Bookshops & Bonedust characters

Also known as Viv

Appears from the start

A young orc mercenary, years before she gives up the work. She is strong, fast, impatient and hungry to be noticed, convinced that the way to matter in a company is to be first into every fight, and she has no interests, habits or ambitions outside soldiering. She does not read. A serious wound to the leg early in the book takes her out of the campaign she was desperate to be part of and strands her in a small coastal town with weeks of nothing to do, which is a situation she is entirely unequipped for.

Appears from the start

The veteran captain of the mercenary company Viv serves in, currently under contract to hunt down a necromancer. Experienced and unsentimental about his people, he is the one who decides that an injured fighter is a liability rather than an asset and orders Viv to sit the campaign out until she is fit.

First appears in chapter 2

A gnome in the same mercenary company as Viv: cheerful, talkative and considerably more dangerous than her size suggests. She is the closest thing Viv has to a friend in the company.

First appears in chapter 2

A necromancer operating along this stretch of coast, and the target of the contract Viv's company is working. She is feared, competent and unhurried, she raises and commands the dead, and her interest in the region is not idle.

First appears in chapter 4

A rattkin bookseller, owner of Thistleburr Booksellers in the town of Murk. Blunt, sardonic and permanently unimpressed, she runs a shop that is quietly failing and is well aware of it. She has firm opinions about books and firmer ones about people who announce that they do not read, and she starts handing titles to Viv partly to make a point. She accepts help with the shop with conspicuously poor grace.

First appears in chapter 7

A dwarf who runs a bakery in Murk: warm, forward, funny and entirely comfortable in her own skin. She takes an immediate and uncomplicated interest in Viv, feeds her, and becomes her closest company during the weeks Viv is stuck in the town.