Sigvat

• Build & height: 1.74 m, thin, narrow-chested, prim: a clerk's body that moves like thirty under a face that looks seventy (ch. 10). Through Arc 2 the body catches up with the face: by ch. 13 he leans on a staff, by ch. 14 he is white-haired and stooped, by ch. 16 he can barely hold the scroll.
• Face: narrow, lined far beyond his years, mouth small and exact. At rest: the patience of a man reading a long document aloud to people who aren't listening. Dead, in the Arena: young, unlined, thirty, and almost kind.
• Hair: alive: thinning, grey going white, and falling out while he reads; hairs drift onto the scroll and he brushes them off without looking (ch. 10). Dead: thick, neat and dark (ch. 74–75).
• Eyes: pale, watery, steady behind spectacles with no glass in them. Kali, at the top of her voice: "what's even the POINT of spectacles with no GLASS". He finally folds them away in ch. 76.
• Clothing, layer by layer: a high-buttoned black shirt · robes of printed black-and-white, like a page of print (ch. 10), columns of tiny unreadable type running down the cloth · a narrow belt with a scroll-case · a plain handkerchief (he coughs grey dust into it, ch. 10) · from ch. 13, a clerk's walking staff.
• Signature item: the scroll, sealed at the foot with a black wax seal shaped like a closed eye, Architect Two's mark. His last one is "the longest scroll in the world", unrolling down a ridge into a valley like a black-and-white river (ch. 14).
• Movement: stands still and reads. Never runs, never strikes, never raises his voice. He turns a page, pushes up the glassless spectacles with one inked finger, and carries on.
• Voice: dry, steady, a drone, "calm as a clock". Decree-text is set in italic print inside quotation marks, in long thin balloons shaped like strips of paper; on the dawn splash one balloon runs the whole length of the spread (ch. 14). When the sound is taken from him his balloon is cut off mid-word, the letters fading (ch. 15).
• Variant looks: Thirty that looks seventy (ch. 10). Ancient at dawn (ch. 14–16: white hair blowing, staff, trembling arms). Edited (ch. 16: his own fingertips going grey, frozen between two halves of a sentence). Dead and thirty (ch. 74–76: dark hair, young hands, the crimson scar). Done (ch. 76: spectacles folded into his robe, one open palm raised from the front row).

Sigvat reads an erasure decree aloud. Whatever it names greys and is uncounted, word by word, exactly as he says it.

• Word by word: "Dwellings": the longhouses fade like ink in water. "Hearths": the fires go colourless mid-flame. "Paths": the stone steps dissolve under fleeing feet (ch. 10). Trollmage: "Every word fades exactly when he says it. Not before. Not after."
• Uncounted means the world forgets to keep it (ch. 10's caption). Fjellheim became a flat grey field "shaped like nothing", and stays gone (its troll child is among Solvig's erased faces, ch. 209).
• The decree must be HEARD. That is the rule the whole of Arc 2 turns on (ch. 10, 14, 15).
• The writ is Solvig's. He reads "under the hand of Architect Two"; the black closed-eye seal is her mark. Outside her Vault a writ must be read aloud and heard; Sigvat is the best reader she ever had ("Sigvat would've read the whole hill in one breath!", the Twin Clerks, ch. 68).
• Dead, he needs no paper: "I read it ten thousand times. I don't need the paper. …The paper was for the people who needed to see it." (ch. 75) And he can decree small: "The floor before the soul designated SMURJAN."
• What it can't do: name a soul that isn't written down anywhere: Kali ("You're not written anywhere." / "Never have been! Rude, honestly!"), Bakasura, Röta ("Nobody bore me. Nobody made me. I grew."), and Smurjan himself once he has been uncounted ("There's nothing there."). It can't name Mingus (no line; the grey stops at his paws) or ∞−1 ("Nobody can count me. Not even to zero.", Solvig's arc). It can't unwrite an Arena verdict (ch. 76). It can't touch anything that doesn't hear it.

• Tempo: 240 (one word per action: a word is an act).
• Home tempo: dead, in the HADOM Arena, where "dead men don't pay" and every decree is free. Alive, he was fastest on a ridge at dawn, where sound carries furthest.
• Burn cost (HADOM OVERFLOW): a decree longer than his tempo can't be breathed in one beat. The Trinity decree ("the soul designated TRINITY, and all who shelter it": a valley, its river, its pines, its children) ran to thousands of words and had to be read across a whole morning. Forced into one breath, the beat would overflow: grey light out of his mouth instead of words, and the reader uncounted by his own sentence. Short of that, the year each decree costs arrives all at once: grey dust in the handkerchief, a handful of hair on the page.

Every decree he reads costs him a year of his life. "Every decree I ever read cost me a year. I was thirty, and I looked like my grandfather." (ch. 75) It is shown on the page as it happens: age spots arriving on his knuckles mid-scroll, hair falling onto the parchment, grey dust in the handkerchief (ch. 10), a staff by ch. 13, a white-haired ancient by dawn (ch. 14). His last words alive put the price in one line: "…Thirty years old. I was only thirty." Dead, he pays nothing, and is thirty for the first time: "I've never been thirty before."

• Silence. The decree must be heard. Trollmage: "So nobody gets to hear anything." MACRO : SILENCE = DAWN (ch. 15) took the sound out of the dawn and his decree fell unheard.
• Editing. One night's waiting, one word: MACRO : EDIT "TRINITY" = "SIGVAT" (ch. 16). He read "the soul designated SIGV—", his own fingertips greyed, and he froze between two halves of a sentence he could neither finish nor unsay.
• Precision. Smurjan's first Wrath strike, the one correct blow, drawn as one crimson line through scroll, seal and man (ch. 16). In the Arena, the same strike into the same scar (ch. 76).
• The unwritten. Kali and Bakasura are in no book; Smurjan, uncounted by the finished sentence, had "nothing left for you to read" (ch. 76).
• Noise. The voice war (ch. 75): Kali's flood of talk and Bakasura's roar drown his words. It fails only because the living need breath and "I'm dead. I have all the time there is."
• How he was beaten: ch. 16 (dead): Trollmage's edit + Smurjan's strike. Ch. 76 (in the Arena): the crew held Smurjan's name outside, Marka's "Get up, big man" inside, the decree finding nothing, and Smurjan's palm in the old scar. THE MATCH DECIDES. SMURJAN.

• The scrolls, each sealed with Architect Two's black closed-eye seal. Break scroll and seal together and the unfinished grey drains away.
• The glassless spectacles, folded into his robe at the end (ch. 76).
• The Cleaners: six in printed black-and-white robes on the ridge at Fjellheim (ch. 10); one was erasure-killed by Rougeina at the camp (ch. 13).
• The Twin Clerks, Four-Eleven and Four-Twelve, his lieutenants: left tied up at the gorge (ch. 12), back without him in Saga II ("Without Sigvat? Then who's reading?"), and they take off their hats for his line in THE DEAD (ch. 76).
• The grey hounds, Null-touched beasts (ch. 14).

• Wants: to finish. "The Arena doesn't like unfinished things. Neither do I."
• Fears: nothing on the page; he has "stopped counting". The nearest thing to fear is the instant he sees his own name on his own scroll.
• Contradictions: an eraser who is gentle; a man who wrote the dead out of the world and was the first to be written into its new column of the dead.
• Humour: bone-dry and accidental: "Very good. Very brave. Very loud." / "Don't be sorry. Be quiet. I'm reading."
• Habits: pushes up glassless spectacles; brushes his own hair off the page; coughs into a handkerchief and doesn't look at it.
• Alone: reads. Aloud. To no one.

• Smurjan: killed him twice, with the same strike in the same scar; the second time caught him before he hit the floor. "I'm sorry." / "WE'RE sorry." / "Don't be sorry. Be quiet. I'm reading."
• Trollmage: edited him. "…You edited a decree of Architect Two." / "Only one word. I'm very lazy."
• Kali: the loudest woman alive against the driest voice; she is the proof that his book has limits.
• Bakasura: won't eat him ("…Not… inside."); Kali: "Eat him and he's one of us. Forever. In there. Reading."
• Solvig: his Architect; every decree he read was signed by her hand (ch. 209, 213: "You signed Fjellheim. Sigvat's village.").
• Marka: died in his silenced dawn, holding Bakasura's jaws open. He never knew her name.
• Grandmother Ulla and the Dresk trolls: the people he read out of their homes.
• The Twin Clerks: his lieutenants and mourners.

• "By decree of the Null Protocol, under the hand of Architect Two…" (ch. 10, 14, 75)
• "Not on the decree. Pity. …Next village." (ch. 10)
• "At dawn, I read the last decree. 'The soul designated TRINITY,' …'and all who shelter it.'" (ch. 13)
• "…Thirty years old. I was only thirty." (ch. 16)
• "Rule Five. The Arena may call the dead. …There. Now I'm enrolled. I was already dead, so it cost me nothing." (ch. 74)
• "I never finished my sentence." (ch. 74)
• "…Thirty. It was nice. Being thirty." (ch. 76)