“One Leg” Petra, ruler of the Market Quarter’s beggars, has several lieutenants, but none so loyal as the misshapen ruin known as “Hatchet”.  Even the other beggars keep well clear of Hatchet's black, filthy skin, shunning his diseased touch.  His odd, grey eyes squint blindly from beneath the yellowed rags that mask his angular features.  Tattered gilt lace adorns the battered and ruined courtier’s attire hanging awkwardly off his warped frame.   With curiously delicate gestures, Hatchet carefully dusts the ragged sleeves of his aged velvet coat. A ragged wig, stylish ten years earlier, covers his grimy grey hair, while an antiquated sword of curious foreign make hangs at the sinister beggar's hip, its battered scabbard covered with rust.

Hatchet never sleeps where anyone can see him, quietly sitting outside his lady’s chamber for hours every day while she rests.  As he sits, he quietly mumbles to himself, muttering imprecations in some strange foreign dialect.  The instant his patroness stirs from her chambers, he is at her right hand, ready to protect his queen with his strange, foreign blade.

When Hatchet is questioned about his mysterious homeland, he lies freely and enthusiastically.  Other beggars have gathered a few odd facts, in between his fanciful tales:  Apparently, he was a merchant in his homeland, but fled into exile after he murdered a prominent noble in some sort of duel.  Miserable in his new land, he lost himself in absinthe and laudanum.  He was fading away, falling into pleasant oblivion when Petra found him.  Her strong hand pulled him from his despair; he found some purpose to his life again when the domineering woman took him into her service.

In the small hours of the night, Hatchet can be seen lurching awkwardly through the streets of the Market Quarter, carefully enforcing “Dame Petra’s” requirements.  Very seldom does he actually draw his rusty weapon; he instead prides himself on finding more ‘imaginative’ punishments for those who would threaten his lady's authority.  Area folk still whisper of the gang leader whose doxy was driven to madness by the twisted beggar’s manipulations, eventually slashing her lover’s throat; others speak of the crusading priest who was found, drunk and stinking, in the bed of a diseased slattern.  Where most folk see only a disease-riddled foreign nobleman ruined by drink, the poor folk of the district suspect the truth:  The creature they call Hatchet is a cold blooded killer, who takes dark pleasure from the misery he wreaks.

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