Foreman-Ascendant Coilbrass

Master of the Kingdom's only real industry, and its most successful merchant of things the court would rather not itemize. He buys kobold ore and gremlin scrap, sells finished artifice to noble houses at a markup that would be a scandal if anyone could follow the paperwork, and has been personally augmented so extensively that it is a live question how much of the original Leprechaun is left.

In Person

He ticks. Not loudly, but continuously, and a room he is in has a tempo. The augmentations are not hidden: geared forearms, a spring-driven leg, a lens seated in one socket, and a chest assembly that hums when he is thinking hard, which is most of the time. He is unfailingly polite, speaks in specifications, and does not make small talk.

The question everyone eventually asks — how much is left — he answers readily and with figures, which is not the reassurance people expect it to be.

History

Sixty years an apprentice, forty a master, eleven Foreman-Ascendant. He rose entirely by craft, which is the Winterworks' one genuine virtue, and he has spent his tenure converting a guild into a company: consolidating the indentures, standardizing the bonds, and buying every rival house that failed a winter.

The augmentation began as repair — a hand lost to a press at twenty-three — and has continued at roughly one component a decade since. He has never explained the later ones. The most recent was not a replacement of anything damaged.

Method

Contracts, and the fact that everybody's is with him. Twenty thousand apprentices on twenty-to-forty-year indentures; the province's heat, housing, and food all supplied through the works; and a Works Council that has not voted against him in eleven years.

He does not use force. He uses scheduling: an inconvenient family finds its shifts moved, its vent-warmth reassigned, its apprenticeships redistributed. Nobody has ever been able to point at a punishment.

Household

The Works Council. Nine master-crafters, formally his equals, practically his department heads. Two of them have started meeting without him, which he knows.

The Bellowsgate Factors. His buyers on the Rustlands road, and the Kingdom's only real commerce with the Wilds — entirely undocumented, worth more annually than the Emberwaste's glass, and conducted in the certain knowledge that the capital has decided not to look.

The Wing Vault. Four centuries of prosthetic wings, racked and catalogued, and his private demonstration to any visiting noble who needs reminding what the works can do. He has never sold one to a wingless customer. He has been asked, repeatedly, by people with a great deal of money, and his refusals are getting less emphatic.

Relations

Indispensable to the Ring and looked down upon by it, a contradiction he has monetized so thoroughly that he now enjoys it. Correct with Matriarch Dunnowar, who supplies his ore and does not trust him. Commercially warm with Nix of the Sump, whose salvage he buys and whose Tinkers' Free Bench he has begun to regard as a strategic problem, because they are inventing things he has not.

He has sealed the Deep Vent below Bellowsgate three times. It has been unsealed three times, not from above, and he has not reported any of it.

Reputation

In the Rimeward: the man who keeps the vents open, feared and not much loved. In the capital: a tradesman of genius, invited everywhere and seated below the salt. In the Wilds: a reliable buyer who has never once cheated on a weight, which out there is nearly the whole of a reputation.

Hooks

• An apprentice has read her bond properly and found a clause that voids twenty thousand indentures. Coilbrass wants her found. So do two members of his own Council, for the opposite reason.
• The frostbloom harvest fails and the works run dry in a season. The only other source is a valley in the Bloodmoors, and the party is the deniable option.
• A gremlin artificer is selling a prosthetic wing better than Winterworks issue, made of scrap, made by a goblin. Coilbrass will pay to buy the design, and pay more to buy the maker, and has not said which he prefers.
• The Deep Vent is open again. He asks the party to go down and does not brief them, and the wage he offers is the tell.

"He gave me the figures without being asked. Forty-one percent original, by mass. He seemed pleased with the number."