Lady Talia Salahaudhi
Noblewoman of the lesser Mól Clan Salahaudhi, aide to Councilor Johanka Materai, and the deliberately unseen coordinator of the Haudh-Gwenn resistance
Background
Clan Salahaudhi is a lesser Mól clan of Haudh-Gwenn, resident there for generations and perhaps the oldest family in the city. Its crest is built into the hearth of the family house: the two great rivers of Idir coming together where the city stands. What the clan was for is told two ways. The books remember them as merchants, which is how Mikhail had it from his reading and only half remembered. The clan remembers diplomats, traders and sailors, entrepreneurs who bought their way up into a lesser clan and were then given the empire’s work abroad and the mediating of quarrels between clans at home.
They stopped doing that work. During the Peren rebellion the Salahaudhi went out to broker a peace, being sympathetic to the Peren case, and something was revealed to them, and from then on they were quietly financing the rebels against the empire they spoke for. What the revelation was has been lost. Finding it out is Talia’s own private business, and she has never said so to anyone in the city.
She was six when her parents drowned. A storm caught the family’s ship on the river and wrecked it; she stayed afloat on a plank of it, paddled herself to shore and walked back to the estate alone. Her grandfather, then head of the clan, raised her himself and named her his heir, and a good many of the clan have never accepted the decision: she is Hobbin rather than full hobgoblin, and she has always been too loud in her questioning of how things are done. She intends to prove them wrong and to make the family a power in Idir again, and she goes at it the way the clan always has. Trade agreements, more of the family’s hulls on the water, money into the caravans, her face at every gathering worth attending. She gives to the hospital. She mediates other people’s disputes for nothing, as a third party.
The house is a poor advertisement for all of it. The estate is old and Mól-boned and coming down over those bones, in a quarter of Haudh-Gwenn poor enough that the guard does not trouble itself there, which is the reason a resistance can be run out of its front room.
Appearance
Six feet tall and slender, which is the first thing that argues against her being a hobgoblin, since the face and the ears argue for it. Raven-black hair with a widow’s peak and the sides shaved, the rest pulled back into a bun. Amber eyes, and an amber necklace cut to match them. She dresses well without dressing at the top of the room: a backless maroon gown worked in silver, a dark brown fur mantle, a white scarf, electrum claw-rings down the fingers of her left hand. The gown is open at the back to show the clan’s mark tattooed large across it, which is the least private thing about her.
Personality
In company she is cold, correct and difficult to move. Insults and threats land on her and stop there. It is a mask, and by her own reckoning one she no longer knows how to take off; underneath it she is open-minded and sympathetic, and cannot make an ordinary connection with anyone without feeling she has handed them a weakness. She paints. She is frightened of thunderstorms in a way that has nothing to do with the weather. She is unusual in her clan for thinking transients worth anything at all.
Her ideopan is four: Luhthar, Maldrak, d’Ouhb and Lord Rickard.
The manners hold even where nobody is watching. Receiving three armed strangers at an hour she had not expected them, she apologized for having no proper dinner to offer, sent her steward to bed over his objection, and made the drinks herself, in silence.
Relationships
Jalal Salahaudhi is the aged hobgoblin steward who keeps the estate, and his mind is going. He believes Dwayne is courting her, which is what Dwayne is there to be believed to be doing, and he is no part of anything else. Dwayne is the road the Valiant Few reached her by.
She serves under Johanka Materai, the councilor who controls the city’s bank, and admitted the split in her loyalties before anyone asked about it. It is also Materai who put the Idiran curses in front of her: the councilor believes in the Curse of the Shattered Throne and has shown her enough of it to convince a woman who did not want to be convinced. What Talia wants once the war is over is to break them.
Current Role
She coordinates the resistance and will not be seen to. She founded nothing, as she was careful to say: the cells formed themselves in the name of the Valiant Few after the Few were presumed dead, and all she did was join them up and keep them pointed the same way. She stays anonymous on a plain calculation, which is that she is worth less to them the moment she can be named. The whole city can be moved by a single signal in one of three senses, act out, act up, or hold back and defend; movement follows within the hour, mass action within a few, and it escalates after dark.
Her politics run longer than the party’s. Kill Beltran badly and he becomes a martyr and his people inherit him. Paint him first, and the councilors who went along with him, and when he falls they fall with him. She pointed the party at a ledger Materai keeps and rarely opens, a private accounting of every councilor’s dealings and loyalties, on the condition that it be lifted so cleanly that nobody knew. She also gave them the name of the thing lodging at the Color Stay, a mind-twisting operative of a kind called a yalwī al-ʿaql, which turned out to be Venros.
Then she put three false names on a councilwoman’s guest list, having asked for them in advance so that she could draft them in herself. At the soirée she retrieved Aldo from a conversation he was losing and steered his cover toward better company, having christened it Gossiping Garrett on the spot.
Beltran’s men came to her door during the riot, and got no further than it. The household was not merely defended but untouched: nobody in it was killed and nobody in it was cut, and Jalal was knocked about and no worse, which at his age was as much as anyone had a right to ask. Whether they had come for the coordinator of the resistance or whether the riot had simply found a rich door was never settled, since the men who could have said were past saying.
Her people were in position for the public reveal the next day, and Beltran died in the road outside the Color Stay while they held his guard off it. She was not there. What she did afterwards with a headless Grayeras house and a council she had spent a year preparing to indict was never written down. The case itself is gone: the blackmail papers that were the spine of it were burned by Davi Solt before anyone could take them off him, to keep his own name from being read out of them.