Greg the Tanner

A skilled leather-worker of Haudh-Gwenn, keeping a shop downriver in the quarter the city smells before it sees. He was the only man who would put his hands on a dead slithering pit, and what he made out of it is the Oubliette.

The Deal

The Valiant Few came to him at the end of a long errand and most of a day, trying to find somebody who would tan the corpse into a carrying-hole. They were down to about eight copper by the time they reached his counter, having spent what they had on boiled urea and a cart deposit. He refused. He was certain that an animal whose hole stayed open after the animal was dead was a scam being worked on him, and he said so.

Then he understood who was standing in his shop. Their name did what their coin could not. He agreed to do the work for nothing and take a portion of the finished piece as his fee, and told them it would be one to three months before there was anything to collect. He and Aldo disliked each other from the first hour and neither of them let it go.

The Fire

The party heard what had happened to him while they were still up in Loshev, and the ride back confirmed it. The tannery had burned. It was half gone and crudely patched, and there was no question of it having been an accident.

He turned when the door opened, one arm in a sling and the other already going for a flail, expecting trouble. Aldo screamed. The arm had been burned rather than broken and had been treated at the hospital. He said the fire was deliberate and that he suspected the reason and would not say it, blaming the rumored piss mafia while looking pointedly at Aldo, and tying it to having done business with them. Koa asked him outright whether it was because he had helped them. What he answered was that they had a deal, that he did not care what anyone else said or tried to do about it, and that he was going to see it through.

Then he brought it out. An inky, oil-slick sheet of hide that had shrunk badly, a few inches of interior depth and no more, but still holding a space that was not in the room: it swallowed a twenty-pound box flat and weighed exactly what it had weighed empty. He said the thing should not exist. He also apologized for it. The corpse had reached him days after it had already begun to collapse, he had not known what the work wanted, and half of what the woman they sent to help him asked for could not be got hold of at any price, so it had been improvised. To demonstrate what it did he draped the material over Aldo, who fainted, and Koa picked the cloak up off the floor and got him back on his feet.

He wanted two things before they went. The first was that they find out who had burned him. The second was a warning: the guards had been getting friendly with the shops in the wealthy quarter, so the party should not take the piece to their armorer, because the armorer might tell them about the party. Aldo palmed him three gold on the way out and said he was sorry about the shop and grateful to have been looked out for, and he took it gladly. Asked whether he would still be there if there was more strange work, he said that if there was a place left, there should be.

Who set the fire was never discovered.