Whent

Background

He came onto the guard of Haudh-Gwenn late, not long after Beltran Grayeras took it, and what he had been before that nobody thought to write down. What he became is on every road out of the city.

For a long stretch he bought men to hunt the Valiant Few. Archers at two gold a head, with a new longbow and new boots apiece, and a second crew of five waiting at the river approach. Daric’s bugbears on the eastern road. Further off and earlier, the whole of the Idir Expedition sent up to Wraithblade Keep, which is how Eralan Rasi and Yamael came to be on that mountain at all. Where the party were on any given day reached him from a carrier-bird handler in the city.

What to call the man doing that is not agreed. One account has him a low-life recently handed a guard’s uniform. The barkeep who named him as the one who sent and paid the assassins called him a councilman, and so did the lieutenant who knew the inside of Beltran’s arrangements better than anyone. What is not in dispute is where he sat: on or around the council, close enough to Beltran to speak for him and cheap enough to be spent.

Kithul crossed him at the keep and was jumped days later by several men, bound, thrown into a soil-covered pit and left for dead. He got himself out. He had no proof and told Mikhail not to say it aloud, because Whent was the guard-captain’s dog.

The Three Specters

They found him in the Silver Web’s sewer den, behind a locked door, beating the flautist Gerald for going off script. The fight was short. Koa took him alive.

He would not stay down. He came round again and again and went at his captors like an animal, biting and clawing, and sleep would not touch him: he shrugged off a daze six times over. His eyes had gone sunken and dark-ringed, which the party first read as the black eye Mikhail had given him escaping the inn ambush, and then read correctly. Dwayne alone could see what was circling him, counted two or three, and urged them to put him down like a sick animal.

They did not. They took him to the Westwood tunnel rather than into the city or down to the Crack, where he had hired some of the refugees himself, and had Yara work a Barren-Lands rite over him: her own blood bled into a pot, some fifty silver shaved into it, the whole of it boiled and ladled over a cut opened in his chest until he passed out from the pain. It burned three wraiths out of him, and he woke scalded and lucid with no memory of any of it. Gerald had already said the thing that mattered, which was that Beltran’s whole inner circle looked the way Whent looked.

Personality

What was left when the specters were gone was a smaller man than the one who had hired the crews. His hatred of the party read as hollow to Aldo, parroted rather than felt: he had been turned against them by somebody else’s telling, and had only learned of the slave ring after it had already collapsed. Koa spent the better part of a day on him, quoting scripture at him and refusing to execute him, and came away satisfied that the guilt Whent carried over betraying his gods was real.

Relationships

His loyalty was never to Beltran. It was to the house. The Grayeras have been kind to me for over thirty years, he said, and it is the only thing he offered that nobody had to press out of him.

Where that loyalty actually settles is on Naevora, Beltran’s sister, whom he has known since the two of them were children. Under pressure he let slip that she writes everything down and keeps it, which handed the party the best lead they had had in a long while. He regretted it at once and would not be moved again. She is innocent, he said, she is no part of it, and they were asking him to throw away thirty years of knowing somebody because it was convenient for them.

Current Role

The rest he gave up burned and coherent in the tunnel. The Wraithblade Khopesh came off that mountain by way of the crew he had hired: only Nazeera and Oshuun Karral came back down it, Nazeera dying of her wounds in Ridh, and Whent saw Beltran carrying the sword afterwards. What became of Oshuun he did not know, and said only that the man was gone. Orvayne, who sat closer, later gave the fuller account, in which Beltran killed him for it. Whent named the Crimson Shroud contract too, paid through a contact called Dusk, ask for Cricket, to make a councilman’s family disappear. Tucked away, he insisted. Not killed.

Then a cell in The Crack, alongside three mercenaries who had tried to betray the party, and he has not come out of it. Haudh-Gwenn noticed. One of Beltran’s own had gone missing for days; guards went hunting Mikhail over it, and the gossip ran well ahead of anything the party could do with it. He was still held at the Crack when a second captured lieutenant was sent down to join him.

He was not there for the end of it. Something wearing his face was: a conjured Whent, made to carry Beltran one piece of news, imperfect and faintly blue and seen through in a moment. The man himself was more than a month gone by then, in a cell some days’ walk away. Whether he knows the Valiant Few are alive, or that a copy of him was walked into a burning inn and used to finish the house he spent thirty years being grateful to, was never written down.