Pikon

Origin

The splice is Irugaine and peacock. Their purpose was crowd control of a kind no whip achieves: they held slave populations in a condition where "the more rebellious of species could not form an original thought." A Pikon overseer standing on a scaffold above a work gang was worth a garrison, and cost less.

After the collapse "they fled, hiding within their own communities built by their mind-trapped slaves." There was never a Pikon homeland and there is not one now. Every Pikon settlement in the world is somebody else's settlement with a Pikon in the best room of it.

The method is fixed and has not changed in six thousand years. They do not conquer, they do not garrison, and they do not administer. They arrive, they replace the ruling noble, they eat the treasury, the granaries, the herds, the stores and finally the people's willingness to work, and when the place cannot feed them they leave it standing and empty and go on. A husk left by a Pikon court is not sacked. It is simply finished.

They favour isolated and independent places, cities and holds that answer to no empire and are not counted in anyone's ledger, and the choice is deliberate policy that the courts teach to their young. An imperial city is counted, taxed and visited; a free city is not. A hold that has just won its independence, a mining town that answers to a company and not a crown, an island port that pays nobody, a valley that seceded two generations ago and is proud of it: these are the ground the Pikon hunt, because the one thing that would end the species is a chart on a wall in a capital with the dates and the places marked on it.

Body

Enormous, broad-chested and genuinely beautiful. "Larger than most, ranging from 300-500 pounds, their variation in vibrant colors captivates and mesmerizes when extended. When they shake their tail feathers, the eye pattern begins to move." The eye pattern moves. It is not a trick of light, and it is the first thing a victim notices, usually about two seconds before it stops mattering what the victim notices.

On top of the head sit "three dangling translucent iridescent nodes that project their signal to nearby towers." They hang, they sway with the head, and they chime when they knock together, a small clean sound that carries.

The nodes and the tail are the same organ and the organ is a brain that did not fit in a skull. A Pikon's braincase is no larger than a Nu'uman's. What it has instead is a cord of dense nervous tissue running the length of the spine and out along the rachis of every feather in the train, and every eye-pattern on that train is the swollen terminal of a nerve. The tail is thinking tissue. It is warm to the touch in a cold room, it bleeds freely and heals badly, and the nodes on the skull are the emitting end of the same structure, grown out through the bone because there was nowhere else for them to go.

Everything in the court follows from that one fact. Counting eye-patterns is counting brain, and the Counting is therefore an honest census of what each lord can actually do. A lord with four hundred eyes can hold a quarter of a city in his head at once and a lord with ninety cannot hold a street; the constitution is vain and it is also correct. Pulling out an offender's tail in front of the hall, which the court does in temper and often, is the removal of a substantial portion of a person, and the offender who is put back in his chair afterward is quieter for the rest of his life. They know this perfectly well. It is why the punishment exists.

The display costs more than any other organ in the WildKin. Holding a street takes a Pikon roughly what a hard day's labour takes a Fathari, and holding a city takes it every hour it is awake, and the fuel is fat. This is the whole explanation of the species and the courts do not teach it because they have never needed to articulate it. A Pikon is not greedy by temperament. It is running a furnace, and the furnace is the only reason anyone brings it bread. A lord who stops eating begins to draw down the store, and a lord drawing down the store fans weaker, and a city under a weakening fan begins, street by street, to wake up. The Reckoner's ledger of what is left to eat is therefore a countdown to being seen, and the terror the record preserves, that they "have a god complex, yet are terrified when their mesmeric abilities do not work on someone," is the same terror at a smaller scale.

Their sensory world is colour and almost nothing else. They see bands of it nobody else in the world can name, and they see their own train as a moving object with depth in it, which is why a fanned Pikon holds perfectly still and lets the tail do the work. Motion at distance they read poorly. Depth they judge badly, which is why they land the way they do. Smell they have next to none of. They cannot recognise a face; they know a person by the shape that person leaves in the signal coming back, and two Nu'uman in the same livery are one Nu'uman to a Pikon lord. The species has never made a portrait, never developed a script, and has no visual art at all except the arrangement of coloured cloth, at which it is superb.

The body under the display is fat. A Pikon in a fight is a large soft target that has never once needed to be anything else. They fly badly and land on purpose: "they fly down and with their massive bellies can land in a bounce on the ground, their fat absorbing the fall," hard enough to shake a market square. The sternum is a broad shallow plate rather than a keel, the pelvis is cushioned front and back in slabs of blubber, and the whole descent is a controlled drop onto the belly, which is why the flight looks incompetent and is not.

Standing height is six to seven feet and the train adds twelve feet or more behind, dragged in the dust unless a Picoco has been set to carry it. A Pikon lord who has held a rich city for a decade may pass six hundred pounds and will need to be helped up from a chair by two attendants, which is not concealed and is displayed. They live one to two hundred years, and the last third of that is spent almost entirely seated.

Life

The mesmeric organ is the whole species. "Through the focusing on their tail feather pattern, and the aura that is transmitted by their head nodes, they are able to warm the minds of the viewer and imbue individuals with their thoughts, convincing them they are their own." The range is extended by architecture: "they construct small pyramid node receptors atop houses that can extend their signal, thus allowing them to control entire cities." Unaided, "when you look away for longer than two minutes, you fall out of their control, but with the nodes, the signal never dies so long as you are within its radius." A roof that has grown a small stone pyramid in the last month belongs to a household that has already lost.

They lay. A hen of the court lays four to six eggs once in twenty years or so, in a nest built in the upper rooms of the taken palace out of stripped hangings, stolen ledgers and loose coin, and she does not brood them herself. The Picoco brood them, in shifts, and hatch them, and raise them, and the Pikon young are fed and cleaned and taught to walk by creatures they will spend their lives ordering about. A Pikon chick is fanned at from the day its eyes open, so the first thing it learns is what the display feels like from the inside of the wrong end, and the second thing it learns is that it is immune. The immunity is structural: the signal is answered by the same tissue that sends it, and a Pikon under another Pikon's fan feels only a warmth at the back of the neck and a mild irritation.

Childhood lasts thirty years and is entirely court. The young are given a street, then a quarter, then a guild, and their progress is measured by how much of the city can be made to do a thing without being told to. Their tail comes in at about twenty and is counted; a chick with few eye-patterns will never be more than an attendant, and the court is candid with it about this from the beginning, because the count will not change and everybody can see it.

They are omnivores and they are gluttons, and the diet is the point of the species: they eat what the city has. Grain stores, herds, cellars, orchards, preserved stock laid down for a hard winter, and the seed corn last. A Pikon does not steal food. The city brings it, gladly, and thanks the lord for accepting it, and starves the following spring without ever connecting the two.

Death is undignified and is hidden. A Pikon that dies in a held city is not mourned by the court; the tail is taken at once, the nodes are cut off the skull and kept, and the body is dropped into whatever the city uses for its dead. The mesmerised populace is told the lord has travelled.

Frailty

Heat is the constant enemy and the tropics are where they live. Five hundred pounds of insulating fat in a hot country has no way to shed what the display generates, and a Pikon that overheats fans erratically and then not at all. This is why the court sits still through the middle of the day in a stone hall with the shutters closed, why every lord has attendants whose only office is to move air across him, and why a Pikon has never in recorded history taken a city in open summer.

The nodes dry with age. They crack, and a cracked node does not chime; it buzzes, a flat sound with no carry in it, and the signal it throws is ragged at the edges. Other Pikon find the sound unbearable and cannot say why, and a lord whose nodes have begun to buzz is eased out of the hall on some pretext of honour and is dead within the year, usually of nothing in particular.

The train is the great vulnerability of a body with no other one. A wound to the back takes eyes off the tail and they do not grow back with the pattern; they come in blank, and a blank feather is dead weight on a nerve that used to reach somewhere. Tail-mite, which lives in the dust of a dragged train and is carried between courts by attendants, does the same thing more slowly and is the commonest reason a lord's count falls between one Counting and the next. Courts that have learned to keep their trains carried by Picoco have half the mite of courts that have not, and they do not attribute the difference to the Picoco.

Then the arithmetic. Four to six eggs once in twenty years, from a hen who must be fat enough to lay and is therefore only fertile while a city is still rich. The species has always been small, was small under Alveria and is smaller now, and every court knows it and none of them will say a number aloud.

Country

The Surface Realm, "across the tropic regions," with raw feathers reaching coastal markets "as a rare material brought from the western tropics." They have no places of their own and never did.

What can be described is the shape of a held city, because every one of them looks the same from the road. The pyramids on the roofs, first, small and grey and multiplying outward from the palace like a rash. Then the good order: no beggars, no brawls, no debt, no locks. Then the granaries, which are full and are opened daily and are never restocked. Then the quiet. A Pikon city does not sing and does not argue, and travellers remark on how peaceful the place is, and stay a night, and leave slightly poorer and unable to say why.

A century of that leaves marks on a country that outlast the court. The herds go first and the breeding stock with them, so the pasture round a hollowed city comes back to scrub and stays there; the orchards are stripped without pruning and die standing; the terraces slip because nobody was made to repair them and nobody thought to. The rivers run clean, since no work is being done. What kills the place is the seed corn, and the season after the seed corn is the season the court leaves.

Then there are the husks. Between four and nine of them stand in the wilder parts of the world, whole and empty, doors open, nothing burned and nothing broken, and local people will not go into them and cannot always say why not.

Society

Parasitic aristocracy. "Once within a city or hold, they take over and replace the ruling noble and feast upon their wealth until there is no more and then they move on." They are "hilarious and greedy," and they are frank cowards: "they have a god complex, yet are terrified when their mesmeric abilities do not work on someone; besides that they are extremely weak and just fat." They keep a noble court, the largest birds lead it and the smaller ones attend, and size is the whole of the constitution.

The court sits in the taken hall, at a long board, in the previous ruler's clothing let out at the seams and hung with the previous ruler's jewels, and it sits there most of the day. Rank is measured twice a year at the Counting, when each lord's train is fanned in turn and the eye-patterns are counted aloud by an attendant who is beaten if the number is wrong. The greatest tail is the Fan Ascendant and takes the throne itself. Below him sit the Lesser Fans, one to a quarter of the city.

Below them, the offices. The Reckoner holds the ledger of what is left to eat and is the only member of the court who works. The Larderer orders the sequence of consumption and decides which season the herds go, and the Larderer's real office is to keep the court alive long enough to reach the next city, which makes him the most hated and most necessary creature in the hall after the Wright. The Voice stands behind the mesmerised noble and moves his mouth for him at public functions. The Wright builds and maintains the roof pyramids, and is the most valuable and worst-treated creature in the hall, and is the only one whose death can end a court.

The court's manners are exquisite and its temper is not. They address one another in long unbroken honorifics that must be recited entire, and a lord who is addressed with one title missing may shriek, upend the board and have the offender's tail pulled out in front of the hall. These quarrels are the substance of Pikon politics and they last for minutes. Nothing is ever settled by violence between them because none of them can fight; they scream, they fan at each other to no effect, they throw food, and then they are seated again and the meal continues. Attendants are struck. Attendants are always struck.

Their custom at the taking of a city is the Sitting: the court enters the hall, the ruling noble rises and offers the chair, and the Fan Ascendant sits, and that is the conquest. Their oath is sworn on the tail and consists of the swearer naming the number of his eye-patterns, which is why a Pikon oath is worth exactly as much as the oath-taker's rank and both parties know it. Their taboo is haste. To eat a city in under a decade is vulgar, dangerous and the mark of a lord with no future, and courts that have done it are named and mocked for centuries. The taboo is the only thing standing between the species and a chart on a wall in a capital, and the Pikon keep it for reasons of manners without ever once admitting that it is a survival rule.

Faith

They believe in few gods, and of what exists the Void Princes fit them best. The Pikon have no clergy, no temple, no calendar and no rite in the sense other peoples use the word. What they have is a private conviction, held by every adult of the court and discussed by none, that there is a Prince whose whole aspect is being looked at, and that the Prince made them as a courtesy to himself. They call him the Regard. He is not petitioned and he is not thanked. He is acknowledged, once, by every Pikon at the Counting, when the tail is fanned to the empty end of the hall before it is fanned to the court. That single gesture is the entire religion of the species.

There is no afterlife in it. A Pikon expects to be looked at until it stops, and to stop. The doctrine, such as it is, holds that a life is worth what was fanned at it, which is why the Counting matters more than birth, rank or wealth, and why a dying lord will spend the last of a city's treasury on an audience.

The truth is the truth for everyone. The worldly gods have no realms and the afterlives their faiths promise are make-believe; the Court of stars and the Princes of the void have realms; and every Pikon soul goes to the soul auction of the star gods with all the rest. The Regard, whatever else is true of him, has never collected one.

Tongue

Common Tongue. The Pikon speak Common and nothing else, and they speak it beautifully, in a warm, slow, chiming register that is half the effect and works on the deaf and the blindfolded to a degree nobody has properly measured. They never learned another tongue because they have never needed to be understood; they need to be attended to.

Names are three-part and are grown rather than given. A chick receives a nest-name of two soft syllables. At the first Counting it takes a court-name, longer and vowelled, chosen by the Fan Ascendant to flatter him. At the taking of a city it adds the city's name, and it keeps every city it has ever held, in order, so that an old lord's full name is a list of ruins and takes a minute to say. In the short form the outside world hears: Ovesh Halloran, Prendithal Vae, Skaovin of the Ninth Fan, Mireleth Quo, Tessavoro Immel, Halvinne Ocelloth, Draveshi Pel, Corrindalo Ashen-Quarter.

The Picoco talk constantly and "often mumble them so fast in passing they are hard to understand." Picoco names are what the Picoco call each other, which is a doubled sound: Bibbit, Nokno, Sassa, Torto, Pim-Pim.

Regard

"Cocky, bulbous, rich lords." "Lazy and fat." And, from somebody who has actually met one: "Beautiful in every where scarily persuasive." The world's verdict on the species is short: "They are a parasitic and invasive entity and consume rather than build."

Almost nobody who has met a Pikon believes any of the above while they are meeting one, which is the difficulty with the testimony. Two professions are careful about them. Coastal merchants, who know that a sudden glut of node charms out of an unfamiliar port means a city is finished and its stores are being liquidated; and the Librar, who have four husks charted and are the only people alive who might be able to draw the map.

The Picoco follow them uninvited and are tolerated. Everyone with a roof is prey, and a Pikon does not distinguish between kinds of victim, only between the wealthy and the spent. The Squeesh and the Librar are enemies in practice, both of them peoples who keep records and neither of whom can be fanned into forgetting what is in them. The Omari are enemies by nature, since their speech is thought itself and the display has no effect on them at all, and no Pikon has ever gone near the water. A Torgai baron will sell a Pikon court the name of an independent hold three valleys over and be paid in coin from the last one.

Harvest

Pikon Feathers. "Beautiful and fantastical, these feathers are used in fans, decorations and other tropical clothings; this can also be found in coastal cities as a rare material brought from the western tropics." Legal everywhere and fashionable in three empires.

Nodes Of Hypnosis. "Made into charms, their head nodes, being rung together, and used with the proper enchantment of words, can place an individual under a mesmeric spell." It is the most dangerous common-market item in the whole of the WildKin material and it is sold openly by people who do not know what it is. A node from a living Pikon is worth ten times one cut from a corpse, because the tissue is charged when it comes off and dries out over a matter of days once the body is cold, and there is no way to tell them apart at a stall a month later. That gap supports a small and unpleasant trade in captured attendants, since an attendant has the same nodes as a lord and is not missed. The tail of a Fan Ascendant, entire and uncut, has never been sold; three are known to hang in private halls and all three were taken by peoples the display did not work on.

Remembered

Ovesh Halloran. Called the Slow Lord, credited with the doctrine of patience and with a hold that took him ninety years to finish.

Skaovin of the Ninth Fan. Ate an island port in eleven years, was named and mocked for it, and is said to be seated somewhere in the western tropics waiting for the mockery to die out.

Bibbit. A Picoco, and the only member of a certain court who is remembered by name in the city it hollowed, because it was the one that fetched the bread.

Kin each has a page of its own

One kin, and it is not a lesser court or a rival line. It is the creature that lives on the floor of every hall the Pikon have ever held.