Sergeant Tholer

House Vandahl's unhurried sergeant at the Highbridge chain-house — the hand every dispatch from Valenfeld ends in, and the first House voice a new walker earns work from.

Tholer has kept the chain-house ledger long enough to know the toll pays the House and the House pays him, in that order, and he hurries for neither. He waves through what he trusts and writes down what he doesn't. New faces that walk the whole vale on their own feet interest him: legs and no local debts are exactly what House business between the towns needs — carrying-work first, and if that holds, the quieter kind. A false seal crossing his counter is the one thing that makes him move quickly.