Davien "Davi" Solt

Background

The office is the town’s, not Beltran’s. Haudh-Gwenn keeps an internal records officer to hold its archive and its paperwork, and Davien Solt held that post for years, since well before Beltran Grayeras took the guard. What Beltran did was not to hire a clerk. It was to take the one the town already had.

The distinction matters and was drawn carefully at the time. Boras is Beltran’s own bookkeeper, an Amber Jewel of the Jewels of Erôth, hired to keep the private accounts of what Beltran steals. Solt kept the municipal ones, and quietly turned what crossed his desk to the same use: flagging whatever looked like a threat, and pulling actionable material on whoever he was asked about. The comparison offered to the party was a tax office let loose on a private citizen’s papers.

By the time anyone learned his name he was one of four lieutenants Beltran actually trusted, alongside Zarif, Rainan Marr and Tazrih, and the only one of them whose position was an office the city had made and not a favor Beltran had granted.

Personality

What his face looked like was never written down. He is a dull and anxious man, the sort you picture trailing loose paper behind him as he walks, and small enough in frame that he overpacks anything he means to carry himself. What he has instead of presence is an uncanny memory. Ask him something he cannot answer and he will have the answer by the end of the conversation, and it reaches back years with the detail intact.

His eyes were sunken and dark. Dwayne read that as the curse and counted two or three specters around him, and a closer look at Materai’s gala found none of it: no agitation, no telltales, nothing but a man who has not slept. Whatever else was wrong with him, the sword was not.

He was terrified of Beltran and too complicit to leave. The reading taken of him long before anyone reached him was that he was no paragon and not quite a bad man either, decent enough to hate what he was in and not decent enough to walk out of it, and that he would crack under guilt or pressure sooner than any of the others. It was correct. In the evenings he took his work to a pub to finish over a couple of pints, and the pub was deep in the part of town where Beltran’s grip was hardest.

Relationships

He is married, with several children spanning the teens to over twenty, and it is the one thing he moved before anything else. By the time armed strangers were in his hall his family were already somewhere safe, arranged by him, on his own reasoning: if he had gone with them, Beltran would have come looking.

Of the four lieutenants, only Rainan wanted the sword. Solt never did, which is part of why he was reachable at all. At Johanka Materai’s gala he was seen working the room and putting his particular talents in front of other patrons, effectively circulating his own credentials, which is how the party learned he wanted out.

Current Role

The corpse of Rainan Marr, made to answer three questions, named him a willing hand in the plot to take Beltran’s sword: the guards were switched, a false audit moved them, and a servant’s passage was left open. He was not among the seven Beltran put in rat-boxes in the town-hall square for it. He was sitting in his own house in the wealthy quarter a day later.

His own account is smaller than the corpse’s. He made sure the right people were on duty at the right time, that a few extra supplies were bought, that money moved the way it needed to move, and he was following direction. He denies knowing anything about a contingency for the sword and says he was no part of that plan. He was also a frightened man talking to four armed strangers he had never met, and said as much: I don’t know any of you, and so I don’t know what you’re supposed to or not supposed to know.

They came to his door in the riot with Rainan’s name, and it went white through him. Told that everyone in the plan was burned, all the way up, he walked off in something close to delirium and then packed with speed and precision. He brought no books at all. He confirmed it plainly when asked: no ledgers, nothing, everything is gone. He had destroyed every one of Beltran’s blackmail papers himself, so that they could not be found in his keeping. That paper was the spine of the political case being built against the councilors Beltran owned, and it is ash.

Walking him out, his face was better than a pass. Guards who would have stopped four armed strangers in the good quarter saw who was with them and stood off. On the riverbank a pack of looters picked the meekest-looking target in the group, and put him down from behind with a single blow; Aldo got him breathing again.

He left Haudh-Gwenn escorted by Rheem wearing the dead Rainan Marr’s face, turning off toward Westwood while she rode on. Whether he arrived was never discovered. The last word spoken about him in the city was Alyphe Grayeras’s, and it was wrong: she believed he had simply run off.