Kriksy

Body

Four inches tall standing, which it does most of the time, and shaped like a tiny monkey without being one at any point in its ancestry. The limbs are the giveaway: five of them, four for climbing and a fifth short grasping limb below the chest, and the fifth is what a Kriksy holds its food with while the other four keep it off the ground. The fifth limb has its own small girdle of bone seated against the breastbone and is the only part of the animal that is not paired, which is the anatomical reason it is no monkey and never was.

The head is round and mostly eye. The two eyes take up more of the skull than the brain does and share a single bony orbit divided by a thin plate, which is why a Kriksy cannot look at two things at once and turns its whole body to change its mind.

The fur is fine, dense and comes in colours no mammal has any business in, banded green and violet and rust; the colour is in the structure of the hair rather than in any pigment, which is why it shifts as the animal moves, why it cannot be dyed, and why it fades to grey in a cage within a year as the coat coarsens on a poor diet. The colour is why they are caught and the fading is why they are replaced.

They have no tail. They have instead a ruff of long stiff hairs around the neck that the animal raises when it is frightened, which is always, and the ruff doubles its apparent size to a little over four inches, which fools nothing and is deployed anyway.

The scream is the whole of the trade and it has a seat. The throat carries an air sac that inflates from the lungs and a ring of stiffened cartilage above it that the sac drives, and the skull behind is largely hollow, so that the animal is a resonator with a small creature attached. The sound goes through a room and through a wall.

Life

Wild Kriksy live in the canopy of warm forest in troops of thirty or more and are almost never seen, because thirty of them screaming moves anything with ears out of the district. That is the whole of their defence and it works: nothing in a warm forest hunts Kriksy twice.

They live perhaps six years wild and two in a cage. They cannot be tamed, they can be handled, and they bite.

Frailty

It screams when startled, it screams when a hand comes near the cage, and it screams in a rising pattern when it is losing, which is the part the gamblers care about.

Screaming is also what kills it. The sac tears under sustained use and the animal drowns in its own blood, and a caged Kriksy that screams every night lives about two years against six in the canopy. The gamblers know this and price accordingly.

The colour goes first. Structural colour needs a coat in good condition, and a cage and a poor diet coarsen the hair inside a year, at which point the animal is grey and worth replacing.

Country

The canopy of warm forest, where they are almost never seen, and taverns from one end of the surface to the other, where they are the first thing anybody hears. A tavern with no Kriksy in it is either very poor or very respectable, and there are more of the first kind.

Regard

The game played over them is simple and cruel and universal: two caged Kriksy, a stake, and a wager on which one screams first, or longest, or last. The animal is small enough to be a stake in itself, loud enough to be the entertainment, and cheap enough to be lost on a bad hand.

The kin

It has no kin and no strains. There is one Kriksy, in the canopy and in the cages, and the only difference between the two is that the caged one is grey and has about two years left.