Professor Ashanti al-Hassan

Background

She calls herself a Tazion, born the youngest daughter of a large peasant family in the south of Taziondale and raised in the firm understanding of Tazion hospitality. Accounts that do not have it from her say only that she was schooled there, which is a smaller claim and not the same one.

She had the most curious mind in a family that had no use for one, and her village gathered the gold between them to send her to a college. She went for alchemy and was captured instead by ancient history, and by the Mól in particular, on the strength of a hobgoblin professor who mentored her and whose name was never written down. She spent years in Taziondale’s own ruins and published what she found so that her country could have the use of it. Then she came to Idir, following the Mól’s lost alchemy, and looking for partners who were local, influential and preferably moral.

She found them at Gwenivere’s shop in Haudh-Gwenn, where she had been wintering and making a nuisance of herself over the stock. Mikhail spotted the Arcane Congress sigils on her alchemist’s kit before anyone had thought to ask what her training was.

Appearance

Five foot six, olive brown, with the lean build of someone who does her own digging. Brown eyes; straight dark brown hair at medium length, kept under a headscarf. She dresses in fine Tazion traveling clothes, trousers and leather gloves and boots, and comes across as upper class until she opens her mouth, which she does in a deep, smooth, elegant Tazion accent that people outside Taziondale find exotic and she has never troubled to soften.

Two things on her are older than she is. Around her throat and neck runs a tattoo in ancient Tazion iconography, a blazing sun. At her collarbone hangs a spearhead of cold iron on a fine chain, her family’s heirloom, and the markings cut into it record an ancient line and the most honored names along it.

Personality

Insatiably curious, quick-tongued, and entirely willing to get her hands dirty. She holds that knowledge is worth having only where it does people good, and she means it enough to be an inconvenient guest about it: she pockets other people’s supplies for the experiments without asking, and she once jumped down a slithering-pit shaft because she wanted a closer look, and sprained her ankle on the way.

The recklessness has a floor under it, which is method. Handed the cipher that Mikhail and Elliot had built, she had the Encyclopædia’s alchemy volume open and teaching inside an evening: base elements, aether, catalysts and reactions, a whole lost discipline back in working use.

She has no combat schooling whatever and does not pretend to any; she absorbed one of Aldo’s drunken tall tales as genuine monster-lore because she had no way of telling the difference. She is not fragile, though. She has stood in a keep alone with seven centuries of dissolved people and taken measurements.

Her Tazion rigidity is her own word for the thing that makes decisions hard for her, and she admits it. Watching the dead made to speak, she said only, “That’s what we were taught, but I’d never seen it before”, and looked horror-struck.

Relationships

Aldo is the complication. She greeted him in flawless Tazion the first night, recognized a countryman and embraced him as a brother, then nearly gave away the fact that he was a Tazion hiding it, in front of everyone. She spent the evening drinking with the persona rather than the man and ended it kissing him, and she went on asking after her Tazion friend for weeks afterwards while he dodged her.

Gwenivere introduced her to the company and became, in Ashanti’s own account, her home. She grieved quietly over taking things out of Gwen’s abandoned shop. With Koa it took three seasons and a bad night at The Crack, where she put her arms round him while he came apart, for anything real to pass between them. She shares a workroom with Elliot and almost nothing else; he is bored by alchemy and they work in opposite directions.

The one relation she will not have is Peredhel. Taziondale’s southern towns have been taken in that war, and when she learned on the road who Leon Yaegar had been, she went silent for the rest of it, and nobody had thought to warn her he was coming.

Current Role

She has been the company’s chemist since the winter she cracked the alchemy volume, and the work has bent steadily darker. It was to her that Mikhail brought the truth about the sludge in Haudh-Gwenn’s medicines, that it is the minds and bodies and souls of the city’s dead; she had already studied slithering pits and knew where the stuff came from. Her answer was to drink her way towards it, escalating doses of a sludge-based concoction until something in the curse-work gave. One dose of it permanently widened Mikhail’s magical reserves and left him light-sensitive for a day. Koa talked her into patience.

With Mikhail she went on to decode the Mól’s whole component system and to identify the ooze itself as a rare catalyst and accelerant, which is the finding everything since has rested on. She read Aldo’s cut-out ooze correctly as an inert simulacrum rather than soul-goo, oversaw the ritual that woke it into Rheem, noted that it had copied clothing as well as flesh (unheard of in any doppelganger story she knew), warned Koa that it had been pressing into his mind, and volunteered to be the one who told Leon what they had done.

The Slumbering Queen used her. She walked to Gwen’s room in her sleep carrying the vial of trapped souls and had no memory of it at all, and she was sent to Harad with Elliot and the books and the supplies for her own safety and the vial’s. The chemistry she came back with is what the last plan runs on: the ooze can be broken to its base elements, earth and water, and evaporated off as air, but it needs a catalyst to start the reaction outside a proper laboratory and an accelerant to carry it through the whole volume at once. She had a week of arithmetic on the timing before Koa pointed out that most of it could be destroyed in advance and only a few barrels left to break at the moment it mattered. She was floored.

She lives in the Haudh-Gwenn curse-keep now, smuggled in through a wine-cellar window at midnight, alone with the ooze she is there to destroy and, latterly, with a captured lieutenant to keep an eye on as well. She supplies everything the company carries: thunder arrowheads and thunderstones and noise pellets, sleep-draughts to order, grave-dirt and bone-dust for a necromancy, extracts and an enhanced potion for the last assault, and a single mass-combat healing working held in reserve for Leon’s army if it is ever needed. Her face may be on the sketches Beltran’s guards are carrying.

What held the work up at the end was not chemistry but supply. The reaction wanted pearl ash in bulk, purified potash, and she named the want of it as the likeliest single thing to stall the breaking of the curse; when a looted accelerant and its dead maker’s recipe book closed most of that gap, she asked for a week and one competent assistant and was given both. The last piece came out of Mikhail’s memory rather than her workbench. He remembered that the keep she was living in had once had a gem-cutting room, went and swept up what the Mól had left on its floor, and the crushed gem-flecks sharpened the burn enough to carry the whole volume. She was declared ready, and then handed another week on top of it when the Elder asked for time to recover. She spent most of it awake and short-tempered, and Aldo bullied her into a nap.

She had not slept the night before either. She was up before dawn calling the sequence aloud for a Mikhail who had drilled it for a week and no longer needed the calls. The ooze boiled and popped and stank past bearing, and then it came apart into the two things it had been made of: the souls of the people dissolved into it left the material plane for the outer planes, and the bound water-elemental essence went back to the inner planes. They had been fused for hundreds of years and they were disjoined in a morning.

More of it is still down there, under and beside the river at the ruins, untouched, and Mikhail wants it next. So is the fold of purple glittering sand, taken off a man who used it to keep captives docile, still sitting somewhere unanalyzed.