Jalal Salahaudhi

The steward of the Salahaudhi estate in Haudh-Gwenn, an old hobgoblin who has served Lady Talia long enough that neither of them appears to have considered the alternative. He was sitting in the room the night the Valiant Few were first brought to the house, and when Talia offered her guests a drink he got up to fetch it. She sent him to bed instead. He said no three times before he would go, and she poured for the room herself.

She keeps things from him, and she said why. His mind is not what it was. He had watched three men peel off prosthetics in front of him and had heard the names they gave when the faces came off, and Talia expected him to have lost all of it by morning. That is why he was told nothing about the sword, about Beltran, or about what the company were doing in her house. He is not part of it.

He is a considerable obstacle at his own front door. When the company came back disguised and Koa asked for the lady by her bare first name, the old man’s manner shut like a gate: he had not had the pleasure of their acquaintance, the lady of the house was not in for callers, he had certainly not been expecting this visit, and what exactly was the nature of their relationship with her? Mikhail saved it by claiming Koa was a hired man being taught his manners, which the steward took at face value and improved upon. In the days not long past, he said, they would simply have used the crop; a week or a month of docked pay might do instead, and he had not wanted to be hard on a new man. He apologized for his own part in it, having looked the fool himself. Then he put out his hand for a calling card. There was no calling card. He observed that another lesson appeared to be wanted, and the three of them left.

When Beltran’s men came for the household during the riots, they went through that door and knocked the old man about on their way in. He was not badly hurt. The company reached everyone upstairs in time and nobody in the house was killed.