Travis

Travis is a human thief in the campaign Yeni Dünya ("New World"), known in the underworld of Aquila as Atmaca and said to have no surname. He is said to have worked around the city almost since its founding, and to have made his name before that robbing banks and noble houses in the cities of the Empire. When Sticks first met him in an underground tavern, he wore a long leather coat and a thin sword.^{1 2 3}

The break-in at Willow's house

Travis offered Sticks not a fee but an equal share of the spoils. A mage had left the city in haste and was not expected back soon; Travis said he had studied the defences of Albus Rodarius Willow's house for months, waiting for him to go, and that the key to its outer gate had come into his hands. He wanted particular skills: someone for mechanisms, someone for magic, someone for a very angry dog and someone quick enough to catch a falling thing.^{4 5 6 7}

Meeting the whole band at their shop, he told them what he had heard of the house: wards that kept sound from leaving the garden, a maze of poisonous thorns, a three-headed hound that healed itself, rooms that moved, a gnome-built vault door and a trap of falling gas. Shares were to be equal among the survivors, with lots drawn for the things beyond price.^{8 9 10 11}

The next evening he drove up in an ordinary four-wheeled wagon with staves, rope, climbing gear and food, took them to the harbour warehouses and opened the hidden gate in the garden wall with his key, marking its place in red chalk once it had vanished again. Inside Willow house he agreed with Sticks that each would watch the other for pocketed loot, and opened a flooded room's lock with Finli's help. In the room of the magnetic column an old wedding ring he had forgotten he wore was torn from him; he got it back when Finli stilled the column for a moment.^{12 13 14 15 16 17}

The share-out

To move the silver, Sticks fetched carriers from the Zincirsizler, Aquila's thieves' guild, while Travis stayed with the loot; the guild men left bags of gold bars in exchange and treated Travis with the respect due to a seasoned hand. Bruno tried to read his face and learned nothing more; long practice kept it closed.^{18 19 20 21}

He proposed that no one ask why another wanted a given thing, and the band agreed. He asked first for the painting and the gas, then for other pieces, but the band would not part with the painting. In the end he took the Green Death and seven gold bars and left the rest. Bruno offered him quiet, paid healing; Travis said he had healers already, but might add a man who could pull an arrowhead and keep silent. Then he drove away.^{22 23 24}

The painting and its buyer

While the band was away, someone took the painting from their shop and left the gold behind. The shop dog described a bald man in a cloak over armour with a small scar under his chin, who came with a few armed companions, took the painting from the back room and left the dog food and water; the man was Travis. Sticks left word for him in a bottle of whisky, and towards four in the morning Travis came with two men.^{25 26 27 28}

He said the painting was safe with him and that he expected something for keeping it. He had heard that people in the city were gathering the strange things taken from Willow's house, though he could not find their link to Willow; when the band vanished without passing a door, he guessed the painting had taken them. He had sent warning first and gone in armed when no answer came, fearing others inside, and would have taken the rest too had they stayed away another week.^{29 30 31 32 33}

He led them to a windowless store beneath a house, had his man Kevin bring up the wrapped painting, and handed it back; a large jar of honey and a little mayonnaise were promised in return. He offered a safe place for any meeting with the buyers, wanting to learn who they were. The same day he came to the clinic to say that a buyer wished to meet at midnight, wanted the painting itself rather than the gas or money, and was thought to be tied to whatever had become of Willow.^{34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41}

For the meeting he wore black leather armour and a scarf to hide his face, with veiled men watching from the roofs and side streets; "northern gold" was the word for flight and "hard bargaining" the word to make ready for a fight. Afterwards his six lookouts could not be found, only blood on a post and signs that bodies had been carried off. In the fight that followed he stabbed one of the shape-changing attackers from behind, holding it by its wrappings, then came wounded to the clinic with more of his men waiting hidden outside. No one could say whether the buyers were behind the attack. Against impostors, he suggested, a friend could always ask him his favourite whisky.^{42 43 44 45 46 47 48}

Spoiler: On the shipRevealSpoils: Yeni Dünya #19; Shadow Over Vansreik; Yeni Dünya #20 · Say what you have read

Aboard a ship, one of the masked escorts of Governor Alexander uncovered his face, and it was Travis, in a long black robe with owls on its cuffs. The governor said he had received reports on the band from Travis and other men of his. Travis reported that the band had turned down a higher price for the painting rather than let it fall into hands they thought evil, and the painting passed to the governor's people.^{49 50 51}

The Grey Owl is the name of the Empire's secret service, whose agents work in the shadows against threats within and without; whether Travis belongs to it is not known.⁵²

The next day he brought gifts to the clinic with veiled men, saying they would not be taken back and could count as a first payment, then drove the band to a supply store under an olive press. In the carriage he told them that he did not head the intelligence of the continent; the governor valued his counsel, and they met every few months unless something pressed. Mages of the service hid him with illusions when he went in and out of the palace. He had not known of the earlier attack, and his own men had been struck too; some of them were agents, some real thieves.^{53 54 55 56 57 58 59}

He had tested the band's skill and honesty, and being seen with them as a thief would make later meetings look ordinary. He had used the name Travis for a long time, but it was not the name he was born with. The governor needed a team that could not be traced to him, and Travis said that his own loyalty was to the governor before the service. The band were not agents of the service, he said, but would work for the governor alongside him.^{60 61 62 63 64}

He did not expect them to storm castles or kill all of Deimos's bodies; their local knowledge, craft and skill at working unseen were what he wanted, since the service's eyes were weak in the countryside beyond the walls. He could not share all he knew, but would warn them of anything that put their lives at risk. He urged them to keep up their ordinary lives at the clinic and offered to arrange a meeting with a scholar of history and dragons.^{65 66 67 68 69}

Contact in the city

Sticks later found him in a cellar, playing cards and slipping a spare ace up his sleeve before taking the pot. Travis spoke first in his everyday guise where others could hear, then sent the server down for an old wine to talk freely. He promised to pass a message to a woman who had been following the band, to find a trustworthy priest to look at the mark three of them bore, and to look into a sailor kinsman of a mage. A note under the door at dawn, from his sources, said that the woman had been killed that night; soon after, she reached the door alive, shot and poisoned.^{70 71 72 73 74 75}

He told Finli that the ship Mavi Tarak had left port and would be back in a day or two, and later that it had come in and that the man they sought was its steersman, with nothing remarkable in his manner.^{76 77}

The priest Kril

For the mark, Travis sent them to a priest from the mainland whose name sounded like Kril: he and his people had helped the man disappear, and they traded help in intelligence and divination. The meeting was set in an old watchman's hut at the pier, with four knocks as a sign; Travis sent his own watchman elsewhere for the night and did not come himself. The priest, who looked between thirty-five and forty, brown-haired and bearded with hazel eyes, in travelling clothes, smelled of wine without seeming drunk; he spoke of the man who had sent him as Donald.^{78 79 80 81}

He gave the three marked companions a foul-tasting draught, and as he prayed with his hand on Bruno's brow his eyes went wholly black. He saw a strong, deep curse that he could not lift, did not fully understand and did not think deadly, and advised them to seek a priest of great power or a scholar of the curse's source. For a fee he cast a prayer of truth so that they could question the steersman, covering his face as he worked. On his way out he left a coin for a beggar at the harbour, a gift in keeping with the faith of Malachar, whose worshippers give food and money to beggars.^{82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89}

After the ceremony

At a ceremony at the harbour, with priests, knights and a great ship at the quay, Travis stood beside the governor's carriage. After the attack there he was hard to reach, running about the streets as the service reported harsh punishments by newly arrived soldiers. He came back worn out in the morning, took Finli's written report and a memory stone to study, and caught at once the name Aetius in it.^{90 91 92 93}

He told the band that the curfew had been lifted, though in the palace the legate had stormed out without the governor's leave, blaming the attack on the governor's soft policies. The tabaxi Kuraks had arrived and wished to share what he knew. The governor's illness was worse; he could no longer stand. Travis urged the band to take care on their way north.^{94 95 96 97}

In a vision the band later shared, the first of two hanged figures they cut down had a face like Travis's, seemingly dead though his heart still beat.⁹⁸