Raz Pelham’s Story So Far
Some of this is adapted from other essays, some is brand new. Enjoy!
Vampire. Pirate. Vampirate*. Captain Rasophilius ‘Raz’ Pelham is a scoundrel with a heart of gold, playing a small but crucial role in Three Parts Dead and a far more significant one in Four Roads Cross. With vampires set up as a major part of the skazzerai plot, surely Raz is going to play a role going forward?
As we approach the publication of Dead Hand Rule, let’s take a look at Raz’s story so far.
(*I WILL make vampirate happen.)
Raz before the series
We know little of Raz’s life before the books, other than the fact he was turned into a vampire 40 years before Three Parts Dead during the Seril case in Alt Coulumb.
There may or may not have been a retcon as to his racial or national origins; in Three Parts Dead he’s described as Iskari (French), but has a Camlaander (British) name. Both of those are pretty connected with whiteness in the Domain. Yet, we hear of him being dark skinned and he mentions ‘back home in Dhisthra’, i.e. Craft-India, in Four Roads Cross. I wonder if there was a Camlaan colonial presence in Dhisthra, and maybe Raz is mixed race?
I would LOVE to learn more about his pre-series life. If i recall correctly, there was an AMA in which Gladstone mentioned originally planning future books going to Dhisthra but that idea was discarded; perhaps we would have seen more of Raz’s background in that storyline.
We do know that he is an old friend of Elayne Kevarian, and that she is the one who turned him into a vampire - not because she is one herself, but because there is a Craft-y way to do it. She appears to have invited him to Alt Coulumb, as he later says that both times he was brought to the city by a Craftswoman it ended poorly. Maybe they were friends beforehand?
He agreed to become a vampire, because the curse won’t ‘take’ without consent. However, he feels he didn’t have much of a choice.
Raz is clearly having the time of his un-life as a pirate, judging by the glee with which he recounts some tales. He seems to have an unusually strong will and ability not to give into vampirism. He has carefully worked on his tolerance to sunlight and shares soul with his ship, drinking blood only through consensual relationships. He seems to view vampirism more like a chronic illness than a deadly curse.
Three Parts Dead
Raz is a secondary but important character in Three Parts Dead, so we don’t get much of his perspective. Let’s take a look at this truly wild three day period in his elongated life.
Captain Raz Pelham is out pirating the seas of the Domain in his beloved ship, Kell’s Bounty. He has a crew of bizarre misfits, described in Four Roads Cross as including someone with a hand of bone, a mantis-thing, a spider-woman, and a skeleton whose bones were half-replaced with metal - though this is the night crew, with mortal sailors working day shift.
He had been hired by a mysterious contact to cause some trouble in Kraben’s Pillars just west of Iskar, attacking the Iskari treasure fleet and being hit by flame and fire. His crew hastily repaired the worst of the damage when Raz’s old friend Elayne Kevarian called him, asking him to meet her just outside Alt Coulumb’s airspace to transport her and an associate into the city.
Of course, nothing is normal when dealing with Craftswomen, and instead of the planned pick up, Ms Kevarian magics her way onto the ship, and Raz has to rescue Tara Abernathy from the sea. Being a vampire, he goes inside before the sun can fry him, and the day captain takes over to sail the Bounty into dock.
That would be the end of things, except of course everything goes a bit wrong. Poor old Raz.
That night, he finds himself wandering the Pleasure Quarters. Tara seemed quite sure she would find him still in the city, so perhaps he had always planned to dock for a few days, but this night he isn’t quite himself.
He is pulled to a club that has stood in AC since he was last in the city, the Xiltanda. He appears to have a membership, or at least a name on the guest list, as he gets in without difficulty. However, he doesn’t stop for a drink; instead, he makes his way up to the roof - where he appears poised to leap to his death. Or maybe something else was going to happen, as I’m not sure that a fall like that would kill a vampire. Given that we know Alexander Denovo was up in the Hidden Schools trying to tie up loose ends, I wonder if he planned to either descend to the rooftop or pull Raz up to the Schools somehow to finish him off for good.
Whatever the plan, it doesn’t succeed. Tara has followed Raz to the roof and is pulling at the vampiric curse Craft contract woven between his spirit and his body. Tara feels there are hooks in his mind controlling him, and he’s strong. Despite her Craft, Raz pulls against her to the edge of the roof until she manages to tether him to the building itself.
But the Craft Denovo hooked into his mind burns at him, removing memories bit by bit. Without Tara’s intervention, his mind would be wiped clean. Tara, however, is willing to sacrifice herself for others, and nearly burns herself out removing the Craft. She succeeds, putting Raz and herself in hospital.
Despite the attack, Raz is wide awake and “angrily maintaining there’s nothing wrong with him and he’s fit to return to his ship” when Tara comes around. She interviews him about why he was at the Xiltanda, and the job he had before transporting Tara and Ms Kevarian. He tells a dramatic story, fit for a pulp novel, but half of it is utter nonsense. The half that does make sense confirms Tara’s theory that the fire battle that damaged Raz’s ship was the same event that killed Kos. The main question is who planned it - and Raz can’t help with that. Knowledge of who hired him has been wiped from his mind. Raz must have agreed to such a bargain up front, but he has no recollection of that now.
He sleeps for most of the next day, as vampires must. But he awakens abruptly to find himself feeding on Cat.
“His eyes were open.
She saw satisfaction, confusion, and revulsion superimposed on his face. Roused from sleep, he found his teeth buried in a strange woman’s wrist. He was hungry, and his will was weak. He did not push her away. A beast within him woke, stretching and yawning in his red eyes. One clawed hand rose from beneath the sheets and hesitated, uncertain whether to seize her or thrust her from him, unsure whether she was real or a predatory dream.
…
“What the hell were you doing? Seriously, woman. What is wrong with you? Haven’t you ever heard of consent?”
Despite this rude awakening, Raz quickly comes back to full senses, assessing Cat and realising someone has worked Craft through Cat’s mind. When Cat heads off to try and find Tara, Raz insists on coming with her and figuring out what the hell is going on.
In Shale’s hospital room (not that they know its faceless former occupant was Shale), they find a scene of destruction, including Tara’s belongings spilled across the floor. The Blacksuits say a gargoyle burst in and abducted Tara and the witness; Raz observes talon marks that support this story. But something isn’t right. The window is broken from the inside. Raz realises that Tara is in fact in the alley below, having hidden from Blacksuits and now thinking her coast is clear. The two of them jump from the window, get a cab to follow Tara’s, and have a flirtatious moment.
They follow Tara to the docks, and try to find her among warehouses. They have some banter about Cat’s vampire bite addiction, and Raz explains that he manages his condition by drinking from people with whom he has good relationships.
Alas, things go wrong once again when they find Tara surrounded by gargoyles, including the formerly faceless witness. Cat feels angry and betrayed, jumping to conclusions - and lets her Blacksuit take over. Justice, compromised by Denovo, tells Cat to break Raz’s neck - and she does.
Alive but unable to heal, Raz watches the ensuing battle between gargoyles and Blacksuits. Tara spots him and manages to put his spine back in the right place - enough so he can heal himself. It sounds incredibly painful, ngl. Poor Raz.
He is dragged along with the gargoyles, Tara, and Abelard to the Temple of Justice, where Tara does her Abernathy thing and starts arguing in their defence. Raz is fully healed but playing dead until Tara calls him as a witness and asks him to get up and help her.
He explains who he is, and vouches for Tara’s story. He of course can’t confirm who hired him, and then steps back. When everything goes even more to hell, with Cardinal Gustave blasting godfire everywhere, Raz catches fire; Tara manages to quench the flame and he falls unconscious once again. Poor Raz plays another unwilling role in the trial, when Cat desperately tries to break free of Justice’s control, pressing his fangs against her wrist. It works.
And that’s the last we see of Raz until he is preparing to leave Alt Coulumb. A pretty shit few days all around, I think we can all agree. Yet apparently it wasn’t his worst visit - he says that “affairs had fallen out better this time than forty years ago,” which says a lot about what happened forty years ago.
Cat apologises to him before he leaves, and they make tentative plans to meet next time he finds himself near Alt Coulumb in a month or so’s time.
And we know he definitely does come back, more than once, because one year later we find him working alongside Cat and the Blacksuits in a drug bust.
Four Roads Cross
Raz appears to have become a regular fixture in Alt Coulumb over the ensuing year, now working alongside Cat. At the start of the book, the pair of them uncover a people trafficking operation beneath a drug smuggling ring. Dozens of people are trapped by predatory loan agreements as debt zombies, and slumber in a ship’s hold. Due to international agreements, Kos can’t intervene - but Seril might be able to.
Between heists and paperwork, Cat and Raz dance around their mutual attraction and the spectre of Cat’s addiction to vampire bites. Raz shares that part of the reason he’s kept his sanity as a vampire is that he shares his ship’s soul, which seems odd but works for him.
Cat and Raz free the debt zombies in Seril’s name - only to be hit by a trap. The refugees are infected with demons, and if the demons can break Seril, they’re free. Blacksuits and gargoyles are attacked. Cat and Raz see Shale falling in the sky, and Cat throws him with unerring Blacksuit aim and strength. He rips the head off a demon, saving Shale.
Kos intervenes and the remaining demons fall to fire in the night sky. This is good in the short term but not the long term, opening Kos to legal challenges over his undeclared interest in Seril. Tara goes off across the continent to try and get some of Seril’s old portfolio back, and Raz offers a rather unorthodox opportunity.
He reveals there’s a community of ancient vampires living deep under the ocean; Cat and Raz swim down to treat with them. In exchange for some of Cat’s blood, a vampire priestess offers a jewel of her cult’s blood in the form of a red jade. If Raz eats the jewel, he can use the vampires’ ancient power, but will become subsumed into the cult and essentially die. Not anyone’s first choice, fair to say. Cat and Raz finally resolved their unresolved sexual tension and bang it out.
The court case starts. Kos is defended by an excellent Craftsperson, but with Tara in Dresediel Lex, Seril is undefended. It all goes rather chaotic, even after Tara shows back up. Battling against an old friend, Tara is about to sacrifice herself - until Raz steps in.
“Raz saw Cat fall. Above him a demon blossomed. He’d seen these before, or things like them. City smashers. Undefined, indefinable.
Raz put the blood jade between his teeth, bit, and drank.
It tasted sharp.
All of a sudden even the demon in the sky seemed slow. He put his hands into his pockets. This wasn’t what he’d imagined at all, but it made a kind of sense.
He walked up into the air, humming softly to himself.
Demonglass scythed toward Raz, slow as an opening flower.
…
“I’m no good at this sort of thing,” he said. “Want an explanation, you’d be better off asking Tara, or Lady K. You’re dangerous because you’re undefined, because the world doesn’t know what limits to place on you. Now, this thing to which I just joined myself—it’s very old. Older than gods. Nothing last this long unless it’s quite simple.” He sounded sad. “You know the joke, that there are two kinds of people in the world? As far as it’s concerned, the whole world’s made of things it’s eaten, and things it hasn’t yet. As far as it’s concerned, you’re not undefined at all. It knows just what to do with you.”
His fangs went in. Glass cracked.”
With the power of all the ancient vampires, he’s able to save the day. This allows Tara to win the court case, but Raz is about to be subsumed by the vampire coven. Cat, as representative of Seril, offers Raz asylum. It means he’s now trapped in the city, but with a burgeoning relationship with Cat this is less of a life sentence than it might have been before.
References to Raz in later books
That’s the last we’ve seen of Raz in the books. And, you know, Raz is barely referenced outwith the Alt Coulumb books, which I think is deeply unfair. I haven’t noted any references to Raz in Full Fathom Five, despite Cat making lots of oblique references to back home. I’m convinced I’ve missed something, but alas cannot say if there are any references.
He is named twice in Dead Country, being remembered as one of Tara’s friends back in Alt Coulumb. We also see that among Tara’s stash of emergency soulstuff, she has “a six-armed statue of a fanged and skull-necklaced Dhistran goddess Raz had given her, which Tara liked because the goddess always seemed to be winking and giving her the thumbs up”.
Tara also says she helped Cat get a mortgage, and as we have no reason to believe Cat and Raz have split up, I’m choosing to believe Raz is living in Cat’s new place (though potentially may not be able to be on the mortgage deed itself, being a vampirate. I doubt he’s filling in his tax forms, unless Tara has strongarmed him.)
He is not named at all in Wicked Problems, despite the whole vampire thing, but we do get one reference: “one of her best friends back in Alt Coulumb had [the vampire curse].”
And that’s it. Being referenced as a best friend who gives gifts does at least give me solace that he is in Alt Coulumb and involved in our ragtag friendship group, and I have hope he will show up again in either Dead Hand Rule or our unnamed finale book.
So for now, that is Raz’s story so far.
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