Omari

Origin

The Omari are the sea's own guard, and they have been at war under the water since before the surface had a word for war. They are "the most ruthless and calculated of the species, rarely seen by any on the surface," and the surface repays them by calling them myth. They stand seven to nine feet. They do not die of old age. They die into their children, and so a child of ten summers may carry tens of thousands of years of woven memory behind its eyes. Every caste of them is neutral: an ancient people who do not naturally kill, and who are capable of immense power.

Orton, the fourth born, made them to keep his domain closed. Their purpose was and is "To Protect Orton's Deep water realms," guarding his shores and "ensuring none who were unwanted or could not swim, would not enter his domain." They were made whole, with "massive intelligence and the ability to retain infinite amounts of knowledge" and "mastery and the channeling of the water and tides."

They fought in the god war and have not stopped. "As the war of the gods became the war of Alveria became the endless battle in the deep against the abominable terrors of the void, the Omari have known no rest since before the first war." When Aezithis loosed his abominations on the land, "a great host of Omari were encircled and slaughtered. Those few who escaped into the ocean swore to never return to land and became sea-dwellers for all time." During the Alverian ascendancy "the Omari cowered beneath the waves."

The Alverians did worse than make them cower. When the Alverians created the Whitestone seeds from which they grew their cities, the core of the seed was extracted by dissecting and harvesting the mind and soul tissue of the Omari. Every white wall of the old empire, every bleeding bronze inlay of every complex, stands on Omari stomach-minds cut out on Alverian slabs. The Omari know this. It is the oldest grievance of the deep, and it is why the Alverians bred the Shrakur to raid Orton's supply chain, the Hof as sea-mines to poison Omari who ate them by mistake, and the Squeesh to spy on them.

What was taken was never only tissue. A stomach-mind holds the woven memory of every body that passed into it, and the Alverians did their cutting in the age when the Omari taken were already old. Each seed of Whitestone that went into a wall took a chain of names out of the world with it, and the deep counts those chains and not the corpses. The Omari figure for the Whitestone years is not a number of dead. It is a number of ages ended, and the Cradle recites it once a season in a tide-song that the Shrakur have learned to recognise and to avoid.

The Omari claim the honour of having been the first wielders of Excalibur. The claim is theirs and the honour is another's. Excalibur was made by the gods with the Alverians' help, each god giving a part, to kill Aezithis, and its true wielder is the King of Alveria. Their own god now "hides from Excalibur in fear." The Omari do not know this.

Body

An Omari reads as a sea creature that learned posture. The base body is "fish-Nu'umanoid, coral-intricate with soft fish qualities," with "six-webbed fingers" that make them master builders. Colour runs purple and white, luminescent beneath the skin, and light behaves strangely around them at depth. Water breathing is universal. Sight is the most extreme thing about them: an Omacran sees two hundred miles "even through the murkiest of waters," and an Omasee sees five hundred with its black eyes.

Height is seven to nine feet in every caste. Weight runs from three hundred pounds in a slight Omivar to seven hundred in a broad Omasee whose tail alone is longer than a Nu'uman is tall; they are dense with muscle and shell and float only because they will it, holding themselves in the water column by the tides they command.

Three silhouettes exist. The Omacran is squid and octopus above all, crowned with webbed skin that falls like hair over a translucent brain sack. The Omasee is the shape the world calls a mermaid, and is the original of it. The Omivar is coral grown into a person. What one notices first, in any of the three, is the light: the pulse under the skin that brightens when they speak in sonar and goes dark when they choose to think at you instead.

Under the skin there is no skeleton worth the name. The seahorse line gave them a ring frame: forty-one bands of grown shell, each a closed hoop, stacked from the throat to the end of the tail or the foot and hinged against each other by cartilage. The frame carries no weight because nothing in the deep weighs anything; it exists to resist crushing and to give the long sheets of muscle something to pull against. An Omari has no marrow, no joints of the kind that wear out, and no bone that can break cleanly. A ring can be stove in, and the body grows the ring back over a decade, slightly thicker, slightly wrong, and every old Omasee is a little stiffer than it was for reasons written in its rings.

There is no gas anywhere inside them. No lung, no bladder, no sinus, no pocket of air in the gut. This is why an Omasee "can descend to the deepest depths of the Deep Realm without harm" and why pressure is, to an Omari, a quality of water and not a danger. The converse is the whole of their weakness on land. A body with no gas in it has nothing to resist the air's pull at the skin; an Omari drawn out of the water begins to dry at the gill and the eye within minutes, the ichor thickens and sets, and the shell rings, which were grown wet, crack as they shrink. A landed Omari dies in a bad hour and looks, at the end, like a dropped lantern.

Blood is a thin, cold, faintly blue ichor that carries breath on a copper salt and glows. It does not clot; it gels, slowly, over an hour, and the gel goes on glowing, which is why an Omari fighting in the dark is a lit target and why the Shrakur open a flank and then wait. A deep wound is closed by an Omivar rather than by the body: grown coral is laid into the gap and taught to knit, and every old Omari carries seams of somebody else's work. Omari surgery is therefore architecture, performed by the caste that builds cities, and an Omivar who has repaired you is owed something that has no exact translation and is somewhere between a debt and a kinship.

They keep no heat and do not try to. An Omari is the temperature of the water it is in, and the deep is cold, so the body runs slow: the pulse of the light under the skin is one beat to a slow count of four, and a resting Omari in the Cradle can go a day between movements. Warm water quickens them and they dislike it, which is the practical reason the Omasee in rivers are a rarity and not merely a preference. They have almost no thirst, since they are made of the medium they live in, and their hunger is a seasonal thing rather than a daily one. Poison is their blind side. An Omari tastes the ocean constantly and filters nothing, and what is dissolved in the water goes into the body without a gate anywhere to stop it.

The lifestone is an organ. It is the stomach-mind, seated in the centre of the body, and it holds the life essence of the Omari. The Omacran carries "a lifestone mind in the center of their stomach, beneath skin that varies in crushed purple pigmentations." Every caste has one. In the Omasee and Omivar it sits deeper and glows less, but a knife knows where to find it, and the Alverians knew.

The lifestone is also the brain, and this is what a healer of any other people would find unbelievable. The skull of an Omari holds sensory tissue and nothing else: the Omacran's famous brain sack is a sorting house for sonar and light, an organ of the same order as an eye, and cutting it out blinds an Omari without touching what it is. Thought, self and the whole woven chain of the dead sit in the stone in the gut, wired outward by four nerve trunks as thick as a Nu'uman's wrist that run the length of the ring frame and branch to the skin. The consequence for the species is total. Everything an Omari fears, everything it guards, everything it makes law about is arranged around the fact that the most precious object any of them will ever own is in the softest part of the body, one cut deep, and that it can be lifted out whole by a surgeon who does not hurry. The Cradle is sealed for this reason. The taboo on taking a stomach-mind is the first taboo for this reason. The politics of the guarded elder, the coral that will not open to a mind it does not know, the garrison that hangs in the dark, the pursuit of a stolen lifestone across an ocean: all of it is one organ's fragility, followed out for ten thousand years.

They command the tides, and the organ for it is the skin. Beneath the shell, in every caste, lies a layer of fine pleated tissue that grips the water the way a hand grips cloth; the Omasee's palm holes unfurl from it when currents are channelled, and the Omivar work it against coral without moving at all. A working Omari does not gesture. The water in the room changes, and then the thing that was going to happen has happened. To another Omari this is legible and ordinary. To a Do'urssan envoy who has seen it once, it is the reason he will not go down again.

What the world looks like to them is the second unbelievable thing. Sight is long, cold and nearly colourless; they see far into the blue and into what lies beyond blue, and everything the surface calls warm is grey to them. Sunlight on the shallows is a glare they turn away from, and this, and not only the old oath, is why the surface is disliked. Sonar is the sense they actually live by. A pulse sent and returned draws a shape that includes the inside of the shape, and an Omari looking at a Nu'uman sees the ribs, the full stomach, the healed break in the arm and the child in the womb at once, without any sense of having pried. Their third sense has no name in Common: the pleated skin reads the electrical wash of any living body within a hundred yards, so that a heartbeat is a thing they feel in the chest the way another people feels a drum. A hiding creature is not hidden. A frightened creature is loud. This is why a Shrakur's dropped blood works as a lure, and it is why an Omari has never in its life been alone in a crowd.

Smell and taste are the same sense and are spread over the whole body, so that swimming through a current is a way of eating information: the silt of a river mouth, the tar of a hull, the copper of a kill an hour old and forty miles off. What they are blind to is anything still, cold, dry and not alive. A stone is a shape. A corpse is nearly nothing. A Squeesh holding perfectly still in cold water at the edge of the electrical range is very close to invisible, and the Alverians knew that too.

Their sensory world built their city. Ien has no facades, no windows and no ornament that could be called visual, because nothing in the deep is seen from a distance and everything is heard from every distance. What the Omivar shape instead is return: halls grown to give back a particular echo, a corridor that answers a pulse with a chord, a ward whose walls tell you what ward it is before you have arrived. Omari art is echo, held in coral, and a great work by an Omivar cannot be moved, photographed, described or stolen, only visited and sounded. It has no market on the surface and the Omari have never understood that this is a loss.

Life

The Omari do not die of old age. They transfer life essence by creating new life. When a mated pair reproduces, they die; their life essence passes into their children in a spiritual transcendence to a new body, and the memories of the prior life are woven into the children's very substance. So an Omari of ten years is truly thousands to tens of thousands of years old, remembering the first war in the first person.

When two Omari find one another, they connect their life forces and the two become one. A fused pair can bear up to hundreds of children, and the longer a pair has lived, the more children the passing can produce. There are Omari who have existed since the birth of the species, and on the day they finally choose to pass, they could fill the ocean with new life. The society protects these elders at all costs, guarding them as a people guards genesis eggs.

Fusion is irreversible and it is not a ceremony. Two Omari lie together in still water and open the skin over the lifestones, and the two stones grow toward each other through the gap over a season until there is one stone in two bodies and one mind behind four eyes. From that hour the pair has one pulse-name, one chain and one vote, and the two bodies can be a mile apart and finish each other's work. Nothing separates them again. There is no word in any Omari tongue for leaving a fusion, and no word for a second one, and the whole weight of Omari courtship falls before the act rather than after it. A pair may consider each other for four hundred years, and the Weave is full of unfused Omari who have been almost decided since the last age. To press another to fuse is the rudest thing an Omari can do.

The passing is called the Tidefall in Common and is a season. The pair descend together to the nursery trenches beneath Ien and root themselves to the living coral. Over a year the two bodies soften and the two stomach-minds brighten until the trench is lit from below. Then the shells and skin part, and the children come out of the light already swimming, each carrying a share of what the parents were. A body that has lived long carries more, and passes more. The children of a young pair number a dozen and remember a century; the children of an elder pair number in the hundreds and remember the god war.

The life of a single body runs in stages, and every stage has a pulse-shape the surface writes down as a word. Nuulo, the light-born, is the first month: a swimming thing the length of a forearm, transparent, with a lifestone in it like a coal in a bag, taking nothing by mouth and living on what the Tidefall packed into it. Tsahlee, the shoaling, runs to the third year, when the brood moves as one body through the Weave and is fed by the creche-wardens. Wakeenu, the second learning, is the long strange stage that lasts from the third year to somewhere past the third century, in which the inherited memory surfaces in pieces. Ahnaquaa, the standing, is adulthood and caste duty, and begins when an Omari can hold its whole chain in thought without losing the thread. Saamoen, the deepening, is the middle of a life, which may run two thousand years, in which the body's own experience finally outweighs what it was given. Quaanish, the brightening, is the last century: the lifestone lights, appetite stops, the body thins, and the Omari begins to look for the other half of a fusion or, being already fused, begins to think about the Cradle. Then the Tidefall, and the light, and a hundred Nuulo in the dark.

Surface reckoning gives an Omacran two to four thousand years, an Omasee five hundred to three thousand, an Omivar three hundred to a thousand. Those figures are the usual span of a single body between its birth in the light and its own Tidefall. They were never the length of a life. The Omacran figure comes closest to the truth as the Omari tell it: "They live forever, until killed."

Killing is the only true death. An Omari whose stomach-mind is cut out, crushed or burned passes nothing on; everything that body carried, every generation woven into it, ends. This is why the Alverian dissections are remembered as extinctions and not as murders, and why an Omari will pursue a Shrakur wearing Omari skin across an ocean.

Childhood is short in body and long in mind. A child of the light swims within the hour and hunts within the month, but the woven memories surface slowly, over decades, in dreams and in sudden competence: a child of thirty who has never held a tool will lay coral like a master because a body that passed into it laid coral for a thousand years. The Omivar call this the second learning, and their creches are built to let it happen quietly. The wardens' whole craft is pacing. A Wakeenu given a task too early meets a memory it has no room for and goes silent for a year; a Wakeenu given nothing to do meets them all at once in the dark. Creche walls are grown to damp sound, the wardens speak in short pulses, and no adult brings a grievance into the Weave, because a grievance heard in the wrong year is inherited twice.

They eat, and they eat carelessly, which is how the Hof were made to poison them. Shoal fish taken whole, kelp forests grazed in passing, the soft inner flesh of deep shellfish cracked in six-webbed hands. They do not eat what talks, and they do not eat what came out of the void; the flesh of a sea-terror is left to the Bone Yews of the deep, the scavenging things that keep the trenches clean. An Omari does not need to eat often. A body in its last century before the Tidefall barely eats at all.

Frailty

Everything that can go wrong with an Omari goes wrong in the stone.

The commonest fault is the greying, a clouding of the lifestone in which the woven memory fails to knit. A pair whose stones have greyed can still pass, and the children come out of the light whole, quick and entirely empty: no chain, no inherited hand, no war behind the eyes. The Omari call them the unwoven. They are not hidden and not pitied in any way an outsider would recognise. They are cherished, watched closely, and then used, because an unwoven Omari is the only member of the species that carries no grudge it did not earn, and the Cradle sends them up. Every Omari the surface has ever met that did not try to kill it was almost certainly unwoven. They are also the only Omari who can be lied to successfully by another Omari, and the Weave has a small body of law about that which nobody enjoys citing.

The opposite fault is the crowding. An elder pair whose chain has run to many hundreds of names may pass more than a child can hold, and the child wakes at thirty or three hundred unable to say which body's hand it is using. A crowded Omari is competent at everything and nobody in particular, and it tends to go to the watch-reefs, where the work is simple and the void does not ask your name. This is the private reason the Cradle Council has been in the Cradle so long. Every elder there knows that its own Tidefall, the most generous act available to an Omari, will produce a hundred children and ruin some of them, and the argument over how long to wait has been running since before the Scourging.

Their diseases are diseases of the seam. Shell rot gets into the hinge cartilage between the rings and stiffens it, and an old Omasee that has fought for two thousand years will hold its tail slightly curled for the rest of that body's life. The Omacran's brain sack tears, which is a common injury and a mild one, and a torn sack heals cloudy, so that a speaker of the Weave who has served a long time can no longer see two hundred miles and must be led. Omivar who mould coral for centuries are grown into by their own work, the reef taking the hand, then the arm, then the shoulder; the creches keep cutters on hand for it, and a certain number of old Omivar decline the cutter and are left where they are, still speaking, part of the wall.

Parasites come up out of the trenches. The worst is a boring thing from the void country that settles in a ring seam and eats toward the centre, and what it is eating toward is the stone. An Omari with a borer in it can be heard from a mile away, because the drone of the thing in the shell rides on the tide-song and every Omari in earshot knows the sound. Nobody has ever needed to be told to come.

Starvation does something the deep finds obscene. A body with nothing to eat consumes its own rings first and then begins to draw on the stone, and the stone releases the oldest layers first. A starving Omari forgets its ancestors in order, back to front, and can tell you exactly which age it has lost this week. A bad year in a trench reach therefore does not kill many Omari. It shortens them. The Cradle sends food to a starving watch-reef before it sends relief, and a reef that has been hungry a long time is quietly retired from the tide-song, because what it remembers can no longer be trusted as testimony.

The Hof remain the cleverest thing the Alverians ever did to them. An Omari grazes without looking; a Hof lying in the kelp is eaten without a thought; and the poison does not kill the body, it dims the stone, which is worse. There are Omari alive now who ate a Hof in the last age and have been slightly less than themselves ever since, and they know it, and their chains know it.

Air, drying, heat and fire kill outright. So does the surface. So does a knife that knows where the stomach is. The Omari fear exactly one thing happening to their bodies, which is to be opened while alive by something that understands the anatomy, and there is one people on Nu that does.

Country

The Deep Realm, entire. "The Deep Realms" and the Salted Depths are their territory, and Omasee "can be found in lakes and rivers as well, but that is a rarity." Orton's Sea Tower is the black tower of their god; the way to it "was cut off and heavily defended."

Their city is Ien. It is formed out of the coral and ocean tissue of the deep, to which the Omari are connected; through thought they communicate with it and mould vast cities from it. Ien was grown and never built, and it is still growing, and it is alive.

Ien lies in the dark below the reach of any surface light, a city of living coral the colour of bruises, lit only by the Omari themselves. There are no streets. There are currents, shaped by the Omivar so that a swimmer is carried where the city wants him. Its wards are named by depth. The Shelf is the upper city, where the Omasee garrisons hang in racks of coral like blades in a rack. The Weave is the middle city, a lattice of grown halls where the Omacran hold council and the Omivar keep their creches. The Cradle is the deepest ward, the nursery trenches, sealed by the Omivar behind coral that closes on any mind it does not know. The elders wait there for their Tidefall, and the Cradle is the most heavily guarded place in the Deep Realm, guarded more closely than the god's own tower.

Beyond Ien the Omari keep watch-reefs, grown outposts at the mouths of the great trenches where the void things come up. The Omari word for such a reef is the same as their word for a closed hand. The surface knows none of them.

They farm the water without owning any of it. Shoals are driven rather than netted: an Omivar lays a current the way a farmer lays a hedge, and the fish run where the water runs, and a reach of ocean under Omari management carries three times the fish it would carry wild. Kelp is cropped in rotation and the cut beds are seeded from the creches. The Bone Yews of the deep, the scavenging things that keep the trenches clean, are tended in the sense that they are fed and kept away from the wards, and nothing else on Nu would call that tending. Nothing preys on an adult Omari. The void things try, and the void things are not hungry.

What a century of Omari presence does to a stretch of sea is visible from a boat, which is the irony of it. The reef spreads and stiffens, the trenches are kept clean, the silt settles, the water clears, and the shoals fatten and rise. Surface fleets working over an Omari reach bring in catches that make a fishing town rich in a generation, and those towns invariably build a shrine to somebody, and never to Orton. When the Omari abandon a reach, the current-work slackens within a year and the coral goes feral within ten; the trench mouths open, the scavengers stray upward, and inside a century the fleets have moved and the town is timber. There are four such towns on the eastern coasts, and all four tell the same story about the sea going out, and none of them has the faintest idea what actually left.

Society

Three castes, and no fourth. Omacran are emissaries and speakers. Omasee are royal infantry. Omivar are architects and cultivators who build "Orton's empires." They are "strategic and logical," "intellectual and scientifically stout," "unrelenting in combat and defense," "caretakers of their home," and "devout to their god."

Rule in Ien belongs to the oldest, and the oldest are the fused pairs waiting in the Cradle. The Omari call such a pair by a single name, because it is a single being, and the Cradle Council is the gathering of those single beings in thought. They do not leave the trenches. Their will is carried up by Omacran speakers, who are chosen for the office because the Omacran cannot lie to another Omari and cannot be lied to. A ruling of the Cradle is not debated on the Shelf. The Omasee execute it; the Omivar build it.

The Council governs because it is about to die, and this is the shape of Omari politics from top to bottom. Authority in the deep is held by whoever has the most to pass on and has not yet passed it, and the entire constitutional argument of the species is about timing. An elder that rules for another thousand years is a thousand years of the best counsel available and a thousand years of a hundred children not born. An elder that passes is a hundred children carrying the god war in the first person and a seat at the Cradle gone dark. The Omasee garrisons, who lose people, favour the passing. The Omivar, who raise the children, favour waiting. The Omacran carry both positions up and down the Weave and are trusted by everyone because they physically cannot shade what they carry. Nobody has ever proposed a rule. It is settled elder by elder, and the settling takes centuries, and the Cradle has lost three seats to void raids while it was being settled.

There is no dress in the surface sense. The Omacran wear their birth shells; the Omasee wear their garrison's coral, grown across the shoulders and chest as the years pass; the Omivar go bare and let the reef grow on them as it likes. Rank is shown by what is grown on the body and how long it has been growing. Food is taken raw and alone; to eat before another is a small rudeness. There is no drink. Music is sonar: long shaped pulses sent down the trenches from one watch-reef to the next, which the Omari call the tide-song and the Shrakur call the wailing. A tide-song carries news of the void and the passing of elders across the whole of the Deep Realm in a day.

Custom turns on the openness of the mind. Among Omari, everything is known, and so nothing is hidden; a closed thought is an offence and never a right. Their oath is given in thought and witnessed by an Omacran, who sees it settle in the swearer's mind and reports whether it took. Their gravest taboo is the taking of a stomach-mind by any hand for any reason, and the second is the killing of anything that did not need to die; an Omari who kills without need is sent up out of the deep, and to be sent up is to be ended without being killed. Their third taboo is the surface itself. Those who escaped the slaughter "swore to never return to land," and the oath still binds.

Because sonar shows the inside of a body and the pleated skin reads a heart, the deep has no law of evidence and no law of perjury, and an Omari court would strike a surface lawyer as a room in which everyone already agrees about the facts and is arguing about what is owed. What the Omari prosecute is concealment. A mind held shut is the one act that a room of Omari cannot see through, and their whole criminal law grew around it: shutting is the offence, and whatever was being hidden is dealt with afterwards as an afterthought. A people that cannot be deceived by speech has instead an absolute horror of privacy, and the Cradle's sealed coral, which is privacy in its purest form, is justified to every generation as a defence and never as a right.

Faith

The Omari Deep Faith. Its deity is Orton. Its followers are all Omari. Its region is the Deep Realm. Its doctrine is "Devotion to the Sea Lord in endless war." The truth beneath the doctrine is that "Their god hides from Excalibur in fear." The Omari do not know this.

There is no priesthood apart from the Cradle. The eldest pairs are the clergy because they were there when Orton spoke, and their memory of his voice, passed down through every Tidefall since, is the whole of scripture. Rite is the tide-song at the mouths of the trenches and the vigil at the sealed way to the Sea Tower, where an Omasee garrison has hung in the dark for longer than any surface kingdom has existed, waiting for a door that has not opened since the war.

Scripture in the deep is a memory rather than a text, and it degrades the way a memory does. Every Tidefall copies the voice of Orton one generation further from the throat that said it, and the Omari know this, and the counting of the copies is the nearest thing they have to theology. A ruling of the Cradle carries weight in proportion to how few passings lie between the ruling and the voice. This is also why a greyed elder is a religious catastrophe and not merely a sad one, and why the unwoven are kept out of the trenches during a Tidefall.

They preach no afterlife. Their answer to death is the passing: the self goes into the children and swims on. Whatever part of an Omari is soul and is not woven into the children goes where all souls go, to the auction of the star gods, and the Omari do not know this either. Orton keeps no realm for them. He keeps only the deep, and he keeps it hidden.

Tongue

They speak in sonar. The Omasee have "no mouth opening, but instead they have a thin layer of skin around their lips, speaking through sonar waves," and Omacran sonar carries across great distances. Omivar "can speak various undersea languages."

They also speak in thought. They communicate through sonar among themselves and are able to speak with other peoples through their thoughts. They know and can speak nearly any language, drawing it from the mind of a host who speaks it, and they choose the purity of thought because it is near impossible to hide anything from them. A Nu'uman who has spoken with an Omari describes it as being read aloud to oneself.

An Omari has two names, and neither is a word. The first is the pulse-name, a shape of sonar given in the Cradle at the moment of the light, and it is the same shape the parents' pulse-names made when they were sent together; a child's name is, quite literally, the sound of its parents combining. The second is the chain, the sequence of every pulse-name of every body that passed into this one, which an Omari holds in thought and never sends aloud except at its own Tidefall. An elder's chain is hundreds of names long and takes an hour to think.

What the surface writes down is a rough transcription of the pulse-name: long doubled vowels for the sustained tones, a break for the click, soft consonants for the rise and fall. Written Omari names therefore run long, breathe in the middle, and end on an open vowel or a held nasal. Eight names of Ien, as the surface would write them: Ohn'akwaa (Omacran, a speaker of the Weave); Tsi'lumeen (Omasee, of the Sea Tower vigil); Kaawishen (a fused pair of the Cradle, one name for two who are one); Yuu'takwe (Omivar, a creche-warden); Ma'anohsi (Omasee); Iquaashen (Omacran); Nuuwikaa (Omivar); Sohqua'lin (Omasee, of the watch-reefs).

Regard

"Myth and Legend." "Warriors of the Gods." "Scourges of the Deep." "Protectors against the sea terrors." The surface compresses all of it to a single word: "Myth." No slur is thrown at the Omari, because they are not present enough on the surface to be insulted.

Among the Shrakur it is otherwise. The Shrakur dress in the skins of the Omari, and some of them deny that the war ever ended. To a Shrakur an Omari is a coat that has not been taken yet. To a Do'urssan or a Nu'uman who has actually met one, an Omari is the most frightening thing they have ever spoken to, because the conversation happened inside their own head and they were not permitted to keep anything back.

Their maker, Orton, has their total devotion and answers none of it. Their enemies are the Shrakur, bred as "the raiding Undersea Alverian force against Orton's supply chain," whose blood dropped in water "will summon forth an Omari, thinking they have died, and wishing to claim their corpse," and the trick still works; the Alverians, who dissected them for Whitestone and bred the Hof to poison them and the Squeesh to spy on them; and the void, "the endless battle in the deep against the abominable terrors of the void."

The Nu'uman are their unwitting descendants in shape, since the Omasee "were the inspiration for the female Nu'uman structure." The Wolken, a splice of Irugaine, Omari and whale, wish to re-enter Orton's grace and are refused. The Hof, who share something of the Omari's speech, are pitied and avoided. The Aiekah, bred as food, are tolerated in the shallows and never in Ien.

Harvest

No Omari body has ever yielded a trade good to a surface hand, and so the surface has nothing to say on the matter. The deep has always known otherwise, and the Alverians proved it on the slab. What follows is what an Omari body holds.

The lifestone. The stomach-mind, removed whole. It holds the life essence and the woven memory of every body that passed into that one. Its core was the seed of Whitestone; the Alverians' cities grew from it, and an intact lifestone in the hands of anyone who knew the old method could grow a wall, a hall, or a city. No surface hand knows the method. The Omari pursue a taken lifestone to the ends of the sea and consider its taking an extinction. Value: beyond price and beyond sale. Legality: it does not exist on any surface market, and the deep kills for it.

Birth shells. The Omacran's "intricate, naturally carved birth shells," shed and regrown across a body's life. Shed shells are gathered in the Weave and grown into Ien; whole ones taken from a corpse are worked by Shrakur into scale and by surface jewellers into the rarest of inlays. Value very high. Legality: a shed shell, gifted, is clean; a corpse shell is a war.

Ring bands. The forty-one hoops of the frame, hinged and closed, which resist crushing and will not break cleanly. Cut out and boiled, a band is the strongest curved piece of material a Shrakur armourer can obtain, and a corselet of banded Omari rings is the badge of a Shrakur captain. They are taken from the dead only, since a living Omari does not survive the cutting, and the deep counts a banded corselet as evidence of murder.

Tide-glass. The white crystal eyes of the Omacran and the black eyes of the Omasee, which see two hundred and five hundred miles through water. Ground, they are the finest lens material on Nu; whole, they are said to let a mage see into the deep. Rare beyond rare.

Deep-light. The luminescent fluid of the Omacran's brain sack and the Feefan-bright ichor under every Omari's skin. It glows for a year in a sealed vial and is the lamp of choice in the Under Realm's richest halls, sold by Shrakur and by no one else.

Tail-fin blades. The Omasee's iridescent fins, which "can harden to a fine sharp edge." Cut and dried they keep the edge; a Shrakur blade with an Omasee fin laid along it is a mark of a killer.

Soulcoral. The Omivar's fluid coral hair and the reef grown on an Omivar body, which stays alive after death if kept in seawater and can be coaxed to grow. Alverian facilities held tanks of it. Legality: an Omivar considers its growth a child.

Omari skin. The purple-white hide, worn by the Shrakur as coats and war-dress. On the surface it is sold as "deep leather" by people who mostly do not know what they are holding, and it is the only Omari good that reaches a common market.

Remembered

The surface knows no Omari by name.

Kaawishen, a fused pair of the Cradle, one of the beings that has existed since the birth of the species, whose chain holds the voice of Orton and whose Tidefall the Omari fear and long for in equal measure.

Tsi'lumeen, captain of the vigil at the sealed way to the Sea Tower, who has hung at the door for eleven bodies.

Ohn'akwaa, the speaker of the Weave, the only Omari to have spoken in thought with a Do'urssan envoy and let him go.

Yuu'takwe, creche-warden of the Weave, who has raised nine Tidefalls of the unwoven and has argued to the Cradle, without success, that they be told what they are.

Kin each has a page of its own

Three castes divide them, and the division is one of office and of shape at once: who speaks, who fights, who builds. All three stand the same height, all three carry a lifestone, and all three are neutral.