Louch Ashford

Pride, but not "Sin of Pride". Ch. 18 gives "BLK: to myself Your fate has already been sealed, the worst sin of them all, Pride." The formula is not used.

The best in the world at everything he touches, correct about it, and completely alone because of it.

Who he is

Mid-thirties, a suit worth more than most people earn in a year, amber eyes. He runs Meridian Holdings from the top of a forty-seven storey tower that "seemed to cut the sky in half", with no waiting room and no receptionist, "just an expanse of polished marble" (ch. 18).

Born in Ashwick's Lower District, in the mills and tenements he can now see from his window as an abstraction.

His first line, without turning round: "You're late. I expected you three days ago."

What he has done

Ashwick is the most efficiently run city in the region. Crime down, employment up, infrastructure at optimal capacity. Affordable housing to his specifications, transport systems his engineers designed, a university expansion he funded and oversaw.

He is candid about what that makes it:

"They don't realize they're living in a benevolent dictatorship. They don't understand that their prosperity depends entirely on my continued interest in their welfare. They don't know that their city is essentially my private project, scaled up to accommodate eight hundred thousand other people."

What it cost

Everyone. He gives the mechanism precisely:

"Excellence is isolating. When you can do everything better than everyone else, collaboration becomes charity. When you understand concepts others struggle with for years, conversation becomes, condescending. When your casual efforts surpass others' life's work, relationships become, performance."

The photograph in his desk drawer is a family portrait taken the day he bought his parents a house. They are grateful, and "also, diminished. They know they'll never be able to repay me, never be able to contribute anything meaningful to my success, never be able to relate to me as equals."

He tried to fake being ordinary for years, then stopped, because "pretending to be less than I am is its own form of dishonesty. And dishonesty is inefficient."

Why his sin is the hard one

The chapter's whole design, and Blook says it outright at the end:

"His sin wasn't thinking he was better than everyone else. His sin was being right about it."

Louch gets there first:

"My pride isn't unfounded arrogance, it's the only rational response to objective reality."

"Being right about your own superiority doesn't make you less alone. It makes you more alone. It makes you a god among mortals, and gods are lonely creatures."

And the one thing his method cannot touch:

"I've solved every problem I've ever encountered except the problem of being myself. And that's the one problem I can't approach objectively, because the thing doing the analyzing is the same thing that needs to be analyzed."

The refusal

He asks to be saved, in the only language he has, and is refused.

LCH: You're not going to try to save me, are you? BLK: Can you be saved?

One chapter after Blook talked Sampo down from his gift, he declines to try here. The naming is not said aloud but to himself:

BLK: to myself Your fate has already been sealed, the worst sin of them all, Pride.

Thirteenth soul found, one left.

He has been following the hunt

He is not surprised by Blook. He is annoyed at the delay, and he can list where Blook has been.

LCH: You're late. I expected you three days ago.

LCH: The reports from Ravenshollow reached me Tuesday. Something about a truth-teller who'd finally found his limitations. Before that, whispers about twin spirits in the hotel district. And before that, a joy-bringer who'd discovered the difference between happiness and addiction.

That is Rogen (ch. 13), the twins (ch. 16), and Sampo (ch. 15), in reverse order, correctly. He also knows what the hunt is for:

LCH: You're hunting the Awakened. And you're very good at it. Which makes you either a threat to be eliminated or a talent to be acquired.

Nobody else Blook finds knows he is coming. See ../lore/the-awakened.md.

Pride incarnate

Blook closes the chapter with the same sentence he used five chapters earlier about Rogen Thorne, changing two words:

He'd become pride incarnate, and it was killing him one perfect day at a time. (ch. 18)

Rogen's runs "truth incarnate [...] one honest word at a time" (ch. 13). It is a refrain, and in Blook's mouth it is a prognosis. See ../lore/the-incarnate.md.

Ch. 18 is also the second of the two chapters that mention the character sketches Blook carries: "I saw what the character sketches had tried to capture." See ../lore/the-fourteen.md.

Two names worth watching

• Ashford. Professor Vincent Ashford in ch. 12 shares the surname, and is the one man Blook investigates and rejects as not one of the Fourteen. Nothing connects them on the page. See velvet-crane.md.
• Meridian. The theatre district where Calista Voss holds court (ch. 14), the hotel run by the twins (ch. 16), and now Meridian Holdings and Meridian Tower in Ashwick (ch. 18). Three chapters, three uses, no stated link, and the name returns once more in ch. 159 as the Meridian Accords. See ../locations/meridian.md.

Open questions

• Whether the two Ashfords are related.
• What Meridian is, if it is anything.
• Whether he is still running Ashwick by the time the volume ends.