Coksi

Origin

Nu'uman spliced with cockroach, "Bred to be the janitorial race for the Alverian cities and megastructure." Their code was locked "as their trash collecting methods were perfect." Since the fall "they have continued their lineage, becoming trash collectors and consumers for various civilizations, with no prospects of escaping that way of life, as they've never known anything different." They understand what is said about them. Few of them will answer in a tongue anyone else can follow.

Body

One to two feet tall. The weight is what a cockroach would weigh grown to that length: four pounds for a small one and up to twenty-five for a two-foot Coksi with a full shell, and the shell is most of it. "Hard shelled, and ugly, they were made harsh to see so they could be spotted and shooed away. Their back shell is appeasing and merely black-brown, so that if cleaning, you don't feel the urge to vomit." The design intent is written into the body: the back was made bearable and the front was made unbearable. "Their mouths are horridly disease riddled, and their six hairy arms and legs are covered in rough, tumor riddled skin." The face beneath is skeletal, and fine bristles run the shell's edge for sweeping.

The shell is in overlapping plates over a body that is almost entirely hinge, and a Coksi can flatten to the width of two fingers and pass under any door in any city on Nu. No lock anywhere has ever held one out, and every city knows it and every city employs them anyway, and a great many wealthy houses have a slot cut at the foot of the service door so that the thing which could come in regardless comes in where it is told to. Their limbs fold flat as well, which is why a Coksi in a corridor appears rather than arrives.

They cannot be killed by weight: "an entire building could fall on them and they would survive." There is no rigid cavity in the body to crush and the plates spread a load around the hinge, so a Coksi under masonry waits. It also breathes through shuttered holes along the flanks that it can close at will, and a closed Coksi holds air for the better part of an hour, which is what saves it from smoke, from flooding cisterns and from being buried. The cities send them into collapses. The cities do not pay extra for it.

A stomach of pitch-black acid breaks down refuse and vents it back sweet, through "stink glands that release the broken down trash aroma that is turned sweet by their insides; a perfume for the cities." The acid is only half the work. The gut is lined with a living ferment, a second creature keeping house inside the first, and it is not born with the child; it is given, mouth to mouth, by the adults of the dump in the first month. A Coksi raised away from a dump has no ferment, cannot break down refuse, and starves with a full belly. Three cities have taken Coksi young to raise them clean and away from the sight of their parents, and all three learned this, and one of them learned it twice.

They are close to blind in daylight. The eyes are made for the dark of a forty-floor shaft and a lamp held at arm's length is a wound. What they navigate by is air: two long antennae and a coat of fine hairs read the movement of a current through a building, and a Coksi three floors down knows a door has opened above it, knows which door, and knows how many came through. It is the most exact sense of its kind in the tier and it is the source of the whole of their misery, because a moving body makes a current and a turned head makes a smaller one, and a Coksi always knows, precisely, when it is being looked at. It feels every glance in a hall it is crossing. It has never in its life been unobserved and unaware of it.

Smell comes in layers and carries time. A Coksi can date a spill to the hour, tell how long a body has been in a cellar, and follow a person through a city by the week-old trace of them, which is a skill no crown has ever formally hired and which several have informally used. Their own speech is half scent, so a stairwell that has been worked all night is a written page to the shift that follows.

They live twenty years. In the noble halls they work under cloth: two Coksi, with royal drapes covering them to hide their hideous cockroach bodies, crawl across the floor, eating any food dropping or wine spillage. Under the drape the air-sense is blinded and the Coksi is, for those hours, the only thing it has ever wanted to be, which is not looked at.

Life

A birth is a hundred young. The mother carries an egg-case the size of a loaf, sealed with her own spit, and sets it in the warmest floor of the dump; the case is the Warm and a dump's lowest warm floors are reserved for nothing else. The hundred hatch together, pale, soft and blind for a day, and the whole dump comes down to wash them before their shells harden; this is the Washing, and a Coksi's first memory is of being cleaned. In the month that follows the adults feed them mouth to mouth and the ferment is passed. The shell takes a year to darken, which the dumps call the Palening, counting the loss of the pale rather than the gain of the black.

At six they go up to work, the Going Up, and it is the day a Coksi is first seen by anyone who is not a Coksi, and the day it is first given a mask. At sixteen they are old, and the old come down and stay down and work the floors below; the dumps call it the Sitting Down, and a Coksi that has sat down will not go up again for any wage. The dead are carried to the lowest floor and given to the acid of the living until nothing of the face remains, since a Coksi will not leave its face where anyone might see it, even dead. They eat refuse, and can eat anything, and prefer clean-grown food, and are given none.

Frailty

Starvation in a Coksi is being eaten from within. The acid is made whether or not there is refuse to put it on, and an empty stomach is a stomach digesting its own lining; a starving Coksi passes black and dies over four or five days in a pain the dumps will not describe aloud. In a bad winter, when a city's refuse freezes and there is nothing to sweep, the dumps feed their young first and the Sitting Down are fed last, by their own arrangement, and nobody above ground notices that a hard winter thins them.

The occupational death is lime. Cities line their drains with it, and lime dust taken in through the flank shutters sets there, and a Coksi of fifteen who has worked the drains breathes in a rattle everyone can hear coming, which is its own cruelty in a people that survives by not being noticed. Ash does the same more slowly. Between them they kill more Coksi than any weapon.

The shell does not heal. A crack is patched with spit and grit and stays a patch for life, and the patch is where the shell-mites get in. Crawling for twenty years wears the leg joints until the hinge grinds, and an old Coksi moves in a way that is instantly recognisable and instantly mocked.

And the mouth. The mouthparts were built disease-riddled and stay so; nothing a Coksi does cleans them, and they are the only part of itself it cannot scrub. In perhaps one in twelve the disease climbs from the mouthparts into the face and the eyes, and that one goes blind and loses what is left of the face, and stays below. A people made to be repulsive, given an obsession with cleanliness, and denied the ability to clean the single part of itself the world recoils from, is the Alverian sense of humour working exactly as intended.

The rest is what other peoples do. Being seen unmasked is the ordinary cause of a Coksi death and it kills them younger than lime does.

Country

The Surface Realm and the Under Realm, wherever there is refuse. The Coksi Dumps are "The trash built homes within the poor or subterranean district of towns and cities, these homes look disgusting and simple on the outside, but within they are clean and beautiful. Often one home would go down forty floors into the soil." No city keeps a register of them, and the oldest and deepest are known only by the Coksi who dug them.

The forty floors are a single shaft with the rooms hung off it, and the shaft is the point. A people that navigates by air currents builds a chimney and reads the whole structure from anywhere in it; a Coksi at the bottom knows what is happening at the top. The shaft also drains. Forty floors of dug and packed soil under a poor ward takes the water off it, and the wards above old dumps are the only dry cellars in a great many cities, which is remarked on and never explained. When a dump is abandoned and the digging stops, the shaft slumps within a decade, and the ward above it goes down with it. There are streets in three Nu'uman cities that are named after the year they fell in.

What a Coksi presence does to a city is measurable and denied. They eat the refuse, the carrion, the spoiled grain and the dead in the gutters, and a city with a working dump does not get the fevers that a city without one gets. Several crowns have driven their Coksi out and had a plague year within two, and a small number of crowns now quietly protect them under ordinances that give no reason. None of those ordinances names the Coksi as the reason.

They compete for the same refuse with the Gorklin, who eat filth and clean nothing, and with the rats and the dogs of every poor ward, and they lose ground to all of them every year they are driven off a district.

Society

Night labour, hereditary, with no exit. Where they are not collecting refuse they are building: "expert structural engineers, often either being conscripted for trash collection, or building construction." "Aggressive and standoffish to most, if not all, as they are treated like the trash they clean up." "They hate themselves, and the world, and just want everything to be clean; even though they clean trash, they are the cleanest of species." "They are ashamed and terrified of anyone seeing their face, as often they abuse or murder them once they see how terrifying they look." They wash constantly; their six limbs are "always clean in between their shifts, as filth repulses them."

The engineering is the air-sense again. A Coksi can feel where a building is loose by the draught through it and can feel a load shift before a beam creaks, and the crews that hire them for construction do so knowing they will lose them to the first hall with a window in it. A dump answers to the Deepest, whoever lives on its lowest floor, which is dug by the one who will live there. There is no election in it; there is a shovel.

Above ground they wear whatever hides the face: drapes, sacking, a bucket. Below they wear nothing and are spotless. They drink water they have boiled three times. They have music, a clicking of the shell-edges in rounds, and stop it if a stranger comes down. The oath is "by my clean hands." Taboo: to show the face; to be seen eating; to leave a floor unswept behind you.

Because every Coksi can feel every glance, their courtesy is built around not giving one. Two Coksi passing in a shaft turn their antennae away from each other, which is the whole of a greeting. A Coksi that wants to insult another looks at it. The drape is not humiliation to them; it is the only privacy their body permits, and the noble houses that think they are sparing their own guests are giving the Coksi the best working conditions it will ever have.

Faith

No other people has ever been told what the Coksi believe, and what is done forty floors down is guessed at from above. The likeliest guess is a faith of the Wash: that the world was made clean and is being dirtied, that the Coksi are what is left of its cleaning, and that when the last floor is swept something will notice. They use no name for that something. They expect nothing for themselves after death and get exactly what everyone gets: the soul goes up to the star gods' auction, where the Coksi soul is entered in the same book as a king's.

Tongue

They understand Common Tongue. Very few speak it. They speak their own language, called by them only the Click, made of shell-taps and scent, in which a whole shift's orders can be passed down a stairwell without a word. The taps carry through the structure and the scent hangs in the shaft, so the Click has a spoken half that vanishes instantly and a written half that lasts a day, and neither can be carried out of a dump.

Coksi names are what others call them, and they carry no names that other peoples can hold in the mouth. A Coksi's own name is in the Click, a scent and a rhythm. Among other peoples a Coksi answers to whatever it is called, and it is called a job, a place, a spill or an insult. It may carry a different name in every house it cleans. The one it keeps, if it keeps one, is the name it was called on the night someone saw its face and did not kill it. Eight such names: Sixfloor, Nightbroom, Cellar, Spill, Underdrape, Pitch, Hush, Tenth.

Regard

"Disgusting trash eating vermin." "Trash exists, therefore the Coksi exist to dispose of it." "Thank goodness they clean at night, lest we need see them during the day." And the line that makes them tragic rather than merely abject: "For how disgusting they are, I do not wish to have a society without them."

Every city runs on them and no city admits it. Being seen unmasked is the ordinary cause of a Coksi death.

The Gorklin, who eat filth without cleaning anything, are the only people the Coksi are known to hate more than they hate themselves.

Harvest

Coksi Acid: "Extremely dangerous, this chemical compound found within the stomachs of Coksi's can melt through a person's skull in a matter of seconds; it's pitch black and constantly sizzles." It is taken from the stomach of a living one, since the acid turns on the dead body at once and is spent within the hour.

Cargba Perfume: "Pungent and fantastical, this refined perfume, captured as a Coksi eats garbage, is sought after by the common folk, as it is the closest thing they can afford; it's grey in liquid colour. The nobles turn their nose up at it, even though they secretly love the smell." The capture is done by hooding a feeding Coksi and drawing off the vent, which does it no harm and is not asked about.

Shell-bristle: the sweeping fringe from the shell edge, cut and bound into the finest fine-work brushes in any city, sold by the Coksi themselves and regrown in a season, and the one thing in this list they are paid for. Both of the first two are legal everywhere, and the perfume is bottled uphill under other names.

Remembered

Underdrape. One of the two Coksi who cleaned a noble hall under royal cloth, and was called nothing else for twenty years.

Tenth. The Deepest of a dump beneath a tenth ward, who dug the forty-first floor and was found there by no one.

The kin

None. "Variant Count : 0 . Their genetic code was locked." Morphs of the one genome for biome and climate are permitted, and no such morph has been named. The nocturnal primates once spoken of under this name are a separate people among the Mammals. The Coksi stay cockroaches.