Tyngd

• The name: tyngd = weight, heaviness; also gravity in the sense of gravitas (a word with tyngd carries weight). His world is Tyngden, "the Weight", and he is its king.

• Build & height: 2.4 m and as broad as a doorway (1.3 m across the shoulders), built like a landslide: slabs of muscle, no neck, legs like bridge pilings.
• Face: heavy-jawed, slate-grey skin, a brow like a cliff ledge, a mouth that turns down by its own weight. Burst blood-vessels web his cheeks and the whites of his eyes: pressure, always.
• Hair: iron-grey, cropped to the skull. A short grey beard, flattened against his chest.
• Eyes: small and deep-set, dark grey, bloodshot from pressure. They never look up. On Tyngden nothing does. (Until ch. 367: "His small bloodshot eyes, for once, looking up.")
• Skin & sin-mark: grey as slate. Gluttony, amber, integration: taking things into yourself. He has taken his world's weight into his own body. Amber cracks run through his skin like lava under lead, brightest where the weight sits (spine, knees, knuckles). At K-IV they have fused into a dull amber halo around his crown. After the Lift (ch. 367): a hundred new cracks; he is "cracked all over like a dropped plate", amber light leaking from every crack and steaming in the cold air.
• Clothing, layer by layer: a sleeveless tunic of grey felt · a lead-plated cuirass, dented · a broad belt of iron links · bare feet, because no boot survives him. A crown of lead, plain and thick, sunk slightly into his scalp (askew after ch. 367).
• Signature item: the crown of lead. It weighs whatever he decides, and he decides it weighs a great deal.
• Movement: slow. Every step is a decision, and the ground cracks under each one. He never runs; he arrives. He puts things down very, very gently (ch. 369: "the way he has always put things down").
• Voice: so deep it makes floors crack: a low rumble, few words, long pauses (the page writes them as (beat) (beat)). His balloons are heavy, square and black-bordered, sagging at the bottom (ch. 367).
• Variant looks: Weighing (amber cracks blazing, the air warping around his raised hand like heat). Kneeling (ch. 109: both knees on his own floor, the first time anyone has seen him kneel). The day of flight (ch. 110: on the roof of the Leaden Hall, arms spread under an open sky, cracks of light all over him, the happiest look a giant has ever worn). The Lift (ch. 367: amber light bursting through every crack as he tears, rising into the bullet-rain, a walking bird flying off his shoulder). Roped (ch. 367–370: weightless, cracked through, lashed to the Upp Igen's mainmast, toes just touching the planks).

Tyngd decides what anything weighs, and he is the weight he decides with.

• A sword can weigh a mountain. An army can weigh so much it sinks into the ground. On the page: the 36-shard coat weighs "a mountain. Exactly a mountain. I'm very precise."; Rougeina's eight blades weigh a ton each; Smurjan's shadow is too heavy to rise; Lilla Ulv weighs a cart; Drekk's axe-head weighs a house (ch. 104); the whole Leaden Hall gets heavier (ch. 109); the clouds sink like a lowering ceiling (ch. 107–108); and the coat, thrown, weighs his whole world (ch. 109).
• A man's heart can weigh nothing at all, so it floats out of reach: he feels nothing, wants nothing, fights for nothing.
• Range: on Tyngden, anything on the planet's surface: the world is his scale. Off-world, only what he touches.
• He feels every weight he moves, in his own bones. Make a mountain heavy and he carries the mountain. That's how he lost: the crew made him weigh everything at once (ch. 109).
• He is the weight: the world's weight lives in his body, not just at his command ("I am this world's weight.", ch. 367).
• Since the Lift (ch. 367): he weighs nothing, and can't make himself heavy again without going "all the way down"; off his world he weighs only what he touches: a cannonball caught and made weightless floats away like a soap bubble (ch. 367); a floor and a giant made to weigh nothing, their weight taken into his own bones (ch. 369).
• The Tyngden rule (home field): everything weighs too much, and everyone crawls. Birds walk. Rain falls like bullets. Trees grow sideways. Tyngd is the only one who walks upright (the Risers stand anyway).
• What it can't do: weigh Mingus (the measure itself can't be put on the scale: "That one weighs exactly what it weighs.", ch. 104; the dog trots across Tyngden as if it were a summer meadow, ch. 108), weigh a Swap (changing places isn't lifting: "He can't weigh a Swap.", Rougeina, ch. 367; the planet's own pull still drags her down the last inch, ch. 103), or weigh the Null (zero weighs zero).

• Tempo: 300.
• Home tempo: Tyngden, where everyone else is slow and he is the only one who isn't.
• Heartbeat technique: LEADEN HEART. He makes one of your heartbeats weigh a ton. Your heart has to lift it, and for that beat you can't, so you lose the beat and kneel. No one else puts weight on the beat itself. Read through the name: it is his own weight, hung on your heartbeat.
• Burn cost: he feels every weight he moves, in his own bones. His skeleton is a map of hairline fractures. He was in pain every waking moment for two hundred years; since the Lift he is cracked through, and every weight he carries now (ch. 369) splits the cracks wider.

He feels every weight he moves, in his own bones. His body weighed as much as his whole world, so he could never leave its surface, except by making himself light, which tears him apart from the inside. He was the only man standing on a planet of crawlers, and he had never once been looked in the eye. Since the Lift (ch. 367): weightless for ever. He set down the only weight he had; he can't make himself heavy again without going through the deck, the sea, "all the way down"; he has to be tied down to stay anywhere; and he is cracked through.

• Swaps and switches. Rougeina can't walk on Tyngden, but she doesn't need to: Swapping isn't lifting. She learns to Swap with light things (a raindrop, a moth) and fall onto heavy ones (ch. 103, 106).
• Mingus, who can't be weighed, makes a mockery of the whole planet just by trotting.
• People who stand up anyway: the Risers, who train for years just to stand, led by Mor Lyft, who stood after forty years, unpowered (ch. 104–105). "You don't fight the weight. You carry it."
• His bones: every weight he moves is his to carry. Make him move enough, and he cracks: "You feel every weight? THEN FEEL ALL OF THEM!" (ch. 109: Trollmage's MACRO : PEBBLE = 3 DAYS, the Triple Pulse, Shared Beat, the moth-Swaps, all at once).
• Vigolas's Minus One: under World-Weight, he gives up kneeling, and stands (ch. 109).
• Since the Lift: he can't stand on a deck without going through it (ch. 370).

• The Mountain-Sword, a slab of black iron as long as a man.
• The crown of lead.
• The Leaden Hall: a low, enormous room of grey lead, its ceiling so heavy it sags in the middle, one window, a throne of lead; the Ballast lie flat along its walls like rugs (ch. 109). He stood three nights on its roof before the Lift (ch. 367).
• The Ballast: his soldiers, crushed into obedience, crawling on elbows and knees in grey armour bolted flat, with hooked pikes and chains on their wrists that weigh whatever he says. BALLAST · K-II MARKED · Tyngden (ch. 103). They crawled for twenty years, stood for one day (ch. 110), and stand with the Risers on the roof in Saga VI (ch. 367).
• The Risers, his old enemies: led by Mor Lyft (eighty and more, stood after forty years, perfectly upright, trembling only slightly). The crew trains with them (ch. 105–108).
• A small brown bird that had only ever walked, which rode up on his shoulder in the Lift and flew, and stays on his crown (ch. 367–369).
• Krydog's rope, lashing him to the Upp Igen's mainmast (ch. 367), cut when he goes to carry Eken (ch. 369).

A siege, in one man. He opens with Kneel (most enemies never get up), walks to whoever is still standing, and stops every attack by weighing it until it drops (ch. 109). He doesn't get angry; he gets interested. The way to beat him is to give him more than he can carry. Order combo: Tyngd + Otur (Arcs 3–4 back to back): she schedules the moment, he drops the weight on it; on the page the arcs are linked only by the hook (ch. 102). The Arena: a match under crushing gravity; and Tyngd vs Smurjan (Gluttony against Wrath) in Tyngd's worst memory. As an ally (Saga VI): catches what he can (one cannonball, ch. 367) and carries what nobody else can (Eken, ch. 369).

• Wants: for someone to stay. He couldn't leave, so he made everyone too heavy to leave him. Under that, since he was a boy: to leave the ground. Just once. To be light. (ch. 110)
• Fears: a planet that stands up and walks away.
• Contradiction: the strongest man on his world was its loneliest prisoner, and a glutton who took in the weight of a world and still felt empty.
• Traits: precise ("I'm very precise."); interested more than angry; slow to speak and slow to change, then all at once; honest ("I'm still their general."); gentle with things; capable of a rockslide of a laugh ("…Too heavy.", ch. 110); a quiet watcher ("I watched you. Every day. You're the only one who ever did.", to Mor Lyft).
• Humour: almost none; a slow, crushing literalness. "Up? There is no up here." · "…I decide that." (ch. 110)
• Habits: sits on nothing (he'd break it); puts things down very, very gently.
• Alone: walks the empty plains at night, the only upright shape for a thousand miles; stands on the roof of the Leaden Hall looking at the sky (ch. 367).

• Vigolas: "You carry more than you know, boy." (On Tyngden, the 36-shard coat weighs a mountain.) Vigolas gives the coat up to free his crew (ch. 104), then stands under it weighing a world, having given up kneeling (ch. 109), and pulls the fallen king up bent like a crane ("…how much do you weigh—" / "…I decide that." / "Then decide less!", ch. 110). "If they send me after you again, I'll come." / "If they do, come light." (ch. 110) · "You said come light." / "You came light." (ch. 367) · "CAME LIGHT! NOW GO HEAVY!" (ch. 369)
• Kompis + Mingus: Kompis sees his threads, dense as lead cables bending down into the planet, and one thin silver thread running up, to the sky ("You've got a thread to the sky.", ch. 110). Mingus trots across Tyngden like a summer meadow, the only creature on the planet moving normally; Tyngd nudges him off his boot "gently, almost respectfully" (ch. 104); the Cave-Bear holds up his falling sky (ch. 108).
• Rougeina: her blades made a ton each (ch. 104); the Swap makes his power irrelevant: "He can't weigh a Swap." (ch. 367)
• Trollmage: lies down on arrival ("I've been training for this my whole life.", ch. 103); floats the Risers' canyon for a heartbeat (ch. 106); buries him in pebbles (ch. 109). Tyngd has no idea what to do with him.
• Smurjan / Bakasura: two gluttons. Bakasura swallows a Ballast: "…Heavy." (ch. 103)
• Mor Lyft: the woman who stood anyway, forty years in the learning. "Then do something useful with that crown for once." (ch. 110). On the roof two hundred years later: "And one day you made us fly. We remember the one day." · "You don't fight the weight, boy. You carry it. We'll carry it." (ch. 367)
• Krydog: ties him to the mast ("Holding you down." / "Somebody has to." / "…First time in my life I've been glad to.", ch. 367); cuts him loose to go (ch. 369); and when he comes back unable to stand: "Then lie there. Nobody's making you get up." / "…First time anybody's ever said that to me." (ch. 370)
• Eken: the giant of three thousand years he carried into the Gate (ch. 369), who carried him back (ch. 370).
• Otur: another of the drifting order who chose the Order. He respected her; she found him uncouth.
• The Risers and the Ballast: the people he kept down, who took his weight back so he could go.

• "On my world, you kneel. Not because I ask. Because you're too heavy not to." (ch. 103)
• "A mountain. Exactly a mountain. I'm very precise." (ch. 104)
• "…That one weighs exactly what it weighs." (ch. 104)
• "Up? There is no up here."
• "You carry more than you know, boy."
• "Nobody has ever stood over me." (ch. 109)
• "Since I was a boy. I've wanted to leave the ground. Just once. To be light." (ch. 110)
• "I am this world's weight." (ch. 367)
• "…There's an up." (ch. 367)
• "You said come light." (ch. 367)
• "…That's a good weight." (ch. 369)
• "…Why can't I weigh the dog."
• "Stand, then. All of you. …I never could hold this many."