Imp

Origin

Nobody made the Imp. The Do'urssan and the Nu'uman are both of the Lesser Four, both built to run the Alverian empire, and in the long age after its collapse they lived close enough for the unintended to happen. The Imp is "a species new to the last 2,000 years, desperately trying to take foothold in a large, terrifying world." Every generation since has been an attempt at the same foothold, and the Imps have never held ground of their own. They live inside the settlements of others, in their trades, their cellars and their households, and they always have.

Three trades carried them through those two thousand years and carry them still. They are "the finest of tailors, as some can conjure minor telekinesis and levitate their threads and needles." They are "apothecary extraordinaires due to their nimble fingers and knack for experimentation." And they are thieves, "due to their small size." An Imp is mischievous down to the bone and has no society of its own; it is woven into everybody else's.

Body

Stumpy and plump, and at a distance easily mistaken for a small Nu'uman child until the ears resolve. "Plump bodies, heavily resembling smaller Nu'umans, yet carrying bolder features of the Do'urssan in their angular bone structure." The bone comes through at the cheek, the brow and the jaw: hard angles set into soft flesh. The ears are the tell: "long-pointed ears; far too long." The feet are petite and the hands small enough that they have been called "his two pygmy hands." The eyes are Do'urssan and say so: "emerald green-yellow, matching the greed and fixation of the Do'urssan." The hair is the vanity. "Their hair is illustrious, rich in nutrients and often the most vibrant of natural colors," worn out and worn proud, "as they are a proud and vain collection of peoples."

Three to four feet tall; thirty to forty pounds. Forty years is what a cellar thief lives to. Ninety is what a tailor with a patron lives to, and the distance between the two numbers is the whole social history of the species written as arithmetic.

Under the plumpness the seam is easy to find in any Imp who has been opened. The Do'urssan skeleton came through in its shape and left its mass behind. Every angle of a warrior people's skull is there at a third of the size and a tenth of the weight, the bone walls thinned to the gauge of a quill in the long bones and paper at the orbit, and the whole frame braced with cartilage where a Do'urssan would carry solid bone. It is a light, stiff, beautifully economical skeleton, and it shatters. A fall down half a flight of stairs breaks an Imp's forearm in three places; the same fall bruises a Nu'uman child. Every Imp above the age of twenty carries at least one badly set break and most carry four, and a healer who has set Do'urssan bone and then sets Imp bone will say afterward that it was like splinting a birdcage.

What the frame carries is fat and fine muscle and very little else. The plumpness is a store of water and warmth wrapped round a body too small to hold either, and an Imp who loses it is in danger within a week. The muscle is laid for burst and for precision. The forearm bellies sit high, near the elbow, and the tendons that run down into those small hands are absurdly long, which is the physical reason for the needlework: the fingers are moved from a distance, by long cords, with almost no muscle in the hand to shake them. An Imp threads in the dark by feel and does it faster than a Nu'uman can do it in daylight with a glass.

The ears are not ornament and are not, in any useful sense, expressive. They are instruments, and what they are tuned to is the low end. An Imp hears through structure: footfall carried in a joist, a chair pushed back two rooms away, a coin set down on wood, a sleeper's breathing through a floor. Above the range of ordinary speech they are no better than anyone; below it they are the best ears in any city. This single fact organises the species. An Imp in a cellar knows who is standing where in the house above it, knows when the household has gone to bed, knows the tread of everybody in the building within two days of arriving, and can tell a full purse from an empty one by the sound of it being put down. The theft follows from the ears. So does the cellar. So does the cant, which is unusually rich in words for noises made by floors.

The eyes are built for the same country. The green-yellow is a reflective layer behind the retina, and an Imp's eyes throw back lamplight from a crawlspace in a way that has frightened generations of householders. They see very well in near dark and poorly in a bright street, where they squint and water and are commonly taken for shifty. They read gloss and glint at a distance no other people manages, which is the honest half of the famous luck: "their luck is extremely high and they have a knack for finding treasure," and a fair part of that is an eye that catches the one bright thing in a black room and a habit of looking into black rooms. The other part of it has never been explained, and the Imps do not want it explained.

The telekinesis has a cost and the cost is visible at every Imp table. "Some can conjure minor telekinesis and levitate their threads and needles," and what they are spending to do it is sugar. An Imp working thread all afternoon comes off the bench shaking, cold in the fingers and vile-tempered, and must eat something sweet within the hour or lie down. The famous sweet tooth that borders on a sickness is the fuel bill of the trade. Households that keep a working Imp keep a honey jar for it and call the arrangement generosity; the Imps know exactly what it is and price their work with the jar included.

The rest is ordinary and runs hot. The heart is fast, the blood is thin and clots slowly, and an Imp bleeds out of a small cut for a long time. They shed heat badly for their size and hate the cold with a passion that other peoples find comic, and a cellar full of Imps is a nest of cloth scraps, banked embers and shared blankets. Taste is where they are strangest. Sweet is detected at concentrations no other people can find, which is why an Imp apothecary can tell one honey from another by the spoonful and why an Imp cannot be poisoned with anything sweetened. Against that, Nu'uman muscle registers on the Imp tongue as rot. One Imp bit the index finger off a Man-at-Arms and "spits out the finger, showing nothing but disgust towards the flavor," and that was neither manners nor politics.

Life

Infertile outside their own kind. An Imp breeds Imps and nothing else, and the line cannot mutate further. An Imp mother carries for five months and bears one child, or two; three is a story told in every quarter and true in almost none. The newborn is the size of a fist, bald, and already grasping. Imp children walk at three months and talk at a year, and from that day they do not stop. They are grown at twelve, and they look grown at twelve, which is why so many are taken for adults and worked as adults from the moment they can hold a needle. The hair comes in its full colour at about seven, and an Imp who loses colour early is pitied more than one who loses a hand.

They count five stages and they name them out of the trade, as they name everything. A child is a fist until it walks, a bobbin until the colour comes, and at seven it is coloured, which is the only Imp celebration that involves the whole cellar network of a city and a great deal of stolen wine. At twelve it is needled, which means it is given a needle of its own, is grown, and is from that hour responsible for its own debts. The last stage is frayed, and an Imp becomes frayed on the day its hands go, whatever its age.

Age arrives at the hands first. The fingers stiffen, the fine work goes, and an old Imp turns from tailoring to selling, or from thieving to fencing, or to sitting in the corner of the shop telling the young ones they are doing it wrong. The long tendons that made the hands are exactly what fails: they thicken, bind in their sheaths, and lock a finger crooked one at a time, so that a tailor of sixty can tell you which finger he lost in which year. The hair keeps its colour to the last, and an Imp corpse looks younger than it was. When an Imp dies, whoever is nearest cuts the hair before the body cools and braids it into a last thread, which is kept by kin, by patron, or by the shop. The body itself goes wherever the household's dead go. Imps have no ground of their own to be buried in.

They are omnivores with a fast, hungry, expensive body to run, and they eat in small amounts at all hours rather than in meals. They have a sweet tooth that borders on a sickness, they will eat anything fried, and they hold Nu'uman flesh in the same contempt Nu'umans hold them.

Frailty

The bone is the standing catastrophe and everything else is arranged around it. Imps do not fight, will not be cornered, and run from things a child would face, because a single hard grip on an Imp's forearm can end its trade for a year. The quarter has a name for the commonest injury in the species, the stair-break, and a name for the commonest cause of death among the young, which is the fall. An Imp who is kicked down a stairwell is not being humiliated; it is being maimed, and the difference is invisible to everyone but Imps.

The slow clotting makes small wounds serious. An Imp with a cut hand binds it immediately and keeps it bound for days, and a bandaged hand on an Imp is so ordinary that no city guard has ever thought to wonder what is under the cloth, which the Imkesh have made a living out of.

Cellar-lung is the disease of the people: a wet, chronic rattle picked up from damp stone and cold air, which kills slowly from about fifty and is the reason a tailor with a warm shop outlives a thief in a sump by half a century. Their parasite is the braid-mite, which lives nowhere but Imp hair and is the reason Imp braid must be baked before it is sold; a wig-maker who skips the baking infests his whole workroom and is ruined, and the Imps who sold him the braid consider that his own affair.

Starvation in an Imp goes in a fixed order and everybody in the cellars can read it. First the telekinesis fails, and a tailor who can no longer lift a thread is quietly given work that does not need it. Then the hands shake. Then the fat goes, in about nine days, and the plumpness with it, so that a starving Imp looks suddenly and shockingly like a small angular Do'urssan. Last the hair loses its colour, from the root outward. A dulling head of hair in a city quarter is a public announcement that somebody is going hungry, and it is read as one, and it is the reason colour loss is pitied more than the loss of a hand: a hand is an accident, and a dull head is a failure of everyone who should have fed it.

The splice goes wrong in two directions and the quarters have words for both. Bone-heavy is the Do'urssan failure: an Imp born with too much of the parent's density, half again the ordinary weight, whose thin-walled joints cannot carry it. Such a one is strong and admired at fifteen and cannot walk at twenty-five, and the Imvak produce more of them than any other line and are proud of the ones that last. The other failure has no polite name and is spoken of in the cellars as a soft one: an Imp born without the angles, round-faced, short-eared, indistinguishable from a Nu'uman infant for years. Soft ones are sold. They are sold to childless households as foundlings, by their own kin, for very good money, and the network knows which of the great houses have one and does not say. What every Imp fears is simpler than any of this. They fear the hands going early, and they fear waking with dull hair.

Country

The Surface Realm, in the cities, and no acre of it theirs. Imps hold no territory, no quarter, no warren and no district. The one Imp premises anywhere with a name over the door is Osbal's Fine Threads, a tailoring house.

What they have is the interstices. An Imp lives in the cellar beneath the shop, the crawlspace above the apothecary's ceiling, the underfloor of a tavern where the boards are loose. In any large city there is a network of such places joined by no map, only by which Imp knows which Imp, and an Imp new to a city will find the network by the second night. No city has ever counted them and no two cities agree which of them holds the most.

What they live on in those places is the leavings of a household and one thing they hunt for themselves. Imps eat Nusraet. A cellar with Imps in it has no vermin, because a three-foot thief with cellar ears and a taste for anything fried is the most efficient rat-catcher a landlord can have and costs him nothing but the theft. Landlords in the old quarters of four cities have worked this out and keep their Imps the way other men keep a cat, and complain about them in the same tone. Nothing hunts Imps in return except dogs, and the household dog is the great enemy of the species; a canine patron who growls at an Imp is making a threat that both of them understand completely.

Where they share a city with Nakasi the division is vertical and very old. The Imps hold the cellars, the crawlspaces and the underfloors; the Nakasi hold the roofs, the gutters and the joined leads. Neither people has ever fought the other for the middle, because neither wants it, and the arrangement is so stable that in three cities the phrase "cellar and tile" means an agreement nobody intends to revisit.

A century of Imps changes a city in ways the city credits to itself. The fine cloth gets finer, because there are hands in it that can do work no Nu'uman hand can do. The apothecaries get better and their prices drop. The cellars stay dry, because somebody is down there. And the theft becomes an institution rather than a crime wave, low, constant, survivable, and absolutely impossible to end. A city that drives its Imps out learns the reverse within a generation: the tailoring collapses, the granaries fill with Nusraet, and the theft continues, conducted by people who break bones instead of stitching them.

Society

No Imp rules Imps. Their standing is stated plainly: "The Imps are of a lowly class of person, with only a handful ascending to the heights of society" as servants who have flattered their way there, and the record's own phrase for that flattery is not repeatable here. They are clever and conniving, barterers by instinct, and "lying through their teeth" is counted among them as a temperament rather than a vice. Some attach themselves to a single patron and stay. The Imp who kept company with Fitoer the Bard whispered into his ear, nodded and shook its head, and stayed with him through a beating and a dragging-off.

The patron bond is the nearest thing Imps have to a law. It is made by the ear: the Imp whispers into its patron's ear one true thing it has never told anyone, and from that whisper the two are bound until one of them breaks it. An Imp who breaks the bond is shunned by every other Imp in the city, and word travels through the cellars faster than through the streets. A patron who breaks it finds that nothing in his house stays where he put it, ever again.

The bond is made in a whisper for a reason that has nothing to do with secrecy. An Imp cannot enforce anything. It cannot strike a patron, cannot threaten one, cannot survive being struck by one, and has no kin group that will come for a debt. What it has is the only thing it can put beyond a large person's reach: knowledge of that person's house, gathered through the floor, over years. The whisper is a demonstration and the demonstration is the contract.

The honey jar is the second institution and it is the reason Imps are so often taken for greedy. An Imp negotiating a wage negotiates food first and coin second, and will accept insulting coin for a good standing arrangement about the kitchen, because coin cannot be eaten at the bench at four in the afternoon when the hands start to shake. Patrons who have not worked this out think they are getting a bargain, and are.

Dress is the one place an Imp spends. A tailor's Imp wears better cloth than the tailor. Hair is oiled, combed and shown, and a hood is an insult to wear and a worse one to be made to wear. Food is whatever the household eats, taken from the pot before the household eats it. Their music is small and quick, played on pocket-pipes and finger-drums, and their songs are almost all about things that were stolen and how. The one taboo is the hair of another Imp: to cut it, sell it or pull it is the last offence, and a fight over hair is a fight to the death at three feet tall, which in a people with this skeleton means a fight neither party survives intact.

Faith

Imps keep the gods of whatever household they live in and keep them badly. A tailor's Imp in a Nu'uman city says the household prayers, is seen at the household shrine, and believes as much of it as the tailor does, which is usually enough.

Beneath that borrowed faith runs one of their own, unnamed and unpreached: the conviction that luck is a thing owed to them. "Their luck is extremely high and they have a knack for finding treasure," and Imps treat that luck as a due paid by the world for having been born unwanted in it. An Imp thanks the gutter when it finds a coin there. An Imp who has had a run of bad luck will go and steal something small and useless to remind the world of the arrangement.

The truth beneath all of it is the same for Imps as for everyone. The worldly gods keep no afterlife; every promised heaven of every household shrine is make-believe, and every Imp soul goes where all souls go, to the auction of the star gods, unnamed and unasked for.

Tongue

Common Tongue, which every Alverian-descended people understands by design. Imps speak, and speak constantly; the silent Imp of the Angwood roads was one Imp's habit and one Imp's choice. Among themselves they use a cant of Common, quick and clipped, built on the words of the needle trade and the pocket trade, in which "to hem" is to hide a thing on your person and "a loose stitch" is a guard who can be got past.

The cant carries one whole vocabulary that no other people has any use for, and it is the vocabulary of noises made by buildings. There are separate words for a floorboard under a standing man and the same board under a man shifting his weight, for a stair taken by somebody who lives in the house and a stair taken by somebody who does not, for a door closed by a servant and a door closed by an owner. An Imp giving directions to another Imp will describe a route by what it sounds like from below.

Names vary freely and no convention binds them; an Imp can be called anything. The pattern that recurs is a given name and a trade-descriptive compound surname, as in Osbal Threadpincher, "Master of Osbal's Fine Threads." The surname is usually earned rather than inherited, handed over by the quarter for the thing the Imp is known to do. Osbal Threadpincher; Pimmick Cuffnicker; Vesk Saltbottle; Drommo Lockwhisper; Tulka Gildbiter; Fennik Ashcarry; Mabbet Purseglove; Quillo Nettlestitch.

Regard

"Lovely little tailors." "The finest of tailors, apothecary experts." The same mouths call them conniving, call them small, and call them a mixture of two peoples that should not have mixed, and the two commonest street names for an Imp are an obscenity with the word for little attached and a term for mixed blood that is not set down here. The species has given the Common Tongue a word of its own: "'Impish', to be conniving and sneaky."

In practice they are treated as vermin. An Imp is kicked down a stairwell, growled at by a canine patron, swatted at by irritated drinkers, and hunted through a town by Angwood Men-at-Arms shouting after the Imp that was with that thing.

The casual violence is calibrated for a body that does not exist. A Nu'uman who cuffs an Imp is doing what he would do to a child and is in fact doing something closer to what he would do to a bird, and the gap between those two is where most Imp deaths in cities happen. No court in the world has ever recognised the distinction.

Harvest

The hair. Imp hair holds its colour after death and takes dye badly, which is exactly why it is wanted: the pigment is laid down the whole length of the shaft instead of at the root, the medulla is thick and waxy, and the result is a fibre that will not fade, will not take a new colour, and outlasts the head it grew on by decades. A braid of it is sold to wig-makers, to embroiderers for thread that will not fade, and to apothecaries who grind it for the nutrients it is held to carry. It is legal everywhere and shameful everywhere, and a Nu'uman lady wearing an Imp braid in her own hair will not be told so to her face. Taking it from a living Imp is theft and is treated as such by nobody but Imps. Nothing else of the body is worth the trouble; the bone is too light to carve and the small quantity of everything else has never repaid the effort of taking it.

Remembered

Osbal Threadpincher. Master of Osbal's Fine Threads, the only Imp anywhere who carries a surname over a door.

The Imp of Fitoer the Bard. Unnamed, bonded to the Irugaine bard, who bit off a Man-at-Arms' finger and spat it out in disgust.

Vesk Saltbottle. An apothecary's Imp remembered in three cities for a sleeping draught that never once failed and was never once paid for.

Kin each has a page of its own

What divides the Imp lineages is which parent came through hardest and what trade the line fell into after. The Do'urssan bone makes one kind of Imp and the Nu'uman softness another, and two thousand years of the same work in the same quarters has set all three.