Elliot

Background

He came to Loshev to write. Several treatises at once, by his own account, one of them on the Mól Empire and how it fell, with a benefactor paying him to gather whatever could be gathered about it. The books were never the point. The point was the money the books would make, and what the money would buy: a pub of his own, with upstanding, proper and honest clientele in it.

Aldo walked into that under a false name and sold him a piece of old vellum. Elliot read it where nobody else in the town could, took a knife to the ink and scraped a little off, licked it, and pronounced there to be a good deal of coal in it. Imperial script, in Taal. It spoke of a sealed and intact ruin somewhere in the mountains west of the town, which the parchment calls the resting Sun, and which the party would eventually walk into as the Valley of Doom. He bought the sheet and offered a contract in the same hour: gather a crew, take a pony and gear and three moonies each, go west in the autumn, and come back able to say whether the place is real and whether it is still shut. He gave his surname as Man, which was a lie, and neither of them was fooling the other for long.

He held to it. When the Valiant Few came back to Loshev the following year he put a formal contract in front of them, explained what he actually wanted (a Mól ruin nobody had ever breached, and the lost knowledge in it, and his name on the publication), and outfitted them with better than a hundred gold of expedition gear: a climbers’ kit, two hundred feet of rope, pitons, a tent, a lantern, grappling bolts, a mule. Then they talked him into riding out with them at dawn, and he spent his last coin on a horse to do it.

Loshev had taken him for a wealthy man for the better part of a year. He was not. The gear, the pony, the mule and the horse were all advances against a bank loan he was counting on the ruins to repay.

Appearance

Well dressed, and given to stroking his beard while he thinks. Nothing of his face or his build was ever written down, and what was said of him out of doors is a list of things he cannot do: no boots for the country, no seat on a horse, no skill in the open at all. He falls off things. He slips on ice.

Put him on a festival platform, though, and he is the best dancer in the square by a distance nobody disputes.

Personality

He talks well and reads people badly, which is the whole of his difficulty and a great deal of his charm. He is a linguist first: he built the cipher that opened the Mól Encyclopædia with Mikhail, and was mortified to learn that a hidden code had been sitting in volumes he had handled for years without his noticing. He writes furiously through any conversation that turns into a theory.

He is not brave and does not pretend otherwise, except for the once, when he agreed to ride into the mountains and put a brave face on for a whole day before the company told him he would die out there and walked him back to a trade road. He is bored by alchemy. He does not buy folklore, including the folklore he is the one to report: asked about Vëné, he laid out the local belief that she is who the Martyr was before she was the Martyr, a hero of some seven hundred years back tangled up in the Empire’s fall, and then said flatly that he did not believe a word of it.

His nerve, when he finds it, is about people rather than danger. At the Shahid in Harad, with the company deadlocked over whether to spend the thing they had on saving Gwenivere, he said it was obvious and walked out when nobody would decide.

Relationships

The relationship that mattered most was his worst one. Aldo sold him the parchment under an assumed name, later stole his books, gave them back, and told him so to his face in one flat sentence that left him staring. Elliot came close to walking away from the whole company over it and openly wondered whether he wanted to be one of the Valiant Few with Aldo in it. He stayed. The two of them have since danced at the same festival on the same night.

Mikhail is the opposite number: the co-author of the cipher, the man who talked him out of pawning his own research book when the debts closed in, and the one he sat up all night with over a green volume until the code broke. With Professor Ashanti al-Hassan he shares a workroom and very little method, and the two of them have been each other’s whole company for weeks at a stretch. He is friendly with Gwenivere, and the two of them are the only allies read all the way into the curse secrets.

Current Role

The winter after the expedition was what made him. Payment came apart first: he had agreed to fund the dig and never to pay a fee, and by then he was deep in debt to a bank. The argument nearly ended the partnership over one volume worth about twelve gold, which he clutched and would not surrender. Then he handed over the whole satchel instead and stayed the season at the party’s estate to decode what was in it. Six of the seven Mól keeps were located off that work, and he was the one who mentioned, in passing, that he had seen other volumes about the place.

Since then he has been the company’s reader. He brought ten more volumes out of a collector’s hands at cost or on credit, completing the alchemy run; he recommended Kithul and Dwayne when the base needed defending; he reasoned out with Mikhail that each of the seven curse-keeps belonged to one clan rather than to the emperor. On the oozes his advice is short and has kept people alive: never cut one. Puncture it, or crush it. He took the electrum crown away to study and has worn it daily since, which is his idea of keeping it safe.

With Beltran’s guard hunting through the city and the crackdown getting worse by the week, the company pressed him to leave. He was moved out of Haudh-Gwenn ahead of the worst of it, then out of The Crack to Harad with Ashanti, the alchemy supplies and the books, into Captain Jack and Luca Green’s keeping. Cleven Gemsmith was sent to him there. He is still in Harad, running the company’s books and its research. A letter written afterwards named him as one of the people the Few would trust.