Horace Wailor

Sir Horace Wailor is (was?) the man who knows too much. Him being a Centurion, a gentleman, a hunter, a sharpshooter, a gambler, a painter, a public servant and a capable if amateur detective has always been a second thought compared to his social status. A member of the old English aristocracy, he is related to roughly a third of the British elite and is in some way directly or indirectly connected to the rest of it as well, his connections only growing from an already impressive start as the decades wore on. He may not have been in any government but he has been behind the scenes for many of them, brought in for one intrigue or secret agreement or another that required a witness or a go-between or simply a trusted advisor. Even were he to try and flee from it, his relatives would find him, and if not them then someone looking for his relatives, He has seen how sausages are made, long past the point where he became completely sick of it. In time it turned into a weary, jaded acceptance.

To make matters worse, Wailor is an idealist, a man of honour and morality - though with the years it has grown ever more twisted with necessary evils and rationalisations. Thus he has been forced to tolerate, enable, sometimes even partake in some ills and misdeeds for the sake of the public good. All this has added a constant depression to his cynicism. In time he learned to live with both and carry his inner conflicts stoically, aided in this by being British.

Aside from political intrigue, Wailor had also doubled in criminal investigations, achieving greater success but not greater satisfaction than many professionals; it helped in some ways but not in others that not only was organised crime not too different from British politics, but it often also featured the same people. A particular archenemy of his was the criminal mastermind Henry Maurice Allard - not himself a member of his circles, but reasonably close, and successful in corrupting many who were even more strongly than was natural for them. In Allard Wailor had discovered one of the few individuals that actually stuck out in this morally gray world; the man practically shone with blackness, being so much more despicable than any others he had encountered, constantly creating new reasons for Horace to keep chasing after him - and new tricks to keep him from catching him, frequently playing on his moral code by putting others' lives in danger. For a time defeating Allard seemed to be Wailor's life's work. Then Allard's cousin, Rose Hayes, got to him first. Relieved and frustrated at once, and slightly aghast at what he figured out she had done, he eventually gave up the search and returned to Britain.

Wailor returned to Africa during the Great War, in the course of his patriotic duty that had the pleasant side-effect of removing him for a time from a country and a social circle that once more began to sicken him. His colonial expertise and capability for spywork were needed to counteract Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and Richard Kessler, who turned what was supposed to be a cakewalk into a drawn-out and uncertain fight... as well as take care of a few other issues of interest to the British Empire in East Africa. Despite admiring Kessler and despising certain on his side, Wailor took to the East African spy game with some leftover enthusiasm. He established a spy post at Dar es Salaam... and received the worst surprise of his life when it was walked in on by none other than Allard himself, apparently well on the way to recovery and willing to turn himself in.

Suspicious, Wailor nonetheless could not pass up this chance. Before he could quite figure out how to make sure Allard never hurts anyone again, however, he was contacted by Junius Tendaji, the anarchist chieftain he had reached a temporary though typically distasteful arrangement with. The Communards had found Rose's apprentice, Sarah Hayes, who was also on Allard's trail. Disquieted by the girl's obsessive hatred, perhaps in part because it reminded him of his own past obsession, Wailor nevertheless took her to the Zanzibar dungeon where Allard was locked up and allowed her to talk to him, hoping that she might figure out what his plan was this time. The beginning of an Indian mutiny aboveground in Zanzibar had forced Wailor to accelerate his plans to transport Allard to Prison Island... but between the use of secret drugs, the presence of traitors among the soldiers and the magical and magitechnological monstrosities left to roam the dungeon since the Sultan's time, Allard was able to free himself (as it turned out, briefly) and gain the upper hand, throwing Wailor off a ledge into the deep darkness below.

As Sarah had not bothered to find out what happened, Wailor's fate remains unknown.

He was (is?) also the mentor of one Abigail Kirkbride, though they seem to have little in common aside from a deep and abiding pessimism.