Lady Malys

Lady Aurelia Malys, known across the Dark City as the Mazeweaver, is Archon of the Kabal of the Poisoned Tongue and one of the most formidable intellects the Drukhari have ever produced. Beneath a gracious, aloof and disdainful manner works a mind of labyrinthine subtlety, and time and again she has matched wits with Asdrubael Vect himself and emerged unbroken. More unsettling still is her foresight, a precognition so acute that it borders upon the supernatural; on the battlefield her forces are always in the right place before the enemy has resolved to move, diverted to advantage by a leader who seems already to have watched the battle end.

She was not always a power in her own right. In earlier days Malys was consort to Vect and one of the brightest ornaments of his Inner Circle, her brilliance shining most keenly during the intrigues of the Panacea Wars. But the Tyrant of Commorragh wearies of every diversion, and when he grew bored he cast her from his court. Rather than dwindle into obscurity, the affronted Malys gathered the warriors still loyal to her and struck out into the trackless webway, resolved one day to return and unmake the master who had discarded her.

It was in those hidden ways that she met the Laughing God. Cegorach, trickster deity of the Harlequins, scattered her followers and set himself before her, challenging her to a contest of riddles with her very existence as the stake. Against all reason Malys answered every riddle the god posed, and with an amused chuckle he was gone, leaving behind a semi-sentient blade and a pulsing crystal that was nothing less than his own heart. Coldly determined to seize the power she needed to undo Vect, Malys took up that blade and carved out her own heart, and set the god's heart beating in its place, where it beats within her still. Some say the encounter was engineered from the shadows by the Harlequin masque called the Veiled Path.

Since that day Vect has loosed an unending tide of assassins against her, and not one has ever found its mark, turned aside by her foresight and the hand of unseen patrons. Her influence spreads like a stain through the Dark City: she holds the void-docks of Scarlet Harbour and the slums of Netherdell, and refines her exquisite poisons in hidden manufactories folded away in the webway. Patient, brilliant and impossible to corner, Lady Malys plays the longest of all Commorragh's long games, and few doubt that its final move is the throne of the Dark City itself.