Nusraet

Origin

It is never shown and it is invoked constantly, in three registers. As a simile for a routed crowd: "Look at them! Look! Scurrying like Nusraets!" As a political insult: "that tyrannical Nusraet of a self proclaimed Emperor." And as a threat made to a child: "I'll turn you into a Nusraet!" answered with "I don't want to be a Nusraet!"

The nursery threat is the interesting part. Children believe a person can be turned into a Nusraet. Their parents say it to frighten them and do not entirely disbelieve it themselves, and the belief is old enough to be attached to no particular story, which is how the oldest fears look.

What is true is that the Alverians ran vermin work, that the Nusraet's hands are too good, and that there are Alverian records of a project whose subject line is a word the modern tongue renders as Nusraet, whose contents nobody living has read.

Body

Ten to fourteen inches in the body with a tail of the same again, and the tail is the first thing anyone notices because it is not bare: it carries a stiff brush of bristle along the underside that the animal uses as a brace, sitting back on it to free both forepaws. The tail bone is heavy for the animal and fused along its last third, which is what makes it a prop rather than a whip, and a Nusraet that has lost its tail cannot work with both hands again and starves within a month.

The head is long and the eyes are set far back, nearly on the sides, so that it can watch a room while facing a wall; the cost is that it cannot see what is directly in front of its own nose and works the last inch by whisker alone.

There are no external ears. There are two dark pits where ears would be, and behind each pit sits a large drum set deep in the skull and tuned low, so the animal hears the building rather than the room: a board flexing, a cat's weight shifting on a joist, a hand on a latch two floors down. It hears better than anything else in the building and is nearly deaf to a shout.

The coat is short, coarse and the colour of wet stone, and it moults in patches rather than all over, because the skin sheds in plates on its own local schedule, so a Nusraet is nearly always half bald somewhere and looks diseased whether or not it is. Under the coat the skin is loose to a degree that has to be seen: a Nusraet held by the scruff turns inside its own hide and bites the hand.

The forepaws have four fingers and a working thumb pad, and it opens things: latches, jars, the corners of sacks. The thumb pad is muscular rather than jointed and works by pressure, and the forelimb behind it is disproportionately heavy, which is why the animal goes on all fours at speed and rears to work. The incisors grow continuously and must be worn against something hard every day, which is the reason a colony gnaws things it has no interest in eating and why granary doors are lined with iron. The gut is long and the liver is oversized, and between them a Nusraet eats spoiled grain that would kill a dog.

Life

They breed four times a year in litters of eight to twelve. A colony in a granary will empty it in a season and leave the doors shut behind them.

They are eaten by the poor without embarrassment in some cities and with great embarrassment in others.

Country

They are found in every settled place on the surface and in most of the Under Realm. Their predators, in order of importance, are Imps, Gorklins, Thylem and cats, and in that order the first three are peoples.

That is the clearest measure of what they cost a city. A cistern gallery with Thylem in it has fewer Nusraet, the two competing for the same wet dark and the Thylem being both larger and permanently hungry, and the granaries above such a gallery are undermined more slowly. A city that loses its Thylem finds out within five years and blames the aqueduct.

Regard

As a slur the word is precise and is used in three ways: of a crowd that has broken and run, of a ruler who has taken what was not his, and of a person who has been in a room they had no business in. To call a lord a Nusraet in his own hall is a duelling matter in four cultures.

The kin

It has no kin and no strains. It is an animal rather than a people, it is the same animal from one end of the surface to the other and down through most of the Under Realm, and the only thing that varies about it is what a given city is prepared to admit about eating it.