Nu'uman

Origin

The Nu'uman are the most numerous, the most adaptable and the most easily killed people on the planet, and they have forgotten who built them. They were bred "to colonize, mass breeding and work the land," and they did, and the surface of Nu is theirs now from the cold snowlands to the hot deserts, held in a feudal order they believe is nine hundred years old and their own invention. They are ape, Irugaine and Alverian. Aezithis, who watched them walk out of the prison complexes, said the truest thing anyone has said about them: "Nu'umans are rather notorious for forgetting."

They were spliced from Irugaine, Alverian and monkey stock, bred "to be the colonist and worker species due to their mass breeding and constant need for consumption." The Alverians wanted a population that could be spent. The female form was taken from a sea god's royal infantry: the Omasee of the Omari "were the inspiration for the female Nu'uman structure." Like all the Lesser Four, the first Nu'uman came out too perfect and were lessened so they could be controlled. In the Nu'uman the lessening took the years and the skin. The first vats gave lives of centuries and hides that turned a blade; the makers cut the life to a hundred years and the skin to something a thorn opens, and kept the breeding, because a worker who dies young and breeds fast is a worker who never accumulates enough to rebel.

The weakness is the design itself. Every other people the Alverians made was given the thing it needed to survive what it was pointed at. The Nu'uman were given only numbers, and numbers work by being spent, so the body was built to be cheap: no plate, no venom, no claw, no fur worth the name, a hide that tans well, bones a knife can cut, a womb that refills. Everything the world does to them afterwards, the hide trade, the brain trade, the contracts that let a Torkan clan feed on a lord's own villages, was made possible at the bench before a single one of them drew breath. The three hundred year old Nu'uman who turns up once a century is the first vats surfacing again through some corner of the line the makers did not reach, and the world treats her as a monster because the world has never known the design and she has never known she is a memory of it.

They were "the grunted work force" of the empire, held in prison colonies, and "sacrificed to their living structures" when the living structures were hungry. When the stars went dark, "the Nu'umans, having already shelter within the collapsed prison complexes, had a head start, resulting in their societies taking root across many places within the world." The first free Nu'uman were "a strong, coastal people who found themselves upon the shores of what later would be called Cameliard." From that shore they took the surface. "They have since become a dominant species, and have become lost to their past." A noble house will trace its blood nine hundred years and not know the line began as prison stock. The court tongue, Tyberian, is itself "an attempt to refine Common to forget the past." The forgetting is policy.

Body

The most ordinary silhouette in the world, and the template for almost everything else in it. Five to seven feet by strain, upright, no natural weapon, no natural armour. Soft skin, with hair growing all over it in various places, the majority on the top of the head to shield from the sun's harsh rays. Base pigmentation is paler olive-pink-white out of the milder climates, and every other shade in the species is a record of where the acclimatising rays were pointed. What one notices first is the decoration. Nu'uman are "often adorned in makeup, tattoos and other forms of marking, acting as a secondary mental defense," and the marking answers to how exposed they are: a Nu'uman face is painted because a Nu'uman face is thin. The second thing noticed is the armour. They are "heavily armoured within a world where their skin is weak," and a Nu'uman in a war camp wears more metal than anyone around him because everyone around him needs less.

The skin is the entire story of the people and it is worth describing as a physician would. It is four thin layers where a Do'urssan has plate and a Shrakur has a translucent hide of cartilage fibre. The vessels run close beneath it, so they flush, blanch and bruise visibly, and a Nu'uman face reports its owner's blood pressure to anyone in the room. It splits under thorn, opens under a blade at any angle, blisters in sun and in frost, and it clots slowly; a cut that a Do'urssan seals in the time it takes to name it will bleed a Nu'uman for a quarter of an hour. Set against that, it heals. It closes, knits, regrows across a burn, and a Nu'uman of thirty carries a map of forty injuries that every other people of the Lesser Four would have died of or carried for thirty thousand years. This is the trade the makers struck for them: nothing keeps the world out, and everything mends.

The consequence is the whole of their medicine. The Nu'uman invented the bandage, the tourniquet, the splint, the cautery, the boiled needle and the field surgeon, and they invented all of it because they had to and nobody else did. A Do'urssan hold surgeon cages bone and knows nothing of flesh. A Shrakur has no field medicine at all and eats its wounded. A Mekuhlian's bones do not mend and its answer to a bad break is a bequest. The surface kingdoms, which are mocked for everything else, export physicians to all of them, and a Do'urssan legion on a long posting will hire a Nu'uman barber-surgeon at three times a legionary's pay and will never once say aloud why.

They sweat over the whole body, which almost nothing else on Nu does, and the entire hide is a cooling organ. It is the reason for the reach of them. A Nu'uman on foot can walk down a horse over two days and a deer in one, can march in the noon of a country his body was made for, and can keep walking when the thing he is following has stopped. The colonisation of the surface was done by legs. The unit of distance used across the whole world, by peoples who can swim faster than a Nu'uman can run and by peoples who cannot go out of doors at all, is the day's march, and the day's march is the length of a Nu'uman leg times the hours of a Nu'uman sun, which is the quietest monument the species has.

They radiate heat and cannot stop. Warm-blooded, fast-hearted, loud in the infrared, a Nu'uman is the brightest thing in a dark room to a Cold Kin, a Yeb, a Shrakur reading the water or a Mekuhlian reading a wall. They cannot ambush. Every people that hunts them knows where they are from the first moment, and the Nu'uman answer to this, arrived at over thousands of years without once understanding the problem, is the massed formation: the line, the shield wall, the square, the block of pike. A people that cannot hide fights in the open in daylight in numbers, and calls it honour, and builds a Curse of Chivalry on top of it.

They channel, and the channelling comes from the same thinness. Nu'uman are "one of the most attuned races for magic channeling," and the reason is that the boundary between a Nu'uman body and the world is barely a boundary. What other peoples' hides keep out, Nu'uman skin lets through, and the nerves run shallow enough to be reached. The cost is written on the outside. Heavy channelling blooms the surface vessels into visible tracery, the blue white of the Alverian vein network coming up through a hide too thin to hide it, and a channeller can be identified across a market square by anyone who knows what to look for. This is the second reason for the tattoo, the ochre, the kohl and the woad. A marked face cannot be read. Half the ink on the surface of Nu is there to bury a vein-bloom under a pattern of somebody's choosing, and the courts that ban tattoo among the nobility do it so that their mages cannot be concealed from them.

What they see is the widest colour range of any people of the Lesser Four, and it is the one sense in which they are the best. They see badly in the dark, hear in a narrow middle band, smell almost nothing, and have no pressure sense, no heat sense, no node and no feel for the grain of stone. They are the least sensory people on Nu, and they have never found it out, because nobody ever describes to a people the sense it does not have. Everything follows from the eye. Their cities are built to be looked at: painted signs, coloured heraldry, banners, glass, illumination, the tabard, the livery, the coat of arms, a whole apparatus of identification through the one organ that works. Their warning systems are beacons. Their maps are drawn. Their courts are held in daylight.

Their law is a prosthesis for the senses they lack. A Do'urssan smells a lie. A Shrakur sees a stomach through a belly wall. A Mekuhlian reads the warmth of a chair and knows who sat in it. A Nu'uman can determine nothing about a stranger except what the stranger's face is doing, so the Nu'uman invented the witness, the sworn oath, the written contract, the seal, the assize and the rack, and built the most elaborate machinery of proof in the world on top of a blindness. Every other people regards Nu'uman law as an absurd amount of effort. They are not wrong, and they have never had to do it.

Lifespan is sixty to one hundred and thirty years, and a very rare few reach three hundred. Those who do are treated as ill omens rather than elders; a village with a two-hundred-year-old in it burns her or worships her, and does either quietly. Weight runs from one hundred and ten pounds in a Sun Strider woman to two hundred and sixty in a Cold Kin man, with the Rivershore and River Sun strains carrying the most muscle for their height. The heart beats faster than a Do'urssan's, the blood runs warmer than a Mekuhlian's, and both of those peoples can hear it.

Life

They breed. Able to birth up to fourteen children per mother is the design, and it is the single fact that made them dominant. Their minds were tuned for the work: "their minds are attuned for repetitive tasks and labors, allowing them to maintain a course and not lose hope towards it," which is why a Nu'uman can dig the same ditch for thirty years and call it a homestead. They channel; Nu'uman are "one of the most attuned races for magic channeling," and each strain leans toward a discipline of its own. They adapt; the species was built to adapt to various climates, which is the reason there is no climate on Nu without Nu'uman in it.

A Nu'uman mother carries for three seasons of the year and births one child at a time, sometimes two; fourteen is the count of a mother's whole life. The female form came from the Omasee, and what the makers took from the Omasee was a pelvis built for a load, set into a body that recovers fast and conceives again inside a year. A woman who bears the full fourteen begins at sixteen and ends at forty, and at forty she is finished in a way no other people's forty-year-old is: the pelvis spread, the back gone, the teeth gone with the children who took the chalk out of them. Half the children born in a peasant house are dead before their fifth winter, and the mothers know it and name the first two the same name in case. More Nu'uman women die in childbed than Nu'uman men die in war, in every year of every century, including the war years, and this is so ordinary that no kingdom has ever thought to count it.

The count is counted elsewhere. Among the houses a woman's births are written into the marriage contract before her name is, in live issue and in sons, with penalties attached, and a noble bride's worth is set by the fertility of her mother and her mother's sisters. The Curse of Chivalry binds the kings and the contract binds the wives, and between them the surface has arranged that its most valuable organ belongs to somebody else. The word for a woman who has borne fourteen and lived is the Fourteenth, and she is given a chair at the church door and a small pension and is looked at the way a village looks at a worn-out millstone that did its work.

The stages have names and everyone on the surface uses them. The Quickening is when the child first moves and the pregnancy is declared, since before that it is not spoken of. The Naming is at a year, and the second Naming at seven, and the two exist because half of them do not reach the second; a child under a year is often not named at all and is called by its order in the house. The Seventh Year puts the child to work in the field, the forge or the scullery. The Sixteenth is majority, and at it a Nu'uman swears on the house name for the first time and becomes a body the law can hang. Then the long working middle, which is thirty years. At Fifty a Nu'uman is old. The body ages visibly and fast in its last third: hair greys, skin folds, teeth go, and a Nu'uman of seventy is a sight that the long-lived peoples find hard to look at. A Do'urssan who has known a Nu'uman friend for sixty years has watched a whole species happen in front of him and is, by hold custom, permitted to refuse a second one.

They eat everything. Grain, root, fruit, fish, fowl, red meat, insects in the poorer quarters, and, in the Under Realm and the war camps, whatever is dead and not yet rotten; the "constant need for consumption" the makers bred into them has never left. The gut is long, tolerant and slow, and it will take carrion, bark, boiled leather and the grey paste that the Do'urvun are piped, which is why a Nu'uman garrison can be put anywhere. It also means they need a great deal. A Nu'uman eats three times what a Mekuhlian of the same weight eats and five times what a Shrakar does between kills, and a besieged Nu'uman city starves faster than any other people's would in the same walls.

Death is grim and specific. Nu'uman were "sacrificed to their living structures" by the Alverians, and Nu'uman Hide is a traded good. Funerary custom follows faith. The temple-going bury in ground blessed to a worldly god and mark the place with a stone. The Providence-sworn sing the dead into the sky at night with the body on a pyre, believing the Court can hear the hymn. The Doom-sworn give the body to the cellar and do not speak of it. In the borderlands the body is often sold before it is cold.

Frailty

They are the plague people. Dense, settled, fast-breeding, penned in walled cities with their animals and their wells and their dead, with a hide that lets everything through and a lifespan too short to build resistance across, the Nu'uman are the sickest people on Nu and the reason every other people has a quarantine custom for them. The red flux runs through a camp in nine days. Greypox takes the children of a town in a season and leaves the survivors marked, and the marks are then covered with ink, which is the third reason for the tattoo. The shaking sickness comes off bad grain in wet years. And beneath all of them sits the worst thing a Nu'uman body can carry, which is not natural at all: Zhurx's gift, the purest form of a Void Prince's disease, carried by the Nu'uman who tried to steal that Prince's power, which has no season, no cure and no mercy, and which the Doom-sworn have been known to introduce into a town on purpose.

The strains do not cross well. Each of the seven is a real adaptation, laid into lung, skin, eye and fat by the acclimatising rays and fixed there, and a child of two strains inherits the dilution of both. The child of a Cold Kin and a Desert Walker has neither the fat that holds the core nor the skin that recovers water, and is fragile in both countries. A Sun Strider and a River Sun child gets neither the water-bumps nor the storm-lid. The houses have known this for nine hundred years without knowing why, and have written it into marriage law as blood purity, with lineages, prohibitions and a whole heraldic vocabulary of clean descent. The peasantry, who marry whoever is in the next valley, pay the price and are told it is a judgement on them.

Channelling injures them specifically. The vein-bloom is the warning; the rupture is the injury. A Nu'uman who channels past the body's tolerance bleeds under the skin in sheets, and the bruise is the shape of the vein network, blue white going black. A bad one blinds. A very bad one stops the heart. The Desert Walkers, who have the strongest inheritance, have the most of it, and "a hyper blue vein structure that can be seen on those that still wield the powers of their ancestors" is a boast in the desert and a coroner's note everywhere else.

Starvation works on them fast because there is so little in reserve. Outside the Cold Kin, a Nu'uman carries almost no fat, so the body takes the muscle, and it takes the channel first: a starving mage cannot reach the world, and the gift goes before the strength does. Every competent siege commander on the surface knows this and knows it as folklore rather than as anatomy, and the rule of thumb across three kingdoms is that a walled town's mages are finished a fortnight before its soldiers are.

The parasites of the Nu'uman are the parasites of crowds and of the hide trade. Lice in every army. The skinworm, which lives in badly cured hide and enters through a break in the skin, is carried north with every bale of Nu'uman Hide out of the Torkan dens, so that the trade in their own skins reinfects them; a tanner's apprentice in a border town is a dead man at forty. The Crimson takes them readily and takes them in numbers, since there is no plate for it to get through. And the last frailty is the one they have made for themselves: a people who breed to fourteen and forget within three generations has no memory long enough to see a cycle, so they rebuild the same town on the same flood plain, hire the same Torkan clan, and sign the same contract, and Aezithis was right about them.

Country

The Surface Realm, all of it. The realms held by Nu'uman are Tyberia, Brenmor, Corbenic, Cameliard and Aegaria; the first free settlement was the coast of Cameliard. There is no short list of their notable places, because the answer is everywhere: every walled city with a market and a gallows, every hedged homestead, every mining town, every port. Hylia is the Holy City of Hymns. The cradle of each strain is described under the kin below, and each is a climate before it is a country.

What they eat is grown, and growing it is what they do to a country. A Nu'uman settlement takes the forest first, for timber and for field, and the field is worked in three parts with one part resting, and the rest is not enough. Within a century the soil above a long-held valley is thin, the hedgerows are old, the woods are coppice and the great trees are gone. The Irugaine forests went this way and the Irugaine went with them, which is the oldest grudge on the surface and the one the Nu'uman have most completely forgotten, since the half of their own splice that came out of those forests is the half that lets the River Sun Children speak to the trees. They have domesticated the ox, the pig, the hen, the river fish in ponds, the dog at the door and the horse under the saddle, and the horse has half domesticated them; a surface kingdom's map is a map of where horses can go. They keep bees, and they keep deer in parks for lords, and poaching a lord's deer is hanging in four realms.

What eats them is everybody. The Torkan and the Vultari eat them under contract to their own lords. The Mekuhlian take the brains. The Shrakur take the coastal villages. The Crimson takes whole counties. No other people on Nu is prey to four peoples at once, and the Nu'uman response has never been to arm the villages, because an armed peasantry is a worse problem for a house than a fed Torkan clan is.

When they leave a country, the country does not return to what it was. The hedges stay for three hundred years, the ridge and furrow stays under the grass for a thousand, the coppice comes back as scrub and then as woodland within eighty, and the deer come back before the wolves do. What does not come back is whoever was there first. A Nu'uman county abandoned in a plague year is a forest again inside a century and an Irugaine forest never again, and the surface calls that recovery.

Society

Feudal and house-based. The Empire is a confederation of peoples with the Nu'uman first among equals, organised into six estates: the Nobility, the Freemen and Gentry through the cities, the Clergy, the Peasantry, the Autonomous Tribes, and the Monsters. The Imperial Diet seats thirteen Electors, three hundred or more Imperial Princes, roughly one hundred Free Cities, some forty tribes and around one hundred monster dens. Nu'uman kings are bound by the Curse of Chivalry. The houses are the spine of surface politics: Pendragon, Du Lac, Eastlemere, Grey, Blackstone, Ambent, Crowden, Naralith. In character "they have the most variety of any species, thus leaving their personality types to be scattered," and then: "competitive by nature," "hard workers and conquerors," "aggressively dominant," "conquering of anything larger than them." The public description of their culture is an indictment. They are "bound by the prospect of Providence, devoted to the breeding and expanding of their families name, to toil beneath Hyton's sun for a homestead to die in, destructive with blind ambition." Their word for the blight is Crimson. The Do'urssan word is te' Blight. The two peoples have argued about a shared emergency in two vocabularies for centuries.

The house is a breeding arrangement with a banner on it, and everything the estates do runs back to the womb and the short life. A sixty-year reign is a long one, so surface politics moves at a speed no other people can follow; a Do'urssan embassy posted to Tyberia will outlive eleven kings and will be recalled twice for having negotiated with a dynasty that has ended. Succession crises are constant because heirs are cheap and die young. A house with fourteen children has fourteen claims, so the surface invented primogeniture, then invented the younger son, then invented the crusade, the monastery and the mercenary company to have somewhere to put him. Every institution on the surface that looks like piety or like honour is, underneath, a solution to the problem of surplus sons.

Dress is the strain's cloth and the house's colour, and above the peasantry it is armour whenever armour can be excused. A Nu'uman of any rank marks the skin: kohl and ochre in the south, woad and scar in the north, ink everywhere, and the marks are read as a second face that cannot be made to flinch. This is the honest heart of it. Their faces are thin and their vessels are shallow and they blush, blanch and sweat in front of each other constantly, so they have covered the face in something that does not move. A court painted in the southern fashion is a room in which nobody can read anybody, which is the nearest a Nu'uman has ever come to the privacy a Mekuhlian is born with.

Food is bread and pottage, the pig, the hen, the river fish, salt meat in winter and the lord's deer when it can be poached. Drink is ale, cider, mead and the thin wines of the warm coasts; the courts drink Tyberian red and the camps drink whatever burns. Music is the voice before anything else. The Elegeian Hymnals and the battle-choirs are Nu'uman, Hylia is the Holy City of Hymns, and a Nu'uman army sings on the march because a frightened animal that sings forgets for a verse that it is frightened. The voice is also the one instrument that fits them: their hearing sits in a narrow middle band and their throats sit in the same band, so a Nu'uman choir is the loudest and most exact sound their world can make, and a doctrine that says the hymn is how one is heard by the Court is a doctrine built on the single sense at which the species excels. The Do'urssan, who hear below them, find Nu'uman singing thin. The Mekuhlian, who hear below them too, find it unbearable and say so only among themselves.

The oath is sworn on the house name, and to forswear it is to lose the name; a Nu'uman without a house is a body waiting for a hide-buyer. Taboo: to sell a kinsman's hide; to break salt with a Torkan; to speak the name of the Alverians in a church of Providence, where it is held that no such people ever existed.

Faith

Nu'uman faith is a matter of affiliation, and there are three. Those who follow the worldly gods believe each of those gods keeps an afterlife realm for the faithful, and every one of those realms is make-believe; the worldly gods have no realm beyond the here and now. Those who follow the Constellation Court and those who follow the Void Princes follow powers that do keep realms. In truth all souls go to the soul auction of the star gods, and none of the living know it save the few who have come back from the auction and are taken for mad. The names by which the world knows its gods, Aezithis, Zaona and Zuella, Orton, Irus, Tantis, Vaeyar, Nunamnir and Hyton, are Nu'uman names. The Nu'uman are the leaders of the Common Tongue, and every other people's names for the same gods stem from theirs or stand against them. Providence is moral: the purest alignment of good.

The first affiliation is the temples of the worldly gods, and it is the peasantry's. Hyton's sun is toiled under and prayed to at harvest. Vaeyar is asked for rain and cursed for storm. Orton is paid by every fishing village with the first catch. Tantis is a mountain-shrine faith of the high passes. Irus is feared in the woods and given the first kill. The moon sisters are asked for children and for a quiet death, and they are asked oftener than all the rest together, because the thing a Nu'uman household actually lives and dies by is the womb. Each temple promises its own hall of the dead, the Sunlit Field, the Hall Beneath the Waves, the Hunting Ground, the Quiet Orchard of the good moon, and the priests describe them in loving detail to people who will never learn that the halls are empty.

The second affiliation is Providence, the Court of the stars, and it is the affiliation of the crowns. It has a Clergy that sits as one of the six estates, a Holy City of Hymns at Hylia, sworn adherents called Providence-sworn, and a doctrine that the regard of the Court can be weighed, which is spoken of as "a Caelatari's measured interest." The Providence-sworn hold that the Court watches the deeds of the world and weighs them, that a moral life earns the Court's interest and an immoral one earns its indifference, and that the hymn is how one is heard. Its clergy are sung orders, and Sister Volima is of them.

The third affiliation is Doom, the worship of the Void Princes in cellars and in the courts of the rotten, sworn to a Prince by name and paid in blood under the dark moon. Its adherents are called Doom-sworn. It is the one affiliation whose promised realm exists and whose promise is worse than nothing.

Tongue

Common Tongue is the first language, which the Alverians built into them. Tyberian is the tongue of the courts, a refinement of Common made to forget. The Nu'uman are the leaders of the Common Tongue, and the tongue itself is a stepped-down form of the gods' own language, gifted to the Irugaine by Irus and taken from them.

The naming rule of the crowns and the core strain is a given name and a house name, or a given name and "of" a place. In use: Arthur Pendragon, Guinevere, Uther, Igraine, Amr, Gaius, Merlin, Lancelot, Elaine, Galahad, Kay Ceinfar Cynwal, Ector, Percival, Mara, Marcus Blackstone, Stewart Crowden, Gailen Ambent, Harold Grey, Arvan Vervos, Aelin Eldmar, Jack Whiteshore, Aedern Wesley, Jacob Declau, Killyian and Akahana Yantho, Leodegrance and Maverie Eastlemere, Clymene, Adric Sweetcolt, Madam Laetia, Sister Volima, Vorek, Thuric Harscor, Cael and Pykon Braxton, Lord Kanthor Auriec of Orilin. Akahana Yantho and Killyian Yantho are a married pair from different naming traditions, and theirs is the one place in the great houses where a strain's own register shows through.

Each strain names in its own register beneath the Common one, and a Nu'uman of any strain who rises into a house takes the house's register and drops his own. The Misted Folk give a short given name and a house or trade name. The Desert Walkers give a given name and a water-name, the name of the well or cistern the family drinks from, joined with a breath. The Cold Kin give a given name and a father's name with a hard ending. The River Sun Children give the family name first and the given name second, and the family name is a word for a place on a river. The Sun Striders give one name only and add a second when the first is earned. The Rivershore folk give a given name and the name of the river they were born beside. The Dew Skins give a given name and a sung name, which is the first note the child cried on, written as a syllable. In the registers: Corvan Ashlet, Ismerah Vol-Dahan, Ukvarr Hollenfrost, Sanvo Kiyeth, Tochel Yaxine, Ashvel Narudin, Brannoch Tey, Sessaly Marrowen.

Regard

"More children to continue to the blood line." "Toil in the sun for a homestead to die within." "Destructive and blindly ambitious." Below the surface kingdoms they are food and stock. The insults are ready to hand and they are not worth setting down: the ordinary words for a Nu'uman in another people's mouth put him somewhere between vermin and meat, they are said in the open, in markets and in war camps and at table, and nobody present finds them remarkable. Vultari soldiers look forward to them: "Nu'uman soldiers for dinner!!" and "I'm gonna get me some juicy Nu'uman flesh!!" Nu'umanoid is the ordinary word across the world for a two-legged upright shape, as in bat-Nu'umanoid, slug-Nu'umanoid, vulture Nu'umanoid. The species is the measure other species are described against, which is its own kind of standing.

The Alverians were their creators, and enslaved them to prison colonies and fed them to their living structures. The Irugaine are genetic kin, half their splice, and the Nu'uman have taken their forests. The Omari are genetic kin, and the Omasee are the template of the female form. Their descendants are everything: the Nu'uman body is the chassis for nearly every Wildkin and hybrid splice, and every WildKin of the tier below is a Nu'uman frame with an animal grafted into the head, the skin and the signature features. The Do'urssan are allies through trade, through mixed houses such as Ambent of Amberhill, and through mutual condescension. The Vultari and the Torkan are predators, and both eat them openly, under contract to Nu'uman lords.

Harvest

Nu'uman Hide, "hide made from their skins." It is thin, even in grain, without plate or scale or guard hair to work around, and it takes dye and tooling better than anything else that walks, which is the plain reason the trade exists and has never needed a magical one. A full back is worth more than the living owner earns in a year. The trade is live and casual, and a buyer inspecting a set of Brutius Bristletooth's leathers will ask straight out, "is the hide nu'uman?" Nu'uman bone is worked into handles and dice in the Torkan dens and sold back north as "pale horn," and it is worked because it can be worked; it is soft enough to take a file, unlike Do'urssan bone, which eats the file.

Nu'uman blood, taken from a victim sacrificed to a Void Prince under the dark moon, becomes void fluid and is the cheapest road to void elixir there is, which is why the Doom-sworn prefer Nu'uman victims: there are more of them. Nu'uman brains are eaten for what they know by Mekuhlian and Torkan alike, and the readers say a Nu'uman skull gives a dense, fast, crowded read, a whole life packed into eighty years with nothing left out, which is exactly what a short life in a thin body produces. All of it is murder on the surface and none of it is prosecuted below it, and a Nu'uman hide on a Torkan's back in a Nu'uman lord's hall is a thing the lord has decided not to see.

Remembered

Arthur Pendragon, King, bound by the Curse of Chivalry, the centre of the surface.

Merlin, fathered by Sagius, the Star of Prophecy.

Harold Grey, Lord Steward, employer of the Vultari Trikarian Company and of the Torkan clans.

Marcus Blackstone, who keeps an Iziakan slave.

Guinevere, Uther, Igraine, Lancelot, Galahad, Kay, Ector and Percival, the Camelot core.

Gailen Ambent, Lord Chamberlain, of mixed Do'urssan and Nu'uman blood.

Killyian and Akahana Yantho, a married pair across two naming traditions.

Zhurx, a Nu'uman cursed by a Void Prince of plague and pestilence for trying to steal that Prince's power, who carries the purest form of the god's disease.

Mahlbar the Lich King is claimed by the surface as one of theirs and is no Nu'uman; he is Mekuhlian.

Kin each has a page of its own

Seven strains, each placed by climate. What divides them is where an Alverian pointed the acclimatising rays and then set the body down. The rays fixed each strain to its cradle, and the cradle is a country of weather before it is a country of borders; the skin, the eye, the build and the magical discipline of each strain are all a record of the sky it was made to stand under.

The changes went deeper than colour. Each strain differs in the lung, in the fat, in the eye and in the skin, in ways a surgeon can see and a herald cannot, and it is those four that decide where a Nu'uman can live well, where he can live badly, and where he dies in the first winter.