Raphael

Raphael is a human assassin and the central figure of the Raphael Efsanesi ("The Legend of Raphael") campaign. His story is set in an older age of the Empire, while Emperor Vaden I still reigned, in White City, as the imperial capital Marble City is called there. White City is his home town: he grew up on its streets as a child thief, and he has worked with the local Thieves' Guild without ever joining it.¹²³

Background

Before his return to the capital, Raphael took a contract from a noble who kept his identity hidden: the death of a rival lord, Yasis. With information bought from his old friend Omar, he entered the lord's castle disguised as a farmhand and a soldier, outbid the lord for the services of his formidable bodyguard Karas, tricked a sewer troll and killed the lord in his sleep.⁴⁵

The employer's go-between then tried to kill Raphael and Karas instead of paying them. The two killed him and took the money, and Omar, who missed his old life, rode with them to White City on stolen horses.¹

Return to White City

In the capital Raphael found four powers beside the army: the Night Rats in the slums, the elite assassins of Kalel, the hired swords of the Followers of Zolan, and the Thieves' Guild. He set out to open an inn that would shelter an assassins' guild of his own, with Omar running the house and Karas keeping its peace (see Raphael's assassins' guild).⁶⁷⁸

Picolo, the young head of the Thieves' Guild in the city, offered to make up the price of the expensive North Wind inn if Raphael killed Dimes, called Shadowblade, the Kalel assassin he blamed for the deaths of several of his thieves. Raphael accepted. That night two envoys of Kalel found him and offered him the same inn and a thousand gold coins for Picolo's head. Raphael bargained instead: he would kill Dimes himself, and the elf envoy's ambitious companion, Asnu, would be blamed for it. Karas broke Asnu's neck on the spot.⁹¹⁰¹¹

To slip into the dry well that led under the inn, Raphael killed an old man in the square with a thrown knife and entered while the guards ran to the body. Below he disarmed a crossbow trap, killed a mage at his notes, and found Dimes asleep. Dimes woke, caught his hand and fought him in a long duel before he fell. Raphael pried a ruby-like stone from Dimes's short sword, and the front of the blade crumbled to ash; the envoy later said the stone could summon shadow. Raphael also took the mage's notes, which he could not read, his staff and a robe, then stitched cuts into Asnu's body so that it would look like the work of a fight.^12131415

Spoiler: What followedRevealSpoils: Raphael Efsanesi #1; Raphael Efsanesi #2 · Say what you have read

Karas went to explain the deed to the envoy and did not return. An hour later armed men of Kalel filled Raphael's room while bows were trained on his window; the envoy named him the killer of their master and threw down Karas's cut-off hair. Raphael was taken, and Omar and Karas with him.¹⁶¹⁷

Captive of Kalel

For about two days Raphael was held in a cell he recognised, by the stairs and the smell of the sewers, as a hidden part of the North Wind. Naros, the new master of Kalel in the city, then cut the throat of the envoy who had bargained with him and offered Raphael a choice: death, or the head of Picolo or of Zulu, leader of the Night Rats. A toothed ring that would betray his whereabouts even through magic was forced onto his right thumb, and Naros cut off the ring finger of his left hand for his collection. If no head came, Omar would die in twenty-four hours and Karas in forty-eight.^18192021

Instead Raphael decided to drive Kalel out of the city. He brought Picolo, Zulu and Fazon, the local head of the Followers of Zolan, together; hired Zolan fighters and mages, partly on credit and with a loan from Picolo; and planned a single night's attack from the front door, the roofs and the sewers, while he and Fazon went in invisible to reach the hostages.²²²³²⁴

When the ring bit him and broke his invisibility, Raphael and Fazon fought Naros in a room of purple flames. Raphael cut off Naros's arm and struck a last blow as he teleported away, and took a finger from the severed arm. His own lost finger was never restored. A Zolan officer later came with the head of an enemy mage to tell him that the inn was his.²⁵²⁶²⁷

Spoiler: The hostagesRevealSpoils: Raphael Efsanesi #2; Raphael Efsanesi #3 · Say what you have read

Beyond the master's room the cells shifted into an enchanted chamber where Omar and Karas were being lowered towards spears. Without a mage, one could be saved only if the other died. Raphael threw a knife into Omar and freed Karas.²⁸²⁹

He had Omar burned in a forest funeral attended by thieves, and kept his ashes in a jar at his side.³⁰

Master of the Night Wolf

Raphael renamed the inn the Night Wolf, hired its former caretaker Ros to run it, took on three guards from the Zolans, a drow spy from Picolo and a war mage, and wrote a coded invitation to Kala, a killer expelled from the Thieves' Guild.^31323334

Summoned to the Palace of Justice, he admitted his part in the death of Lord Yasis to the high judge Rallo. The judge had a ruling written that Yasis had carried papers of treason against the emperor, which made his death and the seizure of his lands lawful after the fact, and granted the inn four months free of tax for clearing Kalel out of the city. He also warned Raphael that honest, tax-paying citizens were not to die suspicious deaths: Raphael was to work in the underworld, and if he broke the law the judge would hang him.³⁵³⁶³⁷

The tower of time

That evening the garrison commander Fin gave Raphael a secret task on the judge's behalf: to kill a young man said to be possessed by a devil in an old mage's tower to the north-west, and to bring back his hair in a jewelled box. Inside, the tower's floors repeated without end and a note on the wall changed each time it was read. When Raphael touched a carved hand on a door, he aged about twenty years and the door opened. A riddle asked for the thing that kills all its children; he answered "time".^38394041

The black-eyed youth fought them while blood dried in an instant, blades rusted and the figure flickered between a child and a skeleton. When the last blow fell, the room reset as if they had just entered, and the youth's hair lay at his feet. Once Raphael shut it in the box, the creature that sprang at him turned to dust. Outside, the tower was a wooden hut, and in the city six days seemed to have passed.⁴²⁴³⁴⁴

A halfling priest at the Palace of Justice set the confusion of time right, but Raphael remained old. The judge kept the hair. Raphael sold the box to Fiz, who said such boxes were made to imprison jinn, and with the money bought a crystal from the blind high priest of a temple of Alarath, who used it to cleanse the ageing and give him back his years.⁴⁵⁴⁶⁴⁷

The mark on his chest

While visiting Picolo, Raphael lost his sense of the room and saw the dead Naros sitting at the table with an apple, threatening him for daring great things. Karas slapped him awake, and Picolo showed him a freshly burned octopus head on his chest; his shirt was burned through as well. The priest who had healed him could not remove it.⁴⁸⁴⁹⁵⁰

His drow spy said the mark might come from an illithid, a mind flayer, and that only a very powerful clan leader could leave such a trace on a mind from afar.⁵¹

Spoiler: Who left the markRevealSpoils: Raphael Efsanesi #3 · Say what you have read

The mark and the vision were indeed the work of a mind flayer, though Raphael himself did not know it.⁵²

Falstad and the Collector

A summons to the Three Rocks outside the city led Raphael through a portal that only he could see, into a pocket realm made for him by the mage Falstad. Falstad wanted his sister Kala freed from the Collector's archive, which he said belonged to Kalel, and offered to translate the texts that would lead Raphael to a name he sought, in return for everything else they found. Falstad asked for a sturdy male body to take along. Raphael first tried to dig one out of a fresh grave in the cemetery behind the temple of Amarath, knocking out its old keeper, but gave up when a voice in his mind warned that he would regret it.^53545556

He hired Taf, a half-orc of the Zolans, as a guard. Before they went in, Falstad told him that no one living but Raphael could enter, and that Taf would have to die; Raphael sent him in all the same. Beyond the portal lay a castle-like archive on a cracked plain under a black sky, its halls full of stuffed beasts, weapons and jewels behind glass. In the throne room a crowned woman sat in chains.^57585960

The Collector, a very old human, fought behind a shield that radiated from his ring until Raphael shattered it. Beaten, he begged for his life, saying he was no mage, that his power came from his objects, and that others had brought the woman to him for safekeeping. He asked for an unbreakable oath; Raphael insisted that Falstad's question be answered first, and killed him as soon as it was. Falstad drew a small book out of nested boxes whose writing filled Raphael's mind with dread.⁶¹⁶²⁶³

Kala, freed, embraced Falstad as her brother and agreed to join Raphael's guild in a few days. Falstad paid Raphael and claimed that he had changed the course of fate in a way that would be remembered a thousand years on. Raphael carried Taf's body back to the Zolans, left the whole payment for the half-orc's daughter, and told Fazon that Falstad had killed him.⁶⁴⁶⁵⁶⁶

Zolan's tomb

Taf's death broke the gravest rule of the Followers of Zolan, and Zolan himself would seek out the truth. Fazon lent Raphael an amulet that hid him from Zolan's questioning and told him not to kill Falstad but to report where he was. Falstad, hunted and sleepless, came to Raphael for help and offered to raise Taf with false memories; Raphael refused, and to make his story believable let Fazon beat him and throw him into the arena, leaving the amulet with Fazon.^67686970

That night Falstad appeared at the inn and opened his book; darkness and tentacles crept up his arm and the ground shook before he and Kala vanished. Kala chose to go with her brother to a monastery in the north until he was safe or dead. Raphael told Fazon that a killer could still have honour, and that if Kala stood by her brother she could have no place in his guild.⁷¹⁷²⁷³

The next morning Zolan's questioning fell on the inn as silence, white light, breaking glass and burning skin; Fazon threw Raphael down behind his shield and covered him. Fazon then told him he must go to Zolan's tomb and make an offering. There Raphael killed a clawed beast the size of a horse that came out of a side tunnel, and in the hall a winged, faceless knight descended through the ceiling, held his head and declared him guiltless: Taf had been told the risk of death, so no contract had been broken, though the knight scorned his way of fighting from the dark.^74757677

From the Trader in the tomb he chose a bargain of claws and a tail. The claws stayed; the tail he cut off himself, and it did not grow back. Asked to cast something precious into an altar's fire, he said that the most precious thing he had was himself and put his finger into the flame; it was not burned, and the fire turned blue.⁷⁸⁷⁹⁸⁰

Outside, thirty or forty orcs waited with two hooded killers and an enemy who bore the scars of Raphael's blades. Centaurs, Fazon's men and the winged avatar of Zolan broke them; the scarred man fled into the forest, and the captives were found to be Kalel assassins. On the way out of the forest a knight who named himself Derek Sunshield met them with riders and foot soldiers, swore them to secrecy and told them they would work for him for a month. Karas came out from among the soldiers alive and said he had recommended Raphael.^81828384

Derek's three tests

Raphael was taken to an empty villa in the noble ring around the palace. Derek, who knew his crimes, said he had been chosen because another candidate was too loyal to his lord. Before the real work, whose target would not be named, Raphael had to pass three tests unseen: steal a silver saddle that the knights of the Order of Palanthor were sending the emperor as a gift, take the spectacles of the gnome archivist of the White Library, and bring back something of the Archon Academy's envoy. There would be no pay for the tests, and failure meant death; success would bring gold, a gift and a pardon for his past. Derek warned that his claws could see him burned as a mutant, and forbade him to go back to his inn.^85868788

For the saddle, Raphael had Wolf, a stable hand who owed the inn money, slip it into a shipment of horses bound for the elves. When the Zolans would not attack imperial soldiers on the high road, Picolo arranged a forged recall order and two borrowed uniforms. Calling himself Leo and posing as a desk officer, Raphael stopped the convoy, told the sergeant a groom had made a mistake, and walked off with the saddle. He and Karas buried it in the forest, and the Zolans later smuggled it into the city.^89909192

To pay for the forgery he sold Night, the silent blade he had taken from Kalel, to Sirius of the shop of wonders in the inner ring, then took it back to have it registered. At the gate office he told the clerk a guest had left it at his inn; the clerk found in it traces of forbidden magic, which gave Raphael a lawful reason to visit the Archon's envoy.⁹³⁹⁴⁹⁵

The envoy's tower, black and ringed by a moat, opened for him unbidden. The old mage in black, called Black, saw through him at once, said that despite Derek's doubts there was no one else to do the work, and gave him a small ring of his own to present as stolen. Trying it on that night, Raphael found it burned him from within.^96979899

He entered the White Library by day as a reader, among robed mages and historians of the Order of Nus’ar, hid under a bed in a dusty room until night, and clung beneath the walkways on his claws when the patrols passed. He hid in the gnome's bathroom until the archivist took out his earplugs and slept, took the spectacles from his table and left at dawn among the readers, leaving the gnome unharmed.^100101102103

Raphael went home and drank himself senseless. Derek arrived in the night with about ten men, had him woken with a bucket of water, accepted the three prizes, and then set one of his squires on him with plate and longsword. Raphael, unarmoured and drunk, wounded the squire's arms until his sword fell; the squire was later assigned to him as his contact.^104105106107

The chain

Alone with Raphael, Derek revealed the real task. The oath of the Chain Wardens of the Order of Chain, he said, once had a secret side: units trained to fight evil men as well as monsters. The practice was long abandoned and its last master dead, but his chain was hidden in an old tower outside the order's lands, guarded by mercenaries and perhaps a Warden or two. After the loss of a precious spellbook, Derek feared what the chain could do if the same thief took it, and wanted it moved to a Palanthor castle; the Wardens, being above the law, had refused. Only the highest knights of Palanthor, Derek and a knight named Maksidus in White City, and Black knew of the mission.^108109110

Raphael remarked that he knew the Chain Wardens had killed a god. He was promised five to ten times his usual fee and a kind of pardon; refusal meant he would not leave the house alive. He told Derek that he had grown up a street child, and spoke of a quiet life by the sea.^109111112113

Allowed back to the Night Wolf, he told Karas he would go alone, and let it be said that he had fallen in love with an elf girl and gone to visit her lands. In a vision by a green fire at the Archon's tower Black gave him a pair of linked stones: one left in a safe place, the other carried, so that breaking the link would bring him back. Black also paled at Raphael's description of a hooded man with a purple orb, who had left a message at the inn telling Raphael to walk slowly, and told him to trust the Archon and the Palanthor knights.^114115116

Four hired mercenaries took him to a ruined tower between Westshield and Blue Grove. In it he passed by a plain silver Warden chain on a skeleton and went down to a waist-deep pool where a much longer, rune-covered chain lay out of reach. A whisper in a dwarven accent said that no living hand could take it. Raphael cut off his ring finger, hooked it through a link, and drew the chain out of the water.^117118119120

When he dropped his stone, it did not take him to the camp but to a storeroom of the Archon in an earlier time, on an island floating above the sea. Caught and searched, he was given a truth potion by the young mage Edward, maker of the stones, and admitted that he was a professional killer sent for the chain with a stone from Black. The old mage who questioned him made him invisible, let him keep the chain and whispered an order to gather what was left and erase memories. Raphael found his way back to his own time and woke in the camp, where only five or six hours had passed.^{121122123124125}

His orders said that the four mercenaries were not to return alive. Raphael did not kill them; he offered them work and shelter at his inn instead, warning that the powerful people behind the mission would find them if they fled, and they accepted. Back in the city, a legionary sent by Derek took the chain and paid him a first instalment in gold bars.^126127128129

Spoiler: After the theftRevealSpoils: Raphael Efsanesi #8 · Say what you have read

Drinking at the inn that night, Raphael felt that he might have had a hand in something. At dawn the alarm towers rang all together: the emperor had been assassinated, and legionaries were breaking into houses in search of the killer.¹³⁰¹³¹

In the square, the decree of the new emperor was read out: a chain of the Order had been found beside his father's body, and the Chain Wardens were declared responsible. The chain shown to the crowd was the one Raphael had stolen. The Wardens were to surrender or be killed, and the Archon's White, Green, Purple and Blue masters were condemned for aiding them, while Black would lead the academy's council. When a groom protested that the Wardens had saved them and soldiers struck him down, the hooded man with the purple orb rang a bell from a tower, threw down another long chain and vanished into shadow.¹³²¹³³

Derek had ordered the theft for the conspiracy that put the prince on the throne as Vaden II; Raphael knew nothing of that purpose while he took the job and stole the chain.¹³²

Now commanding the city, Derek demanded that Raphael become his informer for six months: the names, haunts and families of everyone in the underworld, in return for protection for him and his people, with the threat of losing the inn and everything else. Raphael passed on Kala's message that her brother could name the emperor's killer, and Derek sent about ten knights to the meeting.^134135136137

Military rule lasted about six months. Two strongholds of the Chain Wardens were destroyed, and Picolo was caught in hiding and hanged. Raphael gave up the names of the circles he had worked with in White City; most were executed and some exiled. His own people were questioned and released. Afterwards he lived as a businessman and innkeeper, and was given no more work of the old kind. Some years later, when the last Chain Master, Selazit, was executed in the city and a new revolt broke out, Raphael again stood at Derek's side.^138139140141

Character

Raphael does not kill children, a line Karas does not share, and he once stopped Karas from drawing a sword on a child who tried to cut his purse, telling the boy that he had grown up the same way. He believes in honour among killers and avoids work he thinks dishonourable. He and Karas do not deny that the gods exist, but have little to do with them or their worship.^14214314473

His body bears the marks of his story: a missing finger on each hand, the claws he took in Zolan's tomb, usually hidden under gloves, and the octopus burn on his chest.^21145120

Later echoes

In the Sürgün Günlükleri ("Exile Chronicles") campaign, Ephorus says that in White City, where he comes from, people are told to be like Rafael. Whether he means the same man is not known.¹⁴⁶