Iziakoom

Body

Under the fat they carry the densest bone in the species and a heart that beats thirty times a minute at rest. The tired eyes are literal: an Iziakoom at that weight sleeps eighteen hours in a hot day and is awake all night.

Their hide grades hard, which is armour worth a warhorse a panel, and the sheer area of an Iziakoom makes a dead one worth more than most living persons in the market that prices them.

Society

The tiny scale is the whole problem and the whole answer. Nothing that small can be read, so the scale law has no purchase on an Iziakoom at all, and the readers long ago agreed to read them by the horn of the snout instead, counting the rings in it exactly as they would count a plate.

It is a fiction and everyone knows it, and it is the only recorded case of the Iziaka amending the law rather than enforcing it. A species that will let a child be read down for a damp room and a fish diet found a way around its own doctrine for the only strain too large to argue with, and has never once been asked to explain the difference.

Life

They bury their clutches beneath the sleeping place of the clan's largest, so that his weight warms the ground and any thief must move him first. It is the most direct clutch-guarding arrangement in the species and it has never needed a second measure.

The clans form in the wild, to safeguard each other from the fouler races, and the strain holds together in them rather than in clutch-ground villages or scale-holds. Some have become gentler people, which is the record's own phrasing and is meant plainly: the war stock has not all stayed war stock.

Faith

Tantis in his unmoved face, Tan'oom the Unmoved, the mountain god who made nothing he loved. The Ram Scales take him as a father who did not want them and love him without expecting an answer, and they carry the tiredness in the eyes as his mark. Of all the Iziakan faiths it is the only one that does not promise anything in return for the hardening.