Librathorn
The Librathorn are the inquisitors, and they are a caste of the one locked genome rather than a separate breed. Nine feet, crested, barred grey and rust, with the tusks longer and the beak hooked deeper, and the feeble feline arms of the base replaced by two that are not feeble. They wear a harness of Alverian bronze and carry nothing else.
Under Alveria the whole species gathered by torture. The other castes let the old methods lapse into a decade of teaching. This one kept them. A Librathorn is what a house sends when a question has been refused, and one of them stands behind the Eldest at every bargain.
Body
Nine feet and crested, barred grey and rust, with the tusks longer than the base and the beak hooked deeper. The great structural difference is the arms. In every other Librar they are small, soft-furred and near useless, strong enough to hold a folio and a pen and take a wrist and nothing more, and they are the reason the species cannot build and never has. The Librathorn has two that are not feeble.
The hearing is finer even than the base, and the base can place a mouse under a floor to within a hand's breadth and hears a guest's heart quicken before the guest knows it has. In this caste that sense is turned to a single use. A Librathorn works a subject by the pulse and stops when the pulse says the truth has arrived, which is why its questioning leaves fewer marks than anyone expects and is worse.
Society
One stands behind the Eldest at every bargain, in its harness, saying nothing. The rest of the house is the Eldest who holds the archive entire, the Askers who go out into the world and come back with what they went for, the Keepers who hold and order what is brought, and the Libra'an who write; and when an Asker returns without what it was sent for, this is what goes next.
Nothing in the house is written about what they do in the lower rooms, which in a house of the Librar is itself a statement. The species sets nothing down except for trade and holds everything else in memory, so a silence in the record of a people who record everything is deliberate.
Regard
The houses do not advertise the caste and the world outside mostly does not know it exists, which is of a piece with a species that is half myth to begin with. What the wilderness folk know is the Owl House they take their sick to, and the questions, and the gift they go home with, and the evening they cannot account for. What a rival house knows is different: the arithmetic of the Librar is one egg a century and four or five persons to a citadel, and a rival's Librathorn in the lower rooms is one of the three ways two thousand years of gathering ends with nobody left alive who can say what was in it.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- How many a house keeps, and whether every house keeps one
- What the old methods are now, since the record of them is kept only in memory and taught only in the last decade of the Dark
- Whether a Librathorn has ever been sent against another house rather than against an outsider