Eesha

Origin

Shrakur spliced with swamp eel and river bed fish, "Bred to hunt the failed frog experiments within bogs, lakes, and river regions." "Torturers and villains at the core of their being, these river teeth serpents were torturers in the great Alverian Empire and to this day still continue their torturing and self-serving ways." They served the empire as torturers and serve the courts that came after it in the same office. They were "meant to hunt long past any empire," and they have.

Body

Five to six feet, and two to three hundred pounds, wet. The Eeshmorg stand several feet more, and the oldest of them "can grow fifteen feet tall." "Their head is closest to an eel. Wide, but pointed, often saggy and slimy skin. Jagged sharp teeth line their hard, sharp lips. Their bodies are bulbous and lumpy, with beady black or milky colored eyes. Two long arms, with six clawed fingered hands." The feet are six-clawed too. The mouth "either splits open with three lips, or one that is small with two lips, that expands wide." The walk is the tell: "Their legs only developed in the last 500 years; limped walks on land," and many carry canes. In water "legs and arms flatten down to their side, allowing them to swim like a fish."

The skeleton is the reason for the limp. Almost all of it is cartilage strung along one long flexible rod from skull to tail-stump, which is a perfect swimming frame and a poor standing one, and the hips are a recent and badly made joint bolted onto the end of a spine that was never designed to carry weight upright. The socket is shallow and the surfaces wear. A land-going Eesha of forty has ground its hips to the bone and walks on a cane, and the cane is therefore not an affectation of office; it is the office made visible, and every court that employs Eesha knows that the one with the heaviest cane has been at the work longest. That Dolzik's cane holds a sword is an ordinary refinement.

The oldest of them remember not having legs at all. Five hundred years is nothing to a people that does not die of age, and there are Eeshak on the salt shores who learned to walk in adulthood and have never entirely forgiven it. They hold the land-going houses in contempt for the same reason a swimmer holds a crutch in contempt.

The mouth is two sets of jaws. The outer jaw splits three ways or opens wide on two lips and takes the grip; behind it, set in the throat, a second pair of jaws runs forward on muscle, closes on what the first is holding, and drags it back. Nothing in an Eesha chews. Everything is pulled. Their craft follows their anatomy exactly: an Eesha inquisitor does not break a thing, it draws a thing out, and in Eeshan the word for a confession and the word for a swallow are one word.

There are no scales. The skin is bare and coated in a slime that must be kept wet, and out of water it dries, tightens and splits along the lines of movement. An Eesha on land lives inside a slow continuous burn, worst at the joints and the mouth, relieved by water and never cured. The land-going houses keep wet rooms and damp robes; those that do not are making a point. Dolzik the High Inquisitor is the species entire in one body: "his slimy skin is cracked and dry, covered with markings of self inflicted pain. His angular and arched forehead flows down into his tri lipped mouth, teeth sticking out onto his face." He prefers dry land. Everything else follows from that preference, which is a preference for hurting, taken first upon himself. He draws his sibilants: "Why have you ssstopped!?"

They feel the electrical wash of a living body. Pores over the head and along the flanks read the faint field that a working muscle and a beating heart put into the water, and in air the sense shortens to arm's length and does not go away. An Eesha across a table knows your pulse, knows when it changed, and knows the small tightening in the gut that happens a half second before a lie is spoken. This is why no other people has ever displaced them from the inquisitor's office, why they are hired by courts that despise them, and why an Eesha holds the truth sacred in everyone else while telling none of its own. It is also why they work in the dark: the eyes are milky and near useless in air, the field-sense is not, and the lamp in a questioning room is brought in only so that the prisoner can watch it being brought.

Hearing is done along the flanks, by a line of pressure organs that read the movement of water, and on land they read almost nothing. An Eesha in air is close to deaf to ordinary speech and must be spoken to loudly and from the front. Eesha houses shout at one another as a matter of course, which visiting scribes record as rage and which is only volume. Smell is the long sense: in water they take blood at a distance that other peoples will not believe, and a wounded thing anywhere in a bog is already a destination.

None know their lifespan. They are ancient and seemingly never die. The spans set down for the kin, sixty to eighty years for most, are how long an Eesha usually lasts before something kills it.

Life

"They spawn their eggs in rotting corpses, so that they can feast upon something the moment they enter the world." The landmark this leaves is the Eesha Corpse: "The Eesha collect various corpses to lay their eggs in, and often cluster their young together; if you walk upon ten or more bodies in a bog, run." They are "parasitic omnivores, as they eat and kill everything, creating unstable ecosystems." The body chosen is called the Bed, and a Bed is prepared: opened, weighted, sunk to a depth where it will rot slowly rather than fall apart, and marked by scent so that other Eesha know it is claimed. Fighting over Beds is the commonest killing among them.

The hatchlings eat their way out and then eat each other, and the clutch that reaches the water is the part that ate most. What leaves the Bed is the Leaf: a flat, transparent, leaf-shaped larva the length of a hand, drifting, almost invisible, eating anything soft. Nothing rears them. The colouring comes on at the end of the drift and the pits call it the Dark, and the darkened one goes by smell to the nearest pit and is taken in at the bottom of the rank. Its whole education is the Claiming, which is the taking of a rank off something that had it, and an Eesha's first Claiming is remembered by everybody who saw it.

The long middle has no end in it. Age shows as the Cracking: the skin dries, the splits stop closing, the hips fail, and the old go back into the water and rule from it. This is the Going Back, and it is a promotion. A land-going Eesha who can no longer stand is not retired; it is sent to a pit to be the thing the walkers report to, and Vrassil of the Hundredmouth is what that looks like after a long time.

An Eesha that is killed is laid in as an egg-bed by its own clutch, so that it is, in the pits' phrase, buried in its grandchildren.

Frailty

A body that does not die of age still accumulates everything that has been done to it. There is no Eesha of two hundred years that is not a ruin: hips gone, skin permanently split, teeth broken and regrown crooked, one arm shorter than the other from an old pull. Rank is the only thing holding some of them upright, and it is held by the field-sense and the voice, which is why the ancient ones stay in the dark and out of reach and let the walkers come to them.

The Drying is the ordinary death. An Eesha kept out of water for three days cannot close its mouth, for five cannot see, and dies in the second week, and this is the standard punishment their own houses use on one another. It is also how the SnakeFishers kill the ones they take, since a dried Eesha keeps its hide better than a drowned one.

Their wounds do not close well on land. The slime that seals a cut in water simply runs off in air and takes the scab with it, so a land-going Eesha carries every injury it has ever taken as an open line, and the cracked, marked skin of the inquisitor caste is half occupation and half neglect. Dolzik's self-inflicted markings are cut along the cracks that were already there.

The parasite that specialises in them is their own kin. Eshmor eggs will hatch in an Eesha as readily as in anyone, and the pits keep a watch on the back of the neck; a senior Eesha found carrying them is killed at once by its inferiors, who have been waiting for a reason. In a hungry season a pit eats its own clutch, and the Eesha do not regard that as a failure, and the peoples around them do.

What they fear is water they cannot leave and land they cannot get off. A pit that dries in a drought is a hundred Eesha cracking to death in a mud bowl within sight of a river, and the Torgai baronies have dammed for that purpose more than once.

Country

Surface Realm wetlands and coastal salt water. The Eesh Pit: "Large mud holes that contain hundreds of Eesham; drop food at its mouth and stand back as hundreds slither out." The Eeshmorg keep "patchwork homes out of decayed sunken cities." The land-going Eesha serve in Nu'uman courts, and Dolzik serves at Angwood. Two places carry names. The Hundredmouth is the largest known pit, its mouth ringed with the bodies it has been fed. The Drowned Quarter is an Eeshmorg hold in the flooded ward of a city that fell in the god war.

A pit is a dug bowl of mud with galleries running off it below the waterline and a single mouth, and it is kept deliberately foul, since foul water hides the field-sense of what is inside it and clean water does not. The makers' record that the sight of their own filth makes them callous is exact; the filth is a defensive measure and they know what it is doing to them.

What an Eesha population does to a country is documented by everyone who has had to live downstream of one. They eat and kill everything and they breed into corpses, so a wetland with an established pit loses its fish in a decade, loses its frogs in fifteen, and becomes a mud country of eels and Eesha and nothing else. The Torgai baronies tax the pits on their ground and cull them when the eel yield drops, which is an unwinnable maintenance and is the real reason the swamp economies need the SnakeFishers.

Nothing hunts an adult Eesha except another Eesha and the trained lesser-snakes of the SnakeFishers. The Leaf stage is eaten by everything in the water, which is the only reason the world is not entirely Eesha.

Society

Rank-obsessed, inquisitorial, and professionally cruel. "Deep down their species is one of doubt and the inability to trust their circumstances in those around them, leading to the need and pure want to know as much as they can, never settling for less. The thought that many of their kind still swim in pools of their own filth makes them callous and vicious in almost every interaction, judging all as they are." "Cruel, and dominant towards all species that are beneath them in rank." "Snarky, never really taking light of others, but always 'playing with their food.'" Dolzik commands the Angun Torturers for Lady Angun of Angwood.

Rank is what an Eesha has extracted, and it is taken, never given. The land-going houses of inquisitors keep ledgers of confessions as other houses keep coin, and an Eesha's standing in its house is the weight of its ledger. The pits have no rule but hunger. Dress on land is robes, cane and gloves over the six fingers; the gloves are for the wet, since a dry hand is an admission, and the robes are damp under the outer layer in any house that is functioning. In the water, nothing.

They eat whatever is alive and drink what it bled. They have no music and hiss at other peoples', which is less disdain than discomfort: a people that hears through the flanks finds air-borne song a meaningless pressure and finds a drum, felt through the floor, actively distressing. Courts that want to unsettle a visiting Eesha put drummers in the next room. The oath is "on the truth," which an Eesha holds sacred in everyone else. Taboo: to lie to a superior; to spawn in a clean bed.

Faith

The Eesha align with the local faces of the local gods wherever they live, and some among them worship the Void Princes. An Eesha takes the god of the country it hunts in, under whatever face and name the country gives it, and offers the temple its craft: it becomes the questioner of heretics, and every temple has wanted one. Beneath all the borrowed faces the Eesha keep a conviction of their own, which is that every god is hiding something and could be made to say it. Those who go to the Princes bring the craft with them, and pain becomes the offering.

They expect nothing after death and expect not to die. They are wrong on the second count only. Killed, an Eesha's soul goes up to the star gods' auction like anyone's, and the pits do not know it.

Tongue

Common Tongue, spoken with drawn sibilants and spoken loudly, since they cannot hear it well themselves. In the water they speak Eeshan, a hiss-and-click that carries through mud and that a pit can conduct in total darkness at any distance inside the bowl.

The names are two hard syllables without a family name, since an Eesha has no family it would name; rank is added in Common after, as with Dolzik the High Inquisitor. The names run: Dolzik, Skarvel, Hisszek, Mordik, Vrassil, Ulzik, Thessrak, Kelmoz.

Regard

"Terrifying agents sent to extinguish the truth they so seek to uncover." "The truth at any cost." "Destructive, with no mind to the path of terror they leave."

The Bogish are prey; the Eesham "hunt them to sell at the market," which is the original purpose still running four thousand years on. The SnakeFishers are enemies: "People that use their massive hunting companion lesser-snake to burrow for Eesh Pits. The Snake disturbs the nest and the Eesha burrow up and are caught." The Nu'uman nobility are employers. The Torgai barons are rivals in the same swamp for the same frogs, and a Torgai barony that has hired an Eesham bailiff has hired the thing that will one day lay eggs in the baron.

Harvest

Eeshan Hide: "Waterproof hide for aquatic diving suits." Cured from a dried body, since the slime must be gone before the hide will take; a drowned Eesha is worthless to the trade.

Eeehfilt: "Their filtration organs are harvested and used to filter out toxic elements present in water." The organ is the one that lets them live in their own filth, and it comes out of a body the size of a fist and works for a year.

Throat-jaw: the inner set of jaws, drawn out whole, mounted on a haft and sold in the wetland markets as a grapple and a gaffing hook, which is the tool doing exactly what the organ did. All are legal. No one has ever objected to a dead Eesha.

Remembered

Dolzik the High Inquisitor. River Eesha in the service of Lady Angun of Angwood; prefers dry land, carries a sword cane, and has covered his cracked skin "with markings of self inflicted pain."

Vrassil of the Hundredmouth. An Eesham who has never left the water and to whom the land-going houses send their ledgers to be weighed.

Thessrak Salt-Old. An Eeshak of a saltwater shore who claims to remember the Alverian lords and is not doubted to their faces.

Kin each has a page of its own