Dan

Background

Dan kept the jail of Loshev, which was less a jail than a holding area, and the town’s opinion of him was settled long before anyone came looking. You see Dan walking down the road towards you, one man said. I wouldn’t put it past him. He is a nasty fellow. He had a sailor’s old tattoos, took protection money off an innkeeper, robbed the man who employed him blind, and met grim, matching-tattooed men off the Ravenhold boats at the docks to hand something over and see a crate loaded, though he had no business at the docks at all.

He had also paid Aldo to start a brawl with a half-orc named Tony at the Prancing Prince, then jailed him for it, held him four days, denied him food while he was on duty, and threatened him with a beating for asking why. That was the mistake. Aldo laid the whole of it out in front of the Council of Loshev, fluent and exact and in order, and Dan’s head came up off his chest partway through and stayed up. There was nothing in it a court could use. He walked out of the chamber a free man.

The Lash

What he actually was took another few days to reach. The bandits the party had been sent after were warned before they got there, and the woman sent to warn them was Leila, his girlfriend of four years, who had been carrying sealed letters for him the whole of that time and had never once opened one. A captured fence gave up the arrangement from the other side: goods through Loshev unquestioned, first pick to Dan, no questions asked, and the three of them talking in a code so thin it barely qualified.

The Constable, Tariq al-Mahir, asked him in his own jail to bare his forearm. I’m innocent, Dan said, after far too long a pause. When the sleeve came open there was a single whip-lash tattooed on the arm, the same mark the Ten Lashes’ captain wore nine of. He said he thought he had been drunk when he got it. He tried to name a dock guard who had just walked in as the mastermind. When Leila was brought down he attempted an injured you cheated on me that nobody in the room bought for a moment. She shot him through the bars while he was still talking, and Mikhail spent a healing potion that was not his to spend to bring him back for the questions.

Rattled and half in the next world, he answered them. He had been placed in the guard rather than recruited into the ring, and there were others placed the same way in Forven and in Haudh-Gwenn whom he could not name. He had sent the bandits, and then the party after them, hoping neither came back. The last catch had been people seized in the mountains out of Amulta and held in a cave outside Haudh-Gwenn, sold to fancy folk and moved on south toward Meshtes. The count of lashes on a man’s arm was his rank, and the captain wore nine. Then his caches, all three: a hollow pier leg at the docks with an iron key in it, a wardrobe and a floorboard and a mattress in his house, and a lacquered box of Keif in a stump north of the bridge. When the ring began to come apart he had got word to Ashtara Walnut.

Current Role

Loshev’s bureaucracy burned three days. Then Nathan Fox was seated on the council and his first act pushed the conviction through. The party attended the trial wearing Dan’s own clothes, out of his own wardrobe, which the Constable did not find funny; he warned them that old people have long memories.

He is in a cell still, or was the last time anyone looked. A Loshev guard passed on the gossip long afterwards that he was rotting in one, and the party went and serenaded him and pelted him with rotten fruit for it, and Kurvroc wanted him executed on top of that. Against all of which, one accounting of a soured bottle out of his own cabinet calls him the late jailer Dan, and no death of his was ever written down. Neither was the length of his sentence, and whether Loshev’s later councils went back to the case was never discovered.

What outlasted the conviction is the song. Aldo wrote Dan the Man on a borrowed lute the night they took him, and it got away from everybody: sung in the Broken Shield, sung below decks on a river boat to a delighted crowd, played so badly by its own authors in a tavern that nobody realized whose song it was, and still being called for in Loshev much later. The town took to calling the party the Dandan after him, a name Koa hated, Mikhail hated, and Dan, in his cell, went white with fury over.

A different Dan turns up years later in Ridh, a village tough with a grievance of his own. The two have nothing to do with each other.