Flexsnus

• Build & height: 1.88 m, lanky and loose-jointed, with long arms and long clever fingers. He leans on everything: doorframes, masts, rails, other people, at angles that shouldn't hold.
• Face: long and narrow, olive-pale, with a thin waxed moustache and a lazy half-smile. One cheek always bulges with a pinch (upper left lip). At rest he looks as if he has just thought of something slightly illegal.
• Hair: black and slicked straight back with a pomade that smells of cork-leaf. One strand always escapes over his forehead. He re-slicks it with two fingers and it escapes again: "The one rule I can't bend."
• Eyes: hazel and heavy-lidded. When he spots the slack in a rule, an emerald glint catches at the corner of his eye, like light finding a notch.
• Skin & sin-mark: Greed, emerald. Thin emerald script rings his fingers under the rings and runs up the inside of his left forearm like a ruled ledger line. At K-III that line carries a small kink for every bend-back still due, so the reader can count his debts on his arm.
• Clothing, layer by layer: a cream linen shirt, sleeves held up by brass garters · a merchant's embroidered waistcoat, second-hand, black with faded emerald thread, and a dozen tiny pockets, each holding a deal (an IOU, a key, a button, a chit, a pressed flower nobody gets to ask about) · narrow dark trousers · pointed boots (Jeppson rebuilt the left heel) · rings on six fingers: brass, tin, copper, a bent nail, a braid of bark, and one "ruby" he swears is real. Every ring is a deal he made. · A long bottle-green coat, carried over one shoulder far more often than worn. (Contrast with Levla: Levla's rings are gold and his brocade is new. Flexsnus is flash on a budget.)
• Signature item: the battered tin snus-box: pewter-grey, dented, its lid scratched inside with a pin into nine tiny lines, the ledger of bend-backs due. It holds cork-leaf snus, Ferdinand-grown, which smells of bark and smoke. He taps the lid three times before every flex: tk tk tk.
• Movement: loose and unhurried. He sways out of a blow like a reed rather than blocking it. The three taps are always on-model: thumb, tk tk tk, lid closed.
• Voice: a slow amused drawl, slightly thick on the left side from the pinch, so friend comes out frien'. He calls everyone "friend", except Levla, who is "mate": it's from their childhood on Skatt, and it's on the page every time he speaks to Levla (ch. 237, 246, 256, 260, 281, 286). Levla calls him "Flexi" (ch. 260, 281, 286). He calls Krydog and Vigolas "captain". He makes every sentence sound like an offer, and under pressure talks faster and better, never worse. His balloons lean slightly, and each outline has one tiny notch kinked into it.

He bends any rule one notch. Bends, never breaks. A locked door a little unlocked, a fall a little softer, a deadline a little later, a rank a little higher.

• What counts as a rule: anything that works by a rule: a lock, a law, a contract, a deadline, a schedule, a rank, the way a fall hurts, the way a tide turns, a storm's schedule ("Storms keep a calendar", a Tidekant fishwife, ch. 280: "Everything's got a schedule, friend. Even a storm.", ch. 281), the written limits of a power (with its owner's say-so).
• One notch: the smallest step on the rule's own scale that still makes a difference: one tumbler looser, one storey softer, one hour later, one place higher, one second longer. Never two. "Two's how you break things."
• Bends, never breaks: a bent rule still holds for everyone else, so the door a little unlocked for him is still locked to the next man. When the moment passes the rule springs back, and the spring is the bend-back.
• The three taps: tapping the tin is how he names the rule to himself. Bind his hands and he has to say the rule aloud, in full, which is slow and gives the game away.
• How many: one bend per rule at a time, and nine bend-backs due at most, one per line in the lid. With the lid full, he can't flex at all until one lands.
• What it can't do:
  • Bend an outcome already decided: an Arena result (Rule One), a decree already read, a death. He bends rules, never verdicts; that's Daniel's job.
  • Bend another soul's price. Vigolas's memories, Krydog's sleep and Roffe's hunger are their own.
  • Bend a Codex lock (a person's own trial, not a rule anyone wrote), or a person's will or love.
  • Bend the count.
  • The Null: there are no rules in the grey. It doesn't break laws, it subtracts them. "You can't bend nothing, friend. I've tried." In Phase One the three taps make no sound.
  • Mingus: no rule holds him (no Ledger line), and HADOM is measured in him, so you can't bend the ruler. His taps go silent near the dog. Mingus sneezes at the snus, every time.
• Named on the page (ch. 281), the biggest bend yet:
  • He says the rule aloud: "The rule: a storm forms at first light."
  • The emerald glint: "There's the give."
  • The splash: a thin emerald ruled line across the whole dawn sky, horizon to horizon, and a long thin man standing straight at the end of the dock, pinching it where it crosses the sun's rim. knk. "…A little later."
  • The sun pauses a little, and Hagel's storm stalls unformed, "as if somebody had told it it was early", so Njord can knot it.

• Tempo: 99: one short of a round number. "Round numbers are expensive."
• Home tempo: Glasheim, the capital of rules. The more rules in the air, the faster he is, and nowhere in the nine realms has more rules than the Order's city on the Marhold Spine. He's never faster than three streets from a law-court.
• Heartbeat technique: THE PINCH. One beat, stretched by a pinch: a sliver longer than it should be, and always exactly enough for one more word in a deal. The other side has already said yes, the beat should close, and there's room for one more word: "…tonight." "…forever." "…ours." No one else stretches a heartbeat.
  • On the page (ch. 286): Hagel, hooked on Njord's line and raining away on Still Water, offers: "Unhook me, and I'll take my fleet and leave the lake. Agreed?" "It doesn't say for how long.", so in the half-heartbeat between the offer and the shake, tk, "…forever."
  • The splash: the deal drawn as a line of emerald script over the still water, I'LL TAKE MY FLEET AND LEAVE THE LAKE, with — FOREVER. squeezed in at the end in a smaller, neater, different hand, and the sentence closing round it like a knot pulled tight.
  • "I didn't SAY—" / "You agreed, friend. All of it." · "That's cheating." / "That's paperwork. One word. I never fit two. Two's how you break things."
• Burn cost (and the HADOM OVERFLOW rule): the stretched beat holds one word, never two. A second word would be more than his heart can count in one beat, and it would overflow. Every Pinch is a scene of restraint: he always has a second word ready, and he always swallows it. Each Pinch also bends back on his own heart: that night it skips one beat in his sleep. Over the years it has become a small hitch in his heartbeat that Emma frowns at when she listens.
  • On the page (ch. 286): his heart is drawn through his soaked shirt, ba-DUM, and then nothing where the next beat should be: a gap, a held breath. "Ooh. That'll skip tonight." / "Flex?" / "Fine, captain. One beat. I've got spares."
  • That evening at the bonfire: "Your heart all right, Flexi?" / "It'll skip once tonight, mate. Then it's paid." / "I'll stay up." / "You don't have to." / "I know." Levla sits up with him, right next to him inside the rain, getting soaked on purpose.

Everything he bends, bends back on him later. Usually small and ridiculous; sometimes not. He keeps the ledger scratched inside his snus-tin lid, nine lines in a tiny hand, and crosses each one out with the pin when it lands.

The lid on the page (Saga V):

The lid as drawn: ch. 254 shows ~~ROPE~~ · NET-KNOT · FALL · MOUTH. Ch. 276 and ch. 281 show nine lines, three struck through (ROPE, NET-KNOT, FALL), MOUTH open, five empty. After ch. 281 there are two open ("Two open. Plenty of room."), and after ch. 287 only MOUTH.

• The raincloud (STORM, ch. 281–287):
  • Right after the flex, pling: a tiny raincloud the size of a hat, a metre over his head, grey and grumpy, raining only on him. "There it is. The bend-back. Seven days, probably." · "Worth it?" / "Worth it, mate."
  • Day two of seven at the end of ch. 286. He's still under it, soaked, carrying planks (day three, ch. 287).
  • On day seven it thins, a last drop or two, and goes with a faint pling: "Oh. I'd got used to it." (ch. 287)
• Small: a sleeve caught in a door for an afternoon; nine trips on a flat deck in one day; late for his own birthday dinner (Roffe kept it warm); #10,000 every Wednesday. On the page: a knot slipping a hundred feet up (ch. 249); a bootlace; a spilled drink.
• Not small: the deportation hour he once bent "a little later" for a reject boy, long enough for the boy to get off the Docks, came back as a month in the Docks' holding cells for Flexsnus himself. He doesn't talk about it. He'd do it again. And every Pinch costs a skipped heartbeat.
• On the page: every flex gets its pling, sooner or later. The reader always sees the bill come in.

• He can barely fight. He's a long, light man with a tin. In a brawl he leans out of the way and lets Krydog get knocked down.
• A full lid: after a busy week he's powerless until something silly happens to him. Enemies who know that make him bend early.
• The exact rule: he has to know the rule well enough to name it. Strange islands with strange laws slow him down for a chapter.
• Things with no rules: the Null; Mingus; anything wild and new enough not to have rules yet (the uncharted islands of the Deep, at first).
• An INTEREST bearer (Greed III): his bend-backs would come due doubled every dawn. It's the one Codex in the world built to bankrupt him.
• Bend-backs at the worst moment: the pling doesn't care whether he's mid-deal.
• His word: he never bends a promise he has made, his own included. Anyone who gets a promise out of him has him.

• The snus tin and its lid ledger. Cork-leaf snus, grown on Ferdinand's lower terraces, bought cheap on any dock. He never offers it to Mingus, who sneezes at it anyway.
• The six rings, each a deal: he'll tell you the story of any one of them for the price of a drink.
• The waistcoat pockets: IOUs, keys to doors he's never opened, Tihi's lucky button, a pressed flower. Bakasura once ate a spare tin, and pronounced it "…Crooked." (Bakasura tastes what things are.)
• The UPP IGEN: he's her quartermaster: stores, purse, trade, papers, and every deal made in her name. His counting cupboard under the quarterdeck is the tidiest place aboard ("a crooked man keeps straight books"). The ship: a broad, battered carrack, sunk five times and raised five times, every raising a band of differently coloured planks (tar-black oak, rust-red pine, grey larch, pale ash, and Jeppson's cork-brown fallen-bark band at the rail), her bottom sheathed in Jeppson's bark-scrap mosaic so she can sail the Current. Figurehead: a raised fist with a bandage across its knuckles. Flag: the bandaged fist on black. Motto: "UPP IGEN!" He paid for the ropes that raised her.

He doesn't fight; he negotiates the fight away, and when that fails he makes the enemy's rules a notch worse for them. He opens by talking ("Friend. Friend. Before anybody does anything permanent…"). Mid-fight he leans at the edge of things, tapping: a gate a little unlocked behind his crew, a fall a little softer under a friend, an enemy's deadline a little later so the crew gets there first. He finishes fights at the table, with the Pinch: one more word in the surrender terms. Crew combos (the Up-Again crew):

• Flexsnus + Daniel, "Bend and Appeal": the legal one-two. Flexsnus bends the rule, and Daniel appeals the verdict made under it. It's the shape of the Saga VI challenge. Daniel disapproves of him by about one notch.
• Flexsnus + Tihi, the trickster pair: she picks the pocket, he bends the lock. He taught her the first rule of the Reject Quay: never bet against the captain.
• Flexsnus + Jeppson, "An Hour and a Notch": a chalk-build stands one hour, and Flexsnus can bend that one notch, to an hour and a minute. That minute has saved the crew twice. The bend-back: he can't find his own pencil for a day, and Jeppson lends him one, sighing.
• Flexsnus + Emma: her circle stops compulsion, and a bend isn't compulsion, so his bends work inside it. He asks her first anyway, every time. It's the only permission he ever asks for.
• Flexsnus + Krydog, the Gag: never again. "DON'T SOFTEN MY FALLS."

Marka combos:

• Flexsnus + Rougeina, "Round the Corner": with her say-so, the Swap's "anything she can see" bends one notch, to a hand's breadth round the corner. The bend-back: he walks into doorframes for a day.
• Flexsnus + Kali, "Sixty-One": 5. Two talkers, one extra second.
• Flexsnus + Njord, "A Little Later": Njord can only knot weather that hasn't formed, so Flexsnus bends the storm's forming one notch, one hour later, and Njord knots it (ch. 281).
• Flexsnus + Trollmage: he offered once to bend "worrying doesn't count" a notch, so a little worrying would bank. Trollmage: "No thank you. It's the only rule I like."

• Wants: a fair deal for everybody. He's secretly a fairness fanatic dressed as a crook. Under that, and he'd never say it: to be remembered by one particular person. (Ch. 260: he is. "…Flexi. I called you Flexi." / "Nobody's called me that since.")
• His joy (Iskall's Lamplight Circle, ch. 256): a summer day on Skatt, two boys running between the stalls with a kite made of a stolen ledger page, laughing so hard they can't breathe, and the boy with the string, the one laughing hardest, wearing rings far too big for him, is Levla.
• Fears: the bend-back he can't pay; bending something so far it breaks; becoming a man whose word bends too.
• Contradiction: a rule-bender whose promises never bend. His word is the one straight thing about him.
• Humour: sly, deadpan and loose. He writes mock-formal invoices, narrates his own bend-backs like weather reports, and offers to sell the crew things they already own.
• Habits: leans on everything; taps the tin three times before deciding anything at all (what to eat, which sock); reads the lid every morning; re-slicks the escaping strand; tips in snus; keeps a book on every fight aboard, and nobody has ever collected on Krydog.
• Alone: he sits on the rail and flicks a single marble along the deck seam, again and again, and catches it, and doesn't miss.

• Vigolas: two Greeds.
  • In Tidekant he bends a storm for Vigolas and carries the bend-back himself. "That was the sky, Flexsnus." / "One notch of it, captain. I'll send you the bill." / "Bill?" (ch. 281)
  • The bill comes across the bonfire (ch. 286): ONE (1) BOTTLE CAP, captain's choice. "A bottle cap." / "Captain's choice." Vigolas, who hoards bottle caps, reads it, grins, folds it and tucks it into his coat: "Mine." / "Thought you'd say that."
  • Then he pays anyway (ch. 287): his best cap, off the Camilla, on Flexsnus's pillow, with PAID. KEEPING THE BILL. — V. Kompis: "You paid him." / "I kept the bill. That's what greedy people do." The bill is paid, and the bill is kept.
• Krydog: his captain and his oldest book. He'd bet everything on him, and has.
  • Before the sky: "Flex. That's the sky." / "I know, captain." / "You sure?" / "I'm never sure. That's why it works." (ch. 281)
  • Then: "FLEX! FLEX! FLEX!" (ch. 281). He rows him out to the terms (ch. 286).
• Roffe: the only person he never haggles with. He buys Roffe the best stores in every port, and Roffe makes him eat.
• Jeppson: the pockets of sweepings. Jeppson rebuilt his boot heel, and lends him pencils.
• Perne: she sees him palm things from across a harbour. They hold whole conversations in eyebrows.
• Emma: every Sunday she reads his tin lid and tells him which bends were worth it. He listens.
• Tihi: his apprentice in mischief, and the one person he has never cheated. On the beach before dawn, awed: "He's standing." (ch. 281)
• Daniel: the man he bet everything on. "Bend and Appeal."
• Kali: two talkers. She bets him she can out-talk him, he bends the bet one notch, and they're both still talking at dawn.
• Njord: Njord can only knot what hasn't formed. "Old man can only catch what hasn't formed, right?" / "That's what he says." / "Hm." (to Levla, ch. 280). After the knot, Njord walks up to him under the raincloud: "Forty years I've wanted one more hour. Thank you, lad." / "Anytime, friend. Well. Not any time. Seven days from now, maybe." (ch. 281). Njord reads the hole in Hagel's terms off his lips: "Ten years. Twenty. For somebody else's boys." (ch. 286)
• Hagel : "You. You're the one who made my storm late." / "One notch. I'm still paying for it. As you can see." The Pinch sends the Admiral out of the lake forever: "That's cheating." / "That's paperwork." (ch. 286). "Afternoon, Admiral. Flexsnus. Quartermaster. I do the paperwork."
• Bakasura: "…Crooked."
• Kompis + Mingus: Kompis sees a thread on him that runs back a long way to someone who can't see it from the other end, and knows not to ask. Mingus sneezes at him affectionately.

• "I don't break rules, friend. I lean on them."
• "One notch. Never two. Two's how you break things."
• "Everything's got a schedule, friend. Even a storm." (ch. 281)
• "…A little later." (ch. 281)
• "I'm never sure. That's why it works." (ch. 281)
• "You agreed, friend. All of it." / "That's cheating." / "That's paperwork." (ch. 286)
• "Oh. Captain. Your bill." / "A bottle cap." / "Captain's choice." / "Mine." / "Thought you'd say that." (ch. 286)
• "…You used to cheat at marbles." (to Levla)
• "You sold it. I kept it. Somebody had to." (ch. 256)
• "One thousand. Exactly. I always count." / "Put it on nobody's tab." (ch. 260)
• "Nine hundred and ninety-nine to go!" (ch. 263)
• "The Arena itself may be challenged. By a crew. …Ours." (Saga VI)