Gourmun

Body

"Short, mushroom infested across their droopy skin, the Gourmun are a bottom feeding species. Their eyes are green-black, and across their body grows all assortment of droopy, webbed or tall fungi. They have wet stringy beards, and rounded with tiny ended noses. Pale pink skin, with freckled green-blue pigments, these droopy eared creatures keep to the darkness, as fungi do." Four to five feet, fifty to a hundred pounds, sixty to a hundred years, the shortest-lived Irugaine after the Foigan and the hardest of all of them to kill for good.

They regrow limbs, and "can heal by crawling into dark nooks so that their fungi properties can take hold." The regrowth is the vaan working without a plan: a Gourmun's pattern is loose, the least specified of the sixteen, so the organ can rebuild a hand in a fortnight and will rebuild it slightly differently each time, and an old Gourmun is a collage of its own repairs. Their eyes are nearly useless and they do not mind; a Gourmun navigates by the white threading underfoot and by taste, licking the wall of a tunnel to know which tunnel it is, and their warrens are therefore mapped by flavour and cannot be described to anyone else.

Society

They are ruled as a fungus rules: the thing you can see is not the organism. A warren of Gourmun regards itself as one creature wearing forty bodies, joined under the floor by the white threading that runs beneath every Gourmun tunnel and touches the sole of every foot in it. There is no chief and no vote, because a body does not put a matter to itself. Whichever body is nearest the matter acts, and the rest of the warren does not contradict it, on the reasoning that to contradict yourself is the beginning of madness. When two warrens meet, the older threading wins, and age is settled by taste. The oldest warrens keep a First Body, a Gourmun that has been cut apart and regrown so many times that the warren regards it as the part of itself that speaks, and it is sent out to deal with other kin because somebody has to be.

Life

They eat rot, which is what bottom feeding means here: dead wood, the liquor at the bottom of a rotted log, carrion left too long for the Shieken to want, dung, drowned things, and the pale gardens they grow on all of it. A Gourmun will eat a thing no other kin will touch and be improved by it.

Their sickness is drying, which is the only thing that kills them properly: a Gourmun in open sun for a day shrivels to a husk that cannot be regrown from, and the Boalden learned this and used to peg them out.

Harvest

Taken from them: the fungi off the skin, the richest single field of medicine on Nu, which includes the rot-stop that surgeons pay for, the sleep-cap the assassins pay more for, and the grey button that shows a hold's sappers where the air is bad; the wet beard-strands, drawn into surgical thread that the body does not reject; the spores, which will seed a cellar and then own it; and, uniquely among the sixteen, living flesh given freely, because a Gourmun that loses an arm grows another, and the arm it lost is worth a season's food to the warren. It is the only Irugaine that sells parts of itself, and the other kin find this disgusting and buy it anyway.