Rakhzan

Background

Rakhzan is a hobgoblin out of Draazstone and led the band of four that walks the mountain edge and the goat path out of it: trained warriors in reinforced brigandine, crossbows among them and a long spear, one of them a woman, all of them praying to Drozom the Frozen. They traded with the trappers they met up there. The accounts call them a mountain patrol in one place and goat-herders in another and never reconcile the two. His name is said to mean he who is steadfast.

The company met him standing over Jaden and Harveen, bound and gagged, whom he had tied up for the sole purpose of stopping them killing each other. He untied them. Then, told what the strangers were looking for, he turned his band out of its own road and walked them south to the old goat pass, which is difficult to find every time even for the men who know where it is, and asked nothing for it.

He asked, at that first meeting, whether they were Free Folk, and Koa said they were, near enough, being mercenaries. Rakhzan is not one. He said later, of his own crewmates and to Koa’s face, that they look to their pockets but they are not mercenaries, and there was an edge on it.

What he gave beyond the road was Draazstone itself, said plainly and without advertisement: a place of martial law, the finest smiths in Idir and perhaps in all Erôth, outsiders tolerated by law and unwelcome by custom, and the ones to be careful of are the ones holding authority or friendly with it.

He was out on that mountain because of a death at home. He had taught the egg trade to his eldest, as the eldest had wanted; the eldest is with the gods now and no one else in the family carries it. So it fell back to him and he could not retire.

Appearance

Cheerful, and a smile with several teeth missing from it. Reinforced brigandine, a sword broader than a short sword strapped at his side, and a wicked knife made for cutting through thick hide. When the company found him again at a perimeter tower his arm was in a sling. Since his sentence he is missing an eye, which is reported and has never been seen. His age, his height, his coloring and which eye he lost were never written down.

The Eggs

They came on him at a fortified Draazstone rest-stop, hobgoblins round a fire under a ballista, and one of his four dead on the mountain with talon wounds in him. In private he agreed the stolen eagle eggs had to go back. His crew was the harder question and he said so exactly: three eggs at two hundred and fifty Dell gold apiece is generational money, and surrendering it at an outsider’s word is a shame that follows a family for a long time afterwards. He would speak to them. He would not speak for them.

What turned him was not the argument. Mikhail addressed Al-Sāmiyah in G’lin and she answered, and Rakhzan stood and watched her listen and reason, which is a different thing from watching a clever animal, and changed his mind about what he had been trading in. Two eggs went back to her. She took the third out of a pack herself.

He called the venture a costly failure and a first step, which was fair. There was talk of trade with Draazstone in the spring and of hunting the gnolls together. He gave the road advice that shaped the company’s winter, which was that the old goat roads run only north and south and that the southern one should be taken before the weather shut it. And he passed on what he had heard at his own fire: that Orsugo was somewhere in these mountains.

What It Cost Him

He was punished at Draazstone for having traded those eggs to outsiders. He lost an eye, his freedom and his family’s good name. In that town a man who has divided his attention where he should not have loses an eye, on the reasoning that the eye is what split.

The arms trade between Loshev and Draazstone that now arms the region exists because of him, and the first promise it was built on was made to his band on a mountainside. He remains imprisoned there. Nobody has spoken to him since the day the eggs went home, and making it right by him has sat on the company’s list ever since without moving. Hinta, the only other Draazstone name in Loshev, hates him, and no one has ever given a reason for it.