Iziakaen

Body

The sleeves are not modesty. An Ink Scale spends its life indoors and out of the sun and softens further every year it does so, and the sleeve hides a forearm that has stopped taking rings. The caste has arranged its own appearance so that nobody has to look at the evidence.

They are near-sighted from the work and they read in two lights: in the bright, where Iziakan writing is painted in oil and invisible to everybody else, and in ordinary light, because a hide-book must be legible to a buyer. The double script they invented for that is the nearest thing the species has to a gift to the rest of the world.

Life

An Ink Scale is made at the First Shedding and not born. The child is read soft, the eyes are found too steady, and it goes to the books instead of the wall. It is permitted to be soft because it will never be asked to fight, which is the only lawful exemption from the scale ladder the Iziaka grant a living person.

They alone may speak a scale-word over a stranger's dead, which every other Iziaka is forbidden to do, and they keep the clutch-counts, the tallies and the histories of the wars that no settled kingdom will write down. Reading a whole hide-book takes an Ink Scale a week and is done once in a lifetime, at the founding of a new ground.

Society

Other strains treat them with a mixture of contempt and need: an Ink Scale is insulted at the door and seated at the head of the board. A scale-hold without an Ink Scale to read its book and a Salt Scale to bless its clutch is a hold no other Iziaka takes seriously, and every lord who has ever sneered at a soft-scaled scholar has sent for one.

They do not rule and they are consulted by those who do. They are not paid in the way a trade is paid; they are fed, housed and buried at the ground's expense, like readers of scale, and the office they hold is the reason the species has a history at all.

Faith

Hyton in his first face, Hytaen the First Word, the star-father as the light by which anything was first read. The Ink Scales hold that the god keeps a hide-book of the world, and that everything not written into a book on Nu is lost to the one above, which is the plainest statement of why this caste exists that anybody in the species has made.