Talren was secretary to Master Corven, the Gilded Coven’s emissary in Iskandar, and so was present for the whole of the conspiracy that brought down the Veinwright kingdom without ever once being asked to approve of it.
He was a short, copper-skinned goblin with a gold hoop in each ear and a ring on every finger, and he carried his ledgers against his chest the way other men carry authority. He did not sit in Corven’s presence unless invited; almost nobody did. He was careful, loyal and frightened, and brave in the useless way open to a clerk: on the morning the Shadow Weaver Sythren Vaal first appeared in his master’s study, Talren drew a knife on him and did not put it away for a long time.
He was the one person in that room who said aloud that the arrangement was a mistake, and the one who asked what it would cost. He objected, it changed nothing, and he stayed. For the four years of the civil war he carried the thing rather than chose it — the ledgers, the sealed messages, the letter that set the Justicar’s Legion marching — standing at Corven’s side while merchant houses were frightened into line and a kingdom was bought.
He also noticed what nobody had asked him to. It was Talren who brought Corven two copies of the same escape map, one of which led fleeing separatists straight into a Legion patrol, showing that the Weavers had begun sorting the survivors by what they knew. Carrying that upstairs was the most dangerous thing he ever did.
At the end, when Corven asked what could be done for a witness the Coven had used and then ruined by ordinary means, Talren spent a day and a half establishing that nothing could, short of a payment to a woman nobody could find — which, he warned, would sit in the books as an unmatched liability the auditors would question every year. Corven had it entered regardless.
He had kept the books on the purchase of a kingdom. The last answer he brought his master was the one line in them that could never be made to balance.