Maren Dunmore

Keeper of the Ninth Lock, Greywater Canal

Appearance

A short, broad woman in her fifties with rope-burned palms and a waxed canvas coat two sizes too big. A ring of forty-one keys hangs from her belt, and she can find any one of them without looking. Her boots are always dry; everyone else's on the canal are always wet.

Personality

Patient the way rivers are patient — she has watched three harbormasters come and go and outlasted every one of them by simply not being in a hurry. She keeps a mental ledger of favors owed and repaid down to the copper, and treats a debt forgotten as worse than a debt unpaid. Strangers get exactly one honest warning; what they do with it is their business. She is kind to bargemen, cold to inspectors, and unreadable to everyone else.

Voice & Mannerism

A low canal-drawl; she drops the ends of her sentences, as if the listener should pay for the rest. While she talks she taps her key ring against the lock rail — twice when she's telling the truth, three times when she isn't, though nobody has noticed the pattern yet.

Motivation

Every smuggler who runs the Ninth Lock at night pays her toll, and every coin goes into a strongbox under the sluice floor. She means to buy the lock outright from the Canal Trust before the Trust sells it to someone who would charge honest bargemen what she charges thieves.

Secret

She keeps a second logbook — every night run, every captain, every cargo, dated and signed with her own cipher. It is not blackmail yet. It is insurance, and half the harbor would burn to see it gone.

Relationships

Tobin Dunmore, her son, clerks for the Canal Trust and has a gambling debt with the Marrow Syndicate he thinks she doesn't know about. Captain Wick, a smuggler she has tolled for a decade, is the closest thing she has to a friend and would kill to protect her ledger. Inspector Alda Cray suspects the night traffic and has started buying drinks for Maren's bargemen.

"Water goes where it wants, love. My job's charging admission."

Three Plot Hooks

1. The party needs something — or someone — moved past the city gates unseen. Maren offers the flooded night-passage under the Ninth Lock, for a favor she refuses to name until the job is done.
2. Inspector Alda Cray hires the party to audit the lock's official ledgers. Maren's hidden second logbook names a patron the party already trusts.
3. The Marrow Syndicate stops paying Maren's toll and quietly starts paying her son's debts instead. She wants them run off the canal before they own Tobin outright — and she can't be seen to ask.

Stat Suggestion

Use Commoner for everyday scenes; if things turn violent, borrow Bandit Captain — she has drowned people in her lock before.

Quick Reference

Maren Dunmore keeps the Ninth Lock and tolls the smugglers who run it at night. She wants to buy the lock before the Canal Trust sells it, and her hidden logbook of every night run makes her dangerous to half the harbor. Play her slow and dry: drop your sentence endings, tap the keys, never hurry.