Tazrih

Background

Tazrih was freelance before she was Beltran’s. She had ties into every underground crew in Haudh-Gwenn, which is worth more than belonging to any one of them, and when she took Beltran Grayeras’s coin she took the ties with her. The crews the party had once dealt with closed to them overnight, the Silver Web among them. How she came to him, and when she stopped selling to everybody, was never written down.

She was his ears. One of the four lieutenants he actually trusted, and the only one whose work nobody else could do, she kept her office in Ashtara Walnut’s old estate. A tunnel runs from that house to the wine cellar of the old Ten Lashes tavern. She used it, and in the end it was used on her.

Personality

She was hunting the party openly for a long while before either side stood in a room together. Everything from that stretch came to them at second hand: a fixer’s report, a lieutenant’s list of names, a hobgoblin woman at Beltran’s table looking as though she would rather be anywhere else in the world.

She had seven people strapped into reclined chairs in the town-hall square with rat-boxes over their bellies, waiting to be lit, and she was making a speech over it when a thunderstone drowned her out. Hours later, running for her life out of that same square, she had two of the people that rescue had freed taken aside and killed. No hard feelings, she said; they were falsely accused, but a trail is a trail. Koa, who had cut them loose himself, was openly shocked.

Relationships

Beltran suspected her, and had for a while. Venros was hired as her personal guard and was in fact Beltran’s watcher of watchers, carrying written instructions to keep a close eye on her and to test whether the loyalty around her was genuine, signed off with a line about watching the man who watched the others. The suspicion was misplaced. She had no part in the plot to take his sword: a corpse made to answer questions named a clerk, the Silver Web and Beltran’s own mother, and did not name her.

The party framed her anyway, to pull his paranoia onto her and off the clerk and the Silver Web, whose hands they still needed to run at the sword a second time. It took a loyal lieutenant off his board besides, and it was done in cold blood by people who already knew she was innocent. Two days later Beltran walked out of her house wiping his hands on a rag and handed her the rag, and the man he had been working on inside was one of his own.

Garik carried for her through the tunnel and stood at her shoulder at the finish. He kept a rare powder, a pinch of which briefly clears the Wraithblade’s compulsion, and he kept it for her.

Current Role

The rescue was an accident. The party went into that square to ruin her and came out having saved her, and by the end of the afternoon she trusted the horrified nobleman who had talked her through it. She was never told who he actually was.

She took her people back to Ashtara’s house, let her crossbows finish the town-guards posted outside it, and ordered the place burned: papers first, weapons handed to the freed. She meant one more hideout and then the road, and Garik named Vigil as where the cell was going.

She was fraying by then. She had been one of six sunken-eyed figures counted around Beltran not long before, and she had not had the sword near her in some time, and she wanted it. Mikhail, listening at doors, read the contradiction plainly: she was running and craving at once and could not hold both. When Koa pushed at it she drew a dagger, clumsily, and told him to go find Rainan if he wanted help and otherwise to shut up and keep walking. A little after that she walked out the far door on an excuse and did not come back. They let her go and left.

Whether she was walking away from the sword’s pull or toward it was never discovered. She was not in the street outside the Color Stay when Beltran died.