Pramata

Origin

Nu'uman spliced with bee, "Bred to be the main unit of Alverian aerial assault forces; Began falling near extinct when the war moved underground." After the fall, "having never really wanted to fight in the ways of other soldiers, many, if not all put down their fighting and retired to the tending of their lesser species, the bees. To this day they have become bee farmers and honey traders, and pacifist who refuse to go to war." The engineering did not come out with the war. "Their battling instincts have been suppressed, so many feel unfulfilled and commit suicide as a by-product of that."

The Alverians used the Pramata royal jelly to keep their flesh constructs supple and fresh. Many of the queens alive now have lived since the splicing, in the Age of Alveria, and remember the constructs coming for the jelly.

Body

Three feet tall and thirty to forty pounds. A Pramata can be carried under one arm and resents it. "Their bodies are thin, fragile and dexterous," with little left of the old war in them beyond compact muscle and quick reflexes. "Two athletic, large hind legs, two sharp and thick wings and four arms, all plated beneath a natural bug shelling. They have three tarsus that form a grip, and their eyes are insectoid." The plating sits under the skin. At rest they hover two feet up.

The four arms are not four of the same thing. The upper pair is thin, long and precise, made for comb work, mud work and the fine handling of grubs, and a Pramata surgeon is the best small-wound surgeon any town can hire. The lower pair is short and heavy and does the carrying. A Pramata writing uses the upper arms and holds the page with the lower, and the towns that have hired Pram'votal as clerks have all remarked on the speed.

A weapon is grown into the hand: "From the centre of their tri tarsus grip a soft shell sword shoots out, but this knowledge has become lost to nearly their entire species." The sword lies folded in a sheath under the tarsus and is everted by a pulse of body fluid, coming out soft and hardening in the air within a breath to a blade the length of a forearm. It cannot be retracted; it is broken off at the wrist afterwards and regrows over a week, and the hand is useless for comb work through all of it. Drawing requires the deliberate clench of one particular muscle at the base of the grip, and the clench is not instinct, and no hive teaches it. That is the whole of why the knowledge is lost: the organ is in every Pramata alive and the instruction is in perhaps forty of them. Torrun of the Waxen Reach is one and will not teach anyone.

There are no lungs. Air enters a system of sacs that fill most of the trunk, which is also why a Pramata weighs so little and floats so well at hover. Flight is not worked by the wings directly; the wings are cranked by the deformation of the whole thorax, which is a hard sprung box, and the box must be warm to work. A cold Pramata cannot fly at all and must shiver the thorax for a minute or two to heat it, which makes a rising hum. A homestead at first light hums as it warms, and the same hum is the alarm call, because a hive that is suddenly all warming at once has seen something. Strays in cold towns buy hot drink at dawn and are thought soft for it. They are buying flight.

The eyes read the polarisation of the sky. A Pramata always knows where the sun is, through cloud, through canopy, through smoke, and therefore always knows direction and the hour. It cannot be turned around, cannot be lost, and cannot be made to doubt a bearing. It also cannot read a map, having never needed one, and a hive's land claim is recorded as a set of bearings and angles from the comb and is unusable by anyone else. Every barony and crown in reach of a homestead has hired Pramata to set boundary stones, and the stones are always right, and the disputes that follow are always about the wording. A stray shut in a windowless room becomes distressed within the hour, and jailers who have learned this use it.

Smell is the other half of their world and it is not a sense of pleasure; it is a sense of instruction. Pramata speak in scent as much as in sound, and the queen's own scent, made continually and carried through the comb by the fanning of wings, is the law of the hive felt on the skin of everyone in it. No Pramata in a hive has a private mood. The queen's fear is the hive's fear within a minute, and her death is felt before it is announced. A stray who has left the comb is a body still built to receive an instruction that is no longer being sent, and the strays describe the absence as a constant faint wrongness that does not improve with years. This is the ground under the line the makers wrote about them: a suppressed war instinct in a body that is also missing its queen produces exactly what it produces, and the homesteads bury more of their own by their own hand than by any enemy.

Their wings harden at the instant of death, which is a chemical setting in the vein-fluid of the wing and cannot be induced in a living one. A worker lives thirty years, soldiers seldom pass twenty, architects reach forty, and the queens are ancient.

Life

The castes are born. The hive reproduces en masse, and queens breed new queens rarely, one in a million. The queen lays into comb, and the comb and the feed make the child. An egg fed on flower-jelly for its first days and then on honey comes up a Pramati'or, a worker, and most eggs do. An egg fed on the dark jelly the queen makes from her own body when the hive is afraid comes up a Pramatak, a soldier, and a hive that has laid many soldiers is a hive that expects something. An egg sealed in a comb the architects have lined with river mud comes up a Pram'votal. And once in a million layings the queen fills a hanging cell with her own royal jelly, feeds the egg on nothing else for the whole of its growth, and a Pramavohl comes out of it, and the hive will have a new queen or a war, since a hive holds one.

The stages carry the names of what is done to them. The Lay is the egg in the cell. The Sealed is the grub, capped in wax, blind, legless, a white comma that does nothing but take feed; the grubs are sealed and emerge in weeks. The Unsealing is the cutting of the cap by the workers, and the Damp is the hour afterward, when the new Pramata is soft, wet-winged and cannot yet hover, and is named. The Lift is the first flight, a week later, and is the first day a Pramata is counted as present in the hive. A Pramata is grown at eight. The Bath is the worker's one immersion in royal jelly, at thirty, and it is the last stage most of them have.

Age frays the wings first. The edges go ragged, the thorax box loses its spring, and an old Pramata walks, which for a hovering people is the visible beginning of the end; the old sit on the comb and do close work and are fed. The dead are rendered, and the wax of them pressed into the hive walls, so that a homestead is built from everyone who has lived in it. The wings are kept, or sold, since they are hard by then and beautiful. They eat sweet things and magical flora, taken through a tongue built for nectar; they cannot eat meat or grain at all. The queens' feed is a matter the workers are not told.

Frailty

A hive dies when its queen dies, and it dies of the silence. The scent stops, and within two days the workers stop fanning, stop feeding the grubs and stop eating themselves, and within a month there is wax and no one in it. Hollowhive is that, kept as it was found. The strays who make the pilgrimage go to stand in a building made of the rendered dead of a hive that starved with full comb, and they go because it is the only place where the thing they feel every day is visible in the walls.

The suicides the makers set down are the same wound in a body that is still alive. A worker with no war, no queen within scent, or a Pramatak in a hive that will not fight, has an instinct with nowhere to discharge, and the hives have a hundred euphemisms and one custom, which is that the body is rendered like any other and the wax goes into the wall without comment.

The particular injuries are of the wing and the hand. A frayed wing does not repair; a torn one ends hovering at once and a Pramata that cannot hover cannot work the upper comb, and is moved to ground work and to the bees. A sword drawn and broken off badly leaves a sheath that closes wrong, and the hand swells and stiffens and never grips again, which is a second reason no one is taught the clench. Cold kills the stragglers every winter, since a thorax that will not warm is a Pramata that will not move, and the homesteads send warmers out at dusk with hot wax bottles to find them.

Their bees bring their diseases. A mite that rides in on the bees gets into the sealed comb and into the grubs, and a mite year in a homestead takes a generation of Pramati'or and leaves the hive old. Jelly-hunger is the disease of the strays: a Pramata that has never had its Bath ages hard from twenty-five and dies at twenty-eight, and every stray in every town knows the price of a jar and how much short of it they are.

Country

The Surface Realm. The Pramatoraen Homesteads are "The honey farming colonies owned and kept after by the Pramatore." The hives are tight, isolated communities, and many Pramata have strayed from the hive way of thinking and live among other peoples, inside towns or on their outskirts, coming in to trade. Three homesteads are named. The Nine Combs is the oldest hive, whose queen has laid since the splicing. Hollowhive was abandoned when its queen died and is kept as a place of pilgrimage by the strays. The Waxen Reach is three hives under one queen who has never been seen by outsiders.

A homestead is one structure and everything else is flowers. The comb is a tower of mud-lined wax raised by the Pram'votal, with the queen's cells at the warm centre, the grub comb around her, the stores outward of that and the hive's dead in the walls themselves. Around it, out to a mile in every direction, the ground is planted: the bee pasture and the beds of magical flora, laid out in bearings the Pramata can read off the sky and which look, from a hill, like nothing at all.

The land keeps the record of them. A country with a homestead in it has flowers it did not have, in quantities it cannot account for, because a mile-wide pasture worked by domesticated bees and by the Pramata themselves pushes seed outward every year for centuries. Apothecaries follow the hives without always knowing they are doing it, and half the famous herb valleys of the Surface Realm are old Pramata ground. When a hive dies the pasture goes over in three seasons, the magical flora fails first, and the apothecary trade of the nearest town collapses within a decade. Two towns that laughed at their strays have since sent delegations to the Nine Combs.

They have domesticated the bee, which they call their lesser kin and treat as wards, and they are the only people the bee tolerates in numbers. Almost nothing preys on them; a three-foot hovering thing with a sting in the soldier caste and a homestead behind it is more trouble than it is worth to anything in the Surface Realm. What takes Pramata is other peoples, and it takes them at market, on the road, and one at a time.

Society

Farmers and traders, closed and content. "They keep to themselves and prefer the company of those present on their farms." "They are sympathetic to their lesser evolved bee, and spend their life protecting them and nurturing them." They have become a traitor people who sell what they make at markets, and the word is their own. The hive-born hold that anything carried out of the comb and sold is a betrayal of the queen who made it, and every hive sells, and the strays who live among other peoples are called traitors by the hives they left and call the hives the same. A Pramata homestead is a quiet place with a known reason for its quiet.

The queen rules, absolutely and seldom; the Pram'votal speak for her to the comb. She rules by scent and the speaking is only translation, which is why a hive has no politics worth the name and why the strays, out of scent, are the only Pramata who argue. Hive-born wear nothing; strays dress as their town does and are laughed at for it in both places. They eat honey and drink mead and a bitter tea of the magical flora. Their music is wings tuned against each other in a chord, played on the same sprung thorax that lifts them, so that a Pramata making music is doing the physical work of flying without leaving the comb, and a long piece exhausts everyone sounding it. A homestead at evening can be heard a mile off. The oath is sworn on the comb. Taboo: to strike first; to sell the jelly of a living queen without her leave; to name the queen outside the hive.

The royal jelly is an illustrious thing: bathed in, it keeps them young, and it holds magic. A Pramavohl bathes in it as a matter of course. A worker is granted one bath in a lifetime, at thirty, which is why so many thirty-year-old workers are still alive at forty and no older. Sold, it goes for what a small house goes for, and every buyer is a noble who has already tried Papillon Powder. The arithmetic of the comb is therefore brutal and everyone in it can do it: every jar sold is a worker who will not reach forty, and the hive sells jars, and the workers carry them to market themselves.

Faith

The hive faith is the queen. A Pramavohl who has lived since the vats is, to her comb, a goddess in residence, and the hive's rites are her feeding, her bathing and her laying. Above the queens the Pramata place the flowering world itself, which they call the First Flower and do not personify, and behind it, dimly, the garden moon Zuella, whom they name the Far Comb and thank for the seasons. Clergy are the Pram'votal, who speak for the queen and keep the count of combs. The dead, they hold, go into the wax and are the hive. The soul goes where all souls go, to the star gods' auction, and the queens, who have lived long enough to have heard the mad ones who came back from it, have not told the comb.

Tongue

Common Tongue, and they speak to bees. Among themselves they speak the Hum, a tongue of wing-pitch and turned bodies, half sound and half dance, which a stray in a town can be seen doing to itself when it thinks no one is watching. A third of the Hum is scent and cannot be spoken outside a hive at all, so that two strays meeting in a town are speaking a crippled version of their own language and both know it.

A Pramata is named by the workers who unseal it, with a hum-name, and adds the number of its comb: Zumii of the Ninth Comb. Strays drop the comb and are known by that. Queens have no names, only titles: the Mother of Nine Combs, the Unseen of the Waxen Reach. The names run: Zumii, Ollam, Hessat, Vibrel, Ammi, Torrun, Sellik, Bruum.

Regard

"Humble and pacifistic; mere honey farmers after all." "Quiet and extremely excitable." Nobody outside the homesteads remembers what they were built to do. The strays are welcome in most towns for their honey and watched in all of them for their jelly.

The bees are their wards and their dependents. They refuse to go to war and are not important enough for anyone to force it. The Papillian buy honey from them and pay in dreams. The nobles who buy their wings as fans are the nearest thing they have to an enemy, and the Pramata sell to them anyway.

Harvest

Pramaesh Honey: "Rare in every way, as many of their kind refuse to sell their own, and rather would sell regular bee honey. It has narcotic abilities, often leaving people's mind to feel expansive, and is often used as an escapist drug." The narcosis is the magical flora passed through a Pramata gut, which is why bee honey from the same pasture does nothing.

Pramatoraen Fan: "Fouler members of exotic high societies use their wings as fans, as they are extremely light and firm, hardening the moment of their death." The hardening cannot be faked and cannot be done early, so every fan in every collection was cut off a body, and the buyers know it and the sellers do not mention it.

Royal Jelly: the queen's own making, pressed from glands in her head, bathed in, keeps the bather young and holds magic; the Alverians used it on their flesh constructs for the same reason the nobles use it on their faces, which is that it keeps dead and living tissue supple alike. It is legal to sell, since a living queen can consent to it, and to take it from a hive by force is the one thing that has ever made a Pramatak remember what it is.

Remembered

The Mother of Nine Combs, a queen who has laid since the Age of Alveria and who was, by her own comb's account, bathed by an Alverian lord's own hand.

Hessat Combless, a stray who kept bees on a city roof for thirty years and was buried, at her own request, in a jar of her own honey.

Torrun of the Waxen Reach, an elder who can still put the sword out of her hand and will not teach anyone.

Kin each has a page of its own

The Pramata code is locked. The four kin below are castes of the one genome, made in the comb, never spliced. The hornet the makers wove into the Pramata at the vat is expressed in the soldier and in no one else.