Levla

• The name: levla = to level up (Swedish gamer slang, from level): to gain a level, climb a rung, grind your way up a ladder.

• Build & height: 1.83 m, slim, elegant, effortlessly posed, always leaning on something he owns (later: on something he doesn't).
• Face: young, beautiful and bored, flawless, with a faint smile that never reaches his eyes. He looks twenty-two. He has looked twenty-two for some time.
• Hair: platinum blond, cut perfectly, one lock always catching the light like a new coin.
• Skin & sin-mark: smooth and pale. Greed, emerald. Emerald script runs along every finger under his rings, each line a sentence of a contract; it blazes when he calls in a debt (ch. 368). On the inside of his left wrist is an emerald price tag with a number too long to read: the price of his own childhood. A small silver rowan-sprig scar on one palm from ringing the Wall (ch. 311).
• Clothing, layer by layer: a silk shirt the colour of cream · an embroidered waistcoat of emerald brocade · a long coat stitched together from a hundred currencies (banknotes, coin-mail, pearl-strings, scrip, IOUs, the scales of a fish a whole island once used as money) · soft boots of gold-tooled leather · a ring on every finger, ten in all.
• The coat by saga: whole (ch. 151–158) · a third gone after Skatt · two-thirds of a coat (ch. 226–230) · a plain shirt, owning nothing (ch. 243–245, ch. 363: "no coat of a hundred currencies, nothing in his pockets") · a borrowed grey Ränta collector's coat, too short in the sleeves (ch. 367–368: "I stole it off the tall one.") · coatless (ch. 392). (Ch.
• Signature item: the coat of a hundred currencies, which chinks, crackles and rustles when he moves; after Saga IV, the ten rings.
• Movement: languid and unhurried; he is never in a rush, because he owned the clocks. He flips a coin constantly and never looks at how it lands (he looks once, ch. 158; the side is never shown). He flicks a ring to throw a tag, without turning his head (ch. 152).
• Voice: smooth, amused and bored, a born salesman. He prices things aloud as he talks ("Nice sword. Forty. No, thirty-eight."), and still counts sails under his breath out of habit (ch. 340). His balloons have a thin gold ruled border, like a receipt.

He names a price for anything, and nobody can take it, touch it or break it unless they pay that exact price.

• Put a price on a door, and it can't be opened. Put a price on a man, and he can't be killed.
• Paid in anything (coin, years, memories, names, sins, waiting), as long as it's exact. Payment goes to Levla, into a ring (ch. 347: twenty-six years of someone's waiting).
• Ten rings, ten tags: he can hold ten prices at once. Each tag lands inside one heartbeat (ch. 152).
• The ladder (Skatt, read through the name): every price on Skatt is a rung. Trades go one-for-one at the same level ("exactly equal, to the grain", ch. 155), or up and down it.
• The price must be payable by someone, somewhere. That's the market's own law. He can price things absurdly high, but never at "nothing could pay this." (The famous exception that proves it: PRICE: EVERYTHING I OWN, when he owns nothing. It's exact to the farthing, and nobody can pay it, because nobody can pay nothing. "That's the most expensive thing anyone ever bought." / "Nobody bought it.", ch. 315.)
• A debt can't be stopped by a price tag: a debt is a price already agreed (ch. 156). But a debt can be called in (the Debt-Book).
• The Skatt rule (home field): everything has a price. On Skatt you can buy and sell memories, years, names, sins and loves. The streets are paved with coin; the river is liquid credit. A blow is a purchase, billed to whoever lands it, with interest. What's sold on Skatt only comes back by being bought; being told doesn't stick ("It'll slide right off you. Like being told.", ch. 260, 357).
• What it can't do: price Mingus (the tag slides off: "…He's not for sale", the first priceless thing Levla has ever met, ch. 153–154); price the erased (nobody remembers them, so there's no market) or the black shard ("Nobody remembers what it is", ch. 152); price love (the Null's immunity; it can't be traded); price the Null (PRICE: and nothing: "It's not even cheap. It's not anything.", ch. 392); or raise a worth (only a price).

• Tempo: 1,000. He bought most of it, one level at a time, the same round number as his plate.
• Home tempo: Skatt, where every second can be sold to him.
• Heartbeat technique: PAID IN FULL. Inside one heartbeat, a price is named, met and settled: any trade on Skatt completes in a single beat, and so does any tag he places in battle. Read through the name: every rung of a deal, from asking price to settlement, climbed in one beat. No one else closes a deal before the other side can blink. On the page: one heartbeat rippling out from his palm as the sea-memory trade closes (ch. 155); the Marka un-priced (ch. 158); Läka's payment burning PAID IN FULL (ch. 347); the Order's whole collateral paid in one beat (ch. 368).
• Burn cost: he can't keep anything he didn't pay for, so every full burn sells a moment of his own life on the open market. Somewhere on Skatt, strangers are buying Levla's afternoons (LOT: ONE AFTERNOON · LEVLA'S OWN · SOLD, ch. 158 · "Somewhere on Skatt, somebody's just bought a Tuesday of mine.", ch. 368).

He can't keep anything he didn't pay for. Gifts dissolve in his hands. He sold his own childhood to buy the planet and set its price so high that even he can't afford to buy it back. He has no memory of being a child, and it shows: he has never played. At the end of Saga IV he pays the biggest price there is: everything, for nothing. Saga V, Arc 3 (on the page), the price paid off: his childhood had gone to auction on Skatt as Lot one, and the Bottler bought it ("I bought your childhood, you know. At auction. Lot one. I haven't decided whether to drink it.", ch. 257). On the Bottling Barge it stood on the auction shelf with the Bottler's own tag: LOT ONE · RESERVE: 1,000 CORK. Skatt's law: what was sold comes back only if it's bought; opened without paying, "it'll slide right off you. Like being told." He owned nothing to buy it with. Flexsnus bought it (every coin he'd won betting on the draws, exactly 1,000, into the Bottler's till, ALL SALES FINAL) and gave it to him for nothing: "Put it on nobody's tab." (ch. 260). A gift with no price goes home clean. He pulled the cork and remembered the day of the kite.

• The priceless: Mingus; the erased; love; the Null; and, it turns out, friendship, which he can't buy.
• Exact payment: anyone who works out his price can pay it. Vigolas does, with one memory for another (ch. 155). Läka does, with twenty-six years of waiting (ch. 347): "Nobody pays that."
• Debt: a price tag can't stop a debt (ch. 156).
• The Ränta (the Interest): debt-collectors in grey with figure-printed masks and ledger-chains of tiny iron books, who take payment in body parts and memories. They "worked for" him, "the way rain works for the sea", and collected him the moment he missed one dusk bell (ch. 154–156). Their chief, Usurer Ölund, is patient and unpowered: the law does his work. Since ch. 368 they hunt him for life.
• His own wrist: the tag he could never pay. Remind him of it and he loses focus.

• The ten rings (one per tag) and the coat of a hundred currencies.
• The Memory Market: a vast covered hall of glass jars, each holding a bottled memory, labelled and priced. Vigolas's were on one stall (a music box, a cameo, a locket, a folded ribbon, a knotted rope, a brass tag reading his age), all given back free in Arc 8.
• Mingus's stick: held for the dog, a debt, so it never dissolved (ch. 154–159); given to Mingus at Glasheim ("I'm done holding things for people. I'd like to try giving them.", ch. 226).
• Compound: the Ränta cutter Pyssel stole (grey hull, ledger-chains, a brass abacus figurehead, a Ränta pennant), with the Order's credit ledger aboard (ch. 362–368).
• The Ränta ledger with a chain through its spine, and the borrowed grey collector's coat (ch. 367–368).
• Pyssel: PYSSEL · K-I UNMARKED · Scalelist #5,880,412 · Skatt (no fixed stall), the pickpocket who steals back what people were forced to sell. The one thing on Skatt Levla didn't buy, and his friend. "She picked my pockets for six years." / "Seven. I never caught her." (ch. 363). She teaches him to play (badly), and steals back what's stolen from him ("I'll steal it back.", ch. 368).

A merchant duellist who levels the fight down. He opens by tagging the enemy's weapon, the ground and whatever they want most, so every blow arrives poorer than it left; he finishes with the Debt-Book, collecting everything they owe at once. He never gets his hands dirty. Since Saga V he fights mostly as a bodyguard: tags over the people who can't protect themselves (Jeppson, six fishermen, pilgrims, Vante, Svala). Team combos (after he turns): Levla + Vigolas: Vigolas sees value, Levla sees price, and together they find the one thing an enemy can't afford to lose. Levla + Rougeina: he tags her as priceless for a day, so nothing can kill her until someone pays an impossible price. Levla + Svala: ONE UNFINISHED THING: the hunters' hands shoved aside ahead of her Long Line (ch. 368). Levla + Pyssel: the book and the pickpocket (ch. 363–368).

• Wants: to feel something he didn't buy. (Ch. 260: he does. A childhood bought by someone else and handed to him free.)
• Fears: that without a price, he's worth nothing.
• Contradiction: he owned a planet and had nothing; the richest man in the Current never had a toy. (Since ch. 260 he remembers one: a kite made of a ledger page. Since ch. 263 he flies them again, badly.) The man named for levelling up never played a game.
• Traits: languid, bored, dry, quietly lonely; curious about everything he can't price; proud of exactness ("It's exact.", ch. 315, 368); generous late and surprised by it ("Huh. Twice, now."); a habit of prices he can't drop (counting sails, ch. 340); very gentle when he knows a loss exactly ("It wasn't sold, captain. It was spent.", ch. 357).
• Humour: languid and dry. "I'd say 'priceless,' but I've never met anything that was. Until your dog."
• Habits: flips the coin; prices everything aloud; rubs the tag on his wrist when no one's watching (ch. 315).
• Alone: sits in the Memory Market and opens jars that aren't his, to see what a childhood looks like. (Since Skatt fell: sits on a rail and counts things he can't buy.)

• Kompis + Mingus: the price tag slides off Mingus. Levla stares at the dog for a full minute. "He's not for sale." "No." "…Can I pet him?" (ch. 154). Kompis reads Levla's threads as receipts ("He's never been given anything.", ch. 153), then sees the first thread Levla didn't pay for, to the dog (ch. 159). Levla's tag on Kompis, EVERYTHING YOU'RE WAITING FOR, kept the Menders off him (ch. 347).
• Rougeina: the erased can't be sold. She asks, "How much for the people nobody remembers?" He has no answer, which bothers him for a saga.
• Trollmage: tries to buy his waiting. "It's not done yet."
• Smurjan: offers to buy the consumed. Bakasura: "…No." Levla doesn't argue with that voice.
• Öde: two Greeds: one who sells memories, one who'd die before losing one. She hates him; he can't stop thinking about her.
• Iskall: in her flame he sees a price tag where his childhood should be (ch. 256: a small brass tag swinging on a string, SOLD. "Ah. Right. I sold it. My childhood. To buy a world I don't even own any more." / "The flame can't make a joy that isn't there. I'm sorry.").
• Flexsnus ("Flexi"): his childhood friend on Skatt, and he didn't remember. Half-recognised twice ("bends rules exactly like someone I don't remember", ch. 231; "a boy who kept his debts in a tin lid", ch. 242). In Iskall's Circle, Flexsnus's happiest moment was the day of the kite, and the boy laughing hardest in it was Levla ("…That's me.", ch. 256). "Why didn't you say?" / "Skatt's law, mate. Telling you doesn't stick. I tried, once. Years ago. You looked right through me." / "I'm sorry." / "Don't be. You still owe me a kite." Flexsnus bought his childhood back and gave it to him free, in Levla's own words from Glasheim: "Put it on nobody's tab." / "That's mine. That's what I said." / "I know, mate. I heard about it. I was very proud." (ch. 260). "…Flexi. I called you Flexi." / "Nobody's called me that since." / "I owe you a kite." / "You owe me a thousand kites." The kites: the first, from a stolen Dimmer ledger page, on Lumen's beach: "That's one!" / "Nine hundred and ninety-nine to go!" (ch. 263); the second, from a stripper's licence, on the Upp Igen's rail: "That's two!" / "Nine hundred and ninety-eight to go!" (ch. 275). He is the only one Flexsnus calls "mate".
• Skymning, the Bottler: bought his childhood at auction (Lot one) and kept it in a vial. On the seventh hill, emptied, Skymning felt his own sorrow, and Levla knew the hole: "I know that hole. I was that hole. Till about an hour ago." He gave him a hand up: "The first one's always sorrow. The joy comes later. You've got to earn it, this time. No auctions." (ch. 262)
• Jeppson: priced untouchable, PRICE: ELEVEN DAYS (ch. 266). "Thank you. Mind the heap."
• Läka: paid EVERYTHING YOU'RE WAITING FOR with twenty-six years of waiting; he gave it back free (ch. 347–350).
• Vante and Hedda: the plateless boy he priced at everything he owns, which is nothing (ch. 315).
• Svala: her bodyguard tag, and the girl who flew past his bought number (ch. 368).
• Räva: she has robbed him three times. He has never found out how. He respects it deeply.
• Pyssel: his friend; the one thing on Skatt he never bought.
• Ölund and the Ränta: once his collectors, now his hunters.

• "Everything has a price, Off-the-List. Even you. Especially you."
• "Nice sword. Forty. No, thirty-eight."
• "He's not for sale." "No." "…Can I pet him?"
• "Round numbers are expensive."
• "Take them. All of them. No charge. …Huh. So that's what that feels like."
• "…The day of the kite. You fell in the fountain." (ch. 260)
• "…Flexi. I called you Flexi." (ch. 260)
• "It's never small." (ch. 273)
• "…Sold. Not to you." (ch. 266, 278)
• "It's exact. Everything I own. To the farthing." / "You own nothing." / "Exactly." (ch. 315)
• "It wasn't sold, captain. It was spent." (ch. 357)
• "…Collection." (ch. 367)