Edrick

Background

He turned up twice in two trades. First as an information broker: well connected, expensive, standing guard outside a converted bank that is now a tavern in the wealthy quarter of Haudh-Gwenn near the river, no part of the slave ring but acquainted with everyone in it, and not a man who talks cheap. Then as a mercenary-for-hire, brought to the table by Casper, who agreed to bring four men to a raid for a gold and a share of whatever was taken because he wanted the slave trade stopped. A third telling has him taking his contracts from the city itself, and working days rather than nights. He has never picked between them.

He earned the second description at the slaver cave. He rebuked one of his own four over pay, and when that man used the huddle to slip away and sell them out, Edrick clubbed him unconscious. He lent Koa Lucille so that the guards could be taken alive. He held the cave mouth as a stopper against any retreat, and when it turned, a slaver put an alchemical flame-flask on him and he charged anyway, burning, until he dropped and Aldo stabilized him.

Afterwards he stayed to guard the cave and the stockpiled goods until the party could come back for them, collected his purse, and produced a rare and genuine smile at being paid honestly and called a man of his word. He took the errand to Harad on the strength of vouching for Captain Jack and the town’s willingness to fight slavery. On the way out he took Aldo aside and gave him thirteen gold and a damaged Galderian solid-rod crossbow, which is the weapon Aldo grew up with.

Nothing else about him was ever written down: no surname, no family, no home, and nothing of where a man learns to hold a cave mouth on fire.

Appearance

Human, mid to late thirties when the party met him, and built like an old dock worker who has done hard work his whole life. Very callused hands. A bit of a surly look about him, which is less a temper than a man with a job to do.

He does not like being touched. Somebody gave him a friendly slap on the shoulder at their first meeting and got don’t touch me back before the sentence had finished.

Personality

Blunt, unsentimental, and audibly unmoved by speeches; he listened to Koa condemn the slave trade before the assault and remarked that they were all very inspired. He is also, on the evidence, the most reliable man the company ever hired. He was left with a cave full of other people’s silks and did not touch them.

He is impulsive where the enemy is concerned. A former highwayman, he argued that the road is the best place to take a guarded mark, wanted Beltran dead immediately, and visibly deflated when Leon Yaegar told the room that no, they did not know their enemy yet. His motive is not complicated and he does not dress it up: his hatred of Beltran keeps him doing good out of spite.

Drink is the thing he cannot decide about. He nursed one drink all evening the night the party arrived at the cave, waters down other people’s wine, banned Rheem from drinking outright and then lost a bet and drank with her. When the base rationed the alcohol he had brought in, he went near-mutinous about it in front of everyone.

Relationships

Aldo is the one that matters. It is Aldo he sat with, Aldo whose wine he watered, and Aldo who matched him rant for rant through the near-mutiny and gave him somewhere to put it, which lifted the whole base’s morale in an afternoon and cost nothing but a smuggled bottle afterwards. He rode out bantering with Malik like the wrong half of a double act. He was hidden through the worst winter by two barkeeps, one of whose friends he had personally pulled out of the slavers’ cages.

Current Role

By the second winter he had made The Crack into something. The cave where the Ten Lashes had run their auctions became a refuge: a dozen and more sheltering in it when the party first heard of it, thirty and more by the time they saw it, all of them smuggled out from under Beltran’s guard. That same winter he gave the party the Mól ruins’ back door, an estate whose cellar holds a Mól-stone door onto a passage, and pried the iced-over basement grate loose himself to show them the window was still an opening before sealing it again. He asked for coin while he did it. The bank had closed his account along with theirs.

What he keeps is morale, on short rations and with people who have nothing to do but quarrel. In time the refuge became an armed camp with posted scouts and drill indoors and a room prepared for prisoners, and Edrick held it as counselor beside Leon’s treasury and defense. He greeted the company at the door every time they came back late and worried about them.

He was told, in the end, that Gwenivere and the Slumbering Queen are the same body, though nobody told him while the fight was happening. He was last seen drinking with Rheem in her own form, having lost a bet about it. Who held the cave once its army marched north was never written down.