Venros

Background

He came from out of town about a fortnight before anyone in Haudh-Gwenn thought to ask about him. Casper, who follows that sort of hiring for a living, understood that he had not been taken on by Beltran himself but brought in to work for him. Who did the bringing was never discovered.

He was posted as personal guard to Tazrih, and the papers found on his body say what the posting was actually for. They were written to him rather than by him: instructions to keep close watch on the woman he was guarding, to test whether the loyalty around her was genuine, and a closing line Beltran evidently thought worth putting into ink. Please understand I am watching you while you watch the others. Beyond that letter there was nothing on him in his own hand at all. No correspondence, no lists, no name.

What he was is less settled than what he did. Casper called him a Dhel, which is a nationality rather than a blood, while two witnesses in a single evening described him in terms that read instead as Peren, long-lived and beginning to show it. The party came round to the same reading after they had killed him. Both can stand at once, and neither has been confirmed.

Talia Salahaudhi gave him the name her own people use. He was a yalwī al-ʿaql, a twister of minds out of Mól children’s stories, and she was firm that this is not enchantment and not magic, that such things are demons in the tales she was raised on, and that serpents will run them down. The party, who watched him work, called him a mage and nothing else. Which of them was right was never settled.

His money and his horse pointed the same way. The coin on him was Peredhel currency, freshly struck and out of several mints at once, which means either that Beltran pays his outside men in it or that there is a press nearer the city than anyone would like. The horse he left in the Color Stay stables was good stock carrying the marks of Peredhel military training. Both pointed outside Idir, and whose hand that was in Haudh-Gwenn’s affairs was never answered.

Appearance

Bald, slenderly built, in his middle or late forties, and well dressed without being better dressed than the company he kept. The accounts differ on his eyes: very dark blue in the description Rheem gave the night she first saw him, slate in every telling since. He was in plain clothes when he died, with his hands over his ears.

Personality

He watched people, and Katalia, who worked the bar he lodged over, put the important part precisely. It was not that he watched people. It was who he watched, and how. He looked at whoever was interesting rather than whoever was well presented, which under a glamour that flatters everyone in the room is the behavior of a man seeing something the glamour is not showing him. Asked outright whether Venros could see past it, the inn’s owner would say only that he did not rightly know, and that the man gave the impression of perceiving things outside what a person’s senses ought to allow.

He argued a stranger down once in the common room, and at the end of it the stranger agreed that he had been wrong, apologized, and was not seen again. Katalia’s remark was that this had not looked like a man who admitted fault easily. The house was unsettled enough by its lodger that it would have been glad to be rid of him.

What he did to people directly, he did with words. Rheem left rather than hold his stare. Aldo, caught by the same look across a bar, felt a dread with nothing in the room to account for it, ran, and was stopped mid-stride in the street when Venros called two words after him and made them an order. His employer could hold a man still with a stare and no words at all. Venros had to speak.

The End of It

Nothing else the party had planned could run while he was alive, so they bought their way to him. Katalia carried terms to the inn’s owner, the back door was left unlocked, and a serving woman was arranged who could not see them. The door to his room had no lock anybody could find and would not move, until somebody remembered the key, at which point the lock existed. Koa opened it. Venros was standing in plain clothes with his hands over his ringing ears, and then he looked at Koa and, without a word or a gesture or anything in his hands, took the air out of his lungs.

He did not stay to trade blows. He struck a potion at his arm, turned to gas, sank through the floorboards, hid in the gap between floor and ceiling, and faked the sound of rushing wind to send the search the wrong way. Mikhail, who performs for a living and knows misdirection when he hears it, saw through the decoy. Aldo announced loudly that he was helping himself to the mage’s crystals, to goad him out of hiding, and it half worked: Venros came back to solid long enough to take the air out of Aldo’s lungs as well, then gassed again and slipped away. When they closed on the cloud he lashed Mikhail’s mind with a noise like a whip cracking and left him dazed and diminished by it. A summoned air elemental pinned the cloud long enough for Koa’s oiled greatsword to go through it. As the blade went in, the room filled with the smell of honeysuckle, pungent and out of nowhere, and nobody has explained it since.

What fell onto the bed was a man in three pieces, missing an arm and a leg.

Afterwards Mikhail worked out the thing that mattered. In gaseous form there is no voice, no hand and nothing to hold, so every spell Venros cast in that shape was cast without word, gesture or material. Each of those three disciplines is punishing on its own, and a caster carrying all three is usually reduced to the simplest work. Venros carried all three and was wielding suffocation magic with them. Mikhail said plainly that this made him more frightening than Beltran.

The body gave up a library shard, a healing potion, the coin, and Beltran’s letter.

Afterwards

His room became the party’s bolt-hole and has stayed it. His clothes cut three hours off the work of building a Venros for Aldo to wear out of the city, which was meant to read as the mage walking out on Beltran and to sour his dealings beyond it, and his horse carried Orvayne north under the guards’ noses while the borrowed face told them to stand down. The shard has not been opened. The coin went off to be identified and nothing came back.

The last thing he did was be missing. Beltran, unraveling, called in everyone he owned to look them in the eye and demanded specifically that Venros investigate. Venros did not answer, and could not. On the day Beltran died his guards were sitting in the Color Stay, because the last place his mind-mage had been seen was that inn and he had come to suspect that something had happened to him there. Something had.