STATUS Civilian consultant, unaffiliated
SECTION Called on by Section 18 as needed
FIRST ON RECORD Session 7 – the museum grimoire theft

Asquith Cedartree the 3rd keeps a private museum on the mezzanine floor above one of Chuza’s antiquities halls – a cluttered, lamplit room of things most collectors would rather not display. He holds no badge, answers to no Section House roster, and isn’t an Agent by any definition Section 18 keeps on file. He gets called anyway, whenever a case turns up something older, stranger, or better read in a dead language than the average officer can manage.

He first came to the Agents’ attention over a forced exhibit case and a stolen grimoire – a book on loan from a private collector in Kalitzim, taken the same night a small, charred body turned up beside the broken glass. Asquith talked Crowe, Hawke and Raven through the book’s provenance and its rather grim subject matter without much apparent alarm at either detail. The grimoire was eventually recovered and returned to Section House evidence, where it has sat ever since, pending the outcome of the investigation – with Asquith checking in on its condition rather more often than protocol strictly requires.

FILE NOTES

Asquith reads languages most scholars only know exist. When Raven turned up wearing armour with lettering worked into the edging, he placed the script within minutes as close kin to the Basilican hand used in the temples of Wee Jas – skull and sunburst, the goddess’s usual mark – though the specific dialect didn’t match anything in his own library. He seemed considerably more delighted by the puzzle than concerned about who had made the armour, or why.

“Ahh. I do love language. One small change in a character, a completely different meaning. So many conflicts have started on a mistranslation.”

Asquith Cedartree the 3rd, on the Basilican script

ADDENDUM – SESSION 20

The identity card attached to this file was filed above as an unresolved discrepancy. It no longer is. At the museum, with clearance from Brin, Asquith confirmed the details on the card himself, unprompted – his true name is Akatha C’Dartris, a Tol Kerrate Knight sworn to a King no living Chuzan has heard named, and by his own account just over nine hundred years old.

“My name is Akatha C’Dartris – Tol Kerrate Knight, Guardian of the Tree, sworn to the King. I was born just over nine hundred years ago. If I can assist you through life or in death, then I will.”

Asquith, at the museum

The oath that made him a Tol Kerrate Knight is as much a curse as a gift – immortality bought at the price of natural death, but not of aging’s other cruelties. What’s left to him instead are diseases that would kill an ordinary man cleanly, held off but never cured, and a stranger inheritance from the oath’s patron: cut him, and the wound sheds a scatter of small dark insects along with the blood, sacred to a goddess he doesn’t care to discuss further.

What followed didn’t stay comfortable for long – an account of the Cataclysm that doesn’t match anything taught in a Chuza schoolroom, and an old, unresolved argument with Brin over a decision made thirty-three years ago that neither man has fully forgiven the other for. The full exchange is filed under Session 20.

ADDENDUM – SESSION 41

The argument resurfaced, in person, when Section 18 needed his Order’s help a second time. Asquith didn’t back down from what his Order had done thirty-three years ago – using children as bait to draw the Children of the Eye into the cavern that became the Abandonment – and made a point of reminding Brin exactly whose idea the arrangement had originally been.

“Captain Brin, I may be old but my memory is still sharp. I recall that YOU asked us for help. That when WE stood in front of the Commissioner it was YOU who said ‘whatever it takes.’ YOU and YOUR Agency asked US for help. Remember that.”

Asquith, to Captain Brin

He’s buried the only family he ever had, and not to age or accident. Centuries ago, on the orders of the King he still serves without complaint, his two children were executed before the Battle of Dunrath Fields – not for any crime of their own, but to remove them as leverage the NIL’s spies might otherwise have used against him. He speaks of it, when he speaks of it at all, as a settled matter rather than an open wound – which convinces nobody who has actually watched his face while he says it.

STATUS: Filed under The Good – on the strength of every interaction on record, and now on the strength of his own word besides. Records reconciled.