Khed

A hobgoblin of the Loshev town guard, stocky and broad in the shoulder and shorter than the humans he serves alongside. He stepped out of the torchlight on the night road when the patrol found Mikhail camped beside a pool of blood he had not noticed, and the patrol leader told him to walk the minstrel back to town while he and Ver finished with the ground.

He read the accent as southern on the way in, said Peren, corrected himself to Dhel, and did not catch whatever Mikhail meant by answering that he might think so. He gave him the road as it stood: the fourth attack in two months, a wagon guard who had done for one of the bandits and another who got away. Asked whether the man had been taken alive to be questioned, he said only that Mikhail had seen the pool of blood back there, and left it at that. Looking at the rapier, he said a pin-prick like that would not answer a man who knew how to use a blade or a bow. The wagoner had put one clean through a throat.

Then he asked for a song, and it changed him. He walked the rest of the way jovial, chatty, and open with the details, so that most of what the company first learned about Loshev came out of his mouth on that road: no farmland to speak of, under two thousand people packed tight along the water, every one of them in a specialized trade because all of the money comes off the river. He put Mikhail in an inn at a sliver for the first night and warned him the Council would likely want him the following afternoon.

He turned up again at dusk on the bridge. He hailed them with authority and a friendly undertone underneath it, looked past Mikhail at the prisoners and gave the rest of them a smile that did not invite them closer, then took Mikhail aside. Dan had asked for a watch kept on anyone heading into the forest, and Tariq, hearing of it, had posted Khed to do the watching. That was the whole of the party’s cover: the constable trusted Khed, Khed liked Mikhail, and nothing about their return would reach Dan before they did. What Khed wanted was to mention that a marked guard sword had turned up on display in a shop and that the constable would be cross about it. He waved them off friendly enough and then held his eyes on them a second and a half too long, which cost the party a whole conversation.

Later that night he brought in the dock-guard Sasser for questioning, and stood there while Dan pointed from his cell and named her the mastermind of the whole thing. When Tariq ordered the conversation upstairs, Khed pointed at her, then took her by the crook of the elbow and walked her up, and she went from confused to frightened on the stairs. Tariq’s own assessment of him, given while deciding whom he could still trust in his own guardhouse, was that Khed had a good number of friends down in Forven and spent his off time fishing that lake, and that he would trust Khed with his life. He sent him south to start asking.