Who's who: Cat, Teo, and Izza
Three characters introduced in different books, with vastly different backgrounds, become intertwined in a holy heist in Full Fathom Five. Who are Catherine Elle, Teo Batan, and Izza Jalai? How did they end up on the offshore religious tax haven of Kavekana, trying to break into a high security holy site?
“You,” Cat said, to Teo this time, “are a bleeding heart.
“I didn’t spend the last month befriending street urchins.”
“We’re wasting time. We planned for you to set the beacon, not to set off every alarm in the mountain.”
“I didn’t expect my priestly friend here to use me as cover for industrial espionage. So we’re even. Hells, that bracelet wasn’t supposed to trip their wards in the first place. Make that I’m one up on you.”
Cat crossed her arms.
“Cat,” Izza said. “I don’t think you made the wrong choice. Just the hard one. Like I’m doing now.”
In the end, Cat was the first to look away.
“Shit,” Teo said. “And you call me a bleeding heart.”
There are some minor spoilers here because there’s not really any other way to talk about characters, but I’ve kept them as minimal as possible.
Who are Cat, Teo, and Izza?
Catherine Elle (usually known as Cat, but ‘Cat Elle’ doesn’t roll of the tongue), Teo Batan (full name Teotihual) and Izza Jalai (alternatively Jalai’Iz) are crucial characters across several books, and come together at the end of Full Fathom Five. If one has read in publication order, it’s quite a surprise to see Cat and Teo show up in Kavekana; for me, it was quite disconcerting, as I felt I’d missed a book of development for Cat in particular. Turns out I had, but that book was published fifth. One of the main reasons I recommend a different reading order!
On the surface they have very little in common. Cat is a cop, a former drug addict, a sort of priestess-slash-saint-slash-avatar of Seril Undying, from a working class background in Alt Coulumb. It’s not explicitly stated, but I wouldn’t be surprised if her trip to Kavekana was her first time out of the city. Teo Batan comes from wealth in Dresediel Lex, though she turned her back on her family’s ill-gotten fortune to make her own way as a contract manager in Red King Consolidated. She’s educated, worldly, and hates deities. Izza Jalai is our youngest major character at maybe fourteen. She’s a street kid refugee, having escaped first her homeland in the Gleb after a massacre, then Agdel Lex after a crackdown in Gavreaux Junction. She’s a thief and a prophet, fiercely loyal to her people, but traumatised to hell and back.
Despite their differences, they end up working together (and with Kai Pohala) to break into Kavekana’ai and rescue both a shard of Seril and the nascent Blue Lady. They’re probably some of our more cynical characters who end up part of other people’s quests despite due to their loyalty to their friends rather than because they believe in some great plan for the universe. They’re also most likely to call their friends dumbasses, which is always fun, especially when said friend is Caleb Altemoc.
Now, let’s look at these three women individually.
Who is Catherine Elle?
“She raised a hand to her chest, grasped a small statue that hung from a steel chain around her neck, and began to change.
Black ice flowed through Cat’s mind as her hand closed around the badge. It chilled and crushed her fear of these six heretic killing machines, and her fury at their presence. The burning tower of her need stood alone against the rushing cold: the need for a fix, the need for a high, the need to be something better than she was.
Catherine Elle was fallible. Afraid. Angry. Desperate. What remained after the black ice washed over her was strong, clear, hard, slick, patient, hungry. Her mind froze as a shallow, clear pond freezes, trapping fish in mid-flow. The jumping chaos of her thoughts resolved into stillness, and the stillness came alive with whispers.”
We meet Catherine Elle in Three Parts Dead, and she remains a major character in the direct sequel Four Roads Cross. She also has a surprise appearance in Full Fathom Five, seemingly running away from her life in Alt Coulumb.
Cat shows up in the story getting high from a vampire biting her, and it quickly becomes clear she’s a habitual drug user in this way. We’re not going to use derogatory terms for her here, simply state that she has an addiction to this kind of high in a way that risks her life. We soon learn she’s also a cop - a Blacksuit, sworn into service to Justice, the replacement to Seril Undying. Becoming a Blacksuit gives people a similar high (and similar withdrawal) to vampire bites, and Cat is addicted to both.
Cat is Abelard’s childhood friend, though they haven’t seen each other for a couple of years at the time the story starts. He tells Tara that she “knows the undercity”, and she is indeed able to find the person Tara is looking for - Raz Pelham, vampirate. Cat is an integral part of the plot, chasing down Tara and Shale when they escape from the hospital, calling the Blacksuits on the gargoyles, and managing to fight against Justice’s mind control to help her friends at the climactic battle at the end of Three Parts Dead. Despite her importance, we don’t learn all that much about her beneath the surface.
We learn considerably more about Cat’s backstory in Four Roads Cross. Her upbringing wasn’t particularly stable, and she hasn’t been in contact with her parents for years. We hear that she grew up in Slaughter’s Fell, an impoverished area where many residents are illiterate; Cat herself dropped out of school after tenth grade. Assuming we're working with an American framework, that’s two years before the end of high school. She was a scrappy kid, fighting with children a few years older than herself, and close enough friends with Abelard that she goes home with him before the big battle at the end of the book to have tea with his parents.
We don’t get any specifics about Cat or Abelard’s ages, but as shown in this unofficial timeline article we can infer they are approximately the same age as Tara (so, early to mid twenties) at the start of the series. We hear in Four Roads Cross that Cat hasn’t been in a classroom - or specifically a History class - for more than a decade, but as we don’t know the age at which compulsory education ends that could mean anything. Going with the dropping out of school reference mentioned above, we can assume she left school at 15 or 16 - making her around 26 in Four Roads Cross and thus tallying with my previous assumption.
We don’t find out exactly how Cat became a Blacksuit, but we do know that in the real world armed forces and the police actively recruit kids from underprivileged backgrounds. I can see Cat being recruited as a tough teen fighter, soon becoming addicted to the high of the Blacksuit, and falling into a vampire bite addiction subsequently. She doesn’t seem to have many friends. We see in Four Roads Cross that non-suited Blacksuits do have offices in the Temple of Justice where they do paperwork, though the importance of this has grown after the return of Seril. She has colleagues that she knows when unsuited, but they don’t seem to be friends. She knows bartenders and bouncers in the undercity, but again they are people who hang out in the same area more than friends.
In the year after Three Parts Dead, she has clearly reconnected with Abelard to some extent, developed a friendship with vampire Raz Pelham, and a sort of friendship with Tara Abernathy. She’s also become an semi-unwilling priestess of Seril, much like Tara.
“The goddess addressed Cat in the shower, in her mother’s voice.
‘Catherine, why do you turn from me?’
‘Oh, I don’t know if I turn from you as such,’ she replied as she shampooed. ‘We have a close working relationship.’
‘You live inside my body, yet we don’t talk like I do with my children.’
‘I barely had my life figured out working with Justice. Then you came along.’
…
‘I can help you. We can be closer than the structure of Justice allows. You are a priestess. You have made a vow. You could perform miracles.’
‘Miracles aren’t my job.’
The voice did not answer.”
Cat goes through considerable character development in Four Roads Cross, ending as a fully-fledged priestess of Seril, complete with new silver wings, and opening her heart (…and legs) to Raz. Cat and Raz’s conversations and connection throughout Four Roads Cross are one of my favourite parts of a book stacked with things I love.
We see Cat again in Full Fathom Five - except, it’s before rather than again if we read in publication order. Which, again, I do not advise. Cat shows up in Kavekana in her silver wingsuit, but apparently having run away from Seril. This story is part of her cover to infilitrate Kavekana’ai with Teo and retrieve a shard of Seril stashed there, but to a reader fresh from Three Parts Dead we’ve clearly missed a hell of a lot. Cat says Seril asked too much of her (though readers are yet to have seen Seril in full power in publication order), she has a suit and powers we don’t recognise, and has a connection with Teo that we can’t place without seeing Tara meet Caleb in Four Roads Cross.
Cat is shown through Izza’s perspective. Izza comes across her fighting stone Penitents; whilst she can’t beat them, she injures them more than anyone or anything Izza has seen before. Izza cares for Cat, who grows to care for the girl in return. Cat promises to help Izza leave the island. Although Cat only shares her cover story with Izza, it seems clear she sees herself in the young girl: a scrappy fighter from a bad background, who has nobody in the world to look out for her, but feels the need to look out for everyone else.
We haven’t seen Cat since, though she’s been referenced in a couple of books (Tara helped her get a mortgage, and Abelard implies she and Raz are still together a few years on). I strongly expect she’ll show up in Dead Hand Rule, when we return to Alt Coulumb.
Other characters associated with Cat: Raz Pelham; Seril Undying; Justice; Abelard; Tara Abernathy; Aev; Shale; Izza Jalai; Teo Batan; Kos Everburning; Elayne Kevarian; Kai Pohala
Places associated with Cat: Alt Coulumb; Kavekana
Organisations associated with Cat: Church of Seril Undying; Temple of Justice / Blacksuits
Who is Teo Batan?
“She had almost been a human sacrifice once. It was a long story she preferred not to revisit outside of trying to impress someone. (It rarely worked then, either. People always went “sympathetic” about her “trauma” and “how hard it must have been,” rather than “wow, Teo, how badass, take me now.”) The sacrificer in this case had been Caleb’s jerk dad, about whom the less said the better. But she’d ended up with a scar from a Knight’s blade, which, it turned out, had certain implications.
So when she caught the girl, the scar on her wrist flared with green light, and shadow gauntleted her hand.”
Teo is introduced in Two Serpents Rise as Caleb’s only friend. I’ve expounded on my general dislike of that book more than once, but let me say that it would be greatly improved by more Teo - particularly if we got some Teo POV. She calls Caleb out on his shit, sees straight through Mal, and is more than willing to risk her life to save the city despite not having the magical scars that protect Caleb and Temoc.
Of course, she gets a mini version of those scars after Temoc tries to sacrifice her, but that was a silver lining to a very not nice cloud rather than Teo’s intention.
Teotihual Batan, to use her full name, was born to wealth. Her slumlord dad was a key player in the quashing of the Skittersill Rising in Last First Snow - in fact, we get a brief cameo from a child that is probably Teo in that book - but she rejected his money to make her own. When we first meet her she’s a contract manager at Red King Consolidated, making far more money than Caleb and thus able to afford a swish apartment. She’s queer, and meets her tempestuous long term girlfriend Sam in Two Serpents Rise. Sam has no time for Caleb, which means Sam is pretty smart.
As I said before, we don’t get nearly enough Teo in Two Serpents Rise, but what we do see shows a smart, irreverant, sharp, loyal woman who isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty. After her almost-sacrifice, she fights through blood and pain to revive Kopil, and thus enables Caleb to save the day. Without Teo, Caleb would fail big time. Caleb convinces her to join his new non-profit to help save the world, and the rest is history.
Teo makes a brief cameo in Four Roads Cross, but whether you read the sequence in publication or chronological order, we next see her properly in Full Fathom Five. She shows up on Kavekana ostensibly to open an account with Kai’s Order, but is really working with Cat behind the scenes to break into Kavekana’ai:
“Izza, permit me to introduce Teo Batan, a client of mine. Or she pretended to be a client at least. Come to think of it, I’m not even sure that’s her real name.”
The Quechal woman shrugged, resigned. “I didn’t lie about that. Or my credentials. The Two Serpents Group did send me to open an account on your island. I just had another goal I didn’t mention.”
“Nice to meet you, Teo,” Izza said. “I’m Izza. So, you’re a thief?”
“I wish. If I was, I’d be better at all this. No, I’m just a saleslady who got in over her head.”
...
“I never said my purpose here was innocent, either. Izza wasn’t far off the mark. I’m the scout, not the second-story man. Or woman, as the case may be.”
“You were trying to steal from the mountain.” Izza heard a note of wonder in her own voice.
“Is it still stealing when you’re working for a goddess?”
“Yes.”
“Fair enough,” Teo said. “Stealing it is.””
We don’t see any Teo POV in Full Fathom Five, so her motives are opaque until she explains out loud that she’s working for Seril. We do, however, see how her brush with Temoc’s blade gave her powers: she is able to break her way out of a Penitent, in a way nobody has ever done before. It certainly wasn’t pleasant or easy, but she’s able to do it.
And then, nothing for a few books and years. Teo comes back with a bang in Wicked Problems, including the POV we’ve deserved for a decade. We learn she’s still working with Caleb, that she’s back with her old girlfriend Sam, but that during a breakup she had a dramatic fling with an ullamal player who was involved with the mob (Tollan in the book, but I checked with Gladstone and that was a typo, it’s Zolin). She’s waiting to propose to Sam, with her grandmother’s ring in her drawer. She gets pulled into the main plot by Caleb (shirtless) and Abelard (clothed) showing up on her doorstep asking for a change of clothes and a ride.
Once again, Teo is here to call Caleb on his shit and follow him into the jaws of doom with snark and loyalty. Because that’s Teo’s defining character trait, under her sarcasm and her cynicism, underneath the flashy exterior personified in her sports car (described deliciously by Gladstone as “ the sleek bright red of a bad idea’s lipstick, in all the places she wasn’t chrome”) and her taste in dramatic women. Teo is loyal. Caleb may be an idiot, but he’s her idiot, and she’ll join him on his idiot schemes and help save the day. At the end of Wicked Problems, she dangles from a platform in the middle of a lava cavern with skazzerai demons all around, using the belt of her bathrobe to save the life of a girl she’s never met before because that was Caleb’s mission.
Teo is a fan favourite, so she’ll definitely be back in Dead Hand Rule. Hopefully she gets a chance to change out of her PJs before the next battle.
Other characters associated with Teo: Caleb Altemoc; the King in Red; Sam; Zolin; Temoc Almotil; Kai Pohala; Catherine Elle; Izza Jalai; Mal Kekapania; Abelard; Tara Abernathy; Dawn
Places associated with Teo: Dresediel Lex; Kavekana
Organisations associated with Teo: Red King Consolidated; Two Serpents Group
Who is Izza Jalai?
“Not many gods around here.”
“I didn’t grow up here.”
“Where you from, then?”
“The Northern Gleb. Talbeg country.”
“Shit.” Cat looked up at her, eyes wide, and Izza saw behind those eyes the twist of thought she hated, that she’d run from the Old World to escape: the sudden re-evaluation, the swell of pity. “Sorry. I didn’t–”
“No,” Izza said. “Not…it’s fine.” And wasn’t.
“When did you leave?”
“When there was nothing left to leave. When they burned my village out.”
“Which they?”
“Does it matter?” Izza said, but Cat didn’t look away, didn’t let the subject drop. “They came at night. They dragged us to the priestess’s house first, killed her family, and then her. A knife across the throat, just like that. Then they took others. My folks. I guess they wanted kids for…for whatever. Everyone watched. The gods screamed. I ran.”
In the ensemble cast of the Craft Sequence, Izza Jalai stands apart.
Our characters are diverse in background, in experience, in demographic, but none are quite like Izza. Not only is she the youngest of our protagonists, at around fourteen in her first appearance and seventeen in her second, but the trauma she has faced is significant and ongoing. Many characters had awful experiences in their childhoods. Elayne Kevarian was hunted by her neighbours. Dawn was impoverished, travelling across Northern Kath with her father. Caleb was scarred and nearly killed by his own father.
Yet, they have grown up, and grown past these traumas. Izza is still a child. And, arguably, her traumas have been worse. Almost everyone she knew as a child was murdered in front of her. She escaped, alone. She ended up in Agdel Lex “as a refugee fresh from the Gleb, emerging from a smuggler’s container after days’ sweaty stinking ride through the Wastes, after days spent learning songs sung by kids from other villages that no longer existed either” (Ruin of Angels, page 257). Alone in a foreign city, hiding from the eyes of the Iskari, Izza had to build a new life on the streets. There was no one there to help her. There were plenty there to try and trap her and send her to a squiddy orphanage, or whatever worse option there is for a refugee child alone. She spent enough time in Agdel Lex to know the city and its secrets, to have contacts in low places, and understand the Alikanders and their secret city - yet she ran away from the city when she was barely twelve, after seeing the Wreckers burn out six hundred hunger strikers. She had no future in Agdel Lex, so she ran to find another one.
izza describes Agdel Lex as a palace in which she was trapped. Kavekana quickly became another such place for her. Kavekana was somewhat safer, though still unpleasant, for street kids. Penitents only took you when you were sixteen or so. Izza found something of a family of other kids there, but found herself trapped by their expectations and their hopes. After an older girl was taken by a Penitent, she became the kids’ de facto leader and storyteller of their gods.
We learn through the book that idols in the pool at Kavekana’ai are waking up, becoming sentient, reaching out. Izza and the other street kids become these gods’ first congregation. In their times of need they pray a desperate prayer, and the god that became the Blue Lady hears, and answers. Izza is the one who tells the gods’ stories.
But we only find that out later. From Izza’s point of view, she keeps finding gods - real gods who dispense real grace, offer real miracles that save the street kids - and they keep dying. When the Blue Lady dies at the start of the book, that’s Izza’s final straw. She wants to run again.
“Why did you chase them off?”
“They need me.”
“People need each other sometimes. Nothing wrong with that.”
“I won’t be around forever.”
Cat laughed, but the laugh stopped when Izza looked at her. Not that Izza’d put any special malice into her eyes. She just looked, like normal. “You’re young to say things like that and mean them.”
“I’m leaving, aren’t I? Soon as you’re well.”
Nowhere and no one has been safe for Izza. Not her family’s village. Not Agdel Lex. And now not Kavekana. She’s fast approaching the age where she’ll get locked in a Penitent, her gods are dying around her, and there’s a troupe of vulnerable children relying on her. But she can’t bring herself to leave overnight.
First, she steals to build up a stockpile for the other kids. Then she stumbles across Cat, and risks her own neck to save Cat, and then nurse her back to health. She sees Edmond Margot murdered, and tracks down Kai to demand answers and seek vengeance. Realising Kai has herself been trapped in a Penitent, she tracks down Mako to rescue her. Given a chance to stay out of the heist on the mountain, she chooses instead to stay and try to save her goddess.
Nowhere and no one has been safe for Izza, but she will make a place of safety for others. And she will risk herself, time and time again, for those she cares about. She returns to the dangers of Agdel Lex to help Kai, and once there she gets involved in multiple dangerous schemes to help Kai’s sister, then save a city that did nothing but hurt her.
We last saw Izza at the end of Ruin of Angels, with a massive powerup from the Blue Lady, joining a negotiating committee for the future of Alikand and Agdel Lex. We are yet to hear from her since, and it has been at least a couple of years. Izza will be a full grown adult now, though younger than any of our other major characters, save possibly Dawn.
I’m certain we’ll see her soon. Perhaps she’ll be representing a delegation at the Necromancy Davos in Dead Hand Rule? Or perhaps she’ll come up directly against Dawn. Izza is the prophet of a new goddess; Dawn has melded with a Craft-god and now Ajaia the Green. They’re a similar age. Izza at the God Wastes; Dawn has awoken the Badlands. There are parallels that require far more time and consideration than I can offer them right now, but Gladstone is too careful a writer for these to be coincidences.
Izza will show up in the story. But what role will she play? Whose side will she join? The Blue Lady is not a goddess of last stands, she tells us. She runs. She slips into dark places. She’s a thief. How does this fit in to the endgame?
Other characters associated with Izza: The Blue Lady; Kai Pohala; Catherine Elle; Isaak Bonventure; Nick Cuthbert; street kids; Umar and Hasim; Zeddig Hala; Ley Pohala; Tara Abernathy; Edmond Margot
Places associated with Izza: Kavekana; Agdel Lex; Northern Gleb
Organisations associated with Izza: Church of the Blue Lady; Temple of All Gods
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