Randy

Randolph "Randy" Rumpsveld is a human fighter of forty-eight, a former soldier for one of the prominent houses of the Three Marches whose promising career was cut short by an injury. His discharge came with a parcel of farmland, and for years the farm was most of what he had — that, trips into the city to drink and brawl, and the company of Corvin Slate, who arranges his fights. He wants nothing to do with magic and says so; his answer to nearly every problem the party has met is a great axe, swung by a man who did this for a living long before any of them picked up a weapon.

That answer works more often than it should. Randy has cleaved through boarding parties, finished a hulking factory construct with a one-two of the axe, drop-kicked a scuttling machine off a catwalk into the dark, and — when a thrown net pinned him — cut himself free without breaking stride. In the flooded works beneath the northern coast he shut down a shrieking steam condenser with a steadiness nobody expected of him, and when a winch needed turning that was designed for a machine's strength, he simply turned it.

Something in the old life came to a head the night before the party's meeting with V. Deep in his cups at the Rusted Mermaid, Randy told the others he thought he ought to go home — that he had property and commitments and a farm hand waiting on him, that it had been fun, and that maybe he'd see them again. Then he went up to his room to read the papers he had been carrying, unopened, since Aristonia. He never said what was in them. In the morning he came back down and stayed with the party, and has not raised it since.

For all the bluntness, Randy has twice been the party's conscience at the worst possible moment. When a captured, frightened man lay tied on the floor of the factory and the group stood at the edge of doing something ugly, it was Randy who talked them back — no eloquence, just the plain truth that they'd come to stop the pollution pouring out of the place, not to hurt anyone who'd share the space with them. It worked. Rations were shared, and amends were made.

He went all the way to the bottom. He handed Riml back his bandolier and his saw-arm inside three minutes of being asked, with only "you understand how quickly we could all kill you, right?" attached, and sounded the drop off the edge of the haulage floor the crudest way available to him. On the run down he dropped a leaning crib of railway beams with a thrown hand axe, and when a powered flat truck of constructs ran level with the carts on the third line, he jumped the gap, swung twice, and jumped back — all in one turn. At the last door he put a fifteen-foot guardian on the ground.

What he had to offer in the room at the bottom was not the axe. Randy fought in the war of the Three Marches, and when the Conductor laid out the contract the factory had been filling all this time — warforged and arcano-engines, sold on to the humans of the Marches to fight each other with — Randy was the one who could say flatly that no warforged were ever used in that war. The men who wrote that contract have been dead a very long time.

Then Riml confessed, with Randy standing over him covered in blood and oil, that he had restarted the Works himself three years ago and caused every bit of the poisoning they had walked north to stop. And a few minutes after that, when the Conductor opened its hands and asked to share in their histories because it had none of its own, Randy burst into tears and threw his arms around it.

His proposal for Riml is on the table and nobody has answered it yet: carry the Conductor out to see the coast for itself, and let Riml's judgment be passed by Bracken's circle.