Gorklin

Origin

The Gorklin came from "the forceful breeding of Do'urssan at the hands of the terrifying Xacrie who raped and pillaged their underground civilizations after the collapse of the Alverian Empire." No Alverian intended them. They are a product of the empire's fall and of what came up out of the dark when the enchantments died: "short bodies with tough tumor, wart and disease riddled skin, these green-yellow abominations of the mountain were born with missing bones." They have been in the mountain depths since, and in the last ages they have come up under the cities. The sewers under Old Camelot are Gorklin ground.

They are parasitic and infesting by nature, malformed as a rule, and they breed in litters of three hundred and more. There are rare and horrifying records of a thousand from one brood mother. The Wilder lands are their country.

Body

Small, mangled and visibly unwell. The skeleton is incomplete by failure of the making, and that is the defining physical fact of the species: they "were born with missing bones." "They have bat-like hair and black-purple splotches are across their bodies from their Xacrie ancestors." The mouth is wide and the teeth are "stumpy, jagged." The eyes are dark green-red. The ears are "malformed/pointy" and "rest lower and angle straight outwards." About four feet tall; twenty to forty pounds. At forty pounds an adult Gorklin weighs less than the armour a Do'urssan legionary wears on one leg.

Lifespan is a function of feeding. Thirty years is standard; "the best fed and well kept can live for 60, but are usually rulers within their societies." They have night vision, they scale rock faces, and they digest rot.

The missing bones are the seam and they are missing for a reason. The Xacrie skeleton and the Do'urssan skeleton were written for different animals, and where the two codes both call for a bone and give it two irreconcilable shapes, the body settles the argument by building nothing. What fills the gap is gristle: a tough translucent cartilage that takes no load, holds no edge, and bends without limit. No two Gorklin skeletons are alike, and a healer who has opened three of them has seen three different species.

The commonest absences are known to anyone who has handled them. The collarbone is gone in perhaps half the population, so the shoulders fold forward and inward and a Gorklin gets its whole body through a gap that stops its own head. The breastbone floats, unattached at the lower end, so the ribcage compresses like a bellows. One hip socket is usually shallow, which gives the species its lopsided scuttle and its inability to run in a straight line. Fingers and toes come with bones missing at random, so that a hand may have one finger of pure gristle that wraps a rung like a strap. Vhask Halfjaw is named for the commonest facial version, a mandible that dislocates on one side and goes back in with a push.

What all this produces is the single most useful animal in the Under Realm for getting into places. A Gorklin passes through a grate a cat would refuse, climbs a wet chimney on grip alone, folds itself into a chest, and comes out the far end of a flooded pipe. It also cannot carry anything. No Gorklin can bear armour, draw a bow, take a blow to the trunk, or lift a weight that a Nu'uman child manages, because there is no frame in there to hang the effort on. Their entire manner of violence, the knives, the bites, the poisons and the hundreds, is the tactics of a body that cannot push.

Inside, they are mostly gut. The liver is enormous, a third of the trunk, and the stomach is savagely acid, and between them they break down carrion that would kill a scavenger. This is why a starving Gorklin is still a fat-looking Gorklin, and why forty pounds of the creature is largely the machinery for eating what nobody else will. The bile is the weapon: a Gorklin bite delivers its own gut into a wound, and what follows in a Nu'uman is not a wound, it is a fever.

The ears are the Xacrie legacy and they are not for listening to speech. They are set low and angled out because they are a pair, widely spaced, tuned high, and the gutter-speech that is "half Do'urssan and half bat-shriek" is half navigation. A Gorklin in total darkness clicks and shrieks and reads the return, and what it gets is a coarse map: the shape of a chamber, the presence of a body, a hanging edge, water. It is imprecise, it is fast, and it works in the pitch black of a warren where the eyes do nothing at all. Everything about how Gorklins build follows from it. A warren has no lamps and never has. Its chambers are rounded and smooth because a rounded chamber returns a clean picture and a square one confuses; a Gorklin place is designed to sound good rather than to look like anything. Their approach to a raid follows from it too. They are superb in a sewer, a stair, a cellar and a street, and hopeless in open country, where the return comes back from nothing and the wind eats it, which is why in four thousand years no Gorklin has ever taken a field.

The eyes are large, dark green-red, and backed with a reflective layer that makes a warren mouth look like a wall of embers when a torch is brought near it. Daylight is agony and does real damage to the skin, and the black-purple splotches burn first. They do not regulate heat at all. A warren is warm because it is full, and a Gorklin alone in a cold tunnel will be dead by morning; they sleep in a single breathing heap and always have.

Life

Infertile outside their own kind and prolific inside it. The first word in any account of their temper is "Incestuous," and the first stated objective of the species is "to ever-breed within the depths of the darkened pits of this earth." A litter is three hundred and more. A thousand from one brood mother has happened, rarely, and nobody who has been inside a warren doubts it.

The brood mother is the centre of every Gorklin place. She is a Gorklin who has stopped moving: swollen past the size of six of her kind, blind by her third litter, fed by the swarm with whatever the swarm has, and laid in a pit lined with the bones of the last brood. She litters twice a year. The young come out the size of a thumb, eyeless for a week, already biting, and the first month is spent in the pit eating each other. Of three hundred, forty leave the pit. Of forty, ten see a year. Nothing about this troubles a Gorklin.

The mother is made rather than born. No Gorklin is a mother by lineage; any female fed past a threshold and kept still long enough begins the change, and the change cannot be stopped once the pelvis starts to open. The gristle joints of the hips spread and then fuse wide, the abdomen goes, the eyes cloud, and within two years the creature is four hundred pounds of breeding apparatus that cannot turn over. This is the hard fact at the bottom of Gorklin politics, and it is why warrens are ruled by males almost without exception. A warren that lets a female eat her way to the top does not get a second ruler; it gets a second mother, and since nothing in a warren may harm the mother, it has now acquired a permanent immovable claim on its food supply that it is forbidden to remove. Two of the four named warrens have been through this and one of them is said to hold three mothers at once.

The missing bones show early, in a child whose ribs did not come or a child with no bones in one foot, and the swarm does not notice, because there is no Gorklin without something missing. The pit is the audit. A month of three hundred thumb-sized things eating one another in the dark is a test of whether a given assemblage of gristle can bite, hold, climb and get out of the way, and the forty that come out are the forty whose particular absences happened not to matter.

Their stages have no ceremony and four crude names, used by everyone: a pit thing for the first month, a crawler until it can climb, a fetcher when it carries food, a goer-up when it is taken on a raid at about three years, and a fat one if it lives to be fed. They are grown at three years and old at twenty-five. Age is fat. A Gorklin that has eaten well enough for long enough thickens, slows, and becomes the thing the young ones bring food to; that is how a ruler is made and it is the only way.

The dead are eaten by the warren before they are cold, and a Gorklin who is not eaten was hated. What is left after the eating goes down to line the pit, so that every brood is born on the bones of the last one, which is not a symbol and is simply where the bones go. They prefer rotting flesh, and "feasting on rotting flesh" is what they are known to do; they will eat anything dead, anything dying, and, when the warren is hungry, anything.

Frailty

The whole species is a catalogue of failure and it is important to see that the pit has already removed the worst of it before anyone from outside meets one. What walks in a warren is the survivors of a filter that killed eighty-six in a hundred.

The adults still break. The commonest disabling fault is the chest that has no frame, which collapses under a boot or a fall and does not come back out; a crushed Gorklin lies flat and breathes and takes two days about dying, and the warren eats it before the end and considers this a kindness, which it is. A shallow hip fails outright at about twenty in half the population. The jaw that dislocates eventually stops going back in, and a Gorklin that cannot close its mouth cannot compete at a carcass and starves in a warren full of food.

What kills the old is the gut. The bile weakens from about twenty-five, and when it does, the diet of a lifetime turns on them at once. Rot-fever is the death of the Gorklin elder: a creature that has eaten carrion daily for a quarter of a century is killed in nine days by a mouthful of exactly what it always ate. The rulers die of it first and fattest, which the warren reads as the ruler having been too greedy and which is closer to the truth than most theology.

The rulers have a second problem and it is structural. A frame with bones missing cannot carry two hundred pounds. The hips go, then the spine, and the ruler ends as a thing that decides and does not move, which is precisely why Krell Ninefinger is too fat to leave the chamber he rules from and precisely why that is the point. A ruler who could walk would have to.

They carry more disease than they suffer, and the Gorkva carry more still, but two things get into them. The first is a carrion worm that lodges behind the eye and drives the host into a frenzy for a week before killing it; a warren with frenzy in it is dangerous to itself and is usually burned out by the warren next door. The second is light. 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.

Starvation is fast and has one shape. The warren eats its own dead first, then its own weak, then its mother's food, then its mother. A warren that has eaten its mother is finished; it scatters, and is eaten by the next warren along, and this is stated plainly in their own custom. What a Gorklin fears is not death, which it expects and considers ordinary. It fears open sky, which it cannot read, and it fears silence, which means the shrieks are coming back off nothing and there is no warren left.

Country

The Under Realm, in the mountain depths, and beneath the cities. The Wilder lands are theirs. A Gorklin place is called a warren and is named for what is in it. Four carry names the surface has learned. Gutmaw, the great warren under the roots of a mountain in the Wilder lands, the oldest, with a brood pit said to hold three mothers at once. The Drip, the Old Camelot sewer-warren, named for its ceiling, where a brood mother called Sorewomb is credited with the thousand-litter. Bonesuck Hollow, a cave-warren beneath a battlefield that has fed it for two hundred years. Skullpile, a raiding warren at the edge of settled country, named for its door.

What a warren eats decides what a warren is, and the four named places are four answers to the same question. Gutmaw eats the deep: blind fish, fungus, cave things and whatever the mountain kills. Bonesuck Hollow eats a battlefield and has eaten it for two hundred years, which is the reason a cave-warren of that size can exist under bad ground at all. Skullpile eats livestock and travellers and is at war with everything around it. The Drip eats Old Camelot's dead.

That last arrangement deserves to be stated plainly, because the city will not. Old Camelot puts a great deal down its grates: the executed, the unclaimed, the plague-dead in a bad year, the inconvenient at any time. None of it comes out the far end and none of it blocks the outfalls, and the reason is three thousand Gorklin. The sewer under that city is clear because the warren is hungry, and the offices responsible for the outfalls know it, and the arrangement is nobody's policy and everybody's convenience. Twice in the last century the watch has burned out a section of the Drip and both times the outfalls choked within the year and the burning stopped.

What eats them is the Xacrie, which is to say their own god, and which they consider a blessing. Beyond that, the deep predators of the Under Realm take them, the Great Shattered eat them where their ranges touch, and Do'urssan hunting parties clear them out of holds level by level and have never once finished the job. They compete with the Nusraet for the same rot in the same tunnels and win, comfortably, and a warren has no vermin in it because a warren is the vermin and it is larger. They have domesticated nothing and are themselves the only thing in the tier that has been domesticated, by Argath and by the houses that buy from him.

A hundred years of a warren under a city changes the city in one direction. The graveyards stay small. The plague years are shorter and nastier. The poor learn which grates to use and the rich learn not to ask. And when a warren is finally cleared, as the Do'urssan cleared two in the deep holds, the sewers block, the dead come back up, and the district that paid for the clearance dies of it.

Society

The stated objectives of the species are four, and three are crimes: "To ever-breed within the depths of the darkened pits of this earth / To cause untold mischief / To Steal, murder, rape, and pillage the surface realm / Merchants and traders, selling all assortments of wares." The last one matters. Gorklins trade. They run stalls, move goods, and sell what they have stolen to the people they stole it from. They are unintelligent and scheming at once, which is low cunning without letters. Above all they are a commodity: trained Gorklins are sold "to noble houses as living waste-disposers, and as silent assassins." The dealer is Argath the Gorklin Master, who controls his pack with "a polished bell-collar he uses to summon his pack. Without the bell the Gorklins eat him." Argath is a Foulen, and his strain is written under the Foulen.

The bell is not a symbol of authority and is a piece of equipment that works on their anatomy. A struck bell throws a clean high return that a Gorklin ear reads across three hundred yards of stone in the dark, and a pack that has been fed on the bell for two years will come to it through a building they have never entered. Every trainer in the trade uses a bell or a whistle for the same reason. What Argath has done is ensure that no other bell in the world is tuned to his, and the day he loses it the arrangement reverts to the one sentence everybody quotes.

Within a warren the rule is the rule of the fed. A warren is ruled by its fattest Gorklin, who is by definition its oldest, and the rule lasts exactly as long as the feeding does. The ruler does nothing but eat and decide, and the deciding is mostly about who eats next. Beneath the ruler are the fetchers, who bring food; beneath the fetchers the raiders, who go up; beneath the raiders everything else. There is no oath. There is a custom of the bite: a Gorklin who has been given something bites the giver's hand, lightly, to show it has been received, and Argath's hands are a map of it. There is one taboo, and it is the brood mother. Nothing in a warren may harm her, and a warren whose mother dies goes mad, scatters, and is eaten by the next warren along.

Dress is whatever was on the last body. Drink is the water at the bottom of the warren and anything fermented that was stolen. Their music is drumming on bone and skulls in the dark, fast and arrhythmic, and it carries through the sewers of a city at night in a way the city has learned not to hear.

The arrhythmia is the point and it is not carelessness: a steady beat blinds the ear that is also being used to see, and a Gorklin drum is played in the gaps so that the shrieking can go on over it. Their music and their sight are the same activity and no Gorklin has ever been able to explain this to anybody.

Faith

The Gorklin have a god and it is the thing that made them. They call it the Wing Above, and it is the Xacrie ancestor remembered without a name: a great darkness overhead with teeth in it, that came down once and will come again. They do not love it. They leave it the best of the dead at the mouth of the warren, and if a Xacrie takes the offering the warren considers itself blessed and breeds harder. The brood mother is the other object of worship, the living idol, and the young are made to touch her before their first raid. There is no clergy; there is the oldest fetcher, who remembers the words. There is no afterlife in any of it. A Gorklin expects to be eaten and considers that the end.

In this the Gorklin stand nearer the truth than most peoples. The Wing Above keeps no realm, and the Gorklin soul goes to the auction of the star gods like every other.

Tongue

Common Tongue, by Alverian design, through the Do'urssan side. It is a broken Common, all verbs and no tenses, barked. Among themselves they use a gutter-speech that is half Do'urssan and half bat-shriek, which no scholar has written down and no Gorklin could explain. Half of it cannot be written down, because half of it is not speech: the shrieking that carries the meaning is the same shrieking that is mapping the tunnel, and a Gorklin conversation in the dark is two creatures talking and two creatures looking at once, in the same breath, with the same organ.

Names are crude, tribal and dark. A Gorklin has no name until it has done something or lost something, and then it is named for that, by the warren, without ceremony. A name is a deed or a defect. Owners name them differently, in batches, or not at all; Argath's pack answers to the bell and to nothing else. Skabbek; Gorrut; Vhask Halfjaw; Nubbin-Who-Bites; Muckthroat; Krell Ninefinger; Gibbet; Sorewomb, a brood mother.

Regard

"Tiny little monsters." "Abominable pests." "The great mountain rat." The Do'urssan do not speak of them at all, and a Do'urssan asked about the Gorklin will speak about something else.

Harvest

The skin, and what is on it. Gorklin hide is "tumor, wart and disease riddled," and the scrapings of it, called wart-scrape in the trade, are bought by poisoners for the sickness they carry. The Xacrie parent yields venoms "boiled down into various different disease strains," and the Gorklin carries a cheap, dirty version of the same. It is illegal in every city and sold in all of them. The live trade is worth more: a trained Gorklaen fetches the price of a good horse. Nothing else on a Gorklin is worth the risk of touching one, and the bones least of all, since no two skeletons match and half the pieces a buyer would want are simply absent.

Remembered

Argath the Gorklin Master. No Gorklin himself, he owns and sells them, and holds the pack with a polished bell-collar.

Sorewomb of the Drip. The brood mother beneath Old Camelot to whom the thousand-litter is credited, blind, immense and still breeding.

Krell Ninefinger. Ruler of the Drip, fifty-eight years old and too fat to leave the chamber he rules from, which is the point.

Kin each has a page of its own

The Gorklin lineages divide by what a warren has needed of them: the ones sent up first, and the ones that can be kept on a chain. Both are the same animal underneath.