Nirati

Nirati is the captain of the guard of South Razel in the campaign Mürekkep ve Çelik ("Ink and Steel"). He commands ten or twelve guards from a small wooden post in the town.¹²

Appearance and background

Nirati is dark-skinned and athletic, with long untidy hair and a light beard, and wears something like loose trousers beneath his mail. He does not look local, and he is said to be an islander, not from the mainland of the Empire; Castor wondered whether he came from the Farr Islands, but that was only a guess. Nirati says that he began as a road warden himself, and that where he comes from people work alongside elves and do not find them untrustworthy.³⁴⁵⁶

The bandits

For about four months a band of robbers had been working the roads near the town. Nirati had reported them to imperial officials, but the investigator who came could not find them, and with only a dozen guards and wide, stony country to search he could not catch them either. When a merchant recalled being searched by him with suspicion, Castor looked into the merchant's memories and found no sign that Nirati took bribes. Asked about extortion on the roads, Nirati said that he allowed none in the town, but that the road wardens farther out were poorly paid men from elsewhere, working under other authority.⁷⁸⁵

The band's leader was a professionally armed islander who had been paid to kill Castor and Leonard on the road. He blocked their way with a felled tree and offered to let them pass for a price, but Leonard struck him down in the fight that followed, and the leader was taken bound to the town. Nirati recognised him at once and paid Castor the bounty at the post, striking the name from his list; a second captive brought in later earned a smaller reward, which Leonard gave to the guards. Nirati offered the travellers lodging.^9101121213

Spoiler: The leader's fateGösterAçık ettiği: Mürekkep ve Çelik #2 · Ne okuduğunuzu söyleyin

At the entrance to the town Nirati struck the bound leader and ordered him hanged from the nearest tree. Two guards hauled on the rope, and the man died while Castor walked on.¹⁴

The tremors and the attack

Nirati told the party that the town had been shaken by tremors for a week or more, the last the most violent, and that no one knew why; he wondered whether the dwarves mining coal to the north had dug beneath the town. When Leonard laid a sword on his table, he recognised it as the blade of a knight named Talon, long active in Akşelale, which had been stolen from him while he slept in camp nearby. He also handed over seven or eight letters in Elvish, left at the inn, for Castor to read, since no one in the town knew the language.¹⁵¹⁶¹⁷

When man-sized things of metal and wire attacked the townsfolk and houses burned, Nirati and his guards fought them, according to Glanfall's account, but their weapons seemed useless, and they turned to leading the people out of the town.¹⁸