Orm

• Build & height: 1.88 m, tall and elegant, long in the arm and finger, narrow-shouldered. He stands like a clerk at a counter: weight even, hands held a little forward, as if about to take a receipt.
• Face: long, smooth, clean-shaven, pleasant. At rest it wears the polite smile of a debt collector (ch. 6), the smile that never reaches the eyes. From ch. 20: one clean line of scar from brow to jaw, drawn as a single stroke and nothing more: Kali's black-glass sickle ("That's for making me do chores.").
• Hair: ash-blond, combed flat and parted with a ruler, never a strand loose. When he runs (and he runs), it is the first thing to come apart.
• Eyes: pale grey, attentive, a little bored. They go truly blank for one heartbeat only once in the saga: when his fingers close on the air where Mingus's threads should be ("…What? There's no line.").
• Clothing, layer by layer: a high-collared white shirt · a dove-grey waistcoat with a watch-pocket and no watch · a long coat the grey-white of Trisdel paperwork (ch. 6), cut like a magistrate's, with deep cuffs · fine gloves (Arc 1: plain white kid; Arc 3: brand-new white gloves stitched with silver, ch. 19) · polished shoes he can walk on water in without wetting.
• Signature item: the golden threads. Thin gold lines hang from every fingertip and trail behind him "like the reins of a hundred invisible horses" (ch. 6). Not one of them is his own.
• Movement: unhurried, courteous, economical. He never fights with his hands; his hands are busy. He pulls, twists, re-knots: small wrist movements, the gestures of someone untangling a necklace. When the knot is cut he moves for the first time like a hunted animal: over rooftops, across waves, gone.
• Voice: soft, mid-pitched, clerical. He speaks in office language about love ("proper attachments", "cut the inventory", "tidy up your attachments"). His balloons are neat rectangles with a thin double border, like a form; when he loses control (ch. 6, P34; ch. 20, P31) the border breaks.
• Variant looks: Full harp (ch. 19–20: both fists packed with hundreds of threads, a whole street strung up a stair). Empty-handed (ch. 6: gloves smoking and empty, plate flickering). Cut (ch. 20 onward: the brow-to-jaw line). Leash gone (ch. 25: on a far rooftop, staring at his stitched gloves, which are holding nothing).

Orm lifts the thread between two people out of the air, unties it, and re-knots it to something else. The person on the near end keeps their body, their skill and their strength, and turns all of it toward the new attachment.

• Every stolen thread runs through one knot in his own fist. That is the whole structure, and the whole weakness: cut the knot and every stolen bond snaps home at once, including strangers' a sea away (ch. 6).
• Scale: one thread at a time in Arc 1 ("amateur work"), a whole street of two hundred people by Arc 3 (ch. 19–20).
• It needs a thread. Mingus has no line at all ("There's no line on it."), so Orm can't detach him and has to grab him by the scruff, which wakes the Sabre Lion (ch. 6).
• It moves people, not souls in guns. Ivar's ghost grips the trigger from inside: "I don't shoot friends, boy." A gun-soul has its own opinion ("A gun with an opinion. How provincial.").
• It can be borrowed. When Kali takes his sin for a minute his gloves go dark and the threads go slack "like reins dropped by a driver who has fallen asleep" (ch. 20), and she can re-tie them home.

• Tempo: 260.
• Home tempo: a crowded street of the Prime, best of all Glasheim: more threads per metre than anywhere in the nine realms, and he is fastest where there is most to take.
• Heartbeat technique: THE TURNED HAND. Inside one heartbeat he re-ties a thread mid-motion, so a blow that has already begun changes target before it lands (Marka's anchor, swung at Drekk's head, ch. 6). The swing is honest; only its loyalty is new. No one else turns a blow by turning the heart behind it.
• Burn cost (HADOM OVERFLOW): Orm has no thread of his own, so every thread he holds is carried by his heart alone, and his ceiling is the number of bonds he can hold in one beat. A street (about two hundred) is near it. Reach for a city and the beat overflows: gold light pours from his palms, the gloves burn through, and the heart can't close. Short of that, every re-tie leaves a hairline gold cut on a fingertip; his fingers under the gloves are a lattice of them.

• The knot. Every stolen thread runs through the one he holds himself. Kompis's Subtick reads a hundred attempts until it finds it, and one shot from Ivar severs it (ch. 6).
• The borrower. Kali takes his sin for sixty seconds and re-ties the whole street home (ch. 20).
• Mingus. No line to pull; grabbing him by hand wakes the Sabre Lion (ch. 6), who throws Orm across the sea like a skipped stone. (Mingus only guards; Kompis and Vigolas beat him.)
• Souls with opinions. Ivar refuses twice (ch. 6, ch. 20).
• He runs. "He runs a lot for a K-four." / "Twice now." (ch. 20).
• How he was beaten: ch. 6, Kompis's Subtick shot through the knot, then Vigolas's punch ("That's for pointing my friend at me."): "A K-IV, beaten by a K-II, a K-III and a man the board can't count." Ch. 20, Kali's borrow and re-tie, her sickle across his face; he fled over the rooftops.

• The gloves. Arc 1: plain white, burned through when the knot was cut ("You've cut the inventory—"). Arc 3: white stitched with silver; the stitching glows while his sin is working and goes dark when it is borrowed.
• The communication shard. A small white shard connected to Baldr's desk, left floating on the sea where he stood (ch. 6). Kompis crushed it after saying "I am not a tool."
• The coat of paperwork grey. Nothing in its pockets. He keeps nothing he can't wear.
• No minions. His soldiers are whoever he has borrowed this morning.

• Wants: to be attached. He has made a profession of the one thing he lacks.
• Fears: being seen as empty. Kompis says it aloud ("You've got nobody of your own, have you.") and Vigolas repeats it ("Still got nobody of your own, Orm?"), and for the first time the smile is gone.
• Contradictions: a man made of love-threads who has never loved; a K-IV who is most afraid of a kind old man ("He's never angry. He has never even met most of the people he's ruined. That's what you should be afraid of.").
• Humour: dry, condescending, clerical ("A gun with an opinion. How provincial.").
• Habits: practises ("I've been practising since our last meeting"); straightens his cuffs after every re-tie.
• Alone: sits on high roofs and watches threads cross the streets below, the way a starving man watches a kitchen window.

• Kompis: his mirror. Kompis reads threads, Orm keeps them. Orm turned Kompis's rifle on his captain; Kompis found the knot.
• Vigolas: punched him across the sea; asked the question that hurts.
• Mingus: "There's no line on it." The one creature he can't hold.
• Kali: borrowed his sin, re-tied his street and cut his face. She found him disgusting, which is the closest anyone has come to knowing him.
• Marka & Drekk: re-tied against each other on the Kettle's deck (ch. 6).
• Baldr: his handler; Orm's fear of him is the best warning the crew ever got.
• Ivar: "I won't." / "I wasn't going to ask."
• Roffe: the table he can't turn, and the bowl he's offered ("Everyone eats… Enemies included.").

• "Asset Kompis. Your engagement has been terminated. Please return to your proper attachments." (ch. 6)
• "Oh, I see. The dog. The dog is how he's held. …Detach the dog." (ch. 6)
• "…What? There's no line. There's no line on it." (ch. 6)
• "Good morning, Glasheim. Let's tidy up your attachments." (ch. 19)
• "Your sin reads threads, Kompis. Mine keeps them. Which do you suppose wins?" (ch. 20)
• "The old man isn't angry with you. He's never angry. …That's what you should be afraid of." (ch. 20)