Toma

Toma works to keep a threatened community moving without letting it become an instrument.

Appearance

Toma is taller than Cassian, built lean rather than broad, with dark hair. A black scar runs from beneath his jaw into his collar and opens like an eyelid when his passenger stirs; his chest and back carry deliberate rows of scars, some of them Underworld letters carved during his years as an altar-thrall. He wears a Penitent coat the colour of dried blood.

In The Godless Priest

Toma is the captain of Crowbrook's Penitent Companies, commanding them under Mother Vey. He carries a demon of the Second Hunger that speaks openly through his scars and with which he negotiates terms aloud, valuing small contradictions between them as a border. He was opened as an altar-thrall at fourteen and accepted the demon at seventeen in exchange for numbing what clients did to him; the arrangement has since been amended many times in scar, with his comrade and sometime lover Canto Vale as witness.

He was introduced breaking a possessed masons' riot by ordering his soldiers to sing incompatible songs, the Penitent doctrine against shared cadence. He had accepted Black Mercy's diverted poppy for his companies, and he admitted this, along with Mother Vey's obedience compound, when Cassian found it. Honest to the point of self-incrimination, he insisted that control should leave an owner, recorded breaches under his own name, and refused Vey's order to tear apart civilian beds at Black Mercy.

His tower room is built for escape, with three exits and no external locks, habits he extended to every Penitent quarters so that no restraint could be described as care without a name attached. He added the missing cost columns to Mother Vey's mobilisation tables and cancelled a procurement guild's order under corruption authority, accepting the court's later finding that he had exceeded his role. His demon, under a contract amended in Cassian's presence, may name appetite and likely consequence but may not treat either as authority over an explicit refusal.

Toma and Cassian became lovers after a carefully negotiated encounter in that room, and he later admitted in open court that desire had shaped his choices. At the Black Banner Trial a fraudulent clause in Canto's contract turned Canto's ribs into a walking cage, and Toma killed him, then named his own failures in the ledger. At Cassian's trial he built a defence without permission that saved Cassian's life by making him march-priest.

On the march Toma broke the army into witness cells of five during the thrall mutiny, gave his first public countermand to Mother Vey, and kept soldiers standing when the Crown called for kneeling beneath the changed Light. He joined the compact with Cassian and Ravel, promising to speak aloud any order that would treat either of them as material. The book leaves him commanding the army towards Luna, aware that his marked rank makes him a possible Crown successor.

After the books

A survivor whose choices remain morally charged in the post-crisis record. The record retains both Toma's care and the weight of the killing of Canto Vale.