Iziaksal

Body

The diet does more than crust them. Living on weed and brine for a century strips the mineral that would have hardened the hide and puts it into the crust instead, so a Salt Scale softens steadily across its whole life while the sacred mask on its face thickens.

The caste teaches that this is the point: the priest gives its rank to its god an inch at a time and wears the receipt. Five and a half feet, heavier than the strain they come from, slow, and given to very long silences that inland peoples mistake for rudeness and coastal peoples know to wait out.

Life

A Salt Scale is made at the First Shedding, like an Ink Scale, and unlike an Ink Scale it is made by the priests who will keep it rather than by a reader who is disposing of a soft child. It goes below the water mark and it stays there.

A Salt Scale whose crust cracks is finished as a priest and walks into the water. There is no demotion, no second office and no retirement, and the caste states the rule without any softening at all.

Society

They are the readers of scale for the coast, the keepers of the tide grounds where the Iziakarine clutches lie, and the only Iziakan clergy who bless the clutches of other strains, being sent for from far inland at great cost and travelling by water wherever water can be found.

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, which means the hard-scaled lords of the volcanic country send across a continent for a softening priest they would not otherwise seat.

Faith

Orton in his salt face, Oru'sal the Salt Father. The crust is his hand laid on the face when the sea withdraws. Where the Iziakarine keep him as the Cold Swell who takes the clutch twice a day and gives it back, the caste keeps him as the one who marks the face of whoever agrees to be spent, and the mark is the whole of the office.