Do'urssan

Origin

The Do'urssan were built to be "the main military force of the Alverian Empire," and of every people the Alverians made they were "the most favoured by their creators, and the only race to avoid enslavement." They are a mix of Alverian, Stoneman and Bear: the Alverian strain, the clay-flesh of the Thojar, and the bear. Vanyor, Great Lord of Alveria, ordered them bred first "as a line of defence to safeguard them from the battle above and below," and then as the standing army of the empire. The first generation were the progenitors, "each standing twelve feet tall," and they wore no forged armour, because "their bone exoskeleton forms a full suit of fully-articulated blackened armor, while their spears, of similar origin, are barbed points of death."

The Alverian strain in them is the reason for their history. The first of the four peoples came out too perfect, and the makers lessened them so they could be held. In the Do'urssan the lessening was written into the line itself rather than cut from the first bodies. The hold-wrights call it the Lessening and say the makers wound it into their blood like a clock, so that each generation would come out of the pools a little smaller than the last and no Do'urssan army could ever turn on its masters at full size. The holds also call the same thing a sickness: a sickness of their spirit and soul, as well as their body, which has shrunken from their gigantic stature during the elder days. Both are believed in the holds, often by the same person, depending on how much he has had to drink.

Whatever its name, it is measurable, and the Do'urssan measure it. Every Great Hold keeps a Tally of Heights cut into the stone beside its inner gate, a line and a date for the tallest of each vat drawn from the pools, and the lines walk down the wall the way water walks down a wall. At Kazanoon the oldest line is above the lintel and the newest is at the height of a Nu'uman child. Nobody has scratched the lines out. They are read aloud at the turn of each sixty years by the Master of the Gate, in a hold where every corridor was cut for bodies twice the size of the bodies walking them, and the reading is the single most honest thing the Do'urssan do.

When the stars went dark and every enchantment failed, the Do'urssan alone kept their arms and their gates. Their orders were the last orders given: "The forefathers of our species were ordered to contain te' Blight," and they are still containing it. In 814 A.E. they killed the God-King Menarches the Thrice-Blessed and "covered him in molten gold and returned him, stating that it would be the only tribute he would ever receive from their people." They fought Aelor in the Second War of Corbenese Succession. The Gorklin exist because of what was done to them: that hybrid line was "founded on the forceful breeding of Do'urssan at the hands of the terrifying Xacrie." Now the pumps run day and night in holds where the facility logs read "Day Forty. We have been left to rot," and Galahad, standing in a hold full of Crimson, says what the surface has begun to suspect: "The Do'Urssans were said to have destroyed the Crimson, father, but look with your eyes." The surface, when it is being fair, says the other thing: "If it weren't for the Do'urssan, the great blight would return."

Body

Short and immensely wide. The silhouette reads as a wedge: broad shoulders, a broad chest, a low centre of weight, arms hung heavy from a frame that does not taper. The bodies are dense, muscular or rotund and hairy, and the bone structure is near stone, which makes them strong with a refined, weighed-down physique. The head is the tell. Their foreheads and jaws are broad, and their skin is tough, calloused and thick. Skin runs grey to blue-grey and mottles with age; six and a half feet of Do'urssan, blue-grey skin, mottled grey-blue, six fingers to the hand. They smell through "hive-like holes on his neck," which is why a Do'urssan can tell what a Mekuhlian is through a wall.

Bone near stone is meant exactly. The Thojar half gives them a skeleton that does not grow the way flesh-bone grows. It is laid down in beds, one mineral sheet over another, thickening through life the way a shaft wall thickens with lime, and there is no soft plate at the ends of the long bones where another people's bone lengthens. This is the mechanism of the Lessening and the reason it cannot be outrun: growth in a Do'urssan is a matter of how many sheets the blood will lay before the pattern closes, and the makers shortened the count. It also means a Do'urssan bone does not knit. Break a legionary's forearm and the two ends grind against each other for a century until the body has cemented a lumpen collar around the fracture, and he carries that collar for twenty-nine thousand years. Hold surgeons do not set bones. They cage them, in bronze, and the caged limb is a mark of long service worn with the same pride as a beard bead.

There is little marrow in them. Blood is made in the plates and in a dark organ under the ribs that other peoples have no name for, and the blood itself is thick, near black, and clots in the time it takes to say a name. A Do'urssan cannot be bled out. He can be crushed, cooked or drowned. Wounds seal grey and set hard, and the scar of a Do'urssan is a ridge of mineral that rings when struck. Their healers work with chisels more often than with needles. A physician of another people, opening one, would find no marrow, a liver the size of both his hands, lungs with a grey felted lining that he would take for a disease and that is in fact the dust-trap every Do'urssan is born with, and a heart that beats slow and enormous, once for every three beats of his own.

They run hot. A body that works without stopping makes heat without stopping, and the Do'urssan shed it through the six fingers, through the broad soles and through the neck-holes, which is why a hold's air must always be moving. The Blight Pumps are ventilation before they are anything else. A hold that loses its pumps bakes long before it floods, and every hold child is taught which shafts draw and which shafts blow before it is taught its numbers. They are also dense past floating. A Do'urssan sinks like the stone he is half made of, and none of them swim. This one fact is why the Sub-Oceanic Network was cut as a tunnel and not sailed as a fleet, why no Do'urssan hold has ever kept a ship, and why "he has gone for a swim" is the hold phrase for a suicide.

Every Do'urssan is born with the Orla, "a growing bone spear-like organ that attaches and detaches from their hand." It sits in a sheath along the inner forearm, seated on the bone, fed by its own vessel, and it runs out through a slit in the heel of the palm and locks at the wrist with a sound like a bolt going home. It grows with the body and it is the one weapon no hold can confiscate. It is alive. It bleeds when it is cut, it aches in cold water, and a broken Orla takes sixty years to grow back to a point. At puberty the body lays down post-pubescent reinforced subdermal bone plating, a second skeleton beneath the skin, which is why Do'urssan take blows that kill other people. The plating overlaps in courses, ribs to spine to forearm to thigh, and it leaves seams: at the throat, the inner elbow, the groin, the armpit and a hand's width below the ear. Every people that has fought them knows where the seams are. The narrow bodkin point, the seam-spike, exists across the surface kingdoms for no other purpose, and the Do'urssan sell the plate that stops it to the same smiths who forge it.

Their sensory world runs on something other than sight. The eyes are built for value and edge in the dark and they read colour badly, blue against grey hardly at all, so the crystal fields burn white because white is the only light that tells a Do'urssan anything. What fills the gap is the neck. The hive-holes make a bank of forty separate pits in place of a single nose, each a closed chamber drawing its own thread of air, and a Do'urssan reads a smell the way another people reads a written line: layered, sided, with depth and direction in it. He knows a scent is coming from his left and from below and from three chambers back. Stone draws air, and air comes through rock along fissures too fine to see, so a Do'urssan standing in a sealed corridor can tell you what is standing in the next one, which is the whole of the Mekuhlian's difficulty in a hold.

Beneath even that lies the palms and the soles. They read the grain of stone by pressure, the soundness of a shaft by standing on it, a flaw two hundred feet down by the way a hammer stroke comes back into the foot. A hold-wright signs finished work by laying his open hand on it, and a Do'urssan contract is sealed with a palm pressed into warm greystone rather than with ink, since ink is a thing for peoples who trust their eyes. Their art follows the same sense: incised line, struck relief, deep-cut hold-marks read by fingertip in the dark. They paint nothing. They have no word for a colour that is not also a word for a material. A Do'urssan looking at a Nu'uman banner sees a rag; a Nu'uman running his hand over a Do'urssan door reads nothing at all; and every treaty between the two peoples is engrossed twice, once struck into a plate and once painted on hide, with the two copies held to be one document.

Height has collapsed across the ages. The progenitors stood twelve feet. Elders stand seven. Legionaries of the present day average six and a half feet, and "recently most have become 4-5 feet tall." Lifespan is thirty thousand years. The ancient ones are those who have not died in however long they have existed, and they have lengthened their lives by binding the Crimson into their own bodies. Weight runs far above anything of the same height. A five-foot Do'urssan of the newest generation weighs what a seven-foot Nu'uman soldier weighs, between two hundred and three hundred pounds; a legionary of six and a half feet weighs four to five hundred; a progenitor in his bone armour weighed more than a draught ox. They sink in water and do not swim.

Beards are worn and worked: among the progenitors "every odd Do'Urssan progenitor sports a woven beard, combed and adorned with intricate bone jewelry. The beardless ones beside them are their battle wives, equally as fierce." Bone jewellery in a beard is still read as rank. What one notices first, in any room, is the noise; a Do'urssan announcing itself is the thing other peoples complain about. The noise is anatomy as much as character. The lungs are deep and the chest is a drum with a stone frame around it, the low register of a Do'urssan voice travels through rock where a Nu'uman voice dies in the first turn of a corridor, and a people that talks through walls learns to talk at the volume the walls require. They do not know they are shouting. They have never been in a room that was not made of stone.

Life

The Do'urssan do not carry their young. Their seed and their mothers' essence are combined in breeding pools: the essence of the female is drawn from her body and set into the pool with the seed of the male, and the young hatch from vats of tar and clay. Lake Cilinuel, "their great spawning pool," works this way to the present day. The drawing is called the Giving and it is done at the lake by the Mothers, the beardless matrons who keep the pools; Mother is a title of the pools before it is anything else, which is why a stonemason named Acasia carries it. A battle wife gives once in a decade, more often in war, and a single Giving seeds a vat of ten, which is why the smallest unit of the legion is ten and why every Do'urssan calls the nine who hatched beside him his vat-brothers before he calls anyone father. The tar is warm, black and thick as pitch; the clay beneath it is the clay of the Thojar half of them; the young climb out of it already plated, already gripping an Orla no longer than a finger, and they are rinsed in the lake and named before the tar sets.

No Do'urssan has a mother in the way the other peoples of Nu have mothers, and the whole of their law is built in the hole where she is missing. A father is a real relation, because the seed is one male's and the Mothers record whose. A mother is an office. There is therefore no womb to inherit through, no dowry, no widow's portion, no bastardy and no legitimacy; a Do'urssan cannot be born out of wedlock because there is no wedlock to be born out of. What there is instead is the tar-roll. As each vat comes up, the Mothers write the order in which the ten climbed out of the tar, and that order is seniority for thirty thousand years. First out is eldest. When the legions "morphed from a purely military structure into the semi-feudal structure, where eldest sons inherit their father's rank," the word eldest meant the first of his vat to get his hands on the lip of the vat and pull, and it means that still. Whole holds have gone to war over a claim that a roll was written wrong. Forging a tar-roll is the worst crime a Do'urssan can commit, worse than murder, since murder takes one body out of the line and a forged roll poisons the line for its whole length, and the punishment for it is to be struck from every roll, which is a death that leaves the body walking.

Those struck out, and those whose hold fell with its rolls inside it, are the unrolled. They have no seniority, no rank they can rise to and no name-order, and they take the work at the gates and the pumps that a rolled Do'urssan can refuse. A hold may enter a survivor at the bottom of its own roll as a mercy, and the mercy is real and the bottom is the bottom. Half the pump crews of Bal Glanur are unrolled out of holds the Crimson ate, and the Seventy Fifth Precinct is theirs in everything but law.

Battle wives are bound to a male by a contract of arms, sworn on the Orla like everything else, and the contract obliges them to the Giving and to the line and to nothing domestic whatever. There is no Do'urssan household. There are barracks, forges, creches and the gate. A battle wife's beads are worn at the throat rather than in a beard, and a wife who has given ten vats wears ten, and the surface, which reads beards as masculine display and throat-cords as jewellery, has been misreading Do'urssan rank at every parley for nine hundred years.

The stages have names and the names are older than the grammar that made them. The first year out of the tar is Tarvek, the tar-wet, and a tar-wet is never separated from its nine. From one to ten is Krennen, the creche, when the vat is raised together in the barrack-creches of the hold, taught to count in tens, sixties and six hundreds, and set to the pumps and the forges at the age when a Nu'uman child is still learning letters. Childhood is short and loud. From ten to forty is Bokthan, the working years, when the plating comes in, the Orla lengthens and the voice drops into the register that carries through rock. Full growth at forty is Orlen, the day the Orla reaches its length and locks clean, and it is the day a Do'urssan may swear and be sworn to. After that comes the long middle, which lasts for tens of thousands of years and has no name, because nothing in it changes. Ageing is slow and the body does not weaken for thousands of years; what fails is the spirit, which grows grim, and the size of the line, which shrinks with each vat. Old Do'urssan drink, or work without stopping, or both. The last stage is the ancient one, and it is not reached by living long enough. It is bought, with Crimson, and everyone in the holds knows what it costs.

The dead are fed to the abominations in the pits. Only the noble-born are buried in the mountains. The pit-feeding is done without ceremony and with a name spoken once; the mountain burials are cut into the living rock of the Peaks of Divinor and the Carved Range, sealed with greystone, and the name is recited on the Thundernet with the names of the hold's dead going back to the first vat. The practical argument for the pits is that the things in them must be fed or they come up the shafts, and a Do'urssan corpse is four hundred pounds of meat that the hold does not otherwise need. The argument nobody makes aloud is that a people who feed their common dead to the thing they were made to contain have arranged their funerals so that the enemy is a mouth the hold keeps full. A noble goes into the mountain, and a hold that runs short of nobles has been known to discover several.

"Mountain Eaters" is a name, and nothing more literal than that. The Do'urssan grow their food underground, under crystal light: lightning drawn from Vaeyar's storms is run through crystals that burn white, and beneath them grow crops the hold-wrights engineered to live without a sun. Greywheat, a squat pale grain that ripens in forty days. Lampcap, a mushroom the size of a shield grown on the shaded side of the crystal fields. Vatroot, a black tuber that tastes of iron and is the staple of every legion mess. The Norwind Mushrooms of the surface trade. They eat meat when the surface sells it, and they eat Thojar when the Thojar are foolish enough to come near a hold that treats them as meat. They drink a black spirit distilled from lampcap and vatroot called stillwater, which is neither.

Frailty

The dust kills them, slowly, and it takes twenty thousand years to do it. The felted grey lining of a Do'urssan lung catches rock dust and holds it, and over the long middle the trapped dust mineralises the trap, sheet upon sheet, until the lung is laying itself down the way the skeleton does. This is greylung, and the holds call it the hold-cough. It begins as a dry rasp at ten thousand years, and it ends with a Do'urssan of twenty-five thousand coughing grey grit into his hand and sitting down between the coughs. Pump technicians and shaft crews take it first and worst, which is why every hold pays a dust-wage in addition to rations, and why the dust-wage is the only bargaining right the unrolled possess and the only thing that has ever caused a work stoppage in a Great Hold.

The plating goes wrong often enough that every hold has a word for it. In the seizing, the courses of subdermal bone come in overlapped where they should abut, or fuse across a joint, and the joint closes for good somewhere in the fortieth year. A hip seizes, a shoulder seizes, a jaw seizes half open. The body is otherwise perfect and will live out its thirty thousand years exactly as it is. Seized Do'urssan are set at the forges on fixed stools and are among the finest smiths in the holds, because a smith who cannot rise works longer than one who can, and the finest weapons and armour on Nu are in part the product of a people who make excellent use of their own cripples.

Orla-rot is the fear. The sheath along the forearm infects, the organ dies in its socket and must be cut out with the socket around it, and a Do'urssan without an Orla cannot swear the oath, and one who cannot swear cannot hold rank, take a battle wife or stand at a gate. The surgery is survivable and the life after it is not much of one. Orla-rot follows dirty water and follows the pens, and a pump technician who has been in the wet for a century watches his own palm the way a soldier watches a horizon.

Starvation does something to a Do'urssan that it does to nothing else alive. With no fat worth the name and little marrow, the body turns on its own mineral, and the plating goes porous from the inside, and the great bones go light and chalky and full of air. A starved Do'urssan floats. The holds have a proverb out of the famine that followed the fall, that in the bad years the dead came up out of the flood shafts by themselves, and it is used now to mean that a thing has gone wrong at a level too deep to see. Refeeding does not repair it. The porous plate stays porous, and the seam-spike goes through it, and a hold that has been besieged fields a generation of soldiers who can be killed by an ordinary spear.

Bad vats happen. A Giving that takes badly gives ten at once, all wrong in the same way: undersized, soft-plated, slack in the mind, or born with the neck-pits closed so that they are scent-blind and must be led. The hold does not destroy them, since ten bodies are ten bodies and the pumps want hands. It records them. "A bad vat" is the deadliest insult in the hold dialect precisely because it is often a matter of public record, and a bad vat's ten carry it for thirty thousand years and are given the shafts where the roof is doubtful.

Then there is the Crimson, which the holds treat as a neighbour they live beneath rather than as a sickness going about. It comes in through cuts taken in old workings, through red ash on the air, through the water of a breached shaft. In a Do'urssan it shows early at the throat, where the plating is thinnest and the grey skin is nearly translucent over the vessels, as a blush of red under the jaw that does not fade. Every pump crew is inspected at the throat at the end of a shift, by a technician with a lamp, in a line, and a man who fails the lamp is walked out of the hold the same hour and does not come back. Mother Acasia was a stonemason and failed no inspection that anyone can find in the rolls. What the holds fear, in order, is the lamp, the seizing, the day the Tally of Heights goes below four feet, and the slow certainty that the thing they were ordered to contain is already inside the containment and has been for some time.

Country

The Under Realm, in the Great Holds and the underholds beneath them. Great Hold Kazanoon, in the Northern Mountains of Nunathay, rules the northern passage rails to the Halls of Divinor. Hold Bruber, House Brok and Great Hold Nuladoon are the other named holds. Bal Glanur has its Seventy Fifth Precinct, its Blight Pump, its Undercables and its Underrail. Grekhanslope lies among them. Sacred and strategic: the Peaks of Divinor; Lake Cilinuel, the great spawning pool; the Great Pillars of the Sky, where "any who pass through the pillars' thresholds are vaporised by lightning." The Sub-Oceanic Network rail is Do'urssan work. House Ambent of Amberhill is a mixed house of Do'urssan and Nu'uman blood seated inside surface nobility.

The carved range of Aezithis, the god's body cut and settled into a mountain range on the face of the world, is the main Do'urssan kingdom's throne on the surface. The Do'urssan call it the Carved Range in Common and hold the whole of it as one kingdom. From the surface it is a range like any other until one stands far enough back to see the hunched shoulder in the ridgeline and the valley where a heart would sit. Their throne-hold is cut into that valley and is called Great Hold Korvanoon. Its gate faces the sky, which no other Do'urssan gate does, and its deepest shaft runs down into the Under Realm to meet the rails of Kazanoon. The sky-facing gate is a standing scandal in the holds. Do'urssan eyes are made for the dark and Do'urssan minds are made for a roof, and a legionary posted to the Korvanoon gate is given a rotation of sixty days and a ration of stillwater, because open horizon makes them sick in a way they will not discuss with outsiders and discuss constantly with each other.

A hold is a mouth, a throat and a stomach. The gate-works and the muster-halls at the top, the rail heads and the forges in the middle, the crystal fields and the pump galleries at the bottom, and below the bottom the pits. The crystal fields are the measure of a hold's wealth, since a hold is rich in lit acres and in nothing else; the lightning comes off Vaeyar's storms through the surface conductors, down the copper into the field crystals, and a hold that loses its conductors starves in two seasons. Greywheat takes forty days under the white light and takes four hundred under a failing one. Lampcap is grown in the shadow the crystals throw, and vatroot in the exhausted beds behind them, and the tailings of all of it go to the red ash pans and the golden ash filtration that the surface buys without asking what it filters.

The Do'urssan bred one animal and lost it to their own cleverness. The shaft-ox was a pale blind haulage beast, bred down out of surface stock over ten thousand years until it could work a four-foot gallery and take its bearings by the same stone-grain the Do'urssan read through their feet. The Undercables replaced it. There are shaft-oxen still at Nuladoon and in the poorer underholds, and their herders are the last Do'urssan who can tell you what a hold sounded like before the cables, which is a thing old legionaries will pay to hear described.

What a hold does to the country above it takes a century to show and is never reversed. The shafts drain the rock, the water table falls, and the springs on the surface fail one valley at a time. Above Kazanoon the high pastures went dry in four generations of the Nu'uman who farmed them, and the surface lords blamed a curse, then the weather, then the Do'urssan, in that order, and were right on the third guess. The rivers run clear and dead below a working hold, since red ash takes the small life out of the water. When a hold is abandoned the pumps stop, the workings flood, and within fifty years the range above it sags, the sinkholes open, and the mountain that stood for the whole of recorded time develops a dent. Grekhanslope is named for one of those. Nothing grows in it, and nobody has worked out how to tell a Do'urssan that it was their doing without being thrown down a shaft.

Society

The Prokelen, also written Prokenel, sits on a "life-supporting throne" in the central halls. Each hold answers to an Underking, such as Underking Vazgund Kazanoon. Below them the offices are industrial and military at once: Overseer, Delegate, Plenipotentiary, Technician, Pump Technician, Immortal Centurion, Master of the Gate. The army is the society. Legions run 3,600 strong, broken into 600, then 60, then 10, copied from the Alverian legion, and they have "morphed from a purely military structure into the semi-feudal structure, where eldest sons inherit their father's rank." A Do'urssan surname is a hold name, and a hold name is a chain of command. The Prokelen is the High King. The throne keeps him breathing; he is the eldest of the ancient ones and has not left it in living memory; the Underkings go up to Korvanoon to kneel and come back down with orders, and no order is questioned, because the mouth that gave it is a god's.

The ten is the vat and the vat is the ten, and every larger number in the Do'urssan world is built by multiplying brothers. Sixty is six vats. Six hundred is sixty vats. Thirty-six hundred is the legion, and no legion has been at establishment since the fall, because the pools no longer fill the rolls. The holds have solved this by never adjusting the establishment. A legion of nine hundred is still called a legion and still keeps six hundred empty stalls in its muster-hall, cleaned daily by the unrolled, and an Immortal Centurion still calls the roll of a sixty that has eleven bodies in it and answers for the absent himself. Outsiders take this for parade fiction. In the holds it is understood as bookkeeping against a day when the Lessening is reversed, which nobody expects and nobody will formally abandon.

They are "boisterous, bold and invasive," "comandetive; when one enters a space you know," "hyper and cursed with the inability to never stop working," "highly intelligent, and unsharing to their abilities," and their nobles are "extremely powerful Nobles of few words." They do not share what they know, including with each other. The unsharing has a shape in law: a hold-wright's process is the property of his vat, dies with the last of the ten if none of them has taken an apprentice, and may not be written down outside the hold. More Do'urssan craft has been lost to this rule than to the Crimson. The holds know it and keep the rule, on the reasoning that a process another people can read is a process another people can use against a gate.

They hate magic and say so constantly: "Nothin ev'r good comes from magic! A good ol' hammer n' the job is done!" Their pride is manufacture: lightning boxes, blast doors, copper tubing, crystal windows, industrial pumps, ambered battleaxes with enchantments worked in, war hammers, woven spears. Do'urssan weapons and armour "remain the highest quality in the world." They harness "the divine lightning of Vaeyar" for machinery, which is why the surface calls them "false electric conjurers." They sell the weapon and keep the tooling. Every tool in a Do'urssan forge is cut for six fingers with an opposed inner thumb, and a five-fingered hand can use a Do'urssan axe and cannot use the jig that made it, which is a trade policy disguised as anatomy and has kept the holds' monopoly through nine hundred years of surface espionage.

Dress is plate over leather over wool, in that order of importance. A Do'urssan off duty wears a smith's apron and a belt of tools whether or not he is going to use them, and a Do'urssan on duty wears his hold's plate with the hold-mark struck into the breast. Plate is inherited and recut. A hold armoury holds suits nobody living can fill, and the trade of the plate-cutter, who takes a progenitor's cuirass down to fit a five-foot legionary and returns the cut-out metal to the hold's stock, is an honourable and quietly hated profession. Rank is worn in the beard: bone beads for vat-brothers dead, a bone ring for each sixty commanded, a carved bone plate at the chin for an Underking. Battle wives wear the same beads on a cord at the throat.

Music is the hammer: work songs beaten out on anvil and pipe in a rhythm of ten, sung low in the hold dialect, and the Thundernet recitation of names, which is the only music the Do'urssan will call sacred. Both are felt before they are heard. The low register carries into the rock, and a Do'urssan in a gallery three hundred feet from the anvil takes the beat up through the soles of his feet and works to it without knowing he has joined in. A hold at full production is a single rhythm from the gate to the pits, and the surest sign of trouble in a Do'urssan hold is not an alarm; it is a floor that has gone out of time.

The oath is sworn on the Orla, pressed point-down into the swearer's own palm until it draws blood; an oath so sworn binds the vat, not only the man. Taboo: to leave a gate open; to sell hold-plate to a buyer who will not name his war; to work magic under a hold roof; to touch another Do'urssan's Orla without leave. The Thojar are a plague to them. Some holds tolerate or welcome a Thojar; most look at one as meat to abuse, sacrifice and tear apart. "They are the abominations." That the Thojar are also the clay in their own vats is known to every Mother at Cilinuel and is not a subject on which a hold will hear argument.

Faith

The Do'urssan worship their High King as a living god. Toward every other god they hold the Engineers' Creed, which is predominantly atheist and has no clergy: "The makers were made. The made make. Gods are management." Ancestor-respect is kept as archive and not as worship, through the Thundernet name-recitation. Their devotion to their god and their possession of a priest-tongue both point at the throne, and the two positions are one position. The Do'urssan keep the worldly gods on file. Aezithis is the rock they cut; Vaeyar is the lightning they run through copper; Orton is a flooding hazard. The one god they will kneel to is the one they can see breathing on the life-supporting throne, who was alive when the makers gave the last order and will be alive when the makers come back to inspect the work.

His clergy are the Throne-Technicians of Korvanoon, who keep the throne running and speak the priest-tongue over it. His rite is the recitation of names, which he alone may hear in full. His commandment is the order that has not changed in thousands of years. The Do'urssan promise no afterlife. The pit takes the common dead and the mountain takes the noble, and that is the whole of it. In truth, the worldly gods have no realms at all, and every soul that leaves a Do'urssan body goes where every soul goes, to the auction of the star gods. The Do'urssan, having promised nothing, are the one people on Nu who are not lied to by their own religion.

Tongue

Common Tongue in a heavy hold accent that drops consonants hard and says te' and t' for "the." Outsiders mock it, and Cadel Gethin does it as a party piece. The Do'urssan Priests tongue is a liturgical form of High Alverian, kept for the throne and the Thundernet. Ancient Do'urssan survives now almost entirely as shouting: "SOLAK!!! UNBIND ME MORTAL! KIEN BOK TA! BOK TA!!!" The holds keep the words and have lost the grammar, and no living Do'urssan can build a new sentence in it. What survives of it survives in the life-stage names, in the counting, and in the things a legionary says when a gallery comes down, which is the ordinary fate of an old tongue in a people that does not write for pleasure.

Naming is a rank and an address at once: one given name of two syllables built on hard consonants, then the hold name as surname. A vat is named together, all ten sharing a first consonant. Battle wives keep the given name and take the hold; Mothers of the pools drop the hold and carry only the title. Names in use include Vazgund Kazanoon, Kamrock Bruber, Carthon Brok, Metrius Mulbark, Gailen Ambent and Mother Acasia, and, in the same convention, Dorruk Nuladoon, Gharvek Brok, Tholmar Bruber, Ulkren Mulbark, Bazgrun Kazanoon, Morvik Korvanoon, Mother Ivethe, Mother Sathenne.

Regard

"Greedy, reserved and reclusive within their mountain halls." "Far too powerful." "False electric conjurers." Torkans eat them and rate them; Hulkor Bristletooth boasts of tearing open a Do'urssan skull and drinking the memories out of it, in language not worth carrying across. The surface buys their plate, mocks their accent, borrows their rails, and does not go down to help with the pumps.

Their masters, the Alverians, they were loyal to until the end, and they are waiting on Vanyor still. The God-Kings are enemies, and Menarches was returned in gold. The Xacrie are enemies, and the Gorklin are the proof. The Torkan are enemies by predation rather than politics. The Thojar are kin, their stone half, and to the holds a plague. The surface kingdoms are complicated: war with Aelor, trade in the finest weapons in the world, and a mixed house in Amberhill. The Crimson is the enemy always, their duty since the beginning and the thing eating their holds now.

Harvest

The Do'urssan are a sentient people of the Lesser Four and are not harvested from. What is traded is what they make and what they mine. Greystone, also called "Do'urssek Grey," is "Whitestone re-engineered under Do'Urssan forge-heat" and is credited to the hold-wrights after the fall. The Heartstone of Paranien is a great relic. Norwind Mushrooms go north and south in bulk. Red Ash and its golden ash filtration are theirs. An Orla cut from a dead Do'urssan is returned to his hold at any cost, and a hold that learns one is being carried by a stranger will send a sixty to collect it.

What is taken anyway is taken in the Torkan dens and sold north under other names. Grey plate, the courses of subdermal bone lifted off a dead legionary's ribs, is worked into scale and lamellar and sold as "mountain shell" to buyers who do not enquire; it turns a blade better than anything a surface smith can forge and it cannot be repaired, since it will not take heat. Do'urssan bone yields no marrow and no glue and is therefore worthless to the boilers, which is the only part of the body the trade has left alone. The skull is prized by the Torkan for what is in it. All of this is murder by the law of every hold and by no law on the surface, and the holds' answer to it is the sixty at the door rather than a writ.

Remembered

Kamrock Bruber, of Hold Bruber, anti-magic and foul-mouthed, who says "te' Crimson take none living."

Underking Vazgund Kazanoon, ruler of Great Hold Kazanoon, master of the northern passage rails.

Gailen Ambent, Lord Chamberlain, of mixed Do'urssan and Nu'uman blood from the Amberhill region, braced in the right leg, who uses a golden royal sceptre as a walking stick. The brace is a hold cage on a seized hip, gilded for the court, and everyone in Amberhill takes it for an injury of war.

Metrius Mulbark and Carthon Brok, of their holds.

Mother Acasia, a stonemason turned by the Crimson.

The Kazanoon Delegate, the First Overseer and the Second Overseer, who are known by office and by nothing else.

Ghordamun, Prokelen of Korvanoon, the living god on the life-supporting throne, an ancient one of the progenitor generation who has not stood in four thousand years.

Kin each has a page of its own

What divides the Do'urssan is what has been done to them by their own. Two of the three kin are worked stock, made from Do'urssan hatchlings and held on the leash of the third; the third is the elder generation that refused to shrink and paid for it in machine and Crimson. Every Do'urvun and every Do'urusee was hatched Do'urssan, and every hold is quiet about it.