Katalia

Background

She is a hobgoblin, she works the bar at the Color Stay in Haudh-Gwenn, and she had been doing both for a good while before anyone in the party thought to ask her name. She has worked for the inn’s owner, Voler Bria, long enough to say so as a length of years, and long enough to have given up on understanding him: after all that time, she says, she cannot begin to ravel or unravel the man’s mind. She is the one who put a name to what he is, a congressman of the Arcane Congress paying for the glamour over his own building at what he tells her is enormous expense. She observed, drily, that the place is nothing like as polished as the magic makes it look, and wondered aloud when his papers were last brought up to date and when anybody last inspected anything.

She reads history for pleasure. She believes her family came down out of one of the Mól clans that held this country before Idir did, and she has kept two volumes of the Mól Encyclopædia by her for years on the grounds that it is nice to know where you come from, because it helps you understand how you became who you are. She lent both to the party. Neither came back.

She is also the reason the city’s nightmares can be dated at all. They were an epidemic once, years ago; she remembers having them as a girl, and remembers the stories about them; they stopped at about the time the Slumbering Queen first appeared. The Queen, she says, has been about longer than she has, and everybody’s account of her reaches further back than the last one.

Appearance

A hobgoblin woman with no eyebrows, which she makes the joke of herself: asked to react to something absurd, she will observe that she would raise an eyebrow if she had one to raise.

The inn’s glamour dresses everybody in it above their station. It does the opposite to her. Under the veil she is a plain woman in simple clothes helping out behind a bar, and the first time Mikhail saw her without it he did not recognize her, and needed a moment to understand that the illusion had been plaining her down the whole time.

What She Can See

At the dinner where she was first named she said flatly that the veil does not work on her, that it makes no difference what she wears, and that she does not know why. When Mikhail asked whether she saw some see-through version of it she looked at him as though he had begun speaking in tongues. That is the most useful thing about her. It is how she alone picked Naevora Grayeras out of the monthly gatherings held at the inn, a Grayeras woman in a scarf and a new one every day, whom the disguises hid from everyone else in the room.

Later she said something that cannot easily be squared with it: that she knows of nobody who has ever seen through the illusions except the people who work there, that she saw them herself exactly once, before she officially started, and that she has not seen them since. And on the last night she appears, picking the party’s disguised faces out of a crowded room took visible effort, blinking and refocusing like somebody chasing a floater across their own eye before she found Mikhail and knew him.

Both accounts are hers. Neither has been withdrawn.

Personality

Her politics are not complicated and she does not pretend they are. Told across a dinner table that the man who runs the city had bankrolled the Ten Lashes, she got food up her nose and needed close to a minute to recover, and then said the word disgusting. He has, in her assessment, far too much money for a man of his temperament to use responsibly, and he has used it as a bludgeon to force the world into the shape he wants it in. Asked how her meal was, she said it was very good, and then asked how many people in the city would not eat that night, and whether that was her fault, and whether it was his. Then she gave the line she is likeliest to be remembered by. She was not going to go and throw a rock at him herself, because she could not survive what came back. She could hand somebody else the rock.

She is careful about what she takes on. She would not turn stones over about her own employer, she said, because you do not want to know what is underneath them, and when Mikhail let something slip about what had become of Beltran’s assassins her lips went tight and she did not ask for more. What she did ask, when the party came to her to arrange a killing, was whether they were going to kill him, and, if he lived, what the plan was then.

Relationships

The night she was named was arranged as a date, and Mikhail played it as espionage from one end to the other, so intently that when he finally made a pass at the close of it she was surprised enough to ask whether he had really got through an entire evening without once hitting on her. She paid for the dinner. She took him back to her apartment afterwards to show him the encyclopædia volumes.

A month later, with the party publicly dead and the city believing it, he woke her at home wearing a guardsman’s face. She nearly stabbed him, then slapped him for having been dead, then dressed and helped anyway. By the end they were more than contacts. She asked Aldo after Mikhail whenever he came through the bar, and was openly worried about him.

She works for Bria and does not trust him. She is not against him either. She simply declines to claim she knows what he is doing.

Current Role

What she has done for the party runs well past her job. Across that first dinner she gave Mikhail the shape of the council: Traxian Grayeras’ vote counts twice, which Mikhail already knew and she confirmed without surprise; Alyphe votes however Traxian votes; and the rest of the votes on that council are bought. The Ten Lashes was the one piece she had not heard, and what she gave back for it was the city’s counter-story, that Beltran’s assistance is the reason the ring fell at all, that the Valiant Few came to town and took the credit for it, that this is a root of his grudge against them, and that the same business is what raised him into the office he holds. The account of the daylight gnoll raid having been cover for a private meeting with Orsugo crossed that table too, but it reached it by a circle: the party had put that story into the city themselves a few nights earlier, and the city had handed it back. Whether there is anything underneath it has never been settled.

She brokered the killing of Venros. She carried the party’s proposition to Bria and came back with his price: either access to a supplier they had, or a public reveal that the Valiant Few were alive and had been sheltering at the Color Stay, together with keeping the inn whole through the fight and a small favor owed later. They took the reveal, which is how their return was staged and how the inn became their bolt-hole.

She has kept that bolt-hole since. She turned Beltran’s guards back at the stairs when they came demanding Venros report and tried to force their way up, and told Aldo afterwards that she doubted it would hold a second time. She invented a reason on the spot to walk Aldo out of a watched room, sending him to the back to help choose a bottle somebody had supposedly bought him. She told him the house was safe enough, that she had never seen for herself what her employer would do to intruders but had seen enough of what he could do, and that anyone who tried to take the place might well fall through a hole in the ground.

The last errand was the letter. Bria, by then disheveled and visibly drained, handed it to her to carry to Alyphe Grayeras under a false pretext, and it worked. Alyphe came to the Color Stay, which put Beltran’s mother in the room and Beltran in the road outside it. Katalia came back in by the side door while the trap was setting, found Mikhail’s face in the crowd after some effort, and raised at him the brow she does not have. He sent a message across the room. She told him the guest had arrived and there had been no trouble, gave him a small dry smile she was trying not to make obvious, and when he told her to stay safe she said she knew the ways out.

She used them. She was out of the building before the inn burned and the fighting started, and where she went after that was never written down.