Mekuhlia

Body

The base stock carries the species' anatomy unaltered: base grey skin with slight pigment and pattern differences, visible pink and purple veinage, angular features with terrifying symmetry, ears pointed back and curved sharp, pale grey-blue eyes, and long oily hair in white or black. The grey runs from ash to slate to charcoal and darkens with the eating, so a Mekuhlia who has read many dead is darker than one who has read none.

The cold is the same cold. There is no furnace in the body and no attempt at a temperature of its own, the blood is run out to the surface and held there until it equalises with the room, and nothing in the world can find them by heat. The skin reads and answers, so a naked Mekuhlia against a painted wall is the wall; clothing blinds the organ exactly, which is why a Mekuhlia envoy dresses richly on purpose and why arriving in plain grey is understood by everyone in the hall as a threat.

Life

At home the ordinary shape of a life holds: the Warm, the first vanishing at seven, the Inheritance at sixteen, and a hundred years of work after it. On the Dead Continent every Mekuhlia has eaten at least once, and the house keeps its dead cold so that the carried stem passes cleanly from the kinsman to the heir.

Abroad the shape breaks at the Inheritance. The vault that is never opened does not rest, it dries, and the dry vault gives a grinding ache at the palate, a taste of old iron, sleeplessness and a hunger that is not in the stomach, and it worsens for years and does not stop. Most of the civilised abroad manage it. Some do not, and keep a private vice of animal brains taken quietly, which the vault will accept and which barely serve. Every house abroad has a cousin they watch.

Country

At home in Kehlmareth and Duhlvane they are the readers and the wrights: the readers eat for the Throne, taking the memories of the foreign dead brought in by ship, and the corpse-wrights raise and keep the dead who do all the labour of the continent. Abroad they are the counsel in the corner, holding a quarter in most great cities and a chair in the courts of lords who need a strategist more than they need to be liked.

A Mekuhlia quarter changes the town it sits in. The price of a corpse rises within a generation, the paupers' graves are found opened, the gravediggers grow rich and quiet, and within three hundred years the place has changed its funeral custom to burning without remembering why.

Regard

They are tolerated and disliked, and the Refusal is the whole of the tolerance. A lord who keeps a Mekuhlia strategist keeps him at the end of the board and the guests watch their wine; the Nu'uman courts employ them and never seat them; the Do'urssan smell them through walls and say so. What is said of them in the street is said of the people as a whole and does not distinguish the strain that stopped eating from the strain that never did.