Kett is broad-shouldered and built like a barrow axle, with a compact, planted stance and a habit of turning his whole torso rather than twisting at the waist. His work shirt is patched in four different shades of brown, and the cuffs are stiff with old soap and dried mud. His hands are thick, ridged with calluses, and permanently dark in the creases from grease and soil. Against all that roughness, he wears one carefully polished brass thimble on a cord at his belt, an unexpectedly treasured tool for mending crew gloves. When he walks, his steps have a measured, wheel-tested rhythm; people tend to make room before realizing they have done it.

Kett is strict about tools but tender toward people who are trying their best. He grumbles when anxious and becomes briskly practical when someone is hurt. In a dispute over waste, he is stubborn and loud; with a frightened new hand, he softens without admitting it. He dislikes sentimentality, yet remembers exactly who needs gloves and which handle fits whose grip.

Kett has kept the Dungsweepers Guild's barrows and tools for twenty-two years. Before that, he worked on a night crew clearing the flooded underways beneath the old market. During a sudden collapse, he followed the sound of a trapped child's tapping instead of the foreman's order to save the loaded barrow. He found the child alive, but the barrow and a fellow hand, Huwel, were lost in the rush of muck. Kett still believes both choices were necessary, and neither has stopped troubling him. He later became senior crew hand, turning his grief into exacting routines: every handle checked, every wheel greased, every borrowed shovel accounted for. His relationship with the guild's current foreman, Eshira, is a daily contest of blunt advice and hard-earned trust. He is also quietly close to Huwel's adult daughter, Seli, who works the day crew and refuses to let him treat her as a debt to be repaid. Now a shipment of replacement wheels has failed to arrive, and Kett is trying to keep the crews safe with patched parts while the guild hall debates whether to cancel a dangerous contract.