Balin

An engineer of Kaz'Nakaram, broad-shouldered and thick-armed, his long beard carefully braided. Bolin is his cousin, and the two are so rarely mentioned apart that the apprentices of Perennus learned both names as one word. They were travelling to Vlad for a contract when bandits took their caravan and a group of students they had never met saved their lives.

He speaks the human tongue with visible effort, forcing his gravel voice into a shape it was not built for. I am Balin. Pleased to meet you. He was delighted to discover that the students had learned dwarven instead — and that one of them spoke it with a Kaz'Nakaram accent.

Caste

He is the one who remembers the rules. When Bolin drifted toward improving a firearm, Balin stopped him: a firearm is the work of a dwarven smith. It does not become us to trespass on another domain. Remember the rules of our caste. Engineers may keep the basic knowledge, but weapon-making is restricted to them; their domain is the valerium energy generator, assisted plumbing, adamantine pipework, heated indoor ponds — the installations nobody sings about and everybody wants.

He is also the reason Bolin asked Gyllyn to keep quiet about the two rapiers.

The Guild

In Vlad he found his guild chief Rodin murdered, and read the room the way he reads a building site: the oak desk looks like it was destroyed with something like a heavy mace — the killer was genuinely strong. He worked out who it was, and hated the conclusion. I might have an idea. But I refuse to believe it. It was Thordin, one of his own caste, who answered the accusation with the only argument that could hurt: you believe these humans over a dwarf of your own caste?

Balin's response to a confessed murderer was not vengeance. You should have told us you were afraid, Thordin. We could have helped you. He then wrote to Kaz'Nakaram to argue for a lighter sentence.

Thordin died a few days later, shot defending them in an alley of Vlad, and used his last breath to name Balin chief of the guild. Balin closed his eyes with one movement of his hand, gently pulled the beard-pencil from his braid, and set it in a small metal box. Go in peace, Thordin, son of Kaz'Nakaram. May Askenar open his forges to you.

The Builder

He looks at a landscape for its potential rather than its beauty, and every slope is a figure he is already recording. Given a manor to build, he proposed a village around it first, on the grounds that a manor needs maintenance and constant labour. He knows his limit exactly and finds it funny: the technical side is our strength. The creative and artistic side, though…

Captured alongside Gyllyn by the Baron and beaten in his cells, he never blamed him. Boy… why do you always risk your life like this? He calls him gamin and follows him anyway. When Vidock opened the cell he was already gathering his tools, and he went up the stairs with the others carrying an improvised weapon that was not, strictly, his caste's business either.

When the apprentices had built enough of the village, he told them to stop working so hard — the guild had its labour and its funding now — and to go and study. Gyllyn later remembered those months of building beside Balin, Bolin and Élise as the stretch that made him forget what Cerberus was actually like.