Balon Kilgrave. An extremely wealthy and influential figure in Brightstone, Duskvol’s district of the very rich. Not a member of the town council, though he operates numerous business interests throughout the city and moves in circles of power. His Brightstone estate contains a vault in which a gold tribal artifact is held—a piece the Dimmer Sisters have contracted the Old Town Echoes to steal and replace with a replica, without Kilgrave ever discovering the switch.
- The Dimmer Sisters contracted the Old Town Echoes to break into his estate vault and swap a gold tribal artifact for a replica, leaving Kilgrave unaware the exchange had been made. Session 10
- His Brightstone estate was scouted from the tunnels beneath the district by the Old Town Echoes. Whatever else he is, he is a cautious man: the boundary of his property is protected by ritual wardings cut deep into the stone of the sluiceways, and there is no way onto the grounds from below. Session 13
- Fancies himself a sparkwright, and is middling at best. His grandfather Stefan Kilgrave was the genuine article, and the sparkcraft blueprints spread across the dining table on display nights are very probably the grandfather’s work rather than his own. Session 15
- Old money. He owns a number of lucrative concerns scattered across the city — a mushroom farm, a law firm, and a share in one of the leviathan hunter ships among them — and has never gone in for politics. His serious and expensive interest is antiquities. He has no children that his household is aware of. Session 15
- Every few years he throws an open house at his Brightstone manor, bringing his collection up out of the vault to display it under warded glass and courting whoever he wishes to influence. He is untroubled by the risk of theft: he keeps a whisper — referred to by his staff only as “that dreadful woman” — who wards each piece after it leaves the vault, and a guest at the gathering five years ago is said to have died reaching out to touch one. Guests generally arrive with their own security. Session 15
- The household’s extra staff for such nights are taken on at the last minute by his head butler, Jeeves, from Anna-Maria’s, a Brightstone agency that specializes in helping rich men throw parties. On 18 February, 848 IE the extra staff were the Old Town Echoes. Session 15
- The walls of his great hall are hung with portraits of the Kilgrave line going back hundreds of years, and every one of them holds a bound and raving spirit — a family that keeps its ancestors rather than burying them. Session 15
- His household whisper is his own sister, Zoria Kilgrave, who works out of the sparkcraft workshop in the manor cellar. His cousin Vanessa attended the open house of 18 February, 848 IE on the arm of Inspector Holt, the two having met at the Canary Club. Session 16
- Has been pressed repeatedly by Inspector Holt over something and has refused him every time — refused him plainly enough that Holt came to the open house on 18 February, 848 IE expressly to corner him alone and ask again. Session 16
- Was one of Cyril Lancaster’s victims. Lancaster had him poisoned at the Serendipity Club and sent Kilgrave’s own housemaid to carry the demand and return with the antidote; the price was a machine built to disrupt the electroplasmic flow between two dipole arrays. He built it, delivered it, took his antidote, and said nothing. Lancaster’s judgement of him: not as clever as his father, but clever enough. Session 16
- His cellar workshop was robbed and burned on the night of 18 February, 848 IE, losing years of designs and blueprints along with his grandfather’s clockwork hand. Of the antiquities on display, the newssheets reported exactly one piece taken — the evening’s centrepiece, the brooch of five interlocking rings — which the Old Town Echoes did not touch. The gold Cherokee piece they did take was replaced with a replica and its ward re-armed, and he appears to be none the wiser. Session 16