Perne

• Build & height: 1.70 m, lean and still, long-armed, with a climber's forearms and shoulders a little rounded from years of lying prone along yards and mast-tops. She stands with her weight on one hip and never fidgets. Age 29 at debut.
• Face: narrow and weathered: wind-red cheekbones, a thin straight mouth, a permanent squint-crease between the brows. A pale strap-line runs across her brow and cheek where the patch sits. At rest she is always looking at something far away.
• Hair: ash-brown, cropped short under the hood so it never blows across the scope. One longer lock at the nape is tied with sail-twine, and she forgets it's there.
• Eyes: grey-green, the colour of fog over shallow water. When the Long Look is on, the open eye glows crimson: the iris rings red from the rim inward, like a lamp being turned up. After every look a single crimson tear runs from the open eye, and that is the first price the reader learns to watch for.
• Skin & sin-mark: wind-tanned. Wrath, crimson (precision). The script circles both eye-sockets like a gun-sight's reticle: four short crimson ticks at the compass points round each eye, with tiny range-numbers written in the script between them. Only the ring round the open eye glows; the ring under the patch lies dark. At K-III the ticks have lengthened toward the temples as fine ranging lines.
• Clothing, layer by layer: an oiled-wool undershirt · a quilted lookout's vest with a dozen brass cartridge-loops · the hooded grey-green coat, long and oilskin-lined, its deep hood cut to shade the open eye · fingerless leather gloves (the trigger finger bare) · soft-soled climbing boots · a brass lookout's whistle on a cord · two eyepatches: one worn, one hanging at her throat for tomorrow.
• Signature item: the patch, over whichever eye is resting, and Fjärran, her rifle.
• Movement: still. She moves only to climb. She turns her head, not her eyes, to look: open eye first. She switches the patch at dawn, and the head-tilt reverses with it. When she fires, nothing moves but one finger; the recoil goes into the mast. Her hits arrive before their sound: the target drops, and a panel later the report comes in, small and far away.
• Voice: low, flat and sparse. She talks like a lookout's report: bearing, distance, count, then one dry fact. "Sail. Two points off the bow. Eleven miles. Black flag. One's asleep on the yard." Her balloons are long and narrow like a spyglass, and when she's calling a target a tiny crimson reticle sits where the tail begins.

Perne can see across any distance, in the present. Fog, walls, night, storm, a ship's hull, a mountain's shoulder: if it is happening now and she knows which way to look, she sees it as clearly as her own hand.

• One eye at a time: the open one.
• Present only. Not the past, not the future (the future is Ögar's road).
• She must know the bearing. The Long Look goes where she points it. It doesn't search for her.
• Within the horizon (from a mast-top, about eleven miles), looking through something (fog, a wall, a screen, night) costs a crimson tear and an hour of that eye seeing no colour.
• Past the horizon, the price is the eye itself: blind for a day for every horizon she looks past.
• Blind-near: while the Long Look is on she can't see anything within arm's reach. The far eye is far. She has to trust whoever is at the foot of the mast.
• What it can't do:
  • Mingus. She can see him at any distance; he's the easiest thing in the world to find, a spot of gold. But her crosshairs won't settle on him. There is no correct shot at Mingus, so her Wrath slides off him like a hand off warm glass. In the Long Beat he is never one of the counted ticks: he is the gold pulse the beat is measured in.
  • The Null. Phase One holds. She sees its edge and the not-yet-taken inside it, and nothing the Null has uncounted. Nothing she fires into the grey ever lands.
  • Help. Seeing isn't saving. That is her whole life.

• Tempo: 72.
• Home tempo: the Perch, the Upp Igen's crow's nest. Jeppson built it with a rifle-rest that takes Fjärran's whole weight, so her tempo goes into the eye and not the arms, and it rides above the fog-line of any harbour. From the Perch the horizon is always hers.
• Heartbeat technique: THE LONG BEAT. Her eye holds one beat open across miles, and inside it she sees every moving thing within the horizon at once: sails, gulls, swimmers, a hand closing on a sword-hilt eleven miles away, each marked with a tiny crimson tick. No one else sees a whole horizon in one heartbeat. (Hallbard's Sweep touches every ship but he sees only what the Beam lights; Ögar sees eight thousand endings of one person; Perne sees everything that moves, now.)
• Burn cost (and the HADOM OVERFLOW rule): the eye, as always, plus the count. Seeing is free, but marking is counting, and her heart can count 72 things in one beat. She can see ten thousand moving things; she may mark (hold as targets, call to the crew) only as many as her tempo. Mark more and the beat overflows: the open eye floods crimson, her heart jams open and light starts at the sternum. It happened once. So in every full Long Beat she chooses what not to count, the hardest thing a lookout ever does.

The eye she looks far with goes blind for a day for every horizon she looks past. She wears the patch over whichever eye is resting and switches at dawn. The eye-tally is notched into Fjärran's stock in two columns, left and right: the days each eye still owes. On the page, every time: the patch flipped, a notch cut, and when she overspends, two patches and a lookout who can't see her own feet. Within the horizon the price is smaller, but it's always shown: a crimson tear, and an hour of grey in that eye. The deeper price: she sees everything coming, from farther away than anyone alive, and she is almost always too far away to do anything but say it. She saw her father go under from a bell-tower a league off. Every lookout's nightmare is hers, every day. And home: she can see Töcken from anywhere, any day she can spare an eye. She never looks.

• Blind-near: while she looks far, she can't see a knife at her back. Always draw someone at the foot of her mast.
• Rest days: her blind side is predictable to anyone who has watched her for two days. She breaks the pattern with the Patch-Flip, and pays for it.
• Two patches: spend both eyes and she's blind for days.
• Stillness: the Long Beat marks moving things. An enemy who doesn't move (a still sniper, a held breath, a man frozen in Isa's Hold) is invisible to it.
• A beat ahead: the Seers' Guild (K-III, swallowing Ögar's stolen tears) step out of a sight-line a beat before she looks. She sees the present; they live one beat past it.
• Overflow: a battlefield with more moving things than she can count tempts her to mark them all.
• The Null: she can see its edge and nothing more: a lookout who can see anything, facing the one thing that can't be seen.

• Fjärran ("Far-Off"): a long single-shot, bolt-loaded rifle with a brass barrel and a telescope brazed along it. Jeppson brazed scope and barrel together after a fall broke the old mount, and nobody else is allowed to touch either. Long brass cartridges with crimson-lacquered tips. No soul inside. (Kompis checked: "Huh. Nobody home." Perne: "Good. I don't share.") The eye-tally is notched into the stock.
• The two patches: soft black leather, stitched by Emma. The inside of each is painted with a tiny open eye, so she always knows which one is resting.
• The brass whistle: lookout's code to the deck. One long: sail. Two short: danger. Three: man overboard. (A trill, invented Saga V: "your dog is looking at me.")
• Dog biscuits in the cartridge pouch, from Saga V, Arc 1 on. She says they're for the gulls.
• The UPP IGEN: a broad, battered three-masted carrack, sunk five times and raised five times, every raising a band of differently coloured planks along her sides (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!" Perne's post is the Perch. She sleeps up there in good weather, and Tihi is the only one allowed to climb up uninvited.

She doesn't fight; she sees first. She opens from the highest point she can reach with the Spotter's Call, then picks the one shot that changes the fight (the signal-man, the false lamp, the chain-pin, the hand about to cut a rope) and fires it once. She finishes by calling the clean way out. She almost never fires twice at the same target. Crew combos (the Up-Again crew):

• Perne + Krydog, "Second Blow": she sees the second attacker winding up and calls it, so the captain is never floored twice in one beat.
• Perne + Daniel, "the Far Witness": she saw it from eleven miles away, so she is a true witness to things nobody else was near. (Daniel never calls her for his own crew's cases. He won't allow the bias.)
• Perne + Emma, "Marking in the Ring": from inside Emma's circle the Keeping Beat means no heart can overflow, so she can mark past 72 in a Long Beat. Emma pays the beats.
• Perne + Tihi: Perne calls the pockets from the Perch, and Tihi picks them.
• Perne + Jeppson: he chalks a stair to a high place that isn't there yet; she climbs it and fires from it before the hour is up.
• Perne + Flexsnus: she sees him palm things from across a harbour. They hold whole conversations in eyebrows.

Marka combos:

• Perne + Kompis, "First Look, Last Shot": she sees it past the horizon and calls the bearing; he Subticks the shot along her line, with Tyst, so nothing hears it coming. Or the other way round: Kompis lends her a Shared Beat, and she fires on the version he survived.
• Perne + Rougeina, "the Scope-Swap": through Fjärran's telescope Rougeina can see something miles away, and anything she can see she can Swap with. Her phantom trail runs for miles. (Perne hates lending the scope. She does it anyway.)
• Perne + Svala: Svala can't turn once she launches, so before she does, Perne looks down the whole line and tells her what's waiting at the end of it.
• Perne + Smurjan: two Wraths, two kinds of precision. The Sightline finds the one point; the Long Look finds it at eleven miles.
• Perne + Drekk: he reads the Beam and she reads the horizon. (Drekk, of the too-close horizon in ch. 199: "That one's lying." Perne, Saga V: "It isn't lying. It's closer.")

• Wants: to see something coming in time to stop it. Just once, she'd like seeing to be saving.
• Fears: the crew going under while she watches from too far away to do anything.
• Contradiction: she can see a coin on a beach eleven miles off and can't find her spoon on the table. She lets nobody stand closer than a rifle's length, until a dog does.
• Humour: dry, deadpan reports at the worst moment ("Three ships. Now four. Now… no. Still three. One's a whale."). The rivalry with Kompis is the only time she brags.
• Habits: switches the patch at dawn; cuts the tally; counts sails under her breath; names the gulls that land on the Perch; never sits with her back to open water.
• Alone: she sits on the Perch with both eyes uncovered and looks at nothing far at all: the deck, her hands, the rope. That's how she rests. Some nights she turns toward Töcken, and doesn't look.

• Kompis + Mingus: rival sharpshooters, her Long Look against his Subtick. "You live it a thousand times. I look once." / "Once is enough if you look far enough." They keep a running score from Saga V on, and neither will admit it's tied. Mingus decided she's fine from a mile away, and she has carried biscuits ever since.
• Krydog: her captain. The day they met on the Reject Quay he told her: "You're not half a sniper. You're a sniper who rests."
• Daniel: the other quiet one. She saw the truth through a screen for him on the first day, and he trusts her eyes more than his own.
• Emma: stitches the patches, keeps a second copy of the tally, and is the only one who can get her down off the Perch (by asking).
• Tihi: the only one allowed up the Perch uninvited.
• Jeppson: built the Perch and brazed the scope. She trusts his hands more than anyone's except her own.
• Drekk: the only other person on either ship who takes a horizon personally.
• Hallbard: the Beam and the Long Look. He sees only what his light touches; she sees what it misses.
• Ögar: the woman who sees every ending and not the present, and the woman who sees only the present. "You see how it ends." / "You see where it is."

• "Seeing isn't saving. That's what the rifle's for."
• "Sail. Two points off the bow. Eleven miles. Black flag. One's asleep on the yard."
• "Your dog looked at me. From a mile off. Nobody looks at me from a mile off."
• "He's burning them. Left hand. Behind the screen." (the founding day)
• "It isn't a giant. It's a scab. And under it… it's you two. Still fighting." (ch. 388)