The conjured "Whent"

Not an illusion a hand goes through. What Voler Bria brought down the stairs of the Color Stay was quasi-real, solid enough to walk across a city and be looked at while it delivered its errand, and it wore the face of Whent, the lieutenant nobody in Haudh-Gwenn had seen in more than a month. It was made for one message: to find Beltran Grayeras and tell him that his mother had informed on him.

It was made short. The working wanted powdered rubies and there were none to be had, so what came downstairs was faintly blue where a man is not, and its face was cut at angles a face does not take, flat planes meeting in places skin has no edges. From behind Bria’s own veil the whole seam of it showed.

It showed to Beltran as well. The light caught wrong on the messenger’s skin, and a man who had been handed a warning and an invitation on the same afternoon put those two together too. He came to the inn early and he came angry, with the Wraithblade drawn and already bloodied on somebody, which was sooner than anyone waiting for him had planned on.

The real Whent had no part in any of it. He was a month gone from the city and some days’ walk away, held in a cell at the Crack and knowing nothing about a copy of himself being walked into a burning inn to finish the house he had served for thirty years. Whether anyone has told him since was never written down.