Tony

Background

The name is not his alone. A half-orc of the same name runs the Silver Web’s muscle in the ruins outside Haudh-Gwenn, and off that city’s Waterfront a man buying Keif asks for Tony. Neither is the guard of Loshev, who is this one.

Aldo came into that town with four silver and a job from the jailer Dan: rile up a half-orc named Tony at the Prancing Prince and let the rest happen. What Aldo told the council afterwards was that a few names were all it took, that Tony chased him round the inn and beat him senseless, and that the guards stood and watched it. What happened later that same night, after the room had been calmed and Aldo tried a second time to set him going, is that Tony would not have it: if it was so easy, he said, Aldo could start it and he would join in.

Both of them went to the cells with everyone else out of the tavern. Four days on, Tony was working his sentence off in a guard’s uniform and Aldo was still behind a door. Called to testify at the hearing that followed, Tony gave the whole of his account in one breath, which was that Aldo had said some mean stuff and he had whooped him. The council heard him out and then observed that there were limits to what it could accept from a man convicted of the same charges. Aldo’s own reading, walking away from it, was that the town had sentenced the man who beat him half to death to a post with power over other people, and that this told him exactly how Loshev worked.

Appearance

Orcs are supposed to be small, and half-orcs strange; Tony is neither. He was massive the first time anyone laid eyes on him, and Constable Tariq al-Mahir told the council he was likely the largest guard in the town. Koa is not a small man and Tony’s forearm is thicker. His hands are calloused, which he noticed himself, and looked at, when he was teased about having soft ones. His hair, his eyes, his age and his height were never written down, and neither was anything of his dress but the post.

Personality

He is slow, and everyone who deals with him knows it and uses it. He takes a thing said to him at its face, and once thought a long while about what a Tuesday was before letting it go. He apologizes easily. The cell was the whole of him: he washed Aldo down with cold water and said sorry for it, called four days without a drink cruel and unusual for a big strapping lad, fetched his clothes back for him, and handed over his own wineskin because he was asked. He was a little less kind after Aldo emptied it.

He is sentimental about a fight without quite boasting of one. A worthy opponent he would have killed and drunk the blood of, he told Aldo, but Aldo was a child, and he looked sad saying so. When Tariq told the council that a single blow had felled the man, Tony spoke up from the floor to correct the count: it was two.

He liked Aldo’s mocking song about Dan enough to sing it in the tavern, always off by a syllable, and enough to start making songs of his own with his friends afterwards. He hires out to whatever is going and stands by whoever is in front of him, which has cost him more than once. Set to spar Koa so that Hinta could take his measure, Tony was the only one of the five still on his feet, and then the friends he had brought with him turned on him for the entertainment of it. Long after, standing in a ruin shrine, Aldo remembered that Tony used to swear in the name of Vëné the way anyone swears by anything.

Relationships

Almost everything that has happened to him has happened through Aldo. Aldo took coin to get him arrested. Aldo named him to a guard as the thief of two stolen tavern signs and was believed. Aldo hired him to be beaten by Koa, promised him a song for it, and paid up. When Tony nearly walked in on the party’s business inside Torgun Kurvroc’s house, Aldo turned him around by getting him to tell the story of the old brawl again, and Tony wandered off a hundred and fifty feet before stopping to check the sole of one boot and then, very carefully, the other, for a shrunken Aldo he might have trodden on. He looked relieved.

It ran the other way once. In the street, believing Aldo dead, he took hold of Koa without a word, said he was sorry, and then asked whether there was a table that wanted moving.

Current Role

The Muharib came through Loshev and Tony fought them. By Tariq’s account they maimed on a principle: whoever came at the fight honestly was let go, and whoever fought dirty was given a change of career. Tony fought dirty, or fought the way he has always fought, and they cut the tendon behind his right knee with the same precision they used on everything else that night. He does not walk without a support now, and it is not a wound the party’s magic can mend. Koa and Mikhail meant to look at it and find him a doctor; whether they ever did is not written down.

He drinks at the Broken Shield, cheap and in volume, and has all but worn out his welcome there. Aldo found him one night past speaking or being spoken to, cleared the tab, put the same again down against the next one, and would not let the bartender refuse; the bartender had been angry about that tab for months and was more unsettled by the sincerity than he would have been by a con. Tony does not know it happened.

He is also the reason the council paid anything out. Aldo put his case on the floor, a man who joined the guard because he wanted to protect Loshev and got hurt doing it, and the recompense for the injured guards carried over three votes against. A relief program for the rest of the town’s wounded followed soon after. Whether either of them ever reached Tony was never written down.