Iziaka

Origin

The splice is Nu'uman and lizard, written in the older hand as "Huuman + Lizard." The Alverians made them as "ground infantry across many terrains; expendable in every way," and forked one stock into twenty so that a strain of Iziaka could hold jungle canopy, tidal rock, dune, volcanic ash and deep forest alike. They carry "hundreds of thousands of years of battle expertise that has become ingrained in them."

The forking was done once and then driven. The Alverians did not run twenty separate splices; they took a single stock chosen for how readily it would bend, and pushed it across a handful of vat generations by heat, feed, light and pressure until each line set into the shape its ground required. That method left a signature the species has never lost. Any Iziaka can breed with any other Iziaka, a four-foot gecko strain with a seven-foot komodo strain, and the clutch takes. The eggs are laid rather than carried, so the size of the mother is beside the point; a small female can lay a large strain's clutch and does, and in the quarters of the settled cities she often has. What comes out of a crossed clutch is a hatchling like any other, and what it is read as, at the First Shedding, is soft. Crossings almost never harden. This one fact holds the species together and holds it down at the same time: twenty doors that all open into the same room, and a stairway that any child of two doors is forbidden to climb.

After the fall, "many great armies were led at the hands of great reptilian generals, but as time progressed and species began mingling, many took to a more docile life, and thus the majority became turned away from the days of epic war, and focused on laying family roots, as the Nu'uman did." The turn took perhaps four generations, and it was accepted rather than chosen. The generals who wanted the wars kept found no one left to pay them; the clutch-grounds wanted warmth and quiet ground and got both. What the Iziaka bought with that quiet was three thousand years of hard, patient civilisation in the hot country. What it cost them was the memory of everyone else. The settled kingdoms remember the reptilian generals and have forgotten everything since.

They are a highly advanced people. Where they began crude and tribal they now keep records, breed crops in the warm country, hunt with method, and in the strains that carry the gift work magic with a discipline the settled kingdoms would rather not admit to. What the advancement bought them in those kingdoms is an underclass. The Iziaka appear in the world as a plug servant, a pleasure slave, a body bought for a bed, a caravanner and a troupe of street performers, and a lord will name one aloud at his own board as a thing he owns for that purpose, in words not worth setting down. They have a term for the whole arrangement. They call the settled kingdoms the Cold Country, whatever its climate, and to go into the Cold Country for work is a thing a family speaks of the way another people speaks of a son going to a war they do not believe in.

Body

"Jagged, primal features and lizard traits are apparent across their Nu'umanoid forms." Head spikes jut from various places across the skull, with smaller spikes scattered down the body, and many carry a ribbed spine that runs from the nose, over the head, and down the tail. The teeth line the jaws rather than sitting behind lips. There is no single colouration: "Each scale type is different in its own colour palette and variation," and between the strains the range runs hyper-green, faded cyan, tan and gold, black-and-white spotted, brown-sand, blue-grey, grey-brown, vibrant red with blue limbs, and tiny hard black. The tongue is the tell: "their tongues move in unique ways, allowing them to speak most languages." What a stranger notices first is scale hardness, because everyone else in the room is noticing it too.

Height runs from four feet to seven by strain. The Iziakoom stands outside that band, "towering nine feet tall," the one strain the wars built for mass. Weight follows build rather than height: a four-foot Iziakotiel weighs sixty pounds and can be carried under one arm; a seven-foot Iziakodo weighs two hundred and forty; an Iziakoom weighs upward of six hundred and the floorboards say so.

The scale is the organ that matters and it deserves a page of its own, because the law of the species is written in it before it is written anywhere else. An Iziakan scale is not a plate laid on the skin. It is a thickening of the skin itself, grown over a seed of bone the width of a grain of barley that sits in the deep layer of the hide, and it hardens by taking mineral out of the blood and laying it down in rings, one ring to a shed. A hatchling's scale is a soft leaf of keratin over a seed that is still gristle. By the twentieth shed the seed has become bone, the keratin has become horn, and the rings have fused into a single plate that will turn a knife. Hardness is therefore a count: how many sheds, how much mineral was in the blood at each of them, and how hot the ground was while the new plate set. The three inputs are heat, feed and time, and all three can be given to a child or withheld from one.

Which is how the law became a crime. Mineral comes out of bone, insect shell, river shell and burnt lime, and the hot-country strains eat all four by habit; a child raised on fish and fruit in a damp room will shed soft for its whole life and there is nothing wrong with it that a decade of lime and sun would not fix, and by the time the decade is available the reading has already happened. Grounds know this. Grounds do it. To keep a rival's child cold, damp and fed on soft food until the First Shedding is called damping, and it is the most commonly alleged and least commonly proved crime the Iziaka have. Every scale-hold of any standing keeps a feeding rule for children in writing, nailed where the clutch-mothers can see it, and the rule exists because the alternative was proved in a hundred grounds before anyone wrote it down.

Softening runs the other way just as reliably. A long fever softens the next shed. A year in a cold country softens every shed in it. Deep hunger pulls mineral straight back out of the plates to keep the bones standing, and a starved Iziaka's scale goes chalky and lifts at the edges before the ribs show. Laying a clutch does the same thing at speed, because the shell is made of exactly what the scale is made of: a female who lays thirty eggs pays for those shells out of her own back and stays soft for two years afterwards. This is the single fact that decides the position of Iziakan women, and it decides it in both directions. A female who lays often will never be read hard and will never rule. A female who does not lay at all may be read as hard as any male, may hold a scale-hold, may carry arms and frequently does, and is called a dry-back to her face without insult intended and with a great deal of insult understood. The old females who keep the clutch-grounds have come out the far side of it: past laying, thirty years of hard sheds behind them, they are often the hardest-scaled persons in a village, and the fact that they tend the eggs instead of the wall is a custom rather than a demotion, though a great many of them would put it differently.

Under the hide the frame is light for its size. The bones are thin-walled and very dense at the joint, the ribs run further down the trunk than a Nu'uman's, and the shoulder is a floating sling of muscle rather than a socket on a bar, which is where "extreme flexibility and athleticism, allowing them to scale great structures and cliffs" comes from; an Iziaka can put an arm through a gap its head will not go through, and an Iziakan burglar is a problem no locksmith on Nu has solved. The heart has three chambers and the flow through it is steered rather than separated, which means an Iziaka can shut down a limb, a gut or a whole side of itself and keep the rest running. That is the trick behind the stillness and behind the swimming both.

The throat carries a sheet of thin, heavily veined tissue folded along the gullet which takes oxygen out of still water; hold the water in the mouth, work the throat slowly, and the tissue does the rest. It is why they "swim and breathe underwater," and it comes with a hard limit that every Iziakan child is taught before it is taught to swim: the sheet supplies a resting body and no more. An Iziaka can sit on a riverbed for an hour. An Iziaka that fights on a riverbed drowns in four minutes, and coastal grounds have won three wars on that fact against people who had heard only the first half of it.

The blood is very dark, near black in the cup, and clots into a rubbery seal in the time it takes to count thirty, which is why they bleed so little from so much and why a battlefield they have left looks less busy than it was. It will not seal a throat and it will not seal a belly. Heat is shed through the mouth: they cannot sweat at all, and an overheated Iziaka stands with the jaws open and the throat fluttering, which other peoples read as aggression and which is closer to fainting. Cold is not survivable for long. Below a certain chill the gut simply stops, and food already eaten rots inside a living body, which kills more Iziaka in the Cold Country than any winter does directly.

Lifespan is ninety to one hundred and ninety years across the species, with strain ranges from sixty to two hundred. They are a long-lived people and their societies are built on that patience: an Iziakan debt runs three generations, an Iziakan feud runs six, and an Iziakan apprenticeship in the tanning trade takes thirty years before the apprentice is allowed to cut. Their scales serve as worn armour without being worn. The signature is regeneration: "They can regrow their limbs, allowing them to rejoin the fight mere days after being wounded." This is why the Alverians could spend them so freely, and why no siege line ever thinned as fast as it should have.

Regrowth runs off a store and the store is finite. At the root of the tail, packed around the last of the spine, sits a dense reserve of fat and mineral that a healthy adult spends fifteen years filling. A limb taken cleanly at a joint closes in a day, buds in three, and is a working hand in nine to twenty days depending on the strain and the weather; all of it comes out of the tail root, and the tail root visibly shrinks while it happens. A well-fed Iziaka can do this three times in a life. The fourth taking buds, stalls, and closes over as a stump, and the body that tried it is thin at the tail and slow for a decade afterwards. Every Iziaka knows its own count, and in most grounds the count is notched into the scales at the base of the tail by a reader so that nobody can lie about it.

Cleanliness of the cut decides the quality of the limb: a joint taken square regrows true, and a limb crushed, burned or sawn through the shaft regrows knotted, forked, short, or with the fingers grown into a spade. Iziakan field-cutters are a profession because of this. A cutter who arrives in the first hour and takes the ruin off at the nearest joint has saved a hand; a cutter who arrives on the second day has saved a stump. The armies that fought them worked it out and began burning what they cut, which the Iziaka have neither forgotten nor forgiven, and "the fire-cut" is still the name for an enemy who fights to maim a people permanently.

Regrowth has a price beyond the store, and every Iziaka knows that arithmetic too. A regrown limb comes back soft-scaled and stays soft for a year or more, which in a people who rank by scale is a demotion worn on the body. A hand lost in a brawl is a hand. A hand lost and regrown is a public year of being spoken to as an inferior. The hard-scaled strains have made a virtue of never losing anything.

Their world is seen in a colour above violet that no Nu'uman eye has ever registered. They call it shesk, the bright, and it lies on scale, on wet stone, on certain flowers and on the oils of the body. Scale that reads as plain grey-brown to a stranger is, to them, patterned like a written page: the rings of every shed a person has taken are legible in shesk across the back and the forearms, which is why the Measuring works at thirty paces and why no Iziaka has ever needed to ask another's age.

The consequence is a whole layer of Iziakan life that outsiders walk through without seeing. Scale-words are painted on doorposts in a fish oil that shows in the bright and nowhere else. Clutch-ground boundaries, debts, warnings, the marks that say which street of a quarter a soft-scaled person may walk after dark, all of it is written in a script that a Nu'uman standing in front of it will describe as a smear. Two Iziaka can insult each other in a lord's hall by the angle they stand at, and the forging of rank is nearly impossible, since the oils of a real hard scale shine in a pattern that no paint reproduces and every reader has spent forty years looking at. In low light they are poor, most of them, and the gecko-stocked strains are the exception and know it; the Iziakelesh, the Iziakotiel and the Izieeak see in near-dark in a washed grey and have the run of the night in any ground that holds all three, which is why the second shift of an Iziakan tannery is entirely gecko and why the day strains speak of them, half fondly, as the people who steal the dark.

Smell and taste are one sense and it is carried on the tongue. The tongue goes out, collects the air, and delivers it to two pits in the roof of the mouth, and what comes back is not a scent so much as a reading: the health of a body, what it ate, whether it is afraid, whether it has been in water, and above all whether it hatched out of the same sand. Clutch-kin recognise each other by this at a range of several feet and never lose it, which is why the question two Iziaka ask on meeting, what ground and what morning, is a confirmation rather than an enquiry. In cold dry air the sense fails almost entirely. An Iziaka in a northern winter is half blind in a way it cannot explain to the people around it, and the flat dullness of the Cold Country in Iziakan talk is a literal complaint about a world that has stopped giving off information.

They hear the ground better than the air. High sound is thin to them and a great deal of settled music is simply inaudible, but a jaw or a belly laid on stone picks up a footfall through two rooms, a cart on the road outside a wall, and the difference between one person moving in a cellar and two. Iziakan buildings are therefore built as single slabs wherever the ground allows, with the floor continuous from wall to wall, and a suspended wooden floor is called a liar's floor and is taken as an insult in a house that can afford otherwise. The tail speech works because of this: a tail beating slowly on a stone floor is heard by everyone in the building whether or not they are in the room.

Their music is built for the low end, all skin, gut and pressed flesh, which is exactly why the Wind Lady spider makes such a good instrument and why an Iziakan audience at a settled kingdom's concert looks politely baffled. And their warfare rests on it. An Iziakan ambush is set by persons lying flat for six hours listening to a road through the rock, and no army has ever successfully surprised an Iziakan hold on stone ground. On sand, which carries nothing, they are as deaf as anybody, and every one of their great defeats happened on sand.

Life

The Iziaka breed as lizards breed: the female lays a clutch of eggs and the eggs are left to the warmth of the ground. Nothing in their making locked their breeding, so they breed freely, and the cultures they have built around the clutch are the oldest things they own. Every Iziaka community keeps a clutch-ground: a bed of warm sand, ash, rotting leaf or tidal shingle, according to the strain, tended by the eldest females and guarded by whoever has the hardest scale. Clutches run from six eggs to thirty. The mother does not sit them; she gives them to the ground and to the community, and from the day the eggs go down they belong to the clutch-ground and not to her. Sixty to a hundred days later the hatchlings dig out on their own, and the first rite of an Iziakan life is the Counting: the elders count the living, count the dead in the shell, and give each hatchling its hatch-name in the order it broke the surface. The dead in the shell are eaten by the clutch-mothers, without ceremony and without shame; the ground gave them and the ground takes them back through the women who tend it.

The warmth of the bed does more than hatch them. Ground held a few degrees hotter through the middle third of incubation produces hatchlings that shed harder for the rest of their lives, and every clutch-mother on Nu has known this for three thousand years without ever being able to say why. It is the reason the bed is tended hour by hour, the reason a clutch-mother sleeps beside it, and the reason a ground that loses its fuel in a bad winter loses a generation's standing rather than a generation's children. The Iziakeesh, who bury in volcanic ash, run their beds hotter than anyone and lose a third of every clutch to it, and consider the trade obviously correct.

Because the clutch belongs to the ground, an Iziaka has no mother in the sense other peoples mean it, and the word for mother in their tongue is the same word as the word for the warm bed itself. What they have instead is clutch-kin: the six to thirty who dug out of the same sand on the same morning, bound for life, obliged to feed one another, obliged to avenge one another, and forbidden to marry one another. Two Iziaka meeting far from home ask first what ground and what morning, and if the answer matches they will hand over money, weapons or a house without another word.

The stages of a life are named and the names are used in law. A hatchling from the Counting to the First Shedding is nukhet, the Dug, and is not a person: a Dug that dies is buried in the bed without a reading and without grief shown in public, though there is plenty of it shown in private. From the First Shedding to about fifteen the child is tesk, the Worded, carrying a scale-word and no standing to go with it. From fifteen the child is karrath, the Standing, and this is the decade in which the strain finally expresses: a crossed clutch raised together will start the Standing all much of a size and finish it with one at four feet and one at seven, which the Iziaka find ordinary and which every visiting physician has recorded as a marvel. After the Standing comes vaskh, the Full Scale, which is adulthood and runs a hundred years or more. After that is korrh, the Slow, which begins not at a birthday but at the shed where the reader finds the rings crowding: from that day the person is elder, is owed a seat, and is understood to have lost the use of regrowth. The dead body, between death and the reading of its hide, is heskarr, the Last Hide, and for that day and night it is spoken to and not about.

Hatchlings are born with soft scale and are raised in common, fed on chewed meat and insects by any adult who passes the clutch-ground. They shed for the first time between their third year and their fifth, and the First Shedding is the second rite and the one that decides the life: an elder reads the new scale by touch and by the point of a knife, and speaks a scale-word over the child. Soft, firm, hard or unbroken. The scale-word is a rank and it is also a name. It can be raised in later years by a reader of scale who finds the hide has hardened; it is never lowered while the bearer lives. A child dropped in the reading learns before its sixth year that no achievement will lift it, and the strains that are soft-scaled by their making, the Iziakubu above all, learn it as a people.

A soft reading closes specific doors and the doors are listed. A soft-scaled Iziaka may not command, may not hold a clutch-ground, may not be a reader of scale, may not stand witness in a scale-hold court except to say what it did with its own hands, may not swear the scale oath for another, and may not marry above its word without the ground's consent, which is refused as a matter of course. It may work, own, trade, travel, teach, fight, get rich and be loved, and a great many soft-scaled Iziaka do all six. What it may not do is be obeyed. The Iziaka do not regard this as cruelty. They regard it as reading, and the distinction is the whole of the argument between them and everybody else.

Against that stands the Late Hardening, which is the crack in the system and which the system has had to build machinery around. Perhaps one Iziaka in forty read soft at four will harden properly in its twenties or thirties, usually after coming home from a hot country, a war or a decade of good feeding. The law says the word may be raised, so it is raised, at a Second Reading held in public with a reader from another ground. Nobody involved enjoys it. The raised one is called a turned, keeps the new word and never quite the standing that goes with it, and carries a permanent suspicion that the family bought the reading. The reader who gave the first word is examined, and if the examination goes badly is unmade, which means the knife is taken and the ground feeds him for the rest of his life without ever consulting him again. Grounds with a great deal to lose have been known to make certain a soft child stays soft, and a Second Reading refused is the commonest cause of an Iziakan feud, which is a thing that runs six generations.

The strains keep the clutch differently, and the differences are the nearest thing the Iziaka have to nations. The Iziakee weave egg-baskets of vine and hang them in the high crowns where no ground animal climbs, and the Counting is done sixty feet in the air. The Iziakarine bury their clutches below the tide line in shingle, so that the sea covers the eggs twice a day and the hatchlings' first act is to swim. The Iziakeesh give their eggs to warm volcanic ash and read the hatchlings' scale on the first day rather than at the First Shedding, because in the ash a soft-scaled child will not live to shed. The Iziakoh keep incubation halls in the noble houses, tended by Iziakubu servants who taste the sand for poison every morning, and a noble Iziakoh clutch is watched by more guards than a treasury. The Iziakelesh cook for a Counting for three days beforehand and the feast is larger than the rite. The Iziakoom 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. The Iziakotiel run the news of a Counting to every hold within four days on foot. The Iziak'xak lay theirs in the killing ground, on soil fed with blood, and no one who is not a Blood Eye has seen a Counting there.

They age slowly and the ageing shows in colour. The Iziam are the plainest case: dark green heads in youth fading "to an unidentifiable combination of desaturated colors" with the years. Most strains fade the same way, and an Iziaka's age is read off the crown of the head by anyone who knows the strain. The old do not weaken so much as slow. The regeneration that closes a wound in days at forty takes weeks at a hundred and sixty, and an elder who loses a limb late may die with the stump still knitting.

Death and the body are a matter of hide. When an Iziaka dies among its own, the clutch-kin skin the body within a day. The flesh is burned or, in the coastal and forest strains, given to the water or the ground. The hide is tanned and sewn into the family's hide-book, a long folded record of ancestor skins in which each panel is read one last time and marked with the final scale-word of the one who wore it. A family's hide-book is its lineage, its title to its clutch-ground and its proof of standing, and to wear a panel of someone else's is to wear a stolen ancestor. That is the root of the hide taboo, and the reason an Iziaka will follow a stranger in a scaled coat through three streets to see where the coat came from. The oldest hide-books run to four hundred panels and are kept flat in cedar chests, and the reading of a whole book takes an Ink Scale a week and is done once in a lifetime, at the founding of a new ground. The rings hold in a tanned hide as well as in a living one, so a panel four hundred years old can still be counted, and the whole practice of ancestry among the Iziaka is a matter of counting rings on dead relatives and arguing about the light.

Diet varies by strain. The Iziakotie are "a solely plant based species." The Iziakelesh are "the food hoarders of their people." The rest are eaters of meat by preference and of anything by necessity: birds, river fish, insects, the great spiders of the forest, and their enemies when the wars required it. What runs through all of it is the mineral hunger. Every Iziakan kitchen cracks and boils bone, every Iziakan child is given burnt shell in its food, and the crushed lime-and-shell paste called grek is eaten by the spoonful in the way another people takes salt; a household that has run out of it says so to the neighbours with the frankness of a household that has run out of firewood. Eggs of any lizard are forbidden food to every strain, and a settled kingdom that serves lizard egg at its board has told every Iziaka in the hall what it thinks of them. The healers say the reason is the egg-fluke, which is a real worm that lives in lizard eggs, crosses readily into an Iziakan gut, and lodges in the hide where it ruins three sheds running. The elders say the reason is that an egg is an ancestor that did not arrive. Both are given and neither is doubted, and no Iziaka has ever felt the need to choose.

Frailty

The disease that frightens them is the binding, and it is a disease of exile. In cold damp air the old skin does not lift cleanly at the shed; it dries in place, tightens, and strangles whatever it is wrapped around. Fingers go first, then the tail tip, then the eyelids, and an Iziaka bound at the eyes goes blind in a fortnight with perfectly good eyes underneath. It is trivially preventable by heat, steam and a bath, and it is the commonest crippling illness among Iziaka in the settled kingdoms, where lodgings are cold and a servant does not get to choose when to soak. Every Iziakan quarter in the world therefore keeps a shed-house, a hot wet room open to anyone of the people at any hour and paid for by the whole street, and the peeling of a bound neighbour is a duty that outranks work, debt and marriage. Peeling is the tanner's second trade, which is one more reason the tanner outranks the fighting men.

Scale rot runs alongside it, a grey furring at the edges of the plates that gets into the mouth and the gums and eventually the bone of the jaw, and it too is a damp illness and an underclass illness. Mineral hunger is the quiet one, and it is the one with a political shape. A famine year thins the shell of every egg laid in it, and thin shells produce hatchlings that shed soft; a ground that goes hungry for two seasons can produce a whole soft generation, forty or sixty children who will all be read down together and who will still be alive, and still soft, eighty years later. Grounds date their misfortunes from these. "The soft year" in an Iziakan mouth means a famine, a defeat and a century of diminished standing in three words, and more than one hold has been swallowed by a neighbour simply because nobody born in it for a decade could lawfully give an order.

Regrowth has its own catalogue of failures. A limb regrown from a bad cut comes back knotted or forked and is kept, because to cut it off again is to spend another of the three. Buds that start and stop leave hard lumps under the hide at the shed plane, and in the old these lumps turn: regrowth cancer is what kills most Iziaka who reach a hundred and eighty, a slow spreading of tissue that will not stop growing because the body has forgotten how to tell it to, and it is common enough in the very old that the Ink Scales record a death by it as "the last limb." An Iziaka who has spent all three regrowths and then loses a fourth limb dies slowly and knows the whole time that it is going to. There are grounds that keep a fourth-taking as a form of execution for exactly this reason, on the grounds that it is lawful, bloodless and takes eleven years.

The parasites are two and both are specialists. The scale-louse lives at the plate edge, breeds in the fold, and is the reason every Iziakan household owns a thin brass hook and uses it in company without embarrassment. The egg-fluke comes from lizard eggs and settles in the hide, and a fluked Iziaka sheds in ragged patches for three years and may be read down for it, which is why the food taboo is enforced with a vehemence that looks superstitious and is actuarial. Congenitally, the fault that runs in bloodlines is the glass scale: a child whose plates harden early and completely and then never shed again, sealing in place, so that the body grows and the shell does not. It is read as unbroken at the First Shedding, which is the highest word there is, and it kills by the fifteenth year, and the strains it runs in have a proverb about it that translates roughly as a warning against getting what you asked for.

What they fear is softening, and they are right to fear it, because softening is real, is visible, is usually somebody's fault, and cannot be argued with. An Iziaka who feels the new plate come up chalky under the thumb is holding proof of its own coming demotion three weeks before anybody else will see it, and the three weeks are spent eating lime and sitting in the sun and saying nothing.

Country

The Surface Realm, and effectively all of it. The Alverians distributed them deliberately so that some strain could hold any ground. Their origin is the hot country: tropical islands and coasts, deserts, volcanic zones, hot lowlands and deep forest, wherever a lizard would live. Iziaka in cold country are travellers, servants or soldiers, and they dress for it badly. The one settlement the world knows by name is the Iziakee TreeTops, "Treetop villages of the Iziakee." The rest of their homes are known by climate: tropical island forests for the Iziakee, coasts for the Iziakarine, hot lowlands for the Iziakubu, the desert realms for the Iziakoh, the Iziakinic and the Iziakeen, the drier provinces for the Iziakodo, volcanic and extreme climates for the Iziakeesh, hot-humid rocky regions for the Iziakagrack, and forests for the Izieeak, the Iziakotie and the Iziakbor.

Their settlement forms are three. The clutch-ground village is a ring of dwellings around the warm bed, and that is how most Iziaka live: low houses of mud, cane or cut stone, no upper floors, wide flat roofs for basking, and the warm bed at the centre where any adult may sit and no one may build. Windows are few and vents are many, because the thing a house is judged on is how it moves heat, and an Iziakan builder asked to praise a building will describe its temperature at four in the morning. The scale-hold is a fortified place under an Iziakeesh or Iziakinie lord where the hard-scaled rule and the soft serve, with a wall, a granary, an armoury, a hide-house and a lime-pit, and it is the form the reptilian generals left behind them. The quarter is the Iziakan street in somebody else's city, and it is where the world meets them: a run of tanneries, kitchens, message-houses, shed-houses and cheap rooms, warmer than the rest of the city because the Iziaka burn fuel other peoples would not bother with, and closed at both ends after dark.

What they take out of a country is bone, shell and insects, in that order, and none of it is cheap. An Iziakan ground of four hundred persons eats through a quantity of insect life that no other people would notice going and that every other people notices once it has gone: the beetle-yards, the cricket pits and the walled spider-pens of a mature ground are farms in every sense, stocked, bred, culled and fought over, and a stolen breeding beetle is a matter for a reader and a knife. They burn shell and bone for lime and they burn a great deal of it, which strips a hillside of scrub in a generation. They have half-tamed three things and been half-tamed by one. The beetle-yards are theirs. The warm-country grazers they keep for bone and hide as much as for meat are theirs. The hot pepper is theirs, bred over three thousand years from a weed into forty named sorts, and it is the one Iziakan product the settled kingdoms have taken wholesale and never once credited. The thing that has half-tamed them is the Wind Lady spider, which they hunt for venom and instruments and which has, over the same three thousand years, moved its range to follow them: a spider that grows fat on the beetle-yards and occasionally on the children, and that no ground will exterminate, because the venom and the music are worth the children, and everyone involved says so out loud.

A century of Iziakan occupation leaves a country warmer, balder and cleaner. The undergrowth goes for fuel, the scrub goes for lime, the big insects go into the pens, the predators leave because there is nothing left to hunt, and the ground itself, worked and burned and turned for the beds, holds heat long after the people are gone. An abandoned clutch-ground is recognisable a thousand years later as a shallow warm dish where nothing grows properly, and the phrase for a dead village, in Ossek and now in three other languages, is a ground gone cold. The settled kingdoms have taken Iziakan land more than once and been surprised to find it will not farm. It will, after forty years of dung and rain. Nobody waits.

Society

Rank follows scale. "The stronger the scale, the higher the standing." The Iziakeesh, hard, sharp and thick-scaled, are "the militaristic sections of their societies, as well as the ruling class in many regions." The Iziakubu are "of soft scale, thus hold no high rank among their people." Nobility exists on top of this in the Iziakoh, who "belong to a series of noble families," and the scale law still runs underneath every other claim. They are "strong willed, and determined." They are "Sultry, their intelligence plays off the tip of their tongue as they coerce their way into high standing." They are "cutthroat in their dealings" and "pensive and reserved upon first meeting." A first conversation with an Iziaka is a measurement.

The scale law is administered by readers of scale, and the reader is the most quietly powerful office the Iziaka have. A reader may be any elder the clutch-ground trusts with the knife, but in practice the coast uses Salt Scales, the holds use Ink Scales, and everywhere else the office is inherited from the one who trained you. Readers do not rule and are not paid. They are fed, housed and buried at the ground's expense, and the one thing they may not do is read their own clutch-kin, which is why every ground of any size keeps a standing arrangement with a ground three days' walk away.

Above the scale law sit two castes that stand partly outside it. The Iziakaen, the Ink Scales, are the scholars, drawn from the Iziakotie's green iguana stock and set apart at the First Shedding by an elder who finds the child's scale soft and its eyes too steady; they are permitted to be soft because they will never be asked to fight, and they keep the hide-books, the tallies and the histories of the wars. The Iziaksal, the Salt Scales, are the priests of the Iziakarine, drawn from the coastal strain and marked by the sea. Neither caste rules. Both are consulted by those who do, and 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.

The working day is cut in half by the body and the law follows it. Nobody of the people labours through the middle of the day in the hot country; the day is dawn work, the long basking, and dusk work, and the basking is not rest in the sense a Nu'uman means it, since business, judgement, teaching and most marriages are conducted lying on a warm roof with the eyes shut. Grounds fine an employer who works a person through the middle, and the fine is paid to the person. In the Cold Country the Iziaka work the single long shift the locals set, which they call the killing shift, and which is exactly what it is: a body that cannot sweat, cannot bask and cannot shed properly wears out at sixty in a country where it should live to a hundred and forty. Every Iziakan family in the settled kingdoms has somebody who came home at fifty looking eighty, and the grudge in that is older and harder than the grudge about what is done to their women and their young men in the pleasure houses.

The professions the world has seen them in run wide: generals and soldiers; monster hunters, since Iziakan persons stand among the predators of the Wind Lady spider "alongside other specialised monster hunters"; messengers, in the Iziakotiel, who "have taken to the messenger professions, belonging to many holds and empires"; cooks and market sellers, in the Iziakelesh; caravanners, translators, street performers, servants, slaves and bought bodies. Among their own they are farmers of the warm country, salt-makers, tanners, lime-burners, beetle-keepers, sand-pilots, canopy hunters, field-cutters and hired blades. Tanning is the most respected trade they have, since the tanner keeps the hide-books, peels the bound and reads the rings, and a master tanner in a large ground outranks the ground's fighting men in every way that is not a fight.

Dress follows the scale law: an Iziaka shows its scale. Cloth is worn at the loins, the shoulders and the throat, and metal is worn where the scale is weakest, so that a heavily armoured Iziaka is announcing softness and a near-naked one is announcing that it needs nothing. Cold-country Iziaka wear layers and are pitied for it at home. The Iziakeen paint their frills. The Iziakmar peel scales and write on the skin beneath. The Iziakoh alone wear worked gold, and wear it on the throat where the scale is thinnest, which their own people read as an admission and their neighbours read as wealth. No Iziaka of any strain wears the hide of another Iziaka unless it is a panel of its own hide-book carried into exile.

Food is meat, roasted or dried, and insects in every form, and the Iziakelesh kitchens have made a cuisine of it: spider legs cracked and sucked, river eel wound on a stick, sand-lizard baked in its own clay, marrow bones split and boiled to a grey jelly, and the hot pepper pastes the desert strains carry in the cheek all day. Drink is sunmash, a fermented sap of cactus or palm according to the country, drunk warm; and in the coastal quarters a brine-beer the Iziakarine brew that no other people can keep down.

Music is the living culture. Iziakan street performers play a preserved Wind Lady spider as an instrument, "pressing on the fleshy bulbous sacks on its body to change their notes," with a second performer "covering hole after hole." The Iziakan singer sings "under the influence of the diluted venom of the Wind Lady spider. Blood is in her mouth from the venom." A surviving lyric fragment runs: "Forlorn on winds, they've come afar... / From eastern land that shadow marred." They hunt the spider and they play its corpse. All of it sits low, because low is what they hear; a spider-organ's highest note is below most of what a settled kingdom's choir spends its evening on, and an Iziaka listening to that choir is hearing perhaps a third of it and being polite about the rest. The Iziakvar sing without venom and are prized for it; a scale-hold of any standing keeps a Sung Scale to sing the Counting, and to sing the Counting drunk on venom is the worst breach of manners an Iziakan hold can suffer.

Custom begins with the Measuring: two Iziaka meeting for the first time stand at a distance and look at each other's scale before either speaks, and the one of softer scale speaks first, which is how an Iziaka learns another's rank without a word. The looking is real work, since what is being read is the ring pattern in the bright across the back and forearms, and standing at the wrong angle to the light is a way of refusing to be read that everyone present understands. Foreigners fail the Measuring constantly by speaking at once, and are forgiven for it exactly once. Tail speech carries what the mouth will not: a tail laid flat is submission, a tail raised and still is challenge, a tail coiled about the foot is refusal to deal, and a tail beating slowly against the ground while the face stays pleasant means the pleasant part is over, and on a stone floor everyone in the building has heard it.

The oath is sworn on the scale: "By the scale I was hatched under and the scale I will be read by." An oath-breaker has one scale peeled from the throat, where it will not regrow clean, and the bare patch is read at every Measuring for the rest of its life. Taboo: to wear another's hide; to eat lizard egg; to touch an Iziakeen's frill or an Iziakbor's changing skin uninvited; to speak a scale-word over a child not of one's own clutch-ground; to skin the dead of a strain other than one's own; and to keep a child from heat, lime or sun before its First Shedding, which is damping, and which no ground has ever punished as hard as it punishes theft.

Faith

Each strain worships a different face, or a different local name, of a pre-established god suited to its country, and the faith lines are given strain by strain among the kin below. What runs under all of them is the Hardening. Every Iziakan faith holds that the god it names tests the scale, that the world is the whetstone and the god the hand upon it, and that a life well lived is a life that ends harder than it began. The clergy are readers of scale: the Iziaksal on the coast, the Iziakaen where there is a book to keep, and elsewhere whichever elder the clutch-ground trusts with the knife. The rites are three and they are the same three that structure the life: the Counting, the First Shedding and the Last Reading, when the dead hide is read before it goes into the book. There is no weekly worship, no congregation and no temple in the sense the settled kingdoms use the word. There is a warm bed, a knife, and an elder who says what your skin is.

The afterlife every strain promises is the same promise in different colours: that the god will read the final scale, and that a scale read hard will be worn by the god as the Iziaka wear their ancestors. To be worn is the whole of Iziakan hope. The truth is that no worldly god keeps an afterlife. Every Iziakan soul goes where all souls go, to the auction of the star gods, and none of the living know it. The hide-books are the only place an Iziaka goes on, and they are enough for most of them, which may be the least cruel arrangement any people on Nu has made with the fact.

One cult is attached to the species and it belongs to a single strain rather than to all of them. The Iziak'xak are "often found to be murderers and present within the cults of Xak, channeling their powers of blood magic." The Cult of Xak is a Blood Eye affiliation. Xak is the Blood Eye name for a void power of blood and opened veins, and whether he stands outside the Court as a lesser void god or wears the face of a Void Prince is a thing the cults have never agreed among themselves.

Tongue

Common Tongue, and effectively anything else: "Their tongues move in unique ways, allowing them to speak most languages." An Iziaka answers a stranger in the stranger's own tongue before the stranger has finished the sentence, and in any mixed company the Iziaka is the translator. Their own tongue is Ossek, "the turning speech," a language of hisses, clicks of the tongue against the palate and long doubled vowels, spoken low and fast among their own and never taught to outsiders because no outsider has the tongue for it. It is pitched low for the same reason their music is, and it has a written form that is painted in bright oil and is therefore invisible to the people it is written in front of. Every strain speaks Ossek with its own accent and the coastal and desert strains can barely follow each other.

Every strain takes the Iziak- stem plus a suffix, and every strain carries a two-word epithet. The personal convention is built on the scale law, because that is what the culture indexes on. An Iziaka carries three parts: the hatch-name given at the Counting, the scale-word given at the First Shedding, and the ground, the clutch-ground it broke out of. The scale-words are sul (soft), tak (firm), kesh (hard) and orr (unbroken), and a name is said in full only at a Measuring, an oath, or a Reading. A turned carries both words, the old and the raised, in that order, for life. In the Cold Country an Iziaka gives the hatch-name alone and lets the locals think it is the whole of it.

Ssavek kesh of the Red Ash Ground, an Iziakeesh hold-captain. Ikarrh tak of the Tide Ground, an Iziakarine salt-boiler. Tsuvel sul of the Leaf Ground, an Iziakaen keeper of books. Ozhak tak of the Warm Hollow, an Iziakelesh cook. Kiessa sul of the Long Sand, an Iziakvar singer. Ravuun orr of the Black Slope, an Iziakoom clan-father. Nhakti kesh of no ground, an Iziak'xak who was never counted. Ssorrel tak of the High Crown, an Iziakee canopy hunter. Vekhis sul tak of the Nine Wells, a turned, and never let to forget it.

Regard

"Strong and ferocious warriors and mages." "Affrontive in their interacting with other species." "Armoured and near impossible to kill without being prepared." And the line that governs how any town treats them: "Shunned from many civilizations for the great horrors their race commit across countless wars; many art pieces depict them as carnivorous monsters, bathing in the blood of their enemies." A lord will speak of an Iziakan woman in his household as a thing kept for his bed, in front of a board that does not correct him, and the politest phrase used to one in a market is not worth repeating. The common insults are coldblood, shedskin, leatherback, and the worst of them, "clutch-meat," which is what the Alverians called them and which the Iziaka have not forgotten. In the settled kingdoms they are hired first and paid last, trusted with a message and not with a seat, and desired in the way rare things are desired, which is why so many end in the pleasure houses.

The Torkan were "their stronger militaristic commanders in the great Alverian wars," and the Iziaka "hold distaste and revelry towards them," both at once; an Iziaka who meets a Torkan resents the old chain of command and enjoys the memory of what they did under it. The Scan'uun, "The Scaled Nu'uman's," are their descendants by Nu'uman blood, heat-resistant and reckoned the finest smiths known. The Wind Lady spider is their prey, their pest and their orchestra. The settled kingdoms are their employers and their owners.

The Sarpaen they call crawlers and will not sit with, having no patience for a people that listens for a living, and a deeper objection they do not say out loud, which is that a Sarpaen has no scale to read and therefore cannot be placed. The Sserrin they deal with cordially at any port, since neither wants the other's ground. The Tusiva they fear as every people fears them, and an Iziakan scale-hold near a Tusiva Nest pays it in meat to be left alone.

Harvest

Iziaka hide: "Various in texture, depending on which Iziaka is skinned for its hide; often used in armour, clothing or sometimes weaponry." The Iziakbor case is the warning: "They are few in number due to the value of their hide, containing the same qualities of the Squeesh."

Hide is legal to wear in most central places, and frowned upon there the way wearing a person's skin and walking into that person's neighbourhood would be frowned upon. A lord in a scaled coat is committing no crime and everyone at the board knows exactly what he is wearing. On the Dead Continent it is a rare worn thing, treated by most of its societies as a crime and worn anyway by those who can afford the consequence, and valued for that rarity and for the toughness and durability of the material.

Grades follow the scale law, so a price list is also a social document, and the grading is done by counting rings, which means a buyer who cannot count rings is buying a lie. Soft hide, from the Iziakubu, the Iziakelesh and the Iziakotiel, is cheap leather for gloves and grips. Firm hide, from the Iziakvar, the Iziakee, the Iziakarine and the Iziakotie, makes coats and saddlery. Hard hide, from the Iziakeesh, the Iziakinic, the Iziakodo and the Iziakoom, is armour worth a warhorse a panel. Iziakinie hide, near metal, is sold once in a generation and starts a war when it is. Iziakbor hide is sold by the hand's breadth and is why there are so few Iziakbor.

The trade in regrown skin is the ugly middle of the market. A regrown limb sheds soft for a year and a soft panel is worth a tenth of a hard one, so nobody farms limbs for hide; what is farmed, in three places the Iziaka have names for and no army has ever burned out, is the tail root. A tail taken from a living Iziaka regrows, the store rebuilds over fifteen years, and the taking can be done twice without killing, and the fat of the tail root renders to an oil that keeps a hardening scale supple and sells to Iziakan grounds at a price only Iziakan grounds will pay. The persons this is done to are soft-scaled, bought, and kept warm and well fed, which is the detail that makes it unbearable.

The Iziakodo carry a venom engineered for the slow kill; a wounded enemy who escapes dies three days later, and the venom is milked and sold. The milking is done by the Iziakodo themselves, into clay, and no Sand Sage will sell to a buyer who will not say who it is for; they say the venom carries the seller's name with it. Also taken: the Iziakubu tongue, dried, as a poison-tester; peeled Iziakmar scales carrying written runes, sold as charms; Iziak'xak blood, bought by cults; Iziakeen frill-skin, painted, as banners; and the throat-sheet, cut out whole and dried, which quacks across three kingdoms sell as a cure for drowning and which cures nothing. Among the Iziaka themselves every one of these sales is theft from a hide-book, and an Iziakan tanner who sells to outsiders is peeled at the throat.

Remembered

Kiessa sul, the Venom Voice. The Iziakan singer of the Wind Lady performance, an Iziakvar who sings under the diluted venom and will not stop drinking it.

Ozhak tak, the Laughing Kitchen. An Iziakelesh chef, muscular under the bulk, whose hiss-laugh carries three streets.

The Unbroken. An Iziakeesh general of the last Alverian field armies, remembered in every hide-book of his strain and in no history written by anyone else.

Nhakti, the Stained. An Iziak'xak murderer of the cults of Xak, two centuries old, the sides of whose head are black to the jaw with his own arithmetic.

Tsuvel sul, Keeper of the Book of Books. The Iziakaen who first sewed the hide-books of a hundred clutch-grounds into one record, and was peeled for it by those who did not want their lineages read.

Vekhis sul tak of the Nine Wells. Read soft at four, hardened at thirty-one, raised at a Second Reading that unmade the reader who had first spoken over him, and thereafter spent forty years arguing at every ground that would hear him that the word should be sayable twice in both directions. He was not killed for it, which he took as the worst answer available.

Kin each has a page of its own

Twenty two in all: twenty strains and two castes. What divides them is the lizard stock each was forked from, the country that stock was cut to hold, and above everything the hardness of the scale it gave them, which sets each strain's place under the class law before any individual of it opens its mouth. Each strain names its own face of a pre-established god, suited to its country, and the god always tests the scale.

They are one people and the proof is in the sand. A clutch from any two strains takes, hatches and lives; the children of a gecko and a komodo dig out of the same bed together, spend the Dug and the Worded much of a size, and only separate during the Standing, when the strain that was written into them expresses and one of them walks out of adolescence at four feet and the other at seven. Nobody among the Iziaka finds this remarkable. What they find remarkable, and unbearable, is that such a child is read soft almost without exception, so that the mixing which proves the species is one thing is also the surest way to drop out of its order. The quarters of the settled cities are full of these children, since a quarter puts every strain on one street and nobody's clutch-ground is watching. The Izieeak, who "range in hybrid variation due to their normalcy and ability neutrality," are the oldest and most respectable case of the same thing, and are the strain most likely to be somebody's parent for exactly that reason.