Arcane Musketeer

The Arcane Musketeer on the Free Companies' southern hiring-board is Lucan Ardery, age thirty-six, listed under 'duellist' by trade and 'closure' by rent, the second category being the board's word for the long-trail bounties the Crimson Hand accepts and cannot close within the political-cover window its other commitments allow. The Hand contracts him for those, at first refusal, and the southern bureau-master has recorded the arrangement twice as 'irregular but operationally indispensable,' which Lucan has had embroidered inside the hat. The hat is the point. The feather in it is steel, cut from the barrel of the first pistol he ever fired, which burst in his hand at nineteen and took the top of his left ear; he keeps the ear under the brim and the feather above it and does not discuss which he minds more.

His combat-grant is the vented shot. The pistol he carries now fires no powder — the round is a compressed working, Syndicate-cut, that runs hot enough to scorch the bore — and it vents magical steam when it fires because he had the vent added, at his own expense, on the grounds that a shot ought to be seen. He names the target aloud before he fires, which the Hand's clerks record as theatre and which is, in fact, the aim: a named man stands a little straighter, and a little straighter is where the round goes. His contract-record tracks to sixty-eight closures over nine years with a deadline-variance the Hand has noted and not analysed; he will miss a contract's named date if missing it makes the closure cleaner, and has said, to the bureau-master's face, that the contract is the contract and the deadline is a suggestion with a pay-grade.

He is on warm, unhurried terms with Nyx Varela, who recommends him to crews the way other mercenaries recommend her — 'Nyx finishes; Ardery is seen finishing' — and on wary, amused terms with Liora Stone, who stole the hat once at a Free Companies muster and returned it the next morning with the feather polished, which he has chosen to take as a professional courtesy. He does not work for the Meroveil Empire, has worked for private clients three times in nine years, and has declined the Hand's offer of a sworn position on the grounds that a sworn operative belongs to the Hand and a duellist belongs to whoever he has just named. The steam, he says, is so they remember the name.