Gorklaen

Body

A collarbone is the whole difference. Where half the species folds its shoulders forward through a gap that stops its own head, a Gorklaen has a frame to hang an effort on, and everything the trade wants of one follows from that: it can carry, it can hold still, and it can take a blow without the chest going flat and staying flat.

The rest is Gorklin. Four feet, twenty to forty pounds, night vision, a reflective eye, a gut that digests rot, and ears set low and angled out that read a struck bell across three hundred yards of stone in the dark.

Society

A Gorklaen will learn a bell, a whistle, a name; it will learn a household's rubbish from its silver; it will learn a face and wait for it. Noble houses keep them in the cellars as living waste-disposers and let them out at night as knives, and a trained one fetches the price of a good horse.

The bell is not a courtesy and not a symbol. A pack fed on the bell for two years will come to it through a building it has never entered, because a struck bell throws exactly the clean high return a Gorklin ear is built to read. Every trainer in the trade uses one. Argath has only made sure that no other bell in the world is tuned to his.

They are as vicious as the Gorkva and merely more patient. A house that lets a Gorklaen go hungry for a week learns what the collar was for.

Frailty

They are the only Gorklin lineage ever seen above ground in daylight on purpose, at heel, in a collar, and the sores that come of it are a cost the buyer does not price. Prolonged sun raises weeping sores along the splotches, and a Gorklaen kept above ground in daylight for a season is bald, scabbed and half blind, which is why even the collared ones are let out at night.

Thirty years is the span, and sixty belongs to the best fed, who in a warren are the rulers. In a house, a well fed Gorklaen is simply a Gorklaen that has been kept, and nobody has written down how long one of those lasts.