Craega

Origin

Shrakur spliced with salt water crab, "Bred to scavenge debris from dead soldiers and wrecks washed ashore or deep sunken during the war with Orton." They carry Shrakur blood and none of the Shrakur crusade.

After the fall the people split. "Many stayed beneath the ocean, continuing their collecting of rare relics from the war, building shrouded societies, while their remaining species went to land and began integrating themselves in communities, people that would buy what they could salvage for high prices since none could go as deep as they could." The war ended and the habit did not. They will sell to anyone, guide anyone through water, and tell anyone what a thing is worth, which is always less than the asker hoped and more than the Craega will admit to having paid.

Body

Four to six feet, and two hundred and fifty to four hundred pounds, most of it shell. A Craega that falls through a floor is not embarrassed by it. "Their exterior shell is thick, varying in color, density and texture. They have four legs, that primarily conjoin together to make two, but separate to four in battle. Their head shell is wide, angular, with sharp crustaceans along its edge." The head reads as a helmet that will not come off. The mouth is what unsettles: "Expandable mouths; extremely cavernous."

The shell is the skeleton and there is no other. Muscle hangs from the inside of the plate rather than from bone, which reverses everything a surgeon of another people expects: to reach a Craega's heart you cut inward through meat that is anchored to the wall you have just broken, and the meat lets go. It also means a Craega grows in steps and not in a line, and cannot grow at all without first becoming naked. Every fact of their law comes out of that.

The blood is clear in the body and turns a flat blue as it meets air, since the metal that carries their breath is copper where other peoples use iron. Blue-stained rags at a dome door mean a wounded Craega inside, and every coast town knows it. The copper blood carries less than iron does, which is why a Craega is slow over a long run and immovable over a short one, and why they will walk all night at one pace and refuse to hurry for anyone.

They breathe through gills held in a chamber under the head-shell, and the chamber must stay wet. A Craega on land is breathing the water it brought with it. They pack the chamber with weed and sponge before a long walk inland and wet it at every trough, and a Craega who lets the chamber dry drowns in open air, slowly, while standing. "He let his chamber dry" is the Cragtongue phrase for a ruin that was entirely the ruined one's own fault, and it is the worst thing one Craega says about another. It is also the reason no Craega has ever founded an inland city and the reason the domes are on the shore.

There is no gas anywhere in the body. Nothing in a Craega can be crushed by pressure or made to expand on a rise, and this single absence is the whole of their trade: they descend as far as they care to, come up as fast as they like, and the Deep Realm holds nothing that will do to them what it does to a Nu'uman diver. It is also why the Crag can live where they live.

"When under attack, their entire body can fall in on itself, creating a shield around their entire form." They can "tighten their skin to be a further shielded layer; this exhausts them very quickly." The tightening is a full-body clench against the inside of the shell and it stops the gill chamber pumping, so a Craega that holds the shield too long suffocates inside its own defence, and a patient enemy simply waits. They breathe underwater, see in the dark, and carry "raw mineral senses; treasure finding," which is a lattice of hairs across the shell that reads metal and dense stone through mud at a body's length. A Craega walking a beach is appraising it.

The stomach has teeth. Three grinding plates sit behind the cavernous mouth and do the chewing that the mouth does not, which is why a Craega swallows a shellfish whole, a coin whole and a small relic whole, and why the deep families search a dead rival's gut before they search the hoard. They can drop a claw to escape a grip and grow it back at the next moult, and this is a transaction to them and not a mutilation. "He left a claw on it" means a bargain that cost more than it returned.

Their eyes are made for the blue-black of deep water and are blind to red. A Craega cannot tell blood from mud, cannot be impressed by a painted sign, and cannot be sold anything on its colour. What it can do is see in light no other trader can work in, which is why Craega markets are held in the dark and why goods are priced by weight in the hand, by the ring of a tap, and by the mineral sense. Their writing is notched into shell and read by the claw. Sound reaches them as vibration through the shell and the ground, so a Craega listening puts a claw flat on the floor and turns its head away from you, which surface peoples read as contempt and which is attention.

Salt-water shells run rust-red through slate to bone; lake shells run dark. They live two hundred years. The Crag live in thousands, and how many thousands nobody has settled, because they are ancient and no one has watched one die.

Life

A Craega grows by moulting. Every seven years in youth and every twenty in age the shell splits down the back and the Craega climbs out of itself, soft as wet leather, and spends three days in the inner pit of the dome while the family stands over it. This is the Soft Season. In it a Craega can be killed by a child, and in the deep societies the soft ones are guarded like coin. The old shells are kept. Age is asked politely as "how many shells," and the eldest of a dome-field is simply the Oldest Shell.

The moult has three parts and each has a name. The Thinning comes first: for two months the Craega stops eating, draws the lime out of its own shell to build the soft one folded underneath, and grows irritable, light and hollow-sounding. Any dome-field can tell who is thinning, and creditors can count. Then the Split, which takes a night and is the most painful thing in the life; the Craega backs out of the old shell through a seam along the spine and leaves behind the lining of its own gut and the covering of its own eyes with it. Then the Setting, three days on the floor of the pit while the new shell hardens, blind, mute, soft-clawed, unable to lift its own weight or close its own mouth.

A trading people that goes helpless on a schedule has built the schedule into its law. The Soft Calendar is kept by the Hoard-Reckoners and copied to every dome-field on a coast, and it lists who thins and when. A declared Soft Season freezes a Craega's debts and voids any contract it signs while soft, because a soft Craega will agree to anything and every Craega knows it. The guard over the pit is paid, at a rate set by the field and not by the family, and the fee is the one price a Craega will not haggle. A creditor who comes to a pit during a Setting forfeits the debt entire. And the killing of a soft Craega is the single crime a dome-field will pursue across open water for a generation, which is why the domes are camouflaged, why the isolated one is isolated, and why the lone dome at the end of the Grey Spit is not visited.

Mating happens only in the Soft Season. A male carries his chosen female on his back for days before her moult, feeding her and fighting off other carriers, and the pairing is made while she is still soft. This is the Carrying, and a Craega who has carried and been carried is considered married whether either of them likes it. The female then bears a sponge of many thousand eggs under the apron of her shell for a season, and at the great tide the dome-field walks into the sea together and the eggs are loosed over the drowned war-fields where the first Craega fed. What hatches is the Drift: blind, transparent, thumbnail-sized, moulting through stages that look like nothing and eating anything smaller than itself. The sea takes almost all of it.

The few that come ashore are the Crawlers, and they are found. Whichever dome's shore a crawling one reaches, that dome claims it, and the finder is the parent. No Craega knows its mother and none has ever asked. "Who found you" is how they ask after family. A Craega dates its own life from the First Shell, the first moult it remembers, and counts from there. The Craetan loose their eggs in lake shallows; the Crieke are found on garrison beaches and raised by the garrison. No one has seen a Crag moult. The deep families say the Crag stopped moulting long ago and grew their hoards into their shells instead, and the Crag do not correct them.

Death is a sale. A dead Craega's shell is stripped by the family and sold before strangers can strip it, and the meat goes back into the water. A Craega buries nothing. They eat what is drowned: carrion, refuse, shellfish, wreck-weed, whatever the tide leaves, and they eat enormously in the year before a moult and nothing at all in the two months before it.

Frailty

Everything that goes wrong with a Craega goes wrong at the moult. A shell that will not split is shell-bound, and the Craega inside it swells against a case that has stopped growing and dies over nine or ten days, conscious throughout. The families cut them out where they can; the cut ones come up crooked and are called bent. A bent Craega is barred from deep work by every Hoard-Reckoner on every coast, since a bad seam fails under pressure, and the barring is entered in the Soft Calendar and is not appealable. This is the fear behind the oath. "On my next shell" is a Craega staking the one thing it cannot insure.

A Setting that is disturbed sets wrong. A soft Craega that is struck, or lifted, or made to move, hardens around the wrong shape, and a field can tell at a glance which of its elders were mishandled young. Many of them were. The generation taken in the coastal raids of the last century is visibly the generation it is.

Shell-rot is the disease of foul water: a black pitting that eats inward from a scratch and does not stop until the next moult carries it off, so a young Craega survives it and an old one, who moults once in twenty years, does not. The lake kin get it worst and the Craetan short lifespan is largely this. Crusting barnacle growths blind the mineral hairs and are scraped by a paid hand, which is a whole minor trade in Saltcount. The copper blood clots slowly and goes on seeping under the shell where no one can see it, so a Craega can walk home from a fight and die in the pit. The gills clog with silt and the very old drown in their own chambers. And the last frailty is the plain one: a Craega that has lived two hundred years has moulted perhaps twenty times, and the twentieth is the hardest, and most Craega die on the floor of a pit with their family standing over them, which is why the family standing over them matters so much.

Country

Surface Realm shorelines and the Deep Realm. The Craega Dome is "Made from sand or mud, these camouflaged homes are built on the shores of lakes and oceans. Often one can be found among many, or alone; do not go near the isolated one's, as they are alone for a reason." Three places are named on every chart the Craega keep. The Wrack Shelf is a drowned war-field of the god war where the domes still send their eggs. Saltcount is the largest known shore dome-field, a market before it is a town. The Grey Spit is a strand of a hundred domes and one that stands apart.

The dome is one chamber above and a pit below, and the pit is always wet. A dome is sited where the tide reaches, since the family must be able to walk into the sea together at the great tide and since the pit must fill. A field is a scatter of domes at a distance from one another that looks accidental and is not; the spacing is a shell's-length more than a running charge, and the mineral sense of a dome-field overlaps so that a field knows what walks on it.

They eat what the water kills, and their presence changes what the water holds. A coast with a dome-field on it is a coast with nothing rotting on it: no carcass lasts a night, no wreck lasts a season, no drowned sailor is ever found. Fisher towns downcoast of a field notice the clean beaches and notice, twenty years on, that there is nothing left in the shallows to scavenge, because the Craega have taken the bottom apart. Two Nu'uman ports on the same bay have gone to law over a field that would not move. The field did not move.

What eats a Craega is the deep and each other. In the open water the Drift feeds everything that filters. On the bottom the Eeshmorg take them, and the Crag take the Eeshmorg. On land, nothing hunts them; the shell is more trouble than the meat is worth, which the Craega know and which is the foundation of their confidence at a negotiating table.

Society

Merchants, salvors, guides and treasure hunters. They are the water-navigation experts of the world and they charge for it. "Stern, and off putting to most. They speak what they want, when they want it, and do not care for small talk." "They are a bartering race, always in favour of the best deal for themselves, as they are treasure hoarders." On the Golden Road at Ikarma, three Craetan merchants stand over a large Hof skin hide under crystal light, weighing its worth. Three of them, because a Craega does not appraise alone.

They have no kings. A shore dome-field answers to its Oldest Shell, and the deep societies to the Hoard-Reckoners, who keep the count of what every family holds and settle claims over a find. The Reckoners also keep the Soft Calendar, and that is the greater office; a people whose law turns on who is currently helpless is a people whose archivists are its real government. Dress is the shell and what is bolted through it: rings, coin, bits of wreck, drilled straight into the plate, which costs nothing and is lost at every moult, so a Craega's finery is a record of the last seven years and no longer.

They drink a brine-beer brewed in shell and eat what they find. Music is the clatter of shell on shell, kept in time, and it is played on the ground and felt through the feet rather than heard. The oath is "on my next shell," which a Craega will not break, since a bad moult is what it fears most. Taboo: to touch a Craega's hoard; to ask what it paid; to go near the lone dome; and, under the Soft Calendar, to speak business to a Craega who has declared the Thinning.

Their trade custom follows the eye. Nothing is bought on appearance. A Craega handles, taps, weighs and holds a thing against the mineral hairs of the forearm, and the price it names is the price of the material. This makes them honest about metal and useless about art, and it is why Craega valuations are trusted by smiths and despised by collectors, and why every serious forger on the coast works in weight rather than in finish.

Faith

The Craega keep no priests and no temple. They keep the Due. Everything on the sea floor was somebody's, and the sea god Orton holds the lien on all of it; for every take a Craega throws back a token of lesser worth, and a Craega who skips the Due is said to moult badly. Nobody has tested whether Orton notices. Some of the deep families still carry the Shrakur inheritance and pay their Due downward instead, to the Stone Below, which is Aezithis under a name that keeps them out of trouble on the surface. The Craega expect nothing after death, and in this they are closer to the truth than most: the soul goes to the star gods' auction like every other, and a Craega would want to know the reserve.

Tongue

Common Tongue for trade. The Crag "only speak ancient Alverian," which makes the deepest and richest of the kin unable to bargain with anyone who has not studied a dead tongue. Among themselves the rest speak Cragtongue, a clatter-and-hiss that carries underwater and sounds on land like gravel poured slowly.

The finder names the found, and the name is hard and short. A second name is earned by the first find of worth and is added after: Shalka Two-Anchor, Brannik Bell. The names run: Shalka, Krevv, Tolgash, Brannik, Shurr, Gedrak, Ossko, Kelvash.

Regard

"Greed filled and self involved." "Mischievous; always something up their sleeve." "Knowledgeable of the Aquatic Realms, and treasure hunting experts." And the line every coast town knows: "Dangerous when not behind a shop counter or stall."

They are descended from the Shrakur and are no part of their war. They will sell to any species and travel any road; their armour, however, "is an offence to many within the more civilised regions." They trade Hof hide, Squeesh mucus and drowned Alverian relics, and are the only people the Squeesh will do business with, since both came out of the same Shrakur vat and neither wants to talk about it.

Harvest

Craega Armour: "Harvested off of dead Craega, this armour is highly sought after in the Wildlands, as it is an offence to many within the more civilised regions." The offence is precise: the plate of a killed Craega still carries the drilled holes of its jewellery and the seam of its last moult, and everyone on a coast can read from a suit how old the wearer's victim was.

Craega Pincer: "Used to make weapons, their pincers can be automated and powered through Do'urssan technology." Moult shell: the cast shells of living Craega, sold by the Craega themselves as helms and shield-faces, legal everywhere since no one died for it, and priced by the seller as if someone had. Gut-plate: the three grinding teeth of the stomach, which come out of the body as three hard white discs and are set into flails and threshing tools by inland smiths who have no idea what they are handling.

Remembered

Old Brannik of the Grey Spit, who moulted nineteen times and sold each shell as it came off, and whose lone dome at the end of the strand is the one the children are told not to visit.

Shalka Two-Anchor, Hoard-Reckoner of the Wrack Shelf, who settled a claim between two deep families by eating the find.

The Crag the fishers call Deepmouth, which surfaced in a shallow bay speaking a language no one had heard aloud in four thousand years, and was clearly asking for something.

Kin each has a page of its own

What divides the kin is water and work: the salt shore, the lake, the deep trench, and the garrison beach where a strain was conditioned for war.