Hanniver Toll

The free cities' walls keep the dark out; Hanniver Toll's work begins with the dark already inside. As a witch hunter of the Order of Azyr, he hunts the cults, covens, and corrupted grandees who rot cities from within: a trade of ledgers, cellars, and long surveillance, ended punctually by pistol and blade. Toll works chiefly out of Excelsis, the City of Secrets on the coast of Ghur, where prophecy is currency and treachery accrues like compound interest.

His longest partnership began as an arrest that turned into a recruitment. Armand Callis was a Freeguild guardsman who stumbled onto a Tzeentchian conspiracy reaching into Excelsis's highest offices and lived, barely, to testify; Toll saw what the cult had failed to kill, an honest man with a soldier's eye, and deputized him on the spot. Together they have chased heresy across the Realm of Beasts, the guardsman's conscience and the witch hunter's certainty grinding against each other into something like justice.

Toll is no torch-waving zealot. He is a surgeon who believes the free cities are worth cutting to save, and he keeps a precise count of every cut. The work has cost him friends, comfort, and pieces of the man he might otherwise have been, and he pays without complaint: in a civilization built on hope, someone must be the professional pessimist, and the cities sleep safer for every night Hanniver Toll does not.