Silversten

• Build & height: 1.86 m, tall and elegant, about fifty (ch. 180), with a courtier's posture and a shopkeeper's hands.
• Face: the left half of his face is living silver: "smooth, mirror-bright, as if poured." Silver veins thread down his neck into his collar; when he smiles, his teeth are silver (ch. 180). After twenty coins (ch. 184) his whole face is "a mask of living silver with two coins for eyes." After his defeat (ch. 187–188) the mask is cracked, flaking away like old paint, and underneath is "grey, old, human" skin: half flesh, half cracked silver.
• Hair: iron-grey, swept back neatly under a folded veil.
• Eyes: one grey and ordinary; the other a silver coin. Then both coins. Then, at the end, coins weeping back out of them one by one.
• Clothing, layer by layer: white robes trimmed with silver thread · a silver-mesh veil folded back over his head · a silk coin-pouch at the belt that "clinks heavily" (ch. 184). After: the same robes, torn.
• Signature item: the coin-tears: Ögar's stolen silver tears, each in a small labelled glass jar on the tables of his shop-barge, and in his pouch.
• Movement: serene, unhurried, courteous; under CERTAINTY he walks a silver line a beat ahead of himself, and fists land where he was. 184).
• Voice: polite, mild, a merchant's ("I just like to be polite first."); he counts the seconds aloud ("Thirty-one seconds.", "Eleven minutes."). After twenty coins, "a voice like coins in a jar": his balloons get a silver, faceted edge and tiny coin-shapes in the tail.
• Variant looks: The shopkeeper (ch. 180: on the white barge among jars of tears). Full silver (ch. 184: twenty coins swallowed, both eyes coins, outlines everywhere). No road (ch. 187: every outline going out, pop, pop, pop). Cracked (ch. 187: on his knees among spilled coins, both hands over his face, weeping silver). Penitent (ch. 188: kneeling at the Pillar, reading names aloud).

He swallows one of Ögar's stolen coin-tears, and for one minute he cannot lose: he sees the one road where he wins, and walks it.

• More coins, more minutes. Twenty at once (ch. 184): "You keep winning by a beat. So I bought more beats." Twenty minutes, dozens of outlines, "every road he'll ever need."
• The Guild's trick: every Seer (SEER · K-III TESTED · the Guild of Thanatos) swallows a tear to move a beat ahead: they step out of Isa's sight-line before she looks.

• Tempo: 480.
• Home tempo: the mist round the Pillar of Names, among the Guild's barges, where the future is stocked in jars.
• Heartbeat technique: THE ONLY ROAD. Inside one heartbeat he sees every road the next minute could take and steps onto the one where he wins; everything else is just walking it. No one else chooses the future a beat at a time from a shelf of other people's tears.
• Burn cost (HADOM OVERFLOW): every coin silvers him, and every coin is a death Ögar wept, swallowed and not felt. His overflow is delayed: twenty deaths taken in at once (ch. 184) sat in him unfelt, until the roads closed, and then they came back out through his eyes, coin by coin, and he finally felt them: "That's feeling, Silversten. Twenty deaths. You swallowed them. They're finally reaching you." (Ögar, ch. 187)

Every coin he swallows silvers him: his veins, his teeth, his fingertips, half his face (beats), and he stopped feeling. Ögar: "You don't feel it any more, do you. Every coin is a death I wept. You swallow them and you don't feel a single one." / "Feeling is inefficient, sister." (ch. 180) Twenty at once: "you'll die twenty deaths at once and not feel one of them—" / "Then I won't feel it. That's rather the point, sister." (ch. 184)

• The road nobody sees. Vigolas, whose ending someone keeps rewriting.
• Closing every road. Ögar named the fourth loop ("The fourth loop. Not the first. The fourth."), Kompis paid for one Subtick loop instead of a thousand, and THE FIVE-GUN VOLLEY (first use) shut his roads one by one (Ivar ahead, Lilla Ulv from behind, Fru Gnista overhead, Tyst at the ankles, Bror shoving the crew out of the line), leaving one gap, for Vigolas (ch. 187).
• Ögar's Endless Mourning broke his army's charge (ch. 187), though not him: "Magnificent, sister. Truly. But I didn't look."
• Mingus: the Sabre Lion came when he ordered "the asset of Architect Three" taken: "…That wasn't on the road." (ch. 186)
• How he was beaten (ch. 187): "…There's no— there's no road—" / "Yeah. I don't use those." An Emerald Knuckle from a road that never existed, KRAKOOM; the silver mask cracked like ice. The coins wept back out, the silver flaked away, and he felt it: "…The villages. All the villages. I wrote them down so neatly." Kompis, Bror in hand, chose not to hurt him ("He's hurting enough. You don't hurt people, remember?"). "…I didn't see it. Thirty years. I've seen everything. I didn't see it." / "Nobody does. It's kind of my thing."

• The coin-tears in labelled jars ("Which Architect falls next." "Which child to recruit." "Whether the harvest fails in the south.": Kali, reading the labels: "These people sold the weather!"). All returned to Ögar (ch. 188).
• The white shop-barge, canopied in silver silk: tables, ledgers, scales.
• The Futures House: a three-deck archive-barge of ledgers by year, every future sold and every buyer, a thousand villages in it. Broken in ch. 187.
• The Seers' Guild: white robes, silver-mesh veils, coin-pouches, a beat ahead of everyone; fleets of white barges. Broken (ch. 187); its last barges left without him.

He doesn't fight; he chooses the future. Polite first ("I just like to be polite first."), then a coin, then a minute in which every blow misses and every counter lands, while he counts the seconds aloud. Against the one man he can't see, he hides behind everyone he can. He besieges with numbers (a hundred Seers, each a beat ahead) and flushes his target with fire. Guild combo: Silversten + the Seers: a hundred people one beat ahead, steered by one who can see a minute.

• Wants: certainty. A future with no surprises, bought and labelled.
• Fears: the blank road; and, under that, feeling.
• Contradictions: a man who lived a hundred deaths and refused to feel one; a clerk of catastrophes who wrote them down "so neatly"; he calls Ögar "sister" and sold her tears.
• Humour: dry, urbane ("I foresaw that too."); Ögar's answer: "You look like a spoon, Silversten."
• Habits: holds a jar up to the light before a deal; counts.
• Alone (now): kneels at the Pillar and reads the villages aloud, slowly, so Öde can write them down.

• Ögar: "Sister." His old order-sister, whose tears he sold: "I give them. I never sell them." She lifted the blindfold on his army, and told him what he was finally feeling.
• Kompis: the asset whose village he sold. Kompis could have killed him, and holstered Bror.
• Vigolas: the hole in the future. "The Council of Four would give a chair for your ending, pirate." / "I've seen the poster. Good likeness."
• Bror (Lillebror, Slimo): the five-year-old marked NOT REQUIRED on his ledger, who asked "…Are we going to hurt him?"
• Öde: sat down beside him without being asked, with reed pen and dark ink: "Slower. I'm writing them down." / "…Why do you keep them?" / "Because you sold them. Somebody should keep them."
• Pim and the lantern-children: the hall he set on fire.
• Mörda: found the face his ledger never recorded.
• Baldr (Architect Three): the buyer.

• "Sister Ögar. You look exactly as I foresaw." (ch. 180)
• "…One minute. For one minute, I can't lose." (ch. 180)
• "Feeling is inefficient, sister." (ch. 180)
• "Oh, I know you. I was the clerk on that sale. We sold your village." (ch. 180)
• "You keep winning by a beat. So I bought more beats." (ch. 184)
• "…I didn't see it. Thirty years. I've seen everything. I didn't see it." (ch. 187)