Iziakubu

Body

The softness is structural. The bone seed under an Iziakubu scale stays gristle for life and never takes mineral, so no quantity of lime, sun or good years will harden one, and every Iziakubu knows from childhood that the thing keeping it down is not luck and cannot be outlasted. There is no Late Hardening in this strain and no Second Reading worth attending.

What they have instead is a gut that will survive almost anything, a liver that clears poisons that kill other strains outright, and the tongue. Their hide grades soft, which makes cheap leather for gloves and grips, and their dried tongues are sold across three kingdoms as poison-testers.

Society

A soft reading closes specific doors and the Iziakubu are born behind all of them. They may not command, may not hold a clutch-ground, may not be readers of scale, may not stand witness except to say what they did with their own hands, and may not marry above their word. They may work, own, trade, travel, teach, fight, get rich and be loved, and a great many of them do all six.

The Iziakoh keep them in the noble houses as servants, and the Iziakubu taste the sand of a noble incubation hall for poison every morning. It is the most sensitive work in the building and it is done by the only people in it who cannot be seated at the board.

Two centuries ago a lowland ground tried the obvious argument, that a people who cannot be poisoned should not be ruled by people who can. It was put down in a season by three neighbouring holds who had never agreed on anything else.

Faith

Zaona in her bitter face, Zaa'ubu the Bitter Moon, the sister who tests by poison and spares the one who tastes first. The Iziakubu hold that she reads the tongue and not the scale, which is the only Iziakan faith in which the soft may be counted hard, and which no hard-scaled strain has ever thought worth arguing with.