Reza the Tollwright

The Marrow-Lance serjeant who holds the barrow-road camp — honest steel, brittle word, and three incompatible contracts for watching the Vault door.

Reza has run the Tollwright's Camp for eight years, long enough to know every face that comes up the barrow road and what it is probably carrying. She is the kind of soldier who earns loyalty by being exactly what she says she is: the toll is set, the night is safe, and she does not ask what the thing in your pack once belonged to. What she has not told the camp, and is running out of time not to tell them, is that she is holding three separate pay-contracts on the same job — one from the Sealed Choir (count the runnels, report, do nothing), one from the Silt Hands (delay any Choir-sent warden by any means), and one from the Cinder Quorum (make sure the Choir warden never reaches the door). She is good with a blade and good at waiting, and the waiting is almost over.