Sarpaeli

Body

The iridescence is structural, thousands of fine ridges in the scale surface splitting the light, and it is the most expensive thing in the species to maintain: a Sarpaeli that has missed a shed goes dull, and a dull Sarpaeli loses fees, so the strain is fastidious to a degree the others find comic. A shed takes a day and a half and leaves them nearly blind while it lasts, which for this strain is a business cost rather than an inconvenience.

Their hood is larger than the other strains' and lifts more readily. They have turned that from a defect into a technique: a Sarpaeli lets the hood rise deliberately to tell a room that somebody has just lied, without saying so. The technique has a cost the houses argue about, since a hood raised on purpose is a hood that can be raised falsely, and the Sarpaeli are the only Sarpaen anybody has ever accused of lying with their body.

Society

They hold columns like every other witness and hear a building the same way, but the fee that keeps them is the brokerage rather than the repetition. The houses permit them the opinion and nobody else, and the permission is narrow: the one law still holds, and a Sarpaeli who testifies to something it did not hear is dealt with exactly as any other member would be.

Faith

Vaesseth in her spoken face, whom they call the Carrier of Things Meant, holding that intention travels with the word and is what is actually kept.