Bevin

Bevin is a small dwarven man with glasses who works out of Saltmoor. He appraises finds for the fence Octavian Drell and, by his own account, handles the comings and goings of Drell's establishment; he also assesses and reports to the council of six up at the crow's nest. Nervous and eager, he warms quickly to anyone who treats him well and asks, once acquainted, to be called "Bev."

He is a scholar of the weave. He and his kind, he says, have been studied scholars of it since the return of magic some centuries ago, and it was on the strength of that learning that he found employ in Saltmoor.

On the Party's Finds

Bevin appraised the relics and texts the party carried out of the Vex Caves and recognized them at once as dwarven work of the Second Epoch — the same hand, near enough the same workshop, all tied back to a sacred dwarven text he named the Technomicron. Shown the brass lens, he gasped and recoiled: he had never seen one intact. He named it precisely — a survey instrument of the Second Epoch, heavily employed by his people — and said that of the many broken replicas and copies he had studied over the years, this was the finest he had ever laid eyes on.

Asked where more such artifacts and their history might be found, he offered a two-pronged answer: seek out the dwarves of Steamveil, who hold the origins of these things but are resistant to speak of them; or go to the learned scholars of history in the Firstwood, at Silvaris, whose library keeps the deeper records. He later asked leave to take a charcoal rubbing of the lens's runes for his research, and found among the cardinal-direction marks an additional, more archaic script he would need time to decipher.

A Warning About V

Learning the party meant to meet the figure called V, Bevin came to them twice to urge them to reconsider and simply leave Saltmoor. From his one observation of V's dealings with the council of six, he judged V extremely learned and capable, limitlessly wealthy, unbothered by the pirates' power, and able to draw on power beyond the realm of ordinary men — most likely a wizard. Pressed on what he would do in their place, he said plainly: turn tail and go.

Before the party left Saltmoor, Bevin pressed one of a pair of speaking stones into their hands, keeping its twin. Through it he can send a single message a day — his way of reaching them, wherever they go, once he has made sense of the archaic script on the lens.