruiser”, Milton “Milk Toast”, Freya “Face”, Hunter “Bear Trap”, and her husband, whom the Tillermen called Captain.

The Cell

Word came back afterwards (S3E32). Strangers had walked into Forven in long heavy cloaks with the hoods up, armor moving audibly underneath them, and had handed over two of the three who had fled. The magic-user had every finger broken so that he could not cast, and was gagged for the same reason. Cazzik had fought hard and was very badly hurt, and his wounds had been treated on the road so that he would live to stand trial. Who those men were, and who sent them, was never discovered. The third of the three got away.

Julius was already in custody, and while the three were loose they had been in contact with two men hired to break him out. That contact stopped when the woods went quiet, so the hirelings went looking for a prisoner to ask about the plan. A guard overheard them, refused the bribe he was offered, and they were taken as well. Five stood for trial, in a town that hangs nobody.

Kiras Hallo, who took the command he had abandoned, confirmed later that he was still locked up and still waiting on a prisoner transfer (S4E41), and that the one who slipped the net had gone to ground at a university near Meshtes. He was alive in a Forven cell as late as S4E52.