A thief's frame, copper-red hair no hood quite hides, and the muscle memory of a man who learned to climb before he learned to walk. He reads exits first and valuables second. The nickname "Copper" comes from the man who raised him.

His physical language is the descent and the climb: up into rafters, down into wells. Every time he goes up for something, the film is quietly asking what he will do when he has to go down.

A Parthian prince of the old Arsacid houses, with the stillness of a man who knows he is the cleverest person in any room. His armor is not just gaps. It has a door, and the film is about who is let through it.

He solves problems with brass instruments, glass spheres and arithmetic. The bracelet he wears is armor and a sentence at the same time.

Keeper of the Codex of the Watch. Grey, patient, hiding a cough from everyone and a plan from most. He measures the sky for a living and has just seen it move.

His grief is quiet and unmanaged: he has taught a mountain full of other people's children and never had a family of his own. He is the film's moral center.

A fallen Magus who has read the same scrolls as the others and found a different command in them. Unarmored, unhurried and horribly patient, he reads a street the way other men read a letter.

He is never a cartoon. His father died waiting for the sign and he has decided not to. He wears the same three-flame sigil as the heroes, worked upside down.

Sits bolt upright, never fidgets, never fills silence. He is old, ill and dangerous, and he is most frightening when he is being generous. His softest line is his sharpest.

Played as a still, dry-voiced administrator of fear, he never raises his voice. Zaneb is not in that room, which is the point.

A junior scribe in Herod's court with carbon ink on his fingertips. He writes down what kings say and is never once asked what he thinks.

Eli is mandatory. The film's quietest question runs through him, and the production should protect his scenes in every cut.