Sarpaesh

Body

Sand-pale and banded, ridged over the eye, and lighter than any other strain. Sand carries no sound, so a Sarpaesh works by a sense the others have let wither, which is heat: the pits along the lip read a body's warmth at thirty feet in full dark, and a Sand Watcher buried to the eyes beside a camp can say afterwards who got up in the night and for how long. They are the reason the desert peoples do not talk freely around a fire.

They carry the rest of the people's body entire: no limbs, the tail tip fine enough to thread a needle, the hood behind the jaw that lifts at a lie, the sliding heart, and the shed that takes a day and a half and cannot be hurried.

Society

They need no carrier, which the other strains regard as barely respectable, and they are the only Sarpaen who drink. A load is their column: they travel with it, listen to it, and give it back afterwards. Like every Sarpaen they are bound by the one law of the profession, which is that a Sarpaen never testifies to something it did not hear, and the houses enforce it here as everywhere.

Faith

They name the Carrier Vaes'shu, the Wind Over Sand, who takes even what is whispered into the ground. It is the same doctrine the rest of their people keep, that nothing said is ever unsaid and the air is a hall with no doors, bent to a country where there are no walls to say it in.