Old Tibbault

Runs Mousehold in the sense that everyone pays him and nobody has written it down. He sells the Kingdom's traffic patterns to the Kingdom's own customs service at a rate they have never questioned. He is old enough to remember when the hunting question was not a question, and has conspicuously declined to take a side in it.

In Person

Grey-muzzled, comfortable, and delighted to see you. He keeps a good table, remembers everything anyone has ever told him, and conducts business as hospitality — the price comes up late, pleasantly, and is not negotiable.

He is old even by the standards of an immortal people, which in a world of metamorphosis means he has been this for a very long time without changing, and Cait Sith find that more unsettling than they say.

History

He was a hunter, and by every account a superb one, in the decades before anyone in the Hedges thought to ask whether hunting was a crime. He stopped forty years ago. He has never given a reason, never joined the Unhunted, and never said a word against the Long Whisker, and both factions have spent four decades reading that silence as encouragement.

What he built instead is the Ledger House: four decades of tallies recording who moved what, when, through where. It began as a hunter's habit — knowing the traffic — and became the most complete archive of the Kingdom's movements in existence, more complete than the Chancery's, because the Chancery only records what was declared.

Method

He sells knowledge to everyone, at prices scaled to how badly the buyer wants it withheld from someone else, and he has never yet sold a fact that got a Hedges resident killed. That rule is not sentiment; it is the reason the ditch-runners keep bringing him information.

His authority over Mousehold rests on nothing written. There is no office, no charter, and no guard beyond a few nephews. There is simply the fact that everyone in the province owes him something, and that he has never called all of it in at once.

Household

The Nephews. A dozen or so, not all of them related, who collect, escort, and occasionally break something. They are not frightening. Their existence means he never has to be.

The Toll-Keepers of the Nine Roads. Nine appointments, each nominally the Crown's and each in practice his, and each collecting a tariff that is not the stated tariff.

The Ditch Runners. Not his — he does not command Underbank — but the mouse and beetle couriers who move under the tollhouses are his best source, and they deal with him because he pays and does not ask them to be grateful.

Relations

Sells to the Queen's Customs, who have never questioned the rate; to Duke Aureling, who believes he is getting a bargain and is; and to at least four Ring houses who would deny it.

He and Grismer have never met, never competed for a customer, and have an arrangement neither has ever described. Warm, in a complicated way, with the Underbank guilds. Studiously neutral on the abolition argument that is tearing his own city in half.

Reputation

Beloved in Mousehold, trusted nowhere else, and consistently underestimated by the capital, which regards him as a colorful provincial fixer rather than as a man holding a complete record of the Kingdom's traffic in a shed.

The Unhunted think he is one bad day from joining them. The Long Whisker think the same. He has let both believe it for forty years.

Hooks

"He fed me, he asked after my sister, and then he named a price I could not have imagined an hour earlier. I paid it and I thanked him."