Rainan Marr

Background

He began as a name in a list. Asked who stood closest to Beltran Grayeras, Orvayne gave four, and one of them was Rain. It was two seasons before anyone attached a face to it and most of another before the full name was given.

He was human, and he was a political fixer, which in Haudh-Gwenn meant the man who worked behind people in positions of power to set things in motion for their benefit. Blackmail, bribes and smear campaigns were his trade, and the people he practiced it on were the upper echelon rather than the street. He did not begin with Beltran. He had served other members of the council first, in all likelihood Beltran’s own parents, before he fell into the son’s pocket, and by the time the party heard of him that arrangement was some years old.

Appearance

Rainan was a man. Rheem’s reports out of the household said she throughout, which is the one place the record goes wrong about him and is worth knowing only because those reports are otherwise the best source on the household anybody had. Everyone who stood in a room with him said he.

He was velvet-voiced, always smiling, and rarely to be found without a drink in his hand. Of his face, only the eyes were ever described: sunken and dark-ringed in the way of everyone who stood too long near the Wraithblade Khopesh. By the season the party first looked at him properly they were as bad as Whent’s had been when they collected him, and possibly worse. He was one of six around Beltran carrying that look, and a year on he was still carrying it when Davi Solt’s hollow eyes turned out to be nothing more than exhaustion.

Personality

He worked through other hands and kept his own clean. He did not walk up to a man with a knife and he did not whisper the secret into an ear himself: he had people for that, and the layers were the point. To the ones he dealt with face to face he was pleasant, even warm, and the enforcement arrived from somebody else entirely. He was the planner of the four, the crafty one, and he was almost never anywhere that was not a room with movers and shakers in it.

The curse had taken the smoothness off the edges. Under the velvet he was aggressive and hair-triggered, and the reading at the time was that a man who once would not have touched the knife might well be using it now. He was also aloof to the point of being unreachable, rarely at meetings, seldom in the same place twice, conducting his business by notes passed through others, which is precisely why the party could get at every other lieutenant and not at him.

And of the four he was the one the sword had. Rheem, reading Beltran’s own table, came back with the one thing that set him apart from the rest: only Rainan violently wanted the Khopesh for himself. The others sat with it nightly and desired nothing. His scheming, read the same way, came back to her like a spiderweb.

Relationships

That covetousness made him the party’s chosen instrument long before it made him a corpse. The plan was never to stop his theft; it was to steer it, to become his fellow conspirator, to let him do the difficult half of taking the sword out of Beltran’s hand and then see to it that he did not actually end up holding it. The approach was never made. Nobody could get near him, and then Beltran got there first.

He never learned what killed him. Cornered on a missing hour, Rheem escaped by putting on Rainan’s face, and the intrigue that stirred was enough to convince Beltran that his fixer was moving against him. Beltran was not wrong about the plot, only about the evidence: Rainan was in fact one of the conspirators, alongside Solt, the Silver Web, and Beltran’s mother Alyphe, whose instruction was that the blow be delivered but the blade stayed, to spare her son.

Current Role

At Johanka Materai’s gala he was not himself. He came in late, kept to the edges, spoke to almost nobody and caught Koa’s eye more than once across the evening, which was strange behavior in a socialite and was noted as strange. Then Beltran abandoned a conversation mid-sentence and walked straight at him, and the two went into a back room.

They found him hours later in the cellar of Tazrih’s house, tied to a chair with a Hobbin working him over with a carpenter’s toolkit, unconscious and bleeding out. Aldo would not let Mikhail spend a potion on him, because none of this could look like them. They cut him loose and Koa carried him out over a shoulder, and he was dead before they lost the pursuit in the alleys. He had told Beltran nothing. Blood and screams, and no answers.

They kept the body. While Beltran went on believing his fixer had run, which hardened him in the conviction that he had been right all along, the corpse was carried to The Crack and made to sit up and answer three questions with grave-dirt and bone dust packed into its mouth. It gave up the guard-switch and the forged audit, named the clerk and the Silver Web and, at the last, the order that had come from Beltran’s mother. Then it convulsed and collapsed and the rite was finished.

His clothes were cleaned and mended and went back out onto the street with Rheem’s face wearing his over them, which is how Davi Solt was talked out of his own front door and walked clear of the riot. And his dying testimony is the lever that finished the man who ordered him opened: the bait laid for Beltran at the end was built out of what Rainan Marr had said about Alyphe after he was already dead.