Kırmızı

Kırmızı ("Red"), also called Kızıl, is one of the five great masters who head the Archon in the campaign Mürekkep ve Çelik ("Ink and Steel"). Castor once opened his mind to Kırmızı over a certain matter, and it was then that he received the invitation of the secret society of mages, The Hand. Kırmızı is not the founder whose dark prophecy the Hand's envoy Traumir spoke of; that founder stands above him.¹²

Spoiler: The treachery at the ArchonRevealSpoils: Mürekkep ve Çelik #10 · Say what you have read

When the Blue master, a member of the Archon's council, held a secret gathering of students and announced that the emperor would meet a surprise at the Dwarf Gate, Kırmızı appeared outside with the master Nocklin and offered Blue, who had studied in the same years as he, a single chance to surrender. Blue reached for his spellbook instead; Castor stopped his spell from behind, and Kırmızı sent a ball of fire among the students that spared the young ones by a measure Castor could not tell.³⁴⁵

The Dwarf Gate

When Castor warned Nocklin that the emperor would be attacked at the Dwarf Gate at sunrise, Kırmızı vanished at once and came back with someone else's blood spattered on his left side. Reaching toward the ground, he woke a teleportation circle buried beneath it, on which the students had long played, and opened a gate onto the battle at the fortress of Gazat, so that the Archon's people could cross.⁶⁷

Adviser

About three days after the battle, Kırmızı found Castor walking on crutches in the infirmary. He told him the price he had paid was small for what he had achieved, called it good magic, which he described as making great changes in reality through small interventions, and said that "we protect our own". He spoke of the empty seat on the council, which could take about a year to fill, and urged Castor to cultivate good relations with the new spymaster, so that the Archon too might learn what he knew. The master Horus later consulted Kırmızı and, finding his view of Castor favourable, did not stand in the way of Castor's early examination for mastery.⁸⁹¹⁰¹¹

Castor's mastery

When Castor returned from his mastery examination, Kırmızı received him in the tower room of the council, congratulated him and told him his report showed that the Archon's interests had been well defended. He set out Castor's choices: to stay at the Archon as a scholar, to serve as an envoy to the elven lands, to choose a master and go on research that master allowed, or to pay his yearly costs and cut his ties with the Archon. Of the last he said harshly that if Castor took it, he would kill him himself. He added that a master may work in grey fields such as necromancy as long as he answers to his own master, and that the empire's laws would bind him little.^12131415

Kırmızı led Castor to the dining hall, where the masters waited in ceremonial robes, called him a colleague and asked him to announce his path. When Castor chose to continue with Herrenhal, Kırmızı was among those who seemed to expect it and smiled. Asked afterwards whether he had chosen rightly, he said he did not know right from wrong, only that Castor should weigh the advantages he held. He then sent Castor first to the master Yotun, to whom Castor had promised two months of work, before he could collect his master's document.^1617181920

Spoiler: The tower roomRevealSpoils: Mürekkep ve Çelik #1; Mürekkep ve Çelik #13 · Say what you have read

When Castor returned to the tower room for his document, he found not Kırmızı but a figure in purple and white with a shadowed face, who turned out to be the Grandmaster of the Hand and the empire's chief mage, Loren Opsus. Whether Kırmızı knows the Grandmaster's true identity is not certain; probably he does, and he too has called the chief mage the emperor's dog.^21222324