Malik

Background

Malik is human. He said so before anybody asked, because the whole of his story turns on it: a wealthy house of Peredhel, settled there for generations and fiercely Peren-nationalist, and his family the only human family of that standing to keep an old Peren custom. He took the mette-hina rite, which puts a last-born out of the family at twenty to earn a surname of his own by some deed worth recording, and until he earns it he has no name to use. His did more than let him go. They went through the courts and made the loss of the family name binding, so the only name he has is the one he made out of the situation.

He introduced himself as Malik the bastard, and when it was taken for a title he corrected it. It is his name. He has no family that claims him.

He was trained in arcane magic by a private tutor his parents bought rather than at any of the colleges, and is touchy about the difference. What he does with it is small and precise: a mark left on a wagon or a tree that only he can see, a resistance laid on a man before a fight, a bolt of force, and the habit of reading a stranger’s lineage off him at a glance.

He calls himself an archaeologist, and the truth of it was never discovered. Some accounts give it flatly as his trade, hunting artifacts out of Taziondale. The people who met him took it for a pose and set it down that way. His own version is hedged, an archaeologist of sorts, in the area because there had been word of something interesting, and still in it because a fetching lady had turned up while he looked.

A bandit ringleader out of Loshev carried the same name and had already been killed by the time this Malik came down the stairs of the Color Stay. They are two men and were never anything else.

Appearance

White hair, which is rare enough to be the whole description in a town where nobody knows him. He wears it mid-length and pulled back, and it is very clean. Slim, five foot nine, finely dressed head to toe, and close enough to him to notice, his clothes smell expensive. The eyes are a piercing blue. He arrived with a gentle smile and something the people around him described as a glow, and the effect on a room was close to awe.

He carries a sword given him by one of the princes of Peredhel and knows how to use it. He rides his own horse, and would sooner make a race of the road than ride it.

Personality

Theatrical, vain, and funny about both. Asked a plain question about Ashtara Walnut by a stranger, his first answer was to offer the stranger a duel. Asked to commit to a raid, he invoked Vroga, the Martyr and Moret in one breath. He needled a wounded man the whole length of a ride and called an unworkable plan half-cocked in a way that stuck to it. On the subject of his sword he was quite clear that he would never do anything so barbaric as take a head, because there are many kinds of suffering and his enemies would have all of them if it came to that. Sitting across from him, Aldo’s read was that here was a man who would kill a fellow’s mother for a cup of wine.

None of it survived contact. He is not a fighter, he knows it, and when it went bad he broke and ran, and he has been honest about the arrangement ever since: he agreed to give directions and cast a spell, and he gave directions and cast a spell.

The Raid

He had been taken to see the caged captives by Ashtara, on a date, as something impressive, and he had booked passage out of town before anyone came looking for him. What he wanted was not to be the next headless body in a street. What he had that nobody else had was the route: arcane marks left on the wagon he had ridden in and on trees along the way, findable by their glow at night, a patch of woods southwest of Haudh-Gwenn, and a description of what waited at the end of it. A cave. A chamber split by a chasm with no found bottom. A barred door of worked stone, and the hall behind it where people were kept, sorted and sold.

The intelligence was worth less than it sounded. He did not know the slavers’ hours. He had seen the place drunk and on a date and admitted as much, so his count of the guards was a guess. Riding ahead to scout, he overshot his own marked tree. At the door he said he was there to show them where things were and not to go into it, and he meant it, and he stayed outside with Edrick’s hired men.

He did go in far enough to take an arrow in the gut, hold the spell he was casting and drop a guard with it. Then there were too many of them and he left. Afterwards the party took him apart for it, in front of everyone, with three executed captives lying behind the argument, and he deflated entirely. Koa apologized the next morning. His cut was paid in full and the assessment among the party, once the temper had gone out of it, was that he had been exactly what they needed.

Current Role

They sent him to fetch help, because the buyers were due at the cave the following night and somebody had to be standing there when they came: he and Edrick were to ride hard for Harad, bring back the honest Captain Jack and a crew, and keep the buyers’ coin as their pay. He objected that Harad was a poor choice, further off than Haudh-Gwenn and a genuinely tiny town, and Edrick answered that Harad would fight slavers, which turned out to be the measure that counted. The two of them rode out and bickered the whole way. He had one private condition: the less Ashtara knew of his involvement, the better.

He left Haudh-Gwenn the morning before the party came back for him, and he has not been seen since. What is known of him is second-hand and warm. He is in Harad, he is rich, and he is sympathetic to the cause, which is a combination the company has more than once looked at and failed to use: a letter meant for him missed the month it needed to catch. His name still comes up when someone needs a night at the Color Stay paid for, and the back door of that inn, which he showed them once, is still how they get in.

The rite is not discharged. He swore he would earn his own name, and no deed of his has been written down since.