Iven Marr was a clerk in one of the Arcanum Arcanorum’s administrative repositories, where royal proclamations, trade agreements and guild petitions sit beside thousands of documents nobody expects to matter. He was not important, which is most of why evidence of the Gilded Coven’s plot against the Supreme Ruler passed through his hands.
He was not human, and nobody in the repository would have thought the fact worth filing. His skin was the grey of unpolished silver, his bare skull traced with fine gold lines, his eyes gold the whole way through. He was dry, literal and easily annoyed, a man who insisted that he catalogued things rather than studied them, and then, having been asked, studied them anyway.
He had known Balif in the Arcanum before Balif left for the Supreme Ruler’s court, and the two did not much like each other, which made Iven useful: he had no reason to flatter him. When Balif began quietly investigating the Coven, Iven was the man he took forged documents to, and Iven could tell him what ink they were written in and when the palace had stopped buying it, though the Arcanum is supposed to stand outside guild politics.
Twice Iven brought Balif records nobody had authorised him to show — first Gilded payments hidden in the archive under a false classification, later a payment schedule whose sums fell beside the attempts on the ruler’s life. He would not hand over a copy, and no pressure moved him; they were not his to give.
He was honest about what his guild meant to do with such things, which was preserve them and not act. The Arcanum would not accuse one of the strongest guilds in Ashkar of trying to murder the Supreme Ruler when it could not prove who had paid whom, and Balif recognised the argument because he had made it to the throne himself. Balif never got his proof.
Asked whether the Arcanum was recording the affair itself — all of it — he took a long time and said: some things. That was all Balif ever got out of him.