Vask is a compact halfling with a broad, sturdy torso and a way of moving that seems to measure the floorboards before trusting them. His weather-browned skin has a fine dusting of pale freckles across the nose, and his thick hair is clipped short at the sides and left in a stubborn, uneven crest. His coat smells of salt, hot oil, and old wool. A brass mechanism ticks beneath its left lapel, though the sound stops whenever anyone asks about it. His hands are blunt and densely callused, with dark metal polish caught in the whorls of his fingertips. He leaves the impression of a cheerful repairman who has just heard something moving inside the wall.

Vask is generous with repairs and suspicious of easy explanations. In a busy stall he is brisk, wry, and almost theatrically practical; alone at night he speaks to his tools as if they might answer. He likes company but positions himself near exits, and he will risk himself to protect a stranger while refusing to tell a friend what danger he has found.

Vask grew up repairing fish scales and toy windmills in a tide-town where every household owned something that needed coaxing back to life. His first real success was a brass gull that could repeat a phrase after hearing it once. His first disaster followed soon after: the gull repeated the last words of his mother, who had died days earlier, in a voice that sounded exactly like her. Vask dismantled it, but kept one feather-shaped gear. He apprenticed with a traveling instrument-maker, then spent years following dock work from port to port. In the busy harbor of Kestak, he now repairs lanterns, locks, pumps, and shipboard clocks from a folding stall. He shares his rented loft with Jorik, a one-eyed old dog who is not, Vask insists, a construct. His former apprentice, Tullpa, left after accusing him of hiding what his machines hear. A run of harbor bells has begun ringing a minute before ships vanish from their moorings, and Vask is quietly trying to find the mechanism beneath the quay before the next tide.