Bruno Rossi

Bruno Rossi, known as the Doctor, is a healer of the poor in Aquila in the campaign Yeni Dünya ("New World"). An independent man who works with the Coalition of Enlightenment only when their aims meet, he keeps a clinic, Doktorun Yeri, and carries one black arm whose origin he himself does not know.¹²³

Appearance and character

He was first seen beside Professor Galevan: a man with yellow eyes and scars on his face, wearing gloves and a veil. He gave his name as Bruno Rossi and said he could also be called the Doctor. When he took off his coat and gloves, one of his arms proved black and the other the colour of his skin.⁴¹⁵

The professor described him as someone who did not work for the Coalition but helped from time to time when their aims were shared, and Bruno said himself that he was not the Coalition's man and would work with others on fair terms. He describes his work as taking from those who do not need and giving to those who do.⁶⁷²

Stories of the Doctor circulate in the city: a cart of medicines that went missing and whose contents turned up in the poor quarters, and a healer who treats the poor by day and goes out masked by night to beat certain people.⁸⁹

Background

Bruno was born and raised in the settlements outside the outer walls of Marble City, a little to the west of the city. His father was a doctor who treated the people and animals of the surrounding villages, and Bruno took his first liking for medicine from him; he says that his father served as a physician in compulsory service and that he joined him a few times. In those days he had no surname and no rank.^10111213

At about eighteen or nineteen, after a strange dream and changes in his body, he set out on a journey, and a few months later he had come west. His strength, speed and senses had grown; in an inn he caught a mug of beer flying towards him without looking, and called it a new reflex he could not yet control.¹⁴¹⁵¹⁶

The dream

Bruno has a recurring dream of a giant dragon, its colours ever changing, flying west over Marble City, over the harbours and the sea, to a distant land. On one night before he sailed, his gaze did not fall behind as it had before: he followed the dragon and saw on a shore an eagle's nest the size of a city, full of eggs, and felt that he was being called there.¹⁷¹⁸

The passage west

In the port of Neptune Bruno had three contacts for a passage to the New World. One was a crime baron said to smuggle goods there. Another, Oliver, a young mage and logistics officer of the Archon in charge of supply ships going west on Castor's orders, offered him free passage in return for serving as physician on the voyage, and meant to confirm his training through his father's record. The third was the captain of the Sea Dragon.^19202122

The Sea Dragon was a small, slender ship, lightly armed and built to gather speed quickly. Her captain could take ten men, eleven at a pinch, and was looking for men who could fight; he said they were sailing on the orders of an important man to carry something to the New World. The ship belonged not to him but to the master of a mercenary guild of Vansreik, the Warmongers.²³²⁴²⁵

At the captain's challenge Bruno smashed an empty barrel and showed a few close-combat moves without harming him, and was taken to the master. The master invited him to work with the Warmongers for a year in return for help in finding what he sought; Bruno answered that he had to reach the New World quickly, and it was agreed that he would work his passage without pay.^26272829

In a tavern the boss of a gang called the Gentlemen asked Bruno to board a ship bound for the New World in place of a wandering priest, and there to break the neck of a poisoned old man who, the boss said, had once been his own man; he offered free passage and fifty gold. During the talk an envoy of another leader was stabbed and thrown from an upper window, and Bruno went down and brought him round with healing worked through blows, which he could not yet hide behind ordinary medicine. He gave the boss his word, but on leaving the tavern said that he would never do the deed and would take another ship.^30313233

The black-armed stranger

In the port Bruno glimpsed a hooded man with one jet-black arm, first in the distance and later on a rooftop, but lost him each time he came near. At dawn, as Bruno tried to leave his room, the man blocked his way with a punch and forced him to fight, a bluish-red flame burning on his arm. When Bruno, sensing real danger, answered with full force, the man broke off, saying that it was the danger being real that had set him off.^34353637

The stranger said he had come to see why Bruno gained so quickly abilities that others earn through long discipline, but that he did not understand it himself. Pointing to the sea, he told Bruno to answer the call, though he could not say whether the answers would make him happy. Bruno then caught the Sea Dragon as her last preparations ended, and she put out to sea.³⁸³⁹

Early years in Canarque

By his own account Bruno came to Aquila about ten years before the campaign, when the city was still a camp of tents. He spent two or three years wandering Canarque on foot, asking for answers, then turned to helping people and came to be known as the Doctor. About two years after his arrival he beat a man whom the gang boss had sent after him.⁴⁰⁴¹⁴²

On another occasion he said that the continent had been discovered some eleven or twelve years before, that he came before the incentives for settlers, and that he first helped people in their homes and only later opened a clinic. Most of the Empire calls Canarque the New World, and Castor Onerio's memoir Beyond the Eye tells of the journey west and its discovery.⁴³⁴⁴

The captain and crew of the Sea Dragon still work out of Aquila, and Bruno knows them.⁴⁵

In Aquila

Meeting the band

When the professor offered the band a hiding place among ordinary people, Bruno told them to ask for Tedi the tailor in the nameless quarters if they needed him. That night he took two of them to the old tailor's shop, marked with a needle rather than a written sign; behind it, across a small garden, a one-room house stood empty, its last occupant having recently died.⁴⁶⁴⁷⁴⁸

After a dinner he led the band to a humbler eatery kept by a friend, where the poor share a common pot; he said that those with money put something in, those without eat for free, and that people usually call the place the Pit.⁴⁹⁵⁰⁵¹

Some days later he met the professor alone in his room at the Coalition and asked for someone able to cast divination of great power. The professor answered that, as far as he knew, such casters held official posts or belonged to organisations, and that in such delicate times he would rather wait about ten days before asking his acquaintances. Sticks later shared with Bruno part of what he had learned about the nobles and judges around Albus.^52535455

In training with Finli, who wore his armour, Bruno set his arm aflame and showed his blows under control.⁵⁶

The clinic

Bruno looked for a small surgery and a base for the band in the working people's quarters around the New Quarter and the Merchant Road, and found the ground-floor shop of a three-storey wooden building. Having no physician's certificate, he applied to the Guild Union for registration as a barber and tooth-puller, then gave Sticks a hundred and fifty gold to finish the business so that the shop would not stand in his own name. Through the papers of a man called Otto it opened as Doktorun Yeri, "the Doctor's Place".^57585960

The clinic soon drew more patients than suited a hidden base; Bruno pulled a tooth for the child of the neighbours upstairs. One day he kept the door shut and meditated in the darkened back room by the light of his burning arm. Near the end he saw winged figures fluttering on the wall beside his own shadow, as he had sometimes glimpsed such shapes before, and felt drawn to them.^61626364

The mage's house and the painting

When the band entered a mage's house, Bruno touched a door knocker with his black arm and felt the arm pull towards wealth. In a torture room he examined the body of a boy of fourteen or fifteen and found that, for all the marks of torture, he had died of poison.⁶⁵⁶⁶⁶⁷

A stone lion there asked those who reached into its mouth for their greatest fear; Finli found that it would open to a convincing lie and that it held the souls of those who had died in the room as a source of power in its eyes. Bruno opened it with a lie, took out a small stone shaped like a cat's head and three gold bars, and smashed the instruments of torture; when the lion was shattered, Fauna alone felt a wind leave the room.^68697071

Travis had warned that every minute in the inner vault was said to cost a year of life. When the vault opened, Bruno caught a thin glass vessel of deadly gas as it fell, without breaking it. Each who entered the treasure room lost a year, however briefly they stayed; Bruno went in twice and aged two years.⁷²⁷³⁷⁴

From the spoils Bruno took a pair of green boots that make the wearer run faster when the heels are struck together, and a short silver rod that stays fixed in the air at the press of a button. Back at the clinic he cooked meat, vegetables and yoghurt for the puppy Hobo. When a rising wind began to pull the living into the stolen painting, he fixed the rod beside Fauna, told them to tie the dog to it, and leapt in after his friends.^75767778

Among the Geroni

They came through into an old temple. Bruno carried the senseless Sticks on his back in a harness Finli had made, was struck down twice in the fight with spirits and a masked being, and was brought round by Fauna's healing. When Sticks woke, Bruno gave him the boots, saying that they would serve him better.^79808182

Questioned by a head consul of the Geroni, Bruno put forward his profession and the clinic registered in his name, and Fauna defended him as one who heals those whom the Empire cannot or will not reach. The band agreed not to tell the authorities what they knew of an object said to have been stolen from the Geroni, so as not to draw in their own people.⁸³⁸⁴⁸⁵

During their escape his arm, wreathed in blue lightning, and his heavy blows crushed the city's war machines, and he healed Finli twice with a touch and set him running again. Later, defending a vineyard house where a head consul sheltered, he and Sticks drove back the assassin at the door; Bruno crushed the last mechanical hound's head under his heel, staunched a grave wound in Fauna's belly, and knocked out the last human attacker rather than kill him.^8687888990

A consul told of an old silver-scaled dragon who lived in human form in one of the sister cities and had served as head consul for some seven hundred years. The news of a dragon advising a city gave a new lead to the search Bruno had pursued for years.⁹¹⁹²

Speaking for peace

After a coup, when the city's leaders gathered and many were close to giving up, Bruno spoke through interpreters. He began by saying that he had come to Aquila about ten years before, when it was still tents, and now wished to call it home. To deter war he described the local legion as nearly eighty thousand strong and the Empire as having eighteen legions of about forty thousand each. In truth the Empire has eleven legions, each of between eight and eighty thousand people.⁴⁰⁹³⁹⁴

He claimed that children who showed magical gifts were taken by force to a school and that unlicensed casters were hunted. His words echo imperial law: after the Immortal Wizards' Folly everyone able to cast arcane magic was compelled by the Emperor's decree to attend the Archon Academy, and that the Holy Inquisition, which is not part of the High Church, hunts illegal sorcerers.⁹⁵⁹⁶⁹⁷

He argued that the Empire saw its soldiers as expendable while the Geroni rulers cared for their people's lives, admitted that the great sea made it hard to ship troops and that the Geroni could hold out for years, and pointed to the agreements with the northern peoples, elves, dwarves and the Free Ports as models of peace through shared interest. Beside him Finli set a small cannon model against a vase, which burst; its pieces were later joined again, but it was not as it had been.^9899100101

Then a black-haired man in a wizard's robe came forward, a badge marked four under his collar: one of the Deimos, who claimed to have five healthy bodies. He offered Bruno a knife to kill one of them; Bruno refused, saying that he spoke for peace and that the Empire's victory would not be his. The Deimos gave everyone six months to leave Aquila, boasted of a hidden weapon, and left alive.^102103104105

The castle commander, who kept a private library, looked at the Draconic book Bruno had found beyond the painting. He said that dragons lived on the continent but their writings were rarely seen, and that by legend dragons were among those who had sent his people there centuries ago; he gave Bruno an ancient Geroni manuscript of tales from the time of the struggle against dragons.^106107108

The governor's errand

On the way back Bruno gathered some crumbling white stones with a cloth in his black hand. At Aquila's gate he was known and not searched. He sought the governor through a captain of the city watch for whom he had done work before: they signalled each other with a small fire on a roof and an open window, and the captain knew him only as the masked Doctor. The captain, who owed Bruno his life after an incident at the harbour, offered to bring the band before the governor on a false arrest if Bruno would show his face.^109110111112

Back at the clinic he hung a sign offering free care and saw patients all day, though shortages of medicine and supplies kept him from helping everyone. When he put his arm in a basin of water for Finli, the water began to freeze.^113114115

With the veiled Orpi he went to a driverless carriage behind a judge's house, where the half-elf diplomat Sera appeared out of invisibility. Bruno told her of the governor's illness, of Orpi's chance of treating it, of the coup and of the warrior leader of five manifestations, and of a dark ritual in the forest that drained life; she agreed to bring them to the governor aboard a ship. He also told her his dream and showed her the Draconic book; she did not know the tale, but thought that powerful lore magic might help and that answers might be found in the south-east of the Empire's map.^116117118119

On the way back he told Orpi that the dream had drawn him here ten years before and left him nowhere to return to, and that he was angry at the thought that some power might be toying with him. He hid Orpi with a baker friend, in a compartment under the flour sacks, and went to watch the clinic from outside.¹²⁰¹²¹

There he was attacked by three figures wearing the likeness of Sticks and two of his companions. He saw wounds dealt to their kind far away appear on the bodies in front of him, and escaped by leaping onto a roof and making for a crowd where there were people he knew and guards. Afterwards he covered the bodies near the shop and began to carry them away, and the band fetched Orpi, unharmed, from the baker's.^122123124125

At the meeting on the ship, emboldened by a rune of Finli's, Bruno let it be known that he had seen through the governor's double, introduced Orpi and passed on his news. When the governor asked the band to work in secret to stop the Deimos, Bruno said that he felt no loyalty to the Empire but would work with him to protect ordinary lives.^126127128

Gifts and investigations

When Travis brought gifts to the closed clinic, Bruno received a necklace of a clear blue stone on an organic cord with beads. Travis said that it came from a monk whom they had loved and respected and who had died not long before, and on examination it was found to hold the teachings of a warrior. When Bruno asked for better healing tools, the curator could offer only a standard healer's kit, renewed as it ran out.^129130131132

He told his companions that he charged most patients nothing and kept a tip box for those who wished to leave money. He set out to make known that he could treat blindness, deafness, poisoning and paralysis that were not from birth, and paid children from the box to spread the word, especially in the rich quarters; most went, though some bought buns.^133134135

At a mansion where the band found a household murdered, Bruno pulled burned papers from the hearth, broke open a locked archive room that had been emptied, and found that the wound in a dead woman's side had been made by a shard of ice that had since melted.^136137138

In a tunnel the band fought shadow-like beings of the Void, which Bruno later called Voidborn after Finli's research; their touch drew moisture and life from the body without a wound. Bruno fought with his arm aflame and rapid punches, and in the burning arm he did not feel the horror of their touch; but when one's hand passed through his, his body went cold, his frame thinned and his clothes hung loose. The touch left a lasting mark of the Void, separate from the strength it drained, which curing disease does not remove.^139140141142

Towards dawn a note said that a woman who had been following the band had been killed that night, but she reached the clinic door alive, shot with a hand crossbow and poisoned. Bruno laid her down, touched her chest and drew the poison into his black arm, scattering it as fine specks, and she opened her eyes.¹⁴³¹⁴⁴

Healing in the open

A poor old blind man was brought in by his grandson for a headache. Bruno eased the pain with his inner strength and, with his black arm, cleared the whiteness from the man's eyes, so that he saw again, and took no payment.¹⁴⁵¹⁴⁶

After that, people who had lost their sight or hearing, and veterans missing limbs, came to the clinic. Bruno explained that he could not grow back a lost arm or leg nor do such healing without limit in a day, and kept those he could not help company with food and talk. In the poor quarter his face became known, though the rich did not yet believe in him.^147148149150

The church took notice. An aide of a priest came at night with a young officer, invited Bruno and Finli to the temple and took away the clinic's speaking sign. At the temple Bruno said that he had nothing to hide: he did not know why his arm was black, had simply woken one day to find it so, and had been seeking answers for twelve or thirteen years. The priest admired the healing but warned that its consequences could be dangerous, and strongly advised them to stop for a while.^1513152

Bruno resolved to keep quiet for a few weeks and then heal more discreetly. He told those waiting at his door, once, that the church had not allowed it, and the crowd slowly thinned. He also spoke of going out more often at night to beat criminals caught in the act and take their money.^153154155

Beyond the city

On a journey out of the city, Bruno reached out to heal a wounded mage who bore a deep mark of the same kind; the world went dark in his own eyes and a fear within made him draw back his hand. The mage felt the thing inside him drawn towards Bruno, and Finli stopped him from trying again. Bruno instead bound the man's wounds with clean, tight bandages fit for the road and carried him behind him on his horse.^156157158159

In a fight against mechanical collectors and an arcanist, Bruno wrapped his arm in lightning in the hope of shorting out the machines, and used it as a barrier against a burst of flame. His necklace glowed for a moment as he ran at the arcanist, who was killed by a blow from behind as he tried to answer Bruno with lightning. Bruno healed himself and a badly wounded ally, and finished the last collector by leaping from Fauna's back onto its head and smashing it with his elbows.^160161162163

When he shook hands with the wounded mage in farewell at the harbour, both felt as if something inside each of them pulled at the other.¹⁶⁴

Spoiler: Later eventsRevealSpoils: Yeni Dünya #27; Yeni Dünya #28 · Say what you have read

Bruno, Finli, Fauna and Sticks later found themselves at a picnic in a spring valley near a village called Keçikale. There Bruno was dressed in white and clean-shaven, his hand of normal colour and an old burn healed on his leg, and he spoke of his arm having turned black at seventeen and of being in his thirties. The villagers called him Master Physician and said that he had opened his clinic three months before; he healed an old man's aching leg, and broke open the floor and walls of his own surgery in search of a hidden clue.^165166167168

As the dream darkened, he saw a hanged man with Travis's face whose heart still seemed to beat; when Finli leapt from the castle wall to escape, those left behind saw in Bruno's place a creature devouring Saga's corpse. Bruno woke alive in a damp underground laboratory, where the four had lain on stretchers, their minds bound together by a mixture of drugs and magic. He remembers the camp on the hill road with Sticks on watch, and coming close to waking several times against a strong sleep, but he did not see who took them.^169170171172

On a hilltop Bruno alone saw a great shadow pass swiftly overhead, which he took for a dragon flying west by the stars; at the same moment a burning pain ran up his black arm from the fingers. The stranger Klam Ezor, who met the band there, called it a dragon's shadow, though he said that he had not seen it himself.^173174175

Tasting the stranger's tea, Bruno recognised it as fig tea of Mavi Koru and drank it. He told the stranger that anyone in Aquila who gave his name could find food and shelter, and when asked whether they would leave once their aims were met, the band spoke of not abandoning the lives they had built.^176177178

The black arm

Bruno does not know where his black arm came from. He has set it aflame, wrapped it in lightning, felt it chill water and drawn poison into it; once, concentrating, he felt for a moment the wind that blows high above the clouds. What first set him on the road remains unknown, and the dragon of his dream is still the thread he follows.^17918092

Spoiler: The necklaceRevealSpoils: Yeni Dünya #27 · Say what you have read

The blue-stoned necklace is a pendant rather than a string of prayer beads, and a soul is held within it. It is the necklace that the black-armed stranger wore when he beat Bruno in Neptune.¹⁹