Who's who: Zeddig, Raymet and Gal
An intimidatingly buff sort-of princess, a university post-doc, and a Camlaan Knight walk into a bar, make a deal with a zombie, and join a heist that takes them into a god-strewn desert that will almost definitely kill them.
Meet *Hala’Zeddig, Haaz’Raymet, and Gal, three of the major characters in Ruin of Angels. Criminals, revolutionaries, and queer icons - frankly, what’s not to love? We sadly haven’t seen these three since Ruin, but I hold out hope for a return in the last two books of the Craft Wars quartet.
But who are they? They are so much more than those pithy descriptions, and despite a handful of surface similarities they are incredibly different women who in most other worlds would never have met, let alone become friends. So let’s dig into it and get to know Zeddig, Raymet, and Gal.
There are some minor spoilers here because there’s not really any other way to talk about characters, but I’ve kept them as minimal as possible.
(*Talbeg names are traditionally written as Surname’First Name - for example, Gladstone’Max.)
Who are Zeddig, Raymet, and Gal?
“Raymet knew better than to trust her own judgement about this job. She’d grown up poor, educated by charity and libraries and mistreated in Iskari public schools, chasing scholars around the university at age twelve to ask about proper conjugation of the highly irregular old Talbeg verb la’at. She’d always been an outsider. She used hunger like fuel. Most of the old High Family kids she came to know in college grew up in certainty. They took fewer risks, because they had more to lose. When you’re playing short stack poker, a gambler Raymet slept with had told her once, you bide your time, and when you see your golden hand, you go all in.
But you choose that moment carefully. Don’t play every big pot, don’t fall for a pair of queens. And care was Raymet’s weakness. Climb her family tree and you’d find generations of hungry men and women, desperate for the big score, overplaying hands on the verge of triumph.
So, with a prize like this before her, she knew better than to trust her judgement.
But she couldn’t trust Zeddig’s, either. Ley was a good pitchwoman, and she didn’t have to be with Zeddig. Raymet had known them both separately at school, before they knew each other: each indomitable in her own idiom, guarded by layers of detachment and strength.
So: she couldn’t trust herself, and she couldn’t trust Zeddig.
That left Gal. Raymet’s hope. Her moral compass, sitting cross-legged and radiant in the room she kept, unfurnished save for a mattress on the floor, eyes closed, listening to Ley’s pitch as she might have a sermon—Gal, light in her hair, pure as a statue, gorgeous and simple as a blade.
Gal could not be tempted. Gal would know what to do.”
Zeddig, Raymet, and Gal are introduced in Ruin of Angels as an odd gang of lawbreakers jumping between worlds to steal long lost treasures and put a middle finger up at a colonising government. Or at least, Zeddig and Raymet aim to do that. Gal is there as the muscle.
We meet this trio as a delver crew. Essentially, they illegally drop between the Iskari city of Agdel Lex to the ruins of old Alikand, deathly and deadly, hidden in the cracks of reality. They do this partly as a fuck you to the colonising Iskari, and partly to retrieve rare, long-lost items to sell on the black market.
Well. Zeddig and Raymet do it for those reasons. Gal goes because they asked her to, and because she’s on a secret quest to find an enemy that can kill her. Good times.
Even with their similar rationale for delving, in the context of Agdel Lex, Zeddig and Raymet are unlikely friends. Sure, they met at the same grad school, and have ended up in the same undercity. But Zeddig is of the High Families, more or less a dethroned princess, and feels the loss of old Alikand in her soul. Raymet has clawed her way up from insignificance, doesn’t give a shit about the High Families or their lost glory, and historically would not have been deemed worthy of looking Zeddig in the eye, let alone being her friend.
Because they are friends, all three of them, despite their contrasting backgrounds and personalities. And they are allies in a secret war waged against the Iskari.
Who is Hala’Zeddig?
“This is a long fight, Zeddig. Your family needs you. You take too many risks.”
You don’t see it, Zeddig did not say. You don’t feel it like I do. We’re losing. The dead city grows colder every day, and the Authority more certain. Most delvers don’t care who owned what back when. They sift history for gold. Back in your day, you could delve into Alikand for a half hour at a time; I lasted three minutes today, rescued one book, and almost died. We need to take risks while we can—before the past slides out of reach.”
On the outside, Zeddig is a stone cold badass. Kai later refers to her as “intimidatingly buff”, and she chooses to pay back part of her debt to zombie loan shark Vogel in pain rather than sacrifice a random kid she doesn’t know. She has a graduate degree, and uses it to delve into an environment that wants to kill her. Every description we see of her from a character meeting her for the first time emphasises her visible strength. Even her friend Raymet describes her as moving through the world “wrapped in spiked armor, Zeddig’s thicker and sharper and more forbidding.”
But on the inside, Zeddig is soft and sees herself as weak. Betrayed by her ex-girlfriend Ley Pohala (Kai’s sister, more on her in a future Who’s Who), she is even more pre-emptively defensive than before. She struggles with self-respect, feeling she is walking a tightrope and constantly compromsing her values, her friends, her mission, her family. She carries the weight of her family and her community on her shoulders: she is the future Archivist of House Hala, responsible for keeping their heritage safe and maintaining the sheer existence of the world of Alikand through her belief. She sees the constant encroachment of the Iskari colonisers, and the continual decay of the dead city into which she delves to save individual pieces of her history. Most Alikanders know the stories of the world they lost; Zeddig sees it, always dying but never dead, on a daily basis.
Zeddig is driven by a desire to maintain her community and her culture, but also by anger and grief. She has built up her armour in service of these motivators. She has to be the strongest, toughest delver or she feels like she has failed. She rarely lets anyone knew in - and the last time she did, she showed her city and her culture to Ley, who threw that back in her face, selling Zeddig’s deepest love to the highest bidder (in Zeddig’s eyes, at least).
In her first introduction, we see Zeddig retrieve a rare book in the dead city at great financial cost. She’s supposed to get a huge payout, and borrowed from a dangerous loan shark to fund it. But she realises the book belonged to another of Alikand’s High Families, and her responsibility to Alikand overrides her need for soulstuff. She returns the book, and is faced with both Raymet’s anger and betrayal and her debt being called in. She feels she has failed everybody - but she’s in a situation where she simply cannot win. Zeddig can’t please everyone, and trying to will tear her apart.
“Why did you borrow from Vogel?”
“He limited my debt. No matter how much I owe him, he can’t touch my family, can’t touch their banks. The Wreckers work with banks these days—each loan’s a chance to get their claws on the collection.”
“Surely there were other options.”
“We needed the soulstuff.” Idiot. “And—a full On Comedy? We could have paid off Vogel with room to spare. Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“You should have told us.”
“You would have told me it was a bad idea. And if I told you, you would have told Raymet, and the two of you would have found some way to stop me. It was a big score. I took a risk.”
“You have a week to pay him back.”
She nodded.
“You don’t have the soulstuff.”
“I’ll figure something out.”
Zeddig’s main weakness is people. She comes from a large, previously wealthy and powerful family - we only really see her grandmother, Aman, but hear reference to brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles. Many still live in the same house as Zeddig, but she doesn’t go to any of them for help. No, they can rely on her. They must rely on her. She’ll do anything to protect her family, including getting into debt with a very dangerous person. She knows Raymet needs soulstuff and security more than she does, so she is the one who will compromise herself to get a line of credit. She leapt into a fighting pit to try and save Gal (who, she learned later, needed no such saving). And throughout the book, we see that Ley Pohala is one of her biggest weaknesses.
Ley. The Queen of Evil Exes. We don’t see the two of them during their previous relationship, but we know they met at university in Chartegnon (Raymet was there too), and went through the world with different kinds of armour. Ley is slick and polished; Zeddig is tougher and spikier. But, somehow, they let each other in.
And then Ley betrayed her.
Of course, we learn in Ruin that Ley didn’t think what she was doing was a betrayal, but nonetheless that’s how Zeddig took it. Zeddig let somebody in to her heart and her world, and got stabbed in the back. We meet Zeddig still fragile from this, a few years on. Yet when Ley pops back up in Zeddig’s life, wanted for murder and with a high-risk high-reward delving job on her hands, Zeddig is weak to resist.
This works out for her. Last we heard, she and Ley are still together (apparently talking about children, to Kai’s horror). And while we haven’t seen Alikand or Agdel Lex since Ruin, she saved her city and her community, and has presumably taken a major role in rebuilding.
But, for a woman raised to delve and fight to save Alikand, what is her purpose now? We don’t yet know, but I’d love to see it.
Other characters associated with Zeddig: Ley Pohala, Haaz’Raymet, Gal, Vogel, Jalai’Iz, Kai Pohala, Bescond, Tara Abernathy, Hala’Aman, Hala Family
Places associated with Zeddig: Alikand, Agdel Lex, the Dead City, Chartegnon
Organisations associated with Zeddig: The Roll of Fifty (not really an organisation, but…), University of Chartegnon
Who is Haaz’Raymet?
“Why delve?”
She was fucking fed up, is why: fed up with being poor, fed up with walking the line, fed up with Zeddig’s folks and the High Families and all the other godsdamn great-grandchildren of Senators who had retreated to their enclaves to mourn Iskari rule rather than fight back, who pretended they could live a closed life out of the occupier’s eye. Raymet never had that luxury. So why not break into the dead city and steal the High Families’ history out from under them? Why not learn and plunder, and make those Senators’ kids come to her? Why not fight the Iskari direct—not by building dreams of pleasant imaginary pasts, of perfect worlds that never were, but by burrowing straight through the illusion they called Agdel Lex into the slaughter on which that illusion was made?”
Like her friend Zeddig, Raymet is driven by anger. Unlike Zeddig, she doesn’t care to save the memory or culture of old Alikand - a place where Zeddig would be a sort-of princess, and Raymet would be part of an unseen underclass. To Raymet, it doesn’t matter whether she lives in Alikand or Agdel Lex. The city is not made for people like Raymet. So, Raymet will happily burn it down.
Most of our main characters in the Craft Sequence (with the notable exception of Izza) are part of the systems of oppression in their world, even if they’re trying to rebuild it. Raymet is not that. Sure, she might help support the Alikanders by chance because she’s delving, but when Zeddig goes to donate their big score to an old Family, Raymet tries in vain to stop her. Raymet wants money, and glory, and a big fuck you at the squids and old High Families that run both of the stacked cities. Raymet is ANGRY. Probably the angriest character we’ve met, fueled by spite and coffee and other illicit substances.
At least, that’s the Raymet we see. She is, however, also Doctor Haaz, a woman with multiple degrees from multiple countries, including a doctorate, and a university job. One presumes she’s able to hide her anger and her illegal activities to a certain degree, or she wouldn’t be holding down an academic job in an Iskari-run city. She has a mortgage, for crying out loud. Sure, the mortgage is on a three-level sub-sub-basement apartment filled with books (both legally and illegally obtained), mouldy food, drugs, and a random assortment of students and sexual partners, but still, she got a loan in a squid-city and owns property. She’s more a part of the Iskari system than Zeddig is, despite her rage being more potent and her desire to burn everything down more inflamed.
But that, too, ties into her background. Zeddig doesn’t have to be part of the Iskari system, because she has a place and a future in the High Family system, even if she sees it crumbling. Raymet’s family weren’t anyone of note before Alikand fell, let alone after. And ignoring her family background, Raymet’s life left her on the outskirts of the outsiders. She grew up poor, hungry, angry. While being tortured in the squid tower, she thinks: “Yes, you’ve been abandoned by your people, yes your dad’s a drunk working a third-rate steamer in Kho Khatang and Grandma took you back from Mom for a reason.” Zeddig has an expansive community and family; Raymet has nothing.
Short, bald, and in Zeddig’s memorable words, with “the build of a woman whose idea of heavy lifting involved stacks of books,” Raymet stands out compared to her physically strong fellow delvers. She brings brains rather than brawn. She knows half a dozen languages, has countless contacts, and a willingness to fight dirty. She may be small and struggle with too many stairs, but she learned to fight bullies as a child and kept going.
Like the best characters, Raymet is also plagued by a certain degree of self-doubt. She describes seeing the world as “four cats drowning in a sack, options and might-have-beens tearing each other bloody, ancient fears and unspoken needs and just-this-once ethical exceptions, and don’t forget the lusts, all yowling in panic as black water seeped in,” and this way of looking at the world can paralyse her from action.
She feels this way particularly when comparing herself to Gal, the third member of our delver crew and the focus of Raymet’s pining. She loves Gal, but can’t see a world where Gal would feel the same way in return.
“It’s not like I wanted to. It’s not like I thought to myself, oh, you know what’s a good idea, I should throw myself against Wreckers I can’t possibly fight, to save someone who doesn’t need saving, that’s an excellent idea, let’s try it.
“It’s not love, dammit.
“I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s just sex, the old monkey-brain fucking with me again. Maybe it’s the godsdamn seasons. I don’t understand you. I don’t understand this. Your head’s full of all this worthless godsdamn honor and duty that’s done more to break our world than save it. And you’re so certain, and so steady, and so—so—Gods!
“It can’t be love. Love is something two people do when they know each other, and trust each other. Love’s what Ley and Zeddig had. Damn if I grew up around any of it. This is, I don’t know, whatever it is people have in those dumb dragon-killing stories you must have mainlined back when you were a kid, two people get their wires crossed in a crowded room and turn dumb. It’s madness. As if I have anything to offer you—I’m just some colony punk who’s never put on a damn ball gown, let alone, what, courted a Knight? Neither of us makes the slightest bit of sense.”
She didn’t speak. She panted, furious, raw, in her cell.
“I dream about you. I know what I’d do if you were any other girl. But you’re not. You’re so damn sure. I wish I could be that. I wish I could be as honest about this, about anything, as you are just standing there.”
She felt empty.
“Call it love. If you want. I came back for you because I couldn’t leave.”
(Sidenote: people always quote Gal’s half of the love confession, but I adore Raymet’s reluctant, stumbling confession so much, so you got the whole thing here)
When Raymet first met Gal, she wasn’t quick enough to jump into the fighting pits to try and save her. Zeddig got there first. And since then, Gal hasn’t needed saving. At the end of Ruin, Raymet has two opportunities to make up for not moving fast enough (in her head, Gal likely never noticed) that first day - and she takes both of them. She goes back for Gal when she’s being arrested by the Iskari, despite knowing full well her little strength will do nothing against the Wreckers. She potentially blows up her whole life (good job, perfect-for-her house) to try and save somebody against the odds. Then, at the end of the book, when Gal goes to fight what remains of Maestre Gerhardt, it’s Raymet who steps between her and the original Craftsman who broke Alikand, in attempt to save her.
And she succeeds. She saves Gal - and, frankly, the entirely of Alikand and Agdel Lex.
Like Zeddig, we haven’t seen Raymet since the end of Ruin. I hope she has an incredible academic job with lots of funding, and an incredible life with Gal with lots of good sex. But I can’t quite see Raymet becoming fully mainstreamed. What’s her side gig? Without delving, what dangerous extracurricular activity is she up to? I’d love to find out.
Other characters associated with Raymet: Gal, Hala’Zeddig, Ley Pohala, Jalai’Iz, Bescond, Kai Pohala, Tara Abernathy, Izaak Bonventure, Maestre Gerhardt
Places associated with Raymet: Alikand, Agdel Lex, the Dead City, Chartegnon
Organisations associated with Raymet: University of Chartegnon, University of Agdel Lex (neither named specifically, so may have other names a la Sorbonne)
Who is Gal?
“Zeddig saw Gal wreathed in rainbows. The woman still wore the janitor’s jumpsuit they’d used to sneak into the library, but even Zeddig, who planned the delve, had to admit the limits of her disguise. The jumpsuit hid Gal like a gemstone filter hid a flame: even covered, she shined through, sharp and glittering as ever, the whole blonde, slick, otter-muscled length of her, a deadly curve bent against the room’s sole desk, waiting for an excuse to spring.
…
Her hand drifted to her heart, and tattoos there glowed with golden light. Zeddig heard a distant sound like a horsehead fiddle, but deeper: the music of Gal’s sword.
Because of course murder was the ideal solution to any inconvenience.
Gal was an excellent ally, but the people who had raised and trained her left her with odd priorities.”
Author’s note: this is a shortened and edited version of the first part of “Gal, the Knights of Camlaan, and the Queen.” It does not include my rampant speculation at the end of that essay, just the facts as we know them.
Lethal, beautiful, and chivalrous, Gal is the storybook knight in shining armour - albeit one who takes things a bit too literally, goes for deadly force far too easily, and who has been banished from her order and her country.
Nonetheless, Gal lives the myth of the Knights of Camlaan, believing in and practising their principles even when it put her at odds with her fellow Knights themselves. She will slay the monsters, protect the innocent, work hard, care for friends, speak truthfully, and use her “strength gently save in battle.” To continue quoting chapter 18 of Ruin of Angels, “Someone else had made her a weapon, but she made herself kind.”
We know little of Gal’s life before she washed up in Agdel Lex, but we are aware that she joined her religious Order of Knights against the wishes of her family, who wished to marry her off for political gain. We learn little more about the Order in general, but a few lines from Gal show us that they are pretty similar to Temoc’s Eagle Knights in Dresediel Lex: trained for war, making vows to gods, powered up by said gods to be near-indestructible, channelling divine power via tattoos or scars. We don’t learn anything about the Camlaander gods the way we do about the Quechal pantheon, or what happened to them during or after the God Wars, but given that Gal and the Knights are still running around with divine power one can imagine they weren’t exterminated the way Temoc’s gods were.
Gal was a true believer in the mission of her Order: to save the empire from its arrayed foes. She tells Raymet about her early missions, fighting pirates and slavers. However, she realises that her Order is being sent by their Queen to hunt and kill innocents. She turned on her fellow Knights and fought them in defence of their victims. Subdued and brought back to Camlaan, she was given a quest by her Queen to find an enemy who could best her, and die in honourable combat. This brought her to Agdel Lex, where she sought her own doom before meeting Raymet and Zeddig. She is still, throughout the book, focused on this quest.
Gal represents the best of the Knights, the Knights from storybooks. Yes, she is utterly deadly with or without her magical heart sword, but she uses that strength and skill to protect those who cannot protect themselves against enemies that mean to do them harm. She has preternatural strength, but “uses that strength gently, save in battle.” We see her healing people, so her power is more than violence. Gal takes joy out of her fight, but that doesn’t seem to be connected to the violence of the act. It’s more that she takes joy out of fulfilling her purpose and helping others.
She lives simply, in a room that appears as a monastic cell. She works with Zeddig and Raymet, and loves them despite her mind working somewhat differently than theirs. When she and Raymet are arrested, she refuses to even attempt to fight back or escape (having been bested in honourable combat), but that changes after Raymet clumsily expresses her love for Gal, and Gal gives her famous declaration:
“I thought to spare you entanglement with my condition, with my quest. I was wrong.”
“Gal—”
“There are forms for such an affair, and proper ceremonies. The shortest for now, is: I share you esteem.”
Raymet blinked. “What.”
Gal looked unshakeable as ever, behind those bars. “I do not understand you. But neither do I understand fire, or starlight, or storms, and I love them. I have no land, I have no title. I come from a world you hate. I did not want to trouble you with my affection. You are fierce and beautiful and clever, and I should have told you all this before. It is cowardice that I have not.”
…
“The critical components of our situation,” Gal said, “have changed.”
“Really.”
“My vows forbid escape, once I have been subdued by adversaries in honourable combat.” Golden light seeped from her skin and hardened to a glassy sheen. “But a Knight may rescue her lady from a tower. That’s practically what Knights are for.”
She broke the bars of her cell like twigs. Then she stepped over the splintered bones, crossed the hall, and broke the bars of Raymet’s, too.
“Wow,” Raymet said.”
I know at least one person has got a tattoo of part of that speech. Beautiful. It’s beloved in the fandom, and deserves to be appreciated further afield.
Once again, this is Gal living up to the myth. She may rescue her lady from a tower. That’s practically what Knights are for. Sure, most of her brethren (and sistren? We haven’t heard much about whether Gal is an exception as a woman) are out committing atrocities in their undead Queen’s name, but Gal is a living story.
And, in the world of the Craft Sequence, stories have a habit of coming true.
We haven’t seen Gal in two books, several in-world years, and nearly a decade in our-world years. The end of Ruin has her nearly die trying to kill Gerhardt, before Raymet defends her (love!) and loses her hand. Raymet wakes up in hospital, Gal at her bedside, and that’s the last we’ve seen.
Other characters associated with Gal: Haaz’Raymet, Hala’ Zeddig, Ley Pohala, Jalai’Iz, Kai Pohala, Tara Abernathy, Bescond, Izaak Bonventure, Queen of Camlaan
Places associated with Gal: Camlaan, Agdel Lex, Alikand, the Dead City
Organisations associated with Gal: Knights of Camlaan
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