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Nakasi · “The Palace-Cats”

Nakaseen

Finer-boned and smaller than the street Nakasi, with a skin that folds and wrinkles at the neck and the joints, large lambent eyes, and, as often as not, clean claws. The Nakaseen are the Nakasi that noble houses keep.

They began as clean-clawed cubs sold up from the Skinrows and became, over centuries, a lineage of their own: bred in the house, raised above the stairs, dressed in silk and used as the household's eyes.

Body

The folds are the visible sign of six centuries indoors. A lineage bred warm has no need of the tight hide the street requires, and the skin loosens at the throat and the joints accordingly. The eyes are larger and more lambent than the street's, and the claws are clean as often as not, which means the sheath fold closes and drains and the chronic infection that most Nakasi carry from the change never starts.

What the folds cost is the one thing the Skinrows would have wanted kept. A Nakaseen put out into a Skinrows winter dies in it.

Society

They are kept above the stairs, which no other Nakasi is, and they are kept for the ears. A Nakaseen hears everything said in a house and locates it in three dimensions without turning its head, and its ears then tell its mistress what it thinks of what it has heard, because no Nakasi has ever learned to hold the ear posture still under pressure.

That is exactly why the houses want them and exactly why no house has ever trusted one. It is also why the crews below never fully trust them: a palace-cat reports in either direction, and usually in both.

Origin

The line began as a transaction the Skinrows still make. One Nakasi in eight is born with a fold that closes, and a clean-clawed cub is either made a knife at once, because a clean cut heals and a rotten one is a death sentence a crew may not want to hand out, or is sold up to a noble house, and the crew takes the price.

Six hundred years of that, with the bought cubs breeding in the houses that bought them, has produced a lineage rather than a supply, and Tal Sourclaw is the proof that the traffic runs both ways: born clean-clawed, sold up to a palace at nine, and came back.

See also
NakasiLathonianNu'umanNakmor