Captain Iver Dane

A mercenary captain with a royal paragraph behind him, whose blockhouse book records nine attempts on the line in eleven years and no loss.

Iver Dane commands the line garrison: two hundred and forty men in six detachments, holding the six blockhouses of the line between Enginemead and the capital. They are not Crown troops and not, strictly, the line company’s. The Sarrum council contracts the force and assigns it to the cut under powers recognised in the Crown licence, and the company pays a charge large enough to cover most of the contract. Most of his men are recruited outside the county, and many arrive as formed mercenary companies, because nobody wants a guard who may be asked to stop his own kin. Dane calls them hired men with a royal paragraph behind them.

The blockhouses stand fifteen miles apart on open country and eleven where the ground is bad, so that a detachment from one can reach the next in a day on foot. The cut is patrolled in both directions every day, and the two tunnels and the bridges of consequence are guarded permanently. Dane’s blockhouse book records nine attempts in eleven years, all at or near a bridge, where a train slows; none succeeded, and in the two that came closest what stopped them was a patrol arriving early.

His powers are narrow and defined by ground. Inside the cut and its fences his men may stop, search, detain and remove; a hundred yards away they have only what the council gives them for a particular duty, and ten miles off a garrison warrant may mean little. He has exercised the power of arrest four times in eleven years, because arrest is not the point. The point is that green coal, treated metal, machinery and payroll keep moving, and on those terms the force succeeds.

Dane is worth approaching, and no witness in the county is more careful. He will discuss the powers, the design of the works and the attempts. On a manifest, a passenger or anything the company has told him, he is silent: a garrison officer who talks about cargo, he holds, will shortly be a party to a theft, and he has held to it against the insurers twice.

In person

Iver Dane is forty-seven, about five foot nine, compact, thick-necked and powerful, with a broad face, a heavy brow, a blunt jaw and a slightly flattened nose. His very short steel-grey hair is receding strongly at both temples, and he wears an enormous dark-grey horseshoe moustache over an otherwise clean-shaven face. His eyes are amber-brown, his skin pale beneath a grime that never quite washes out. The upper half of his left ear is gone, a heavy scar crosses the bridge of his nose, his right cheek is peppered with small black powder burns, his left eye opens a little less than the right, two front teeth are silver, and an old break has left the middle knuckle of his right hand oversized. He carries a battered brass railway watch on a heavy chain, and his coat always carries soot however lately it was cleaned. He looks like a railway mercenary, not an officer of the line regiments.