Mekuhlian

Origin

A Mekuhlian can walk into any room unseen and take everything a person ever knew out of their skull, and there has been no one to report to for a very long time. Their homeland is the Dead Continent, the far western landmass, and it is a necromantic society: necromancy is not looked down upon there, the dead labour and the living read them, and the High Throne of the Lich stands over all of it. They exist on every continent. Many places will not turn them away. Many do not like them. Mahlbar the Lich King, who sacrificed twenty million on that continent to the void, is one of them.

The Mekuhlian are Alverian, Irugaine, carnivorous ape and chameleon, made in the Alverian Age alongside the Nu'uman as "the groundling spies in the Alverian war," bred able to consume creatures' brains to share in their memories. The design was a courier service: eat, carry home, deliver. They were posted to "the deepest recesses of the underworld" "to keep watch on the remnants of Aezithis' forces," and never released from the posting. Like the rest of the Lesser Four, the first of them came out too perfect and were lessened. In the Mekuhlian the lessening was cut into the mind. The first vats could hold every memory they ate and stay whole; the makers narrowed the vessel, so that a spy who did not bring the memory home and hand it to a handler would fill and crack. The madness of the fall was the lessening working exactly as designed, in a world where the handlers were gone.

"During the fall, their race continued its consumption, until realizing there was nowhere to return said information. Many went insane, with no way to give away the knowledge, while others took to civilizing themselves, to enter society as political and strategic geniuses." The modern refusal is a real position: "most of them have become neutral entities within the world, refusing to eat brains as they do not wish to share in everyone's misery."

Their deep posting lay beneath the far western landmass, and when the enchantments failed they came up out of it onto a surface that had few peoples on it and fewer after Mahlbar. The Dead Continent was made dead in their keeping, by one of their own, and the Mekuhlian who remain there are the ones who decided that a continent of the dead is a continent that will never lie to them.

Body

Tall, light, fast and wrong-looking in a way that takes a moment to place. Base grey skin, with slight pigment and pattern differences among the race, and visible veinage that appears pink and purple. The veins under the grey are the first thing seen at close range. The face does the work: angular features with terrifying symmetry, jagged and sharp, the symmetry itself the disturbing part. The ears are pointed back and curved sharp to collect noise. The eyes are pale grey-blue. The hair is sickly long and oily white or black, and it falls rather than sits. With a light bone structure they have heightened speed. They are cold-blooded and do not radiate infrared heat, which defeats every heat-sensing hunter in the world, the Cold Kin and the Yeb among them. A Mekuhlian working is naked, because clothing defeats the skin: when naked they camouflage by changing colour based on their environment, and "when spying they are naked, as to be able to blend perfectly in with their background." A clothed Mekuhlian in a hall is announcing that it is not, at present, hunting.

The coldness is machinery. A Mekuhlian body has no furnace in it and makes no attempt to hold a temperature of its own; the heart is slow and enormous for the frame, and the blood is deliberately run out to the surface and held there in the wide shallow vessels that show pink and purple through the grey, where it equalises with whatever the air is doing. The visible veinage is a radiator run in reverse, dumping every scrap of warmth the body makes until the body is the room. Nothing in the world can see them by heat because there is nothing to see, and the Alverians built it that way on purpose against an enemy that hunted by warmth in the dark of the deep. The price is paid every hour they are alive. A cold Mekuhlian is a slow Mekuhlian, and there is no way around it.

The camouflage is an organ and it works because the skin has eyes. Under the grey lies a layer of colour cells over a bed of light-reading cells, and the reading cells take the wall, the stone, the tapestry, the shadow, and the colour cells answer without troubling the mind about it. A Mekuhlian's back knows the colour of the wall behind it without the head turning, and a Mekuhlian's forearm laid on a bolt of cloth judges the dye better than the eyes in its head do. Clothing defeats it exactly and simply: covered skin can read nothing and therefore answers nothing, so a robed Mekuhlian is a grey shape with a hole in it where the robe is, which is worse than useless. This is the whole of their dress law, their manners and their diplomacy, and no other people has ever understood that when a Mekuhlian envoy puts on a heavy coat he is disarming in public.

Behind the palate, beneath the floor of the skull, sits the organ that makes them what they are. The Mekuhlian call it the vault. It is a dense gland the size of a fist with a duct opening in the roof of the mouth, and consumed brain does not go to the stomach at all; it passes the duct and is taken apart in the vault and written into the reader. Nothing else in the body can do it, nothing else in the body is warm, and the vault is warm. It runs hot for three days after a reading, hot enough that the skin cannot hold the room's temperature, hot enough that the colour cells dull to a flat grey and will not answer. A Mekuhlian who has just eaten glows to every heat-hunter on the continent, cannot vanish, cannot run at speed, and wants only to lie down. The most feared people on Nu are helpless for three days every time they do the thing they are feared for. Every practice of the species descends from this: the spy eats last and eats at the end of the work; a reader in a memory house is guarded while reading, in a locked cold vault, by kin with edged weapons; and a good half of the Refusal, which is presented abroad as a moral position, is a professional one.

The lessening is in the vault's size. It fills. A full vault aches at the palate and behind the eyes, and an overfull one cracks, and what comes through the crack is another person's life arriving unasked in the middle of one's own, which is the madness of the Mekuhl and the sound of a Mekuhlian talking to himself. Emptying it was a physical act, done to a handler: to speak a carried memory aloud, in full, to another who takes it, is to discharge it, and the vault goes quiet and cool and empty. The handlers are four thousand years dead. What remains is a people carrying full vaults with a permanent ache behind the eyes, a taboo on speaking a carried memory aloud outside the house, an oath sworn on a carried memory, and the Inheritance, which is the one legal channel left for moving a life out of one head and into the next.

The rest of the body is built light and fast and does not forgive a mistake. The long bones are thin-walled with hollow cores, the joints are half cartilage, and a Mekuhlian outruns anything on two legs over fifty paces and breaks like kindling at the end of it. They do not wrestle. They do not hold a line, take a charge, or fight anything they have not already decided cannot reach them. A Mekuhlian who is caught is finished, and every Mekuhlian knows it from the age of seven, which is the real source of the Quiet and of the stillness. Their blood is cold, dark and slow, and carries the precursors of the colour cells in suspension, which is precisely why "Mekuhlian Blood, containing transformative qualities, this is highly sought after for alchemic purposes" is a sentence that appears in every alchemist's ledger on three continents. The gut is short and acid and takes meat only. They cannot keep grain down at all.

What they sense is not what they see. The pale grey-blue eyes are superb in near-dark and superb at motion and at value, and they are poor at colour, which the skin does better. The ears are pointed back and curved to collect what is behind, so a Mekuhlian hears the room it has turned away from better than the one it faces, and Mekuhlian rooms are round, with the seats set against the wall and the doorway behind the speaker, because a Mekuhlian conversation is conducted by two people facing away from the thing they are both listening to. They hear at the bottom of the register and they hear hearts. No room is ever silent to them. And they read heat as a map: being the temperature of the room, they feel every place the room is not itself, the warm chair, the hand that just left the table, the body behind the curtain, the flue that runs behind a wall. A Mekuhlian envoy walks into a hall and knows which chair the king favours before the king comes in. The Mekuhlian word for a quiet place is the word for a room with no heartbeats in it, which is why the dead make such restful servants and why the Dead Continent is, to them, the most peaceful country in the world.

They stand at the smallest six feet seven inches to seven feet four inches. They are a darker people. The tallest of the memory houses reach eight feet. The grey runs from ash to slate to charcoal, and it darkens with age and with the eating; a Mekuhlian who has read many dead is darker than one who has read none, and the wild ones who never stopped are black as the bottom of a well. Weight is light for the height, one hundred and eighty to two hundred and sixty pounds, most of it in the long muscles of the leg. Lifespan is ninety to one hundred and sixty years, and those who eat regularly age worse and will not say why. What one notices first, when one notices at all, is the stillness; a Mekuhlian standing against a wall is a wall.

Life

A Mekuhlian mother carries for a year and births one child, and the child is the only warm thing a Mekuhlian ever touches: it is born bone-white and blood-hot, and it cools through its first year until its skin is the temperature of the room. That first year is called the Warm, and it is the only year of a Mekuhlian life in which the body makes its own heat, and it is spent held, passed from kinsman to kinsman around the cold rooms of the house, since a house that has an infant in it has a fire in it and the fire is carried. Mekuhlian who have children speak of the Warm the way other peoples speak of a country they lived in once. The grey comes in slowly behind it.

At about seven the child's skin first takes the colour of the wall behind it, and the house calls this the first vanishing and gives the child its own name-stem that day. What has happened is that the reading cells have finished wiring to the colour cells, and it happens over an afternoon; a child playing against a painted door stops being there, and someone in the room says the date. Childhood is quiet and watchful and spent among the dead, who do the housework. A Mekuhlian child learns to walk among corpses carrying water and is not frightened of them, because a corpse has no heartbeat and is therefore the only thing in the house that is truly still.

At sixteen comes the Inheritance. The house keeps its dead cold for this; the child eats the brain of a kinsman, takes what that kinsman knew, and takes the kinsman's first name-stem as its own first stem, so that a memory house is a line of carried stems going back to the fall. The vault opens that day and never closes again. For three days after it the heir is warm, grey, blind in the skin and guarded, and when the fever goes down it comes up with sixteen years of its own and a hundred and forty of someone else's, and the house has a new adult in it who remembers being old. On the Dead Continent every Mekuhlian has eaten at least once, and the Refusal is a thing of those who live abroad among peoples who would not understand.

After the Inheritance there is no ceremony left. The middle of a Mekuhlian life is a hundred years of work, and the last stage is called the Full, and it is reached by those who read for a living. The vault will take no more. The ache becomes constant, sleep goes, the carried voices come close to the surface, and a Mekuhlian at the Full has three roads: bequeath early and die at ninety with a clean vault and a satisfied house, go quiet and let the crack come, or go looking for room somewhere other than in the body. One of them went looking and found a Void Prince willing to sell.

They are meat eaters. Raw, hung, salted and bled: black-hung meat aged in the cold for a season, blood set in bowls until it stands, marrow cracked from the long bones. They cannot keep grain down and treat bread as a thing other peoples do. The dead themselves are not eaten below the skull; the body is worth more working. Death is a bequest. The brain goes to the heir, the body goes to the corpse-wrights, and a Mekuhlian of the Dead Continent expects to labour for a century or two after dying and would be insulted to be burned. Abroad the civilised dead are shipped home in salt if the house can pay for it, and read in the port when they arrive.

Frailty

Cold is the great enemy and the one they will not discuss. A body with no furnace becomes the weather. In a hard northern winter a Mekuhlian slows through the afternoon, thinks more slowly than it moves, sits down against something out of the wind and does not get up, and a torpid Mekuhlian will lie for weeks and wake in the thaw if nothing finds it first. Something usually finds it. The Cold Kin hunt them in the deep winter and only in the deep winter, the one season in which the fastest people on the surface can be run down by a heavy man in furs, and the Mekuhlian answer is a hard rule that no house sends an envoy north of the pine line between the turning of the year and the break of the ice. The envoys who die doing it anyway die sitting up.

The abstainers have their own sickness. An unused vault does not rest; it dries. 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 and some do not, and the ones who do not keep a private vice: the brains of animals, taken quietly, dog and hare and crow, which the vault will accept and which barely serve. What comes back from them is fragments with no person in them, a road seen at ankle height, a field from above, hunger without a reason. A Mekuhlian counsellor who is seen buying a dog in a market street is a Mekuhlian counsellor in trouble, and every house abroad has a cousin they watch.

The readers have the opposite problem and a worse one. The overfull vault cracks and the crack does not heal; the carried dead come through unbidden, in the wrong order, at the wrong hours, and the Mekuhl are what a whole strain of the people looks like after a thousand years of it. There is also reading sickness, which is what a reader gets from a bad skull. What was in the head comes into the vault entire, and that includes a madness, a terror, a compulsion or a dying. The houses keep lists of unreadable lines, families whose dead are not bought at any price, and a reader who has taken a bad one is kept in a cold room by his own kin until he is either himself or is not, and the house knows which by the fourth day.

The congenital fault of the species is the patchwork. The reading cells fail to wire to the colour cells across part of the body, usually the back and the outside of the thigh, and the child never fully vanishes; a patchwork Mekuhlian standing against a wall is a grey shape with a map on it. It is found at the first vanishing or very shortly after, and it decides the whole of a life in an afternoon. Patchwork children are put to the corpse-wrights and the embalmers, trades that are honourable, necessary and beneath the readers, and they are never sent abroad. The Mekuhlian do not conceal them or kill them. They file them. Asymmetry in the face is read the same way, as the mark of a line that is coming apart, and a house with two asymmetric children in a generation will stop marrying into whichever house it blames.

The light bones break and do not knit well, so a Mekuhlian with a bad break has a permanent injury at thirty and a bequest to write. A fluke lives in the vault's duct and is taken from eating unclean or badly kept brains, and it gives a reader a slow ruin of the palate and a read that comes back wrong, blurred, out of order, which is the reason the embalmers exist as a profession and the reason a house that cannot keep its dead properly cold cannot have an Inheritance at all. Starvation puts them into the same torpor the cold does, and a starving Mekuhlian will stand motionless against a wall for a long time; more than one has been plastered into a room by workmen who did not know they were there. And the Crimson took a third of the people and made the Mekulak out of them, which is the only thing the Dead Continent burns.

Country

The Dead Continent, the far western landmass: a necromantic society where necromancy is not looked down upon, and the seat of the High Throne of the Lich. Twenty million were sacrificed there to the void by Mahlbar. The Mekulak Pits are "the rotted and Crimson Blight infested pits dug by the mutated and abominable variations of the species. Slave camps, terrifying torture devices, and more can be found within the pits where the Mekulak rests their heads."

Kehlmareth is the throne-city, built at the foot of the High Throne from the stone of the sacrificed cities and worked entirely by the dead; the living of Kehlmareth number in the tens of thousands and the dead in the millions. Duhlvane is the city of the memory houses, where the cold vaults are, and where the dead of other peoples are brought by ship to be read for what they knew. Nahrgul is the western port from which the envoys sail east. The Ashen Reach is the Common name for the plain where the twenty million died; nothing grows on it, and the Mekuhlian walk across it on business without looking down. Beyond the Dead Continent they exist everywhere, in quarters of the great cities and in the courts of lords who need a strategist more than they need to be liked.

A continent worked by the dead grows nothing, since the dead do not eat and the living cannot digest what a field produces. The Dead Continent is therefore a meat country from shore to shore. Herds of a big slow black-coated beast are run across the interior by dead herdsmen who never sleep, never lose one and never come in out of the weather, and the herds are enormous because there is no labour cost in them at all. The grass goes. A century of herding on the same ground with no shepherd's judgement behind it turns pasture to scrub and scrub to dust, which is how a good deal of the interior came to look the way the Ashen Reach looks without ever having been sacrificed to anything. The living eat the herds, hang the meat in cold cellars, and import almost nothing except salt, iron and corpses.

Corpses are the import trade and the reason the world has to have a policy about them. Ships come into Duhlvane out of every port on Nu carrying the foreign dead in salt, bought from plague towns, battlefield contractors, gaolers and families in debt, and the readers take what those heads knew and the wrights put the bodies to work. Wherever the Mekuhlian have a quarter in a great city, the price of a corpse rises within a generation, the paupers' graves are found opened, the gravediggers grow rich and quiet, and the town changes its funeral custom to burning. Four surface kingdoms burn their dead today who buried them nine hundred years ago, and not one of them remembers why the practice changed. That is what a Mekuhlian presence does to a country: it makes the living careful about the disposal of their own bodies, forever, long after the grey men have moved on.

Nothing hunts them. They have no natural predator on any continent, which is unique among the Lesser Four, and what takes them instead is other people with a price list. Their one domesticate is the dead, and it is total; a Mekuhlian house owns its labour outright, cannot be struck against, and has never in four thousand years faced the question of what to do with an idle poor.

Society

Two ways of living. The first is service: those who "took to civilizing themselves, to enter society as political and strategic geniuses," and those who serve empires and still consume brains. The second is the wild, "within foul empires." In character they are "vicious, and unforgiving," "sly and of few words," and "a taunting bunch" who "toy with their captives and/or captors"; the taunting comes of refined and acquired intelligence, which is to say they taunt you with things they took out of someone else's head.

On the Dead Continent the High Throne rules, and beneath it the memory houses, each named for the carried stem its line inherits: the Mahl, the Vohr, the Kehl, the Sahn, the Nahr and the lesser. The dead do all the labour of the continent. The professions of the living are four. The corpse-wrights raise and keep the dead in working order. The readers eat for the Throne, taking the memories of the foreign dead and of condemned foreigners brought in by ship. The embalmers keep the house dead cold for the Inheritance. The envoys go east to sit at the elbows of other peoples' lords and send home what they hear.

A house is a vault and a line of carried stems, and property follows the stem rather than the body. A Mekuhlian inherits his predecessor's memories, and with them his obligations, his contacts, his grudges and his debts, and the law holds that the debt follows the memory; a creditor presents his bill to whoever ate the debtor. This makes the Inheritance a legal event as much as a rite, conducted with witnesses, and it makes the bequest of a brain the single most contested instrument on the continent. A reader who has eaten widely is a walking archive of other houses' business, and there is a whole quiet profession of Mekuhlian who exist to be read after death by the highest bidder, who live carefully and observe everything and are paid an annuity by a house that will collect at the end.

Dress at home is long, layered and dark, robe on robe with a deep hood, because at home no one hunts and the skin need not be bare. Abroad the civilised dress richly on purpose, in colour and in weight, so that everyone in the hall can see that the Mekuhlian is clothed and therefore not working; a Mekuhlian envoy who arrives in plain grey is a threat. The wild go naked. Food is meat and drink is blood-wine, blood cut with a spirit of fermented marrow, drunk cold.

Their music is played on instruments of their own and has a cold sound, wide and slow, out of the high frozen places. The ghulhorn is a bowed horn of hollowed leg bone longer than the musician is tall, played standing, drawn with a bow of hair, and it gives a drone that sits under everything. The thrennel is seven thin bone pipes bound in a fan, and it wails high and narrow over the drone. The skull-drum is skin stretched over a hollowed skull and is struck slowly, once for every ten heartbeats. Under all of it the singers hold a chest-drone and one voice keens above them, and the effect is of wind crossing a frozen plain with something in it. The music sits low because Mekuhlian hearing sits low, and the drone is pitched at the register of a heart, so that a Mekuhlian hall at music is a room that sounds full of living bodies and contains almost none. Other peoples find it unbearable at length and cannot explain why.

Custom: the Inheritance; the Quiet, since a Mekuhlian who talks is a Mekuhlian who has decided you are worth talking to; the Taunt, which is how a Mekuhlian tells a prisoner that he is already inside his head. The oath is sworn on a carried memory: by the Mahl in me, by the Vohr in me. To break it is to be read while alive. Taboo: to waste a body; to burn a brain uneaten, which kills a person twice; to eat a child, which is the line between the people and the Fallen; to speak a carried memory aloud outside the house. The last of these is a property law wearing the clothes of a manners law, since a memory spoken in full is a memory discharged, and a Mekuhlian who tells you his grandfather's life has given it to you and no longer has it. Confession among them is surgery. It is done deliberately, once, to a chosen listener, and it is how the very old set down a weight they can no longer carry, and the listener is thereafter responsible for it.

Faith

The faith of the Dead Continent is the faith of the Throne. The Lich King is its door and its priest; the Void Prince he serves is its god, whose name the Throne does not permit spoken; the dead are its congregation. Its doctrine is that a person is memory and flesh and a small third thing, the soul, which is the least of the three; the memory is kept by the eater, the flesh is kept by the wrights, and the soul is let go as one lets go a breath. Its rite is the Inheritance and the reading. Its great rite was the Ashen Reach, when the Throne offered twenty million souls to the void in one act to open the door it now keeps. The Mekuhlian abroad hold to the Throne loosely, or to nothing, or a few to the Constellation Court, whose interest in a life of good deeds strikes most Mekuhlian as sentimental.

The doctrine is the vault talking. A people whose one sacred organ takes the memory out of a head and leaves the rest behind was always going to conclude that memory is the person and the remainder is packaging, and the theology of the Dead Continent is the anatomy of the palate written out at length. The truth beneath the faith is the truth beneath every faith: the soul goes to the auction of the star gods, whatever the Throne does with the rest. What stays in a read brain is memory without a soul in it. The Mekuhlian know that distinction better than any people alive, having tasted both sides of it, and have drawn from it the conclusion that the soul was never worth keeping.

Tongue

Common Tongue, built in by the makers like everyone else's. Their own tongue is Ikhrun, a low, clipped speech spoken barely above a whisper and made to carry in caves without echoing; it has no word for "I" that is not also the name of a carried memory. Its colour words are skin words, since the skin is the better colour organ: to say red in Ikhrun is to name a state the body can be in, and a Mekuhlian describing a banner describes what standing in front of it would do to him. Its temperature words are the richest part of the language and it has nine of them for the range between a cold hearth and a chair somebody has just left.

Their names follow the pattern of Mahlbar: two stems joined. The first stem is the carried stem, taken at the Inheritance from the kinsman eaten, and it is a heavy syllable closed with a breath and a consonant: Mahl, Vohr, Kehl, Sahn, Duhl, Nahr, Tehl, Ohr, Ruhl. The second stem is the child's own, given at the first vanishing, and it is a hard closed syllable: bar, dek, gur, vok, mar, bek, var, gath, vane. The carried stem comes first because the dead come first. The Lich King's name is written Mahlbar; the older spelling, Malbhar, moved the breath into the second stem, and the scribes of the Throne have corrected it everywhere. In the convention: Vohrdek, Kehlgur, Sahnvok, Duhlmar, Nahrbek, Tehlvar, Ohrgath, Ruhlvane.

Regard

"Foul, uncivilised brain eaters." "Blood mongers." The third thing said of them in the street is a name for the colour of their skin, and it is not set down here. Tolerated and disliked: a lord who keeps a Mekuhlian strategist keeps him at the end of the board, and the guests watch their wine. The Do'urssan smell them through walls and say so. The Nu'uman courts employ them and never seat them. Children of every people are taught that the grey man in the corner will eat what they know, and the teaching is not wrong, only out of date.

The Alverians made them to spy and never stood them down. The forces of Aezithis are their enemies of record, the original posting in the deep. Children are prey; the Mekuhl still consume the brains of children, and the Mekulak hunt them in colonies, which is why no settled kingdom houses the people willingly. The Crimson is a parasite that took a third of the people and made the Mekulak. Everyone trades in them, since a lone Mekuhlian is worth more dead than most people are alive. The dead are their servants. The Mekuhlian have no allies and have never needed any.

Harvest

The Mekuhlian Shroud, "hide made from their colour changing skin. As long as the hide is touching the material one wishes to be shielded as, it will change to that colour." The reading cells survive the tanning and go on reading for decades, which is why the hide must touch the thing it is to imitate and why a Shroud sealed in a chest goes flat grey and is thought ruined until it is taken out again. Mekuhlian Blood, "containing transformative qualities, this is highly sought after for alchemic purposes," and the transformation in it is the colour precursor the living body keeps in suspension. The vault itself is the third commodity and the one nobody advertises; dried, it is the only substance in the world that will hold a memory outside a skull, and the price of one is a matter for private arrangement. On the Dead Continent, to take any of the three from a Mekuhlian is to be raised and worked for a thousand years, and the sentence is carried out by the family of the skinned. Everywhere else it is legal, lucrative and done at night. No outsider has eaten a Mekuhlian brain and lived to say what was in it.

Remembered

Mahlbar, the Lich King, a Mekuhlian, whose name was once written Malbhar. He sacrificed twenty million on the Dead Continent to the void. The Eye of Mahlbar is a talisman, his connection to the realm of his Void Prince. He holds the High Throne of the Lich on the far western continent, and the Lich King is the highest rank of the Dreamt Ones. He was a reader of the house that carried the Mahl stem, in the first age after the fall, and he read past the limit of the lessened vessel; where others cracked and talked to themselves, he went to the void for room, and a Void Prince gave him room at a price. The price was paid on the Ashen Reach. What sits on the High Throne now is what a Mekuhlian becomes when he has eaten everyone and refuses to go mad, and the Mekuhlian who remain on the Dead Continent regard him with the plain respect of a people who have seen the alternative.

Vohrdek, called the Grey Counsel, strategist to a duke of Brenmor for forty years and never once seated at the duke's board.

Ohrgath the Reader, who has read the dead of every people on Nu save the Alverians, and who is said to be waiting.

The High Throne of the Lich

The High Throne of the Lich stands on the Dead Continent, in the far west, and it stands there in the open because the Dead Continent is the homeland of the Mekuhlian and a necromantic society where necromancy carries no shame. There is nowhere else on Nu where such a seat could be kept without concealment. Elsewhere a Lich is a scholar, a physician or a lord with an unusual number of shuttered rooms; here the arrangement is simply the arrangement.

The Throne is a seat and an office rather than a building. What has accreted around it over four thousand years is a black terrace, the ossuary of the households, the sworn-halls of the Liches who owe upward, and the field where the twenty million went. Nothing grows in that field and nothing is buried in it. Liches from every continent travel to the Throne to swear, to renegotiate, and to be told what their debt has become while they were away.

Mahlbar the Lich King, known as the Defiler, is a Mekuhlian. He laid down his birth name upon the Stygian altar and died that night, and took up the name he is known by; the sense of it in Ancient Naga'esh is the Defiler. Twenty million were sacrificed to the void on the Dead Continent at his hand, and the arithmetic that followed is what matters to his people. Twenty million souls did not clear a debt. They established one, at a scale that required a continent to service it, and every Mekuhlian necromantic house that has risen since has risen inside the collection apparatus he built. His people do not universally revere him. They live in his ledger.

The Eye of Mahlbar is his talisman: his connection of power to his Void Prince's realm, the object through which the arm reaches, and the reason he can act as a Lich King at any distance from the Throne. It is no place, no organ and no figure of speech.

Of all the peoples of Nu the Mekuhlian are the only ones who have built a civil society around this work, and their view of the rest of the trade follows from that: they regard foreign Liches as provincial. They also work nearer the void than anyone else, and they treat the Remoulded as a rival profession rather than as a horror, which is the sort of respect that gets people eaten.

Kin each has a page of its own

What divides the Mekuhlian is what got into them after the makers stopped watching. One strain kept the discipline and walked into other peoples' courts. One went into the desert and never stopped eating. One was taken by the Crimson and now reads the world on the hive's behalf.