The Gallery

A gutter child the gang named for the part of the candle meant to burn. Bought by a priest, raised to a lord’s name by a duchess, turned from every door in the city, then killed on a stone by the heads of the six houses. Raised by the voice below, he wakes on a throne under the cathedral and goes to put the six houses out.

He is proud, quick, contemptuous of the gutter that made him and of the nobility that would not have him. He speaks in short verse. He never explains himself. He answers the god at every turn and never lets it finish a warning. He is magnificent, he is right about every fact, and he is being used.

Wears: three faces in the options menu, all open from the start: Classic, Bright Red and Silver Dark (see Skins). Carries: a sword and an axe from the first step; more arms as the road goes on (see Arms). Becomes: the bat, then the crows; late, perhaps, the mist (see Forms).

Heard and never shown: eyes in the flames, embers rising in the status panel’s window where a face would be, a hand of embers when he takes hold. He speaks to Wick as “you”, plainly, briefly, and he never lies. He keeps his word: every death, he brings Wick back. He has a whole chapter: The One Below.

A lord who bought his title and drank his household, so the gutter’s story goes, and took to the bells of the court’s belfry. The bounty bill calls him a lord of no family. He drops on grave robbers in the graveyard court, drinks them white, and turns on whoever is next. He is the first fight that asks you to learn a pattern instead of swinging, and the bat that is Wick’s for the rest of the game is drunk from him.

When he is down, Wick drinks him to ash and takes the bought signet off his hand.

The shrine on the Height is a pilgrimage shrine, and its relic is “her birds”, kept in a gilded reliquary cage that a giant monk carries chained to his back. When Wick breaks the cage, a thin girl in an undyed shift rises out of it, ghost-pale, and sings while she speaks. Then she comes apart into birds that fly into him, and the crows are his.

She is the whole game shown once, in small, before the first house: the church makes saints of the dead it made, and keeps them in boxes.

A giant lay brother in a brown habit and an iron yoke, under a vow never to set the cage down. He carries her up and down the pilgrims’ stair. Beaten, he kneels where the cage fell, the chain loose, and Wick may drink him or let him walk down the mountain.

The orphanage’s priest, kind to Wick’s face, unafraid of the dead lord at his gate. He bought Wick from the gang and wrote it down. He keeps the charity’s accounts. He never tells Wick what to do: he only asks. After every house he comes down the visitors’ stair into the haven with one question and one gift, and sits in a chair by the stair.

A hunter from the gutter: a vat boy a generation before Wick, bought off the same coach by the same gang for a shilling and a bottle. He drinks at the tavern bench, carries a net, a hook-pole, a shuttered lantern and a bandolier of stakes, and lives by his own law. He meets Wick in the first hour and is not frightened of him for long.

He is the only living person who knows what Wick is and likes him anyway. Hunter’s law is his whole philosophy: the worst one first; nobody hunts alone; you don’t take a man’s kill.

An old man with a lantern who has lived in the grotto at the bottom of the King’s pleasure garden for sixty years. Nobles talk in gardens; he has heard sixty years of it, and he sells it back. When you are lost, go to him: he names where you should be going and marks it on your way. His price rises as the game goes on: a little blood early, then the dark you carry, and late in the game, hunts.

A marsh woman the houses hanged forty-odd years ago, for hiding her newborn from the coach. She went with the rooks. She speaks through them now, on the Gallows Downs, and at the opening of the world her rooks come for Wick and teach him the long roads: the flight above the land, the roosts, the ways home. She is not the god’s, and he says so.

One of the washerwomen at the gutter’s river steps looks at Wick too long. If he tries to feed on her, his hand stops, and he does not know why.

An old man in the ferrymen’s sea-green coat and a broad round hat, poling a boat called Slack Water. For forty years he was the houses’ corpse-ferry: every burial went down the river in his boat. He meets Wick at the foot of Marrowmere Falls, after the Duchess, and rows him home. He charges the living a penny and the dead nothing. One line a crossing, never a sermon.

In the King’s Chase, a band of people the houses squeezed out rob the tithe carts on the King’s road, and everything they take goes back down to the villages. Their captain, Hollin, is a runaway ward of the Duchess. Gentle Cobb is a Tower levy deserter with a quarterstaff as long as two men. Ash and Yew are a hanged poacher’s children. Brother Wystan is the Bishop’s runaway clerk. Sorrel is a marsh girl who said aloud what the coach takes. They are brave, funny and good. They do not hire lords: they try them.

A lady in a travel-ruined gown and a bought coronet, standing at the gutter church’s door reading the calendar aloud, puzzled.

The sister who carries on teaching when the dead lord walks into the orphanage schoolroom. As a girl she saw the clear light of the rose window fill with a face, and the church showed her in the square. She has doubted her own miracle ever since, which is what makes her faith sincere. Her name is not final in the design TBD.

High clergy, and the one man of the church who believes every word of the surface. He runs the canonisations and preaches the Blessed Hand. His homily is the one sermon in the game you can find no logical flaw in, only a moral one. He does not thank anyone for anything.

An old soldier who keeps his house’s grip with the levy and the gibbet. His household believes in the war and the law; his heir believes the night’s vigil is holy. He watches his son fight first, and does not move. His name and seat are not yet set in the design TBD; the game calls him the Earl of the Tower.

The mother of every foundling in the city, and the woman who bought Wick his name. She ties white sashes on her wards before a rite and kisses each. She has owned the city’s water all her life and is christened again in its font every year.

A sporting noble of the city’s court who has made the odds his office. His exchange sells the villages’ years; his circus follows funerals; his board on the exchange wall foresees every move Wick makes.

He sends for Wick after the third house. His court applauds the dead lord’s entrance in the language of hospitality, which everyone in the hall understands but Wick. His own cup at the head of the triangle is never filled.

Abbess of the marsh convent, who keeps a day of no word and rings her handbell two strokes and a rest. She never varies the beat. She rings so he can find her.

The man who built half the city, every stone of it marked with his guild’s sign. His house is a machine; his plans lie open on his table.