Jerrik Vale

Jerrik's ordinary working life is violated by a possession that turns command into mass harm.

In The Godless Priest

Jerrik Vale is a forty-two-year-old laundry clerk from the Saint Drev quarter with no registered mark. Possessed, he walked into a public washhouse and ordered twenty-seven people to drown themselves in shallow water; four obeyed before a boiler woman broke the cadence with a shovel. He was then brought before a crowd of three hundred at the Witness Pit, where Bellad hooked the nail bed of his finger to draw out the fugitive Choir mouth beneath his tongue, which claimed the Archivist and the Second Hunger and said that nine doors lay beneath Saint Drev.

Cassian reminded Jerrik of who he was, including that he once stole chestnuts for his sister Ossa, and refused the crowd's call to execute him as a contract when they had witnessed only an occupation. Afterwards, writing on a slate in a room without corners, Jerrik revealed that "Etris" was an instruction rather than a person, named the missing clerk Sennic, and admitted that Ossa had asked him to host the fugitive voice to map what the Many-Mouthed feared. He had agreed to hear it, not to the Pit, the hook or the pain. He survived.

After the books

His final status remains unresolved in the current canonical record. The record preserves the washhouse dead and does not fabricate certainty about Jerrik's final fate.