Rheem

Background

She began as an intruder nobody knew about. An ooze took Aldo in the Haudh-Gwenn curse-keep and then lay dormant under his skin for a long while, editing what he could remember of it so that he only recalled the thing at all once it had been cut back out of him. Its arrival was also when he began to see the Elder, and why was never discovered.

Cut out, it was not what they feared. Professor Ashanti al-Hassan read it as inert: not soul-goo, but a simulacrum, a doppelganger, holding a vague fetal human shape and nothing else. Yara smelled it for evil and found none in it. So they crowned it, and it grew to the size of a child, and Aldo pushed a crystal of soul-goo through its membrane. The body reshaped into an adult woman folded into a child’s frame; crowned a second time it came up to full height, and woke.

What woke was a person, whole, with her memories intact. She spoke Taal. She was frightened of the masters. She could read minds, and did, without being asked. Her last memory of her own life is running for the fields during the rebellion and seeing Vëné and the one whose power rots the ground standing against the Mól to cover the escape, and it was she who supplied the name the whole company had been chasing: Nancáro, Vëné’s brother, whom Aldo recognized at once as the Elder they had been following through the keeps. She herself, she said, had been freed because I served. The party spared her anyway.

She has a name from before all of that. Raheema Anbar, Rheem to everyone, and it means merciful rain, for the drought year she was born in and the parents who were praying for it.

What she is remains open. Ashanti calls her a doppelganger and a simulacrum. Nancáro put forward the Hags of the Night instead, the soul-eating fae of Eldamar said to live in dreams, as the origin of the ooze she was made from. Neither has been proved and nobody has tried very hard.

Appearance

In her own body she is blue and translucent, a light sea blue rather than an indigo, and gelatinous to the touch and the eye both. The skin goes thinner and clearer as the body stretches while the color inside it darkens, and you cannot see all the way through her. When she is agitated her whole surface ripples; when she settles it goes still, and her feelings can be read off her at forty paces.

She wears clothes Yara found for her, and she hates the form they hang on. The aversion to her own body is real and consistent, and was never explained.

Borrowed, she is anyone. A touch takes the shape and the voice both, though only the body: the clothes stay hers, and the one time they did not, on the first contact of her life, Aldo’s copied garments faded off her while he watched. She takes a weapon’s use the instant she picks it up and learned javelins in a morning off watching, she has the proficiency of a trained soldier in armor she has never worn, and in her natural state she does not need a weapon at all. She cannot be put to sleep. Opened along the gut she heals in a day or two, provided she stays jelly.

Personality

She is about a month old. Everything above sits on an adult body carrying fragments of seven to ten centuries of somebody else’s life, and the person on top of it is new: her handlers put her at roughly thirteen, and it showed in every direction at once. She was bored constantly. She drank when she was told not to and shapeshifted for entertainment. She called Koa Captain Stickup and resented the swordplay he wanted her learning, on the grounds that she could rip the arms off the person holding the sword. She asked Aldo, the first time she cornered him alone, whether she should call him daddy.

She was also very good at the work. She read a room and reported it cleanly: Rainan Marr’s scheming came back to her as like a spiderweb, and of Venros, bald and slate-eyed and somewhere in his forties, she said only that his stare made her leave rather than press her luck. She learned that Koa is deliberate rather than slow. She called going into Haudh-Gwenn going home for the first time in a millennia, and she stopped in the street to look at a memorial the city had put up to the company she rides with.

She bumped a stranger on a bridge to borrow their face and brushed a lieutenant’s sleeve at a table to take his, deliberately and without hesitating. She flinches from her own people’s hands, and from being healed.

Relationships

Aldo is the one she chose, and she calls him daddy to annoy him. It is grifter to grifter, and it went wrong before it went right: she copied him perfectly on the first night of her life, voice and all, without understanding what she had done, and for a con-man whose entire craft is identity it read as theft. He came round. When she came back to the keep gut-stabbed the only thing he had for her was that next time she should not try to play the hero.

Koa set the terms she rode on: no wearing a teammate’s face without their knowledge, no more reading minds, or he would put her back in the slime well. She agreed and had a spell on Mikhail inside the hour. He threatened her in anger and apologized for it sincerely afterwards, which is more than most of the people in her life managed. Mikhail is the one who sat with her after she nearly killed somebody and talked her through what it does to a person, and let her have the day alone that she asked for. Edrick banned her from drinking, lost a bet, and drank with her.

Current Role

She joined the company outright before the march on Haudh-Gwenn, took a bundle of javelins, and was the reason a great deal of the work in the city came off. She walked a guarded bridge wearing a passer-by. To pull every eye on the street onto the two of them while Mikhail, Aldo and Ashanti let themselves into Gwen’s house with Koa’s key, she staged a shouting match with Koa in the open street and slapped him hard enough to leave a mark. She spent a night working the crowd around Beltran’s table and came back with the one fact the whole plan turned on: of his four lieutenants, only Rainan Marr violently wanted the Wraithblade Khopesh for himself. She took Orvayne’s form and armor and sword, stood his watch, and slept in his house.

Then the roles began to close over her. As Zarif she was collecting coin and keeping it, and showing off what she had lifted along the way: silver spoons, a locket, a round crystal she was pleased with. The crystal turned out to belong to Hinta, and the crew who sold it had her in a cell, so Rheem had to go and break her out again without letting her see who was doing it. Koa read the whole pattern as corruption, either by the sword’s reach through her mind-reading or simply by the part itself; Mikhail and Aldo answered that she had to live in the role or lose it. The company never settled that argument.

She was hurt covering Koa. Screening a line of guards so he could get clear with Hinta, she was struck twice and did not come back that night, and the guards who chased her recovered Zarif’s blood-soaked armor, which blew that cover open across the city. Cornered in the streets, she escaped by taking Rainan’s face instead, and it was that which stirred the suspicion that ended with Beltran torturing the real Rainan Marr to death. She got to the keep opened along the gut, and she was horrified about the man long before she was worried about herself.

She healed. Then she agreed to put Rainan’s face back on, over his cleaned and mended clothes, to walk Davi Solt out of the city under escort. She said out loud what it was: puppeting a dead man past a man coming apart is a risk laid on top of a risk. Then she rode south for The Crack, a day’s hard ride, to bring Leon and his army up behind her.

She was not there for the end of it.