Iziam

Body

Alone in the class they run warm through the breeding months, generating their own heat from the gut for eight or nine weeks a year. Nothing else among the Cold Scales does this. An Iziam in that season needs three times the food, sleeps badly, and is dangerous in a way the strain does not bother to apologise for.

The rest of the year they are an ordinary Iziakan body at an unusual size: three-chambered heart, throat sheet, tail root, no sweat, and a jaw that ends most arguments it is brought into.

Life

Grounds with Iziam in them keep a separate calendar of when the courts will not sit. It is not a courtesy and it is not a punishment; it is the same class of arrangement as not building on the warm bed, a fact of the body that the law has been shaped around rather than fought.

Their ageing is the plainest in the species. Where other strains fade slowly and are read by their rings, an Iziam can be dated across a room by the crown of the head, from the dark green of a young one to the nameless desaturation of an old one.

Society

They are common, which in a species that ranks by hardness means they are everywhere and nowhere in particular: soldiers, hired blades, labourers, and whatever a body of that size is worth doing. Brutish is the word the record uses and the strain has never contested it.

They do their worst at night, which is a religious observation before it is a criminal one, and is covered under their faith.

Faith

Hyton in his watching face, Am'hytos the Eye That Does Not Blink. The Iziam hold that the sun sees every act and forgets none, and they do their worst at night. Whether that is evasion or courtesy toward the god is a question their own elders have declined to settle.