Nakasi

Origin

Unforeseen by the designers and unwanted by both parents, the Nakasi are two thousand years old "and have made a sour name for themselves among civilized folk." They are the crossing of the Lathonian and the Nu'uman: hairless, gaunt, clawed, and organised. The Lathonian parent is a people of pelt, prisons and an imperial house; the Nakasi are what that bloodline becomes when it reaches the gutter and stays there. They are an underbelly people. No one hunts them. They are simply beneath every city that has them, and the city steps over them.

Body

Hairless, and that is the entire problem. "Skinny, uncomfortably smooth bodies, with subtle amounts of silky hair in certain regions, these naked cats are gaunt." The feet are "a Nu'uma-feline blend." The skin is pale-beige. The eyes are yellow-black. The ears are the emotional register of the species and can be read across a room: "their ears are large; pointed when cocky, and droopy during normal affairs." A Nakasi cannot bluff with its ears. The claws are the weapon, and the description of them is exact: "Extendable, often diseased claws."

Five to six feet; one hundred to one hundred and forty pounds. Forty to seventy years is the street's span and seventy to eighty is the palace-cat's, and both are true of the same people.

The hairlessness is the seam, and it is a cancellation rather than a loss. The Lathonian code writes a pelt and the Nu'uman code writes bare skin over a subcutaneous layer, and the two were written one across the other until what grew was neither: a thin, elastic, poorly keratinised hide with no undercoat, no guard hair and no grease, carrying only the "subtle amounts of silky hair in certain regions" where one code ran unopposed. Those regions are the groin, the inside of the forearm, and the face, and on the face what survived is the whiskers. A Nakasi has a bald head and a full set of long white vibrissae, and that combination is the single thing that makes strangers step back. The whiskers are functional and are the reason a Nakasi moves through a black cellar without putting out a hand: they read the width of a gap and the movement of air off a wall at the speed of a walk.

What the skin does not do is hold heat. A Nakasi loses warmth faster than any other people of its size and has no reserve to lose; a hundred and twenty pounds of long bone and lean muscle with no fat and no fur is a body that must be fed and must be covered and must be near something warm. Every visible custom of the people comes off this one deficiency. They dress dark and close because they are cold. They sleep in heaps, cubs in the middle, and the crew's sleeping heap is a more binding institution than any oath they swear. The Skinrows houses lean on one another and the roofs join because a terrace that shares walls shares heat, and a Nakasi quarter rebuilt after a fire is always rebuilt tighter than the street it replaced. And they go up at night, onto flat roofs that have held the sun all day, and lie on the warm lead and sing, and the roof-song that the tanneries hear is a people getting warm.

The skin also keeps every record. No fur hides a scar, a burn, a blister or a bruise, and a Nakasi's history is legible at three paces. Sun raises weals on them in high summer and the tannery quarter's runoff raises a chronic rash on any leg that stands in it, so the people are covered head to foot in both seasons for entirely different reasons.

Below the skin the Lathonian came through clean. The spine is long and flexible through the lumbar, the shoulder blade rides free, the hips rotate further than a Nu'uman's, and the feet are pads on a half-raised foot bone, silent on stone and wretched on ice. A Nakasi falls well from two storeys, poorly from three, and the falling is the commonest way a young one dies.

They have night vision and extreme agility. The eyes carry a reflective layer and a wide pupil, and they are excellent in near dark and bad in a bright street, where a Nakasi squints and tears and looks exactly as shifty as everyone already assumes. Their colour sense is narrow and weak in the reds. The crews' marks are consequently cut into doorframes and window ledges rather than painted, and a Nakasi chalk mark is read by running a thumb over it. A watch that has spent a decade looking for painted signs in the Skinrows has been looking at the wrong sense.

The ears do two jobs and only one of them is famous. They are large, mobile, independently steerable, and they locate a sound in three dimensions with an accuracy no other people on the surface can match; a watcher on a roof works by ear and faces away from what it is listening to. They also cannot be controlled. The ear posture is driven from below thought, it moves before the face does, and no Nakasi has ever learned to hold it still under pressure. The whole social architecture of the people rests on that failure.

The claws come out of a sheath fold at the last joint, and the disease lives in the fold. In most Nakasi the fold does not close cleanly and cannot drain, and what sits in that warm blind pocket is a chronic infection that begins at the change and never resolves: a yellowing at the root, a smell, a weeping that never dries. It does not heal and it does not kill. It does slowly deform the claw bed, so that an old Nakasi's claws are crooked and will not retract at all, and old hands are kept wrapped.

Life

Infertile outside their own kind. A mother carries for four months and bears two to four cubs, blind, bald, and the size of a hand, in whatever room is warmest and least watched. They are never not bald. The cubs open their eyes at ten days and their ears are already talking. They are raised by the whole crew rather than by the parents, and a Nakasi child knows the crew's boss before it knows its mother's name. Grown at fourteen. The claws come at twelve, the disease with them for most, and the first thing a young Nakasi is taught is to keep the claws in, because a scratch from a rotten claw is an insult and a wound and a debt all at once.

The crew names the stages in Skinrow and uses them as ranks. The first ten days a cub is blind. From then until twelve it is a tile, which is where a cub spends its days, learning the joined roofs of the quarter before it learns a street. At twelve comes the change, the claws, the smell, and the crew's judgement on the claws. At fourteen it is made and is given work. At the far end it is a doorway, and the word is literal.

They age at forty and the agility goes first; an old Nakasi is a planner, a fence, a sitter in doorways who sees everything. The claw bed has usually finished deforming by then, so the hands cannot do fine work and cannot be hidden, and the promotion from knife to planner is not a promotion, it is what happens on the day the hands stop.

The dead are laid on the roofs. That is the custom, older than any crew: the body is carried up at night to the highest flat roof of the quarter and left under the moons, and what the birds and the weather leave is gathered a month later and dropped in the river. Nobody outside the quarter knows why, and the Nakasi do not say. They are omnivores, and the trades they are permitted give it away: "butcher shops, harvesting." They eat the offcuts of the trade and are fond of offal, fish and anything fried in a gutter.

Frailty

They have no reserve. This is the fact that explains the crime, and the record states it plainly because no one else does. A body with no fat and no fur burns what it eats within the day, and a Nakasi that has not eaten for three days is not hungry, it is failing, and at six it is dead. No other surface people starves on that timetable. An economy built by such a body cannot be a raiding economy, because raiding is intermittent and this metabolism cannot wait for a good week. It has to be a tax. The Sourclaw extort businesses on a fixed round, at fixed intervals, in small amounts, because the crew must eat every day, and the whole apparatus of collectors and watchers and debts and the word "to trim" is the organisational shape of a species that cannot skip a meal. The settled world calls it greed.

Cold is the other killer and it takes the two ends of the life. A hard winter in the Skinrows kills cubs and doorways in numbers the city never counts, and a crew's standing is measured within the quarter by how many of each it brought through. A Hood who loses cubs in a cold month is finished by spring.

The claw disease is the standing sickness. Most Nakasi carry it from birth and live with it, and what it costs them is a lifetime of low fever, a thickened finger that aches before rain, and the constant risk of the scrape going deep. Claw-fever takes the young: a cub that catches a bad scratch in the heap at four years old goes hot, goes quiet and dies in a week, and every crew has lost cubs that way and every crew keeps the claws of the sick wrapped. Among adults the scrape is a political instrument, and the oath of the scrape is dangerous precisely because it is honest: two Nakasi swearing know whose claws are clean, and a swearing between two rotten ones is a wager that both of them will survive their own sincerity.

A clean-clawed Nakasi has a fold that closes. That is all it is. One in eight are born with it, and the crews treat it as a windfall, which it is, and as a suspicion, which is less rational and no less real.

What ends the young adults is the roofs. Roof-fall breaks hips and backs, and a Nakasi with a broken hip does not work again; the quarter's doorways are full of forty-year-olds who came off a wet lead roof at twenty-five. What ends the old is the cold and the lungs, in that order. Their parasite is an ear mite that nothing else in a city carries, and a Nakasi scratching at an ear in company is a small private shame. What they fear is losing the ears, which are the whole of their hearing and the whole of their honesty, and a Nakasi with a cut ear is pitied and never promoted.

Country

The Surface Realm, in the cities, in the parts the wall does not properly enclose. "They rule over poorer parts of cities as gangs." The quarter is called the Skinrows wherever there is one, and there is one in every large city; the name travels with the people. The Skinrows are the streets between the tanneries and the river, low, wet and unlit, where the buildings lean on each other and the roofs join. The oldest and largest of them runs to some thirty streets, held entire by one crew and taxed by it, with its own butchers, its own fences and its own dead on its own roofs.

They are between the tanneries and the river for reasons of trade and of body. The tanneries give them offal, which is their food, and hides, which they will not touch, and warmth, since a tan-yard runs hot all year. The river gives them fish and a place to put what the roofs leave. The rent is the lowest in any city because the smell is the worst, and a people with a poor nose for anything except blood and bitterness is unusually well suited to living downwind of a tan-pit.

Where a city holds both peoples, Imps and Nakasi divide it vertically, the Imps below the floors and the Nakasi above the eaves, and neither has ever wanted the other's half. The one creature the Nakasi have driven out is the ordinary cat, which will not stay in a street that smells of them and which they find funny. They have domesticated nothing and keep nothing, and the only animal in the Skinrows is whatever the butchers have not finished with.

A century of a crew in a quarter does something the cities refuse to write down. The Skinrows are policed. Not lawfully, and not kindly, and thoroughly: a quarter under one crew has no freelance robbery in it, because freelance robbery is theft from the tax base, and the collectors put a stop to it faster than a watch ever has. The rents stay low, the buildings stay up because the crew makes the landlords repair them, and the tanneries pay and are protected. When a watch finally breaks a crew, which happens perhaps twice in a century, the quarter does not become orderly. It burns.

Society

Organised crime, and the causation is stated: "Organised crime and theft; most places won't hire them out of distaste of looking at them, and the outward perception they look like rats." "Being of the criminal class, due to their shunning from society due to their unappetizing looks, they rule over poorer parts of cities as gangs, extorting businesses for their wealth, and parasitically inserting themselves into the towns and cities they've been shunned from." The lawful trades left to them are the ones nobody watches: "Several lowly jobs including city cleaning, butcher shops, harvesting, ect." Their temper reads as gang doctrine: "Manipulative and ruthless. Criminal and cutthroat. Vicious when cornered. Simple intelligence, but amazing strategists."

The gang is the society and its name is the Sourclaw. Every Skinrows crew in every city calls itself Sourclaw and claims to be the first, and none of them answers to any other, and all of them keep the same rules, which is how one knows they were once one thing. The boss is called the Hood, for the reason below, and holds the crew as long as the crew's take holds up. Beneath the Hood are the knives, the collectors, the watchers on the roofs, and the cubs. A clean-clawed Nakasi is either made a knife at once, because a clean cut heals and a rotten one is a death sentence the crew may not want to hand out, or is sold up to a noble house as a palace-cat, and the crew takes the price.

The hood is the custom that names them. A Nakasi's ears cannot lie, so a Nakasi who must lie wears a hood pulled low over them, and to come hooded to a meeting is to announce that one intends to. The Hood of a crew wears one always. Two consequences follow and both are strange to outsiders. The first is that Nakasi negotiation is unusually honest in substance and unusually theatrical in form, since everyone present knows who has declared a right to deceive them and adjusts. The second is that a Nakasi in a Nu'uman court is at a permanent disadvantage that nobody has ever named: a witness who cannot arrange his own face is believed when he should be doubted and doubted when he is telling the truth, and three cities have hanged Nakasi on the evidence of their ears.

The oath is the scrape: two Nakasi swear by drawing one claw lightly across the other's forearm, and if either claw is rotten the oath is kept or the wound is. The taboo is fur. A Nakasi does not wear, touch, sell or sleep on the pelt of any creature, and a Nakasi found with a Lathonian pelt is killed by its own crew before the Lathonians can. It is worth seeing what that taboo costs a freezing people: the warmest thing available in any northern city is a fur, the Skinrows sit beside the tanneries that make them, and the Nakasi go cold on principle in the one quarter where fur is cheapest. Dress is dark, close, and hooded. Drink is a sour fermented milk the crews make from whatever animal the butchers have. Music is roof-song, sung to the moons at night in a high thin register that carries over the tanneries and stops when a stranger's step is heard.

Faith

The Nakasi keep the Ledger of the Hooded Moon. The dark moon, Zaona, is their goddess under the street name of the Hood: the one who sees only what she is shown, who keeps the count, and who collects. Every debt a Nakasi owes or is owed is written, in the crew's head if not on paper, and death is the settling; the roof-burial lays the body out under the moons so that the Hood may read the account. There is no clergy. The oldest watcher on the roofs keeps the words, and a cub learns them before it learns to climb. They hold that the settled go to the Wastes of Zaona to walk the count off.

Zaona is real and the Wastes are real, and no soul walks them. The Nakasi dead go to the auction of the star gods with the rest, and the Hood collects nothing.

Tongue

Common Tongue. The crews speak a gutter Common called Skinrow, thick with the words of the butcher trade, in which "to trim" is to collect a debt and "offal" is anybody who is not Nakasi. It is spoken quietly and at a pitch chosen to carry along a wall and die in the open, which is a habit of people who are always overheard and always listening.

A Nakasi carries a short given name and an earned street-name that the crew gives and the crew can take away, which is why it is guarded like money. Vesh Two-Debts; Karro Softstep; Ninnick the Hood; Tal Sourclaw; Ozzet Rooftile; Mirrik Halfear; Dannu Ledger; Sabbe Fourknives.

Regard

"Naked Cats, nothing more." "Rats on legs." "Smooth freaks." "Crimson scum rags." The fourth accuses a Nakasi of blight without cause; there is no Crimson Nakasi strain and the hybrid lock means there cannot be one. The insult says more about the settled world's fear of the Crimson than it does about the Nakasi, and it is thrown at them for the ordinary reason that a bald, weeping-clawed, visibly scarred people looks to a frightened farmer exactly like the first stage of something. No people hunts them. They are beneath notice, and they have made a living out of it.

Harvest

Almost nothing, and that is their armour. The Lathonian parent yields pelts, "various in texture, depending on which Lathonian is skinned for its fur," and the Nakasi have no pelt at all; a Nakasi corpse is worth nothing to a furrier and no furrier has ever bought one. The hide itself is too thin and too poorly keratinised to tan, and the two tanners who have tried produced a sheet that tore in the hand. The claws are sold, rarely, to poisoners, for the rot in them, and a crew that learns of it finds the buyer. Nothing else. A people that cannot be harvested cannot be farmed, and the Nakasi are the only hybrid the world has never found a commercial reason to keep, which is the entire difference between their history and the Gorklin's.

Remembered

The crews do not write their dead down and the cities do not write them at all. Two names have travelled anyway.

Ninnick the Hood. Boss of the oldest Skinrows for thirty-one years, who has not been seen unhooded since he took the crew and is said by some to be a woman.

Tal Sourclaw. The knife who planned a job so clean that the crews of three cities claim him, and who was born clean-clawed, sold up to a palace at nine, and came back.

Kin each has a page of its own

The Nakasi lineages divide at the claw and at the stairs: the ones the watch steps aside for, and the ones who live above them.