Messy (Diggle)

Diggle was his name and Messy was what the crew called him, and Casper, who had worked beside him, had to reach for the first of the two before he could produce it.

He was the third man at the ruins ambush, the one winding a chain around his wrist, and he ran when Mikhail’s spell dropped the man beside him. Casper gave up where he went to ground: a disused bits-and-bobs shop-front behind the Haudh-Gwenn blacksmith, two doors from a brightly painted tailor. Then Casper came back to add a warning he thought they needed. Messy had apprenticed at alchemy some years before and knew how to make things go bang, and if he decided things were going sideways he was liable to blow himself up with everything else.

A stair gave the company away on the way up. He fought them through a doorway, was driven into a corner, and gave in under the threat of Mikhail’s magic, and then answered what was put to him: the lashes on the forearm marked the leadership, Ashtara was one of them, and the boat captain was real. He had also kicked the door as a signal before any of that, and when the knock came Aldo stood over him and made him send the men outside around the back.

Then he set off his own jars. The blast was feeble and it took the floor out anyway: Koa went down through it into the basement with the spike wound in his thigh tearing open again, Mikhail went down the stairs, Aldo went out a window, and Messy knocked himself cold in the middle of it. They dragged him out of the wreck of his own hideout past neighbors who had come to gawk, telling them he was being taken to the Chantry, and caged him at the ruins instead.

From the cage he gave up Edrick: an information broker in the wealthy quarter, well connected and expensive, keeping a tavern that had been a bank. The rest of the rescue ran on that name.

He was the more defiant of the two prisoners, and he was the one Mikhail was willing to threaten with the sock. Willie kicked him through the bars and had to be threatened off it. He never got out of them. Koa came back to the ruins days later to find the door standing open and both men stabbed dead in the cage, and Casper under the rubble beside them.