Khudan

An enormous bugbear bounty hunter, a master tracker and an archer, and the terror of the Barren Lands to everyone who had heard of him there. His methods put him in and out of cells for years and no cell held him, and he moved his trade west to let the name cool. He works alone. He only responds to force.

He speaks Tanjun by preference and a rural, proper-goblin G’lin otherwise, heavily accented and close to monosyllabic in both, and he understands Peren without speaking it. G’lin has no word for blackmail, that being only bartering in goblin, so when he had to name what one of his colleagues had been hired to do he reached into Peren for it, and it was the one Peren word he spoke all night. He carries an unstrung stave of fused bone backed with sinew, an eastern Karruk longbow that the west calls an orc bow. He holds some real power over animals rather than mere training: Mikhail heard the weight come into his voice when he crouched in an alley and set a stray dog to a trail.

Beltran Grayeras hired him as one of six independent sellswords set loose to hunt the Valiant Few, and did not pay him in coin at all. Beltran had seized his hounds and held the order that would release them from a vault in Meshtes; the dogs were the fee. Before the party had his name they had him as the Hound of the Barren Lands, and doubted it was even the same man, because nobody had seen a hound anywhere near him.

He opened on them from a rooftop in a street ambush, was run down across the roofs, and was taken alive when Mikhail landed a single word of compulsion across the gap: surrender. He set down bow, quiver and short sword. Mikhail confiscated the bow, which mattered to him more than the coin ever had, and then traded him everything he knew about the other five for the collection order on the Meshtes vault, the paper that frees his dogs. The terms were full intelligence and a permanent departure from Idir, no work in it and no travel through it, with a clause Mikhail added on his own authority: no further contracts against the party, unless it were life or death for him. He agreed to all of it and was plainly surprised the price was so low, then hired on for thirty gold to track three of his former colleagues, refusing Durat, the only one of them he respected.

The bow was handed back as an apology and bought nothing. From the moment it was taken off a man who had already yielded, Khudan counted Mikhail a personal enemy and said he would remember it. Koa and Aldo he holds nothing against.

He ran the borrowed scent-dog that found the arsonists, then waited outside a councilors’ meeting for hours to close his own business. His next contract had been to move Sarro Rashid’s kidnapped son onward from Nahr. He turned it inside out and agreed to bring the boy home instead, in exchange for guaranteed passage to Deadport, which only military vessels sail to now. He would not take a councilor’s word for it. What he took from Asiya Azrak was a G’lin honour-oath, an archaic Mól-derived form that binds honor rather than word. Then he said it would take time, and that he would return, and went.