Hallbard

• The name: Hallbard = hall + bard: the bard of the hall, and his hall is the lamp-room at the top of Fyren's 212 steps. In the old northern tongue hall is also a slab of rock (hallr), so the name reads twice: the singer of the lamp-room, and the singer of the black rock.

• Build & height: 2.15 m, enormous and weather-beaten, broad as a mast-step, standing bolt upright. He hasn't sat down in four hundred years (until Vaka's doorstep, ch. 236), and his legs are like pillars. (Ch. 397's "two metres" is a round figure.)
• Face: craggy and storm-red, deeply lined, nose like a cliff. His eyes are always narrowed against a light nobody else can see.
• Hair: white, wild, blown back from his face. A beard like sea-foam, spilling over his chest (ch. 235, 397). (Ch. 335 and 337 call it a red beard: a slip in those chapters. Draw it sea-foam white; the storm-red is his face.)
• Eyes: pale grey, narrowed to slits. He sees only what the Beam is touching (partly before ch. 239; wholly after it). After the Sweep (ch. 239) they go milky white, and in a dark room he sees nothing at all. When the Beam sweeps over something far away, his pupils still flash silver in the same instant (ch. 397). The one exception: a lantern held up to his face by someone else (Vaka, ch. 339).
• Skin & sin-mark: wind-burned, salt-cracked. Pride, silver, placement: everything arrives where it belongs. Silver script radiates from the corners of his eyes like rays and has spread into his beard. At K-IV the marks have fused into a faint silver halo around his head, like the corona around a lamp.
• Signature item: the lens-rag. He is always wiping something clean.
• Movement: slow and planted. He walks the lighthouse stairs round and round, two hundred and twelve steps, and never seems tired. 234, 235, 239). When he logs a ship he lifts his chin to the glass and his lips move before the sound comes, like a man finding the note.

Whatever his light touches cannot get lost. It will always find the way to where it is going: ships, souls, letters, armies.

• The Beam sweeps the whole Current from the Mouth, coming round every seven minutes (ch. 234), about sixty-one turns a night (Natta's count, ch. 240). A ship it touches holds its course through fog, storm and the Deep's lack of north until the Beam comes round again.
• It doesn't choose. "Where it is going" means where they are going: honest ships, pirates, Order fleets, Wreckers. "If I start choosing, I'm a Wrecker." (ch. 241)
• The Mouth opens only in the Beam: for one heartbeat each sweep, for one ship, and the first through sets the Beam's course into the Deep (ch. 237, 241, 335).
• The Deep Current has no north. Past the Mouth, only the Beam's silver threads keep a ship from getting lost for ever (ch. 242). That's why the crew needs him (Saga V).
• The Fyren rule (home field): in the Beam, nothing can get lost: not a ship, not a child, not a thought.
• The Beam carries his voice: anyone the Beam is lighting can hear him as if he stood at their rail. That's how a warning crosses the whole sea (ch. 241), how he talks to Mörda across the water (ch. 236–399), and how a sleeping girl heard about the boats for nine years (ch. 339).
• What it can't do: reach the Null, choose who it guides, guide anything with nowhere to go, or sing what the Null takes: when the Null takes an island, its line in the Log goes blank (Kvarnholm, ch. 314). In the Beam's light the Null has a shape: where the light stops (ch. 397).

• Tempo: 400: a beat for every year at the lamp.
• Home tempo: Fyren, at the lamp: the lamp-room is his hall, the one place the bard is fastest.
• Heartbeat technique: THE SWEEP. Inside one of his heartbeats, the Beam makes one full turn and touches every vessel in the Current at once (ch. 239). Every ship lit in that beat cannot be lost until the next. No one else reaches the whole sea in a single beat. The bard's reading: the Sweep is the whole song in one breath: every ship lit, and every ship's verse owed, in the same heartbeat. That's why the night of the Sweep is the longest page in the Log, written down afterwards, blind, the entries getting bigger and wilder down the page, the dead's little grey boats included (ch. 316).
• Burn cost: each full sweep takes sight from his own eyes. Four hundred years of staring into the lamp left him nearly blind, and the Sweep took the last of it (ch. 239): since then he sees only what the Beam lights. A blind bard, singing what he can't see. (The verses themselves cost only breath. It's the light that costs the eyes.)

A lighthouse doesn't choose its ships, so he lights the way for villains too, and a bard who sings in the Beam doesn't choose who hears him. The same night he guides the crew into the Deep, he guides the people hunting them (ch. 241). He can never leave the light. If Fyren goes dark for one night, every vessel in the Current loses its way. He had not slept in four hundred years until the Dark Night (ch. 337), and the Sweep took the last of his sight (ch. 239): he sees only what the Beam touches.

• The Wreckers: pirates who light false beacons to lure ships onto the rocks, led by Rasp (ch. 235). They want him dead so their false lights are the only ones.
• The Lamp-Eater (Gluttony VIII): Natta, who eats light, and Lamp-Glare is her food (ch. 236–238). She bit the Beam and every silver thread in the Current went out (ch. 238). Emma's Sanctuary round the lamp ("nothing gets made to go out") and the Sweep beat her (ch. 239).
• He can't leave Fyren, can't chase anyone, and can't fight far from the rock.
• Neutrality: he won't refuse the light to anyone, and everyone in it hears his voice. The crew's enemies use him too.
• The Null: the Beam can't reach it, and what it takes goes blank in the Log (ch. 314, 397).
• Blindness: since ch. 239, a dark room is total dark to him; he finds people only when they "stand in the light".
• Exhaustion: four hundred years awake.

• Fyren's lamp: a colossal lens of cut crystal taller than three men, turning on a bed of quicksilver, a flame at its heart that has never gone out, fed by oil that never runs out (no one knows why) (ch. 235). He turns it with a great crank (ch. 335) and closes it with a shutter-lever (ch. 337).
• The step below the lens, the one he had never sat on, until he slept there (ch. 337).
• The brass lamp-keys, the soot-black rag (lent to blacken Rougeina's blades, ch. 239) and a pocket of ship's biscuits for Mingus.
• The Keeper's Log: four hundred years of logbooks on the stair walls; one thick salt-stained volume given to Drekk to copy (ch. 240).
• The lighthouse moths: big, pale, soft-winged moths that live in the lantern room and carry his light into fog.
• The lamp-room door: one of Jeppson's trued planks, locked violet in the Rivet Beat (ch. 371, 374).
• Natta, the night-keeper (from ch. 240): she smells whether the lamp is lit ("There's a draught on the north side of the glass"). "One of us sees what it touches. The other smells if it's there."
• The keeper's cottage, a small white house at the foot of the tower, its door kept open "so she can hear the sea" (ch. 236). On the page (ch. 235–339): Vaka slept here nine years, three months and a night, her lamp kept lit beside her bed. The crew brought him her message ("she's fine", ch. 236), and she woke (ch. 339).

He doesn't leave the rock. He lights and he sings: guides his allies home, warns them down the Beam (the Mention), blinds attackers with Lamp-Glare (rarely, and sorry for it), and sends the moths into the dark. Team combos: Hallbard + Drekk: Drekk is the only human who can read the Beam without going blind (ch. 231), and steers the Marka by its silver threads into the Deep, the Log on his binnacle. Hallbard + Rougeina: the Beam lights something a league off and she can see it, so she can Swap with it. Hallbard + Kompis: to Kompis's Lust-sight, the Beam's silver threads look like his own gold ones, and he reads where every ship wants to go. Hallbard + Natta: the day keeper and the night keeper. Hallbard + Mörda: "Light it, old man. I'll do the dark." (ch. 397).

• Wants: (before ch. 337) to sleep, one night. (Since) to keep singing them home, and to see Vaka sail.
• Fears: the night the light fails, and everyone it was holding drowns.
• Contradiction: the most neutral man in the Current cares about every single ship he lights, villains included. "They're going somewhere too, son." (ch. 241)
• Traits: gruff and grandfatherly; patient; stubborn; principled to the point of pain; tender in private; humble about his own power ("I can turn the lamp. The Mouth opens when it opens.", ch. 235); hates using light as a weapon; naked envy of anyone who can lie down (Trollmage, ch. 235).
• Humour: dry, grumbling, kind. "Sit? Son, I'd never get up." · "Mind the step, son, it's been loose since the Third Age." · "Stubborn, says the man who wore a bell-rope over his face for most of a year." (to Drekk, ch. 240)
• Habits: wipes the lens; talks to the lamp ("I'm sorry. You're a light. Not a weapon.", ch. 235); sings every ship into the Log as it passes; told the sleeping Vaka about the ships every night for nine years (ch. 335, 339); drops biscuits to Mingus without looking, even from 212 steps up (ch. 235, 236, 335).
• Alone: stands at the lamp all night, as always. At night he talks across the water to the only other person in the Current who never sleeps (Mörda).

• Vigolas: "I've lit you before, son." Red sails, the Camilla, the boy with the apple (ch. 235). Asks him to put the light out (ch. 335) and gets it: "For one night, Fyren is yours." "Morning, son." (ch. 400)
• Hild: the only captain who ever waved at him.
• Drekk: the only one who can read the Beam. Hallbard gives him the Keeper's Log to copy ("Somebody should know the way." / "And I'll bring it back." / "Grumpy old sailors are hard to find.", ch. 240). A grumpy old sailor and a grumpy young one: instant friends.
• Kompis + Mingus: Kompis delivered Vaka's message, and Hallbard sat down for the first time in four hundred years (ch. 236). Mingus barks at the moths; Hallbard pretends to be annoyed and feeds him biscuits. Mingus held the white off Vaka's dream while he slept (ch. 336–338).
• Vaka: the lantern-girl asleep in his cottage nine years. He kept her lamp lit and told her about the ships every night; she woke and lit his face, the first thing he'd seen without the Beam since the Sweep ("They said to tell you I was fine." / "You're fine.", ch. 339).
• Mörda: the two people in the Current who never sleep. They talk across the water at night ("They found her, Mörda." / "I know. I was there.", ch. 236 · "Long night, girl." / "The longest.", ch. 399). He asked her for help once, the first time in four hundred years he asked anyone (ch. 336).
• Natta: the Wrecker's daughter who ate his light and gave it back all over the sky; now his night-keeper ("I've got an apprentice, Mörda.", ch. 240).
• Emma: her Sanctuary round the lamp kept it from being made to go out (ch. 239).
• Rougeina: the Beam lets her Swap across leagues, and she loves it. He worries. He lent her his lens-rag to darken her blades (ch. 239).
• Trollmage: sleeps on Hallbard's stairs, and Hallbard envies him so much he can barely look at him (ch. 235).
• Smurjan: the Sightline sees the Beam's threads as precise as lines on a chart.
• Svala: the Beam always finds Flyttfågeln, the island that never lands twice. She calls him "Grandpa Lamp", which he hates. His fondest nuisance.
• Rasp and the Wreckers: the oldest enemy: the people who drowned his first ship.

• "A lighthouse doesn't choose its ships, son. It just keeps them off the rocks."
• "Don't follow those, son. Those are Wreckers." (ch. 231)
• "Sit? Son, I'd never get up." (ch. 235)
• "I'm sorry. You're a light. Not a weapon. I'm sorry." (ch. 235)
• "Red sail. Two nets. Going home to a woman who sings." (ch. 240)
• "I didn't choose. I only mentioned. That's allowed." (ch. 241)
• "I lit your hunters too. I'm sorry. That's the job." (sheet; on the page as "I lit your hunters too, son. Every night. That's the job. Not tonight.", ch. 397)
• "A lighthouse doesn't choose its ships. Today it does." (ch. 339)
• "Just one night. Then I'll light it again. Just one." (sheet; ch. 397: "Then I'll light you again.")
• "Tell her… tell her the lamp's still lit."
• "The Marka. The Upp Igen. Going where they're going." (ch. 420)