Sarpaen

Origin

The Alverians did not trust each other. The lords built the Sarpaen late, out of Irugaine and serpent stock with a strain of Alverian in them as all the lesser peoples carry, for a purpose the halls never wrote down and everybody in them understood: living surveillance, wound around the pillars of every audience chamber, decorative, silent, and reporting to whichever lord had ordered that pillar's occupant. They were bred to be beautiful and to be ignored, which is the same instruction twice. They were furniture that remembered.

Everything they were given was given for the pillar. The limbs went, because a thing with hands is watched. The hearing was moved out of the air and into the body, because what a listener on a stone column needs is the building rather than the room. The memory was made exact and the capacity to write was not supplied at all, because a report that cannot be written down cannot be intercepted, sold to a second lord, or found in a drawer. The last of those was the cleverest thing the Alverians ever did to a people and it is the one that outlived them, since a species that cannot take notes and must be perfect has no choice about what it becomes.

When the atmosphere changed and the lords went into their bunkers, the Sarpaen were left coiled in halls that nobody came back to. Some stayed for four hundred years. What came out of those halls was a people who knew, in exact words, what the lords of Alveria had said to each other in the last century of the age, and who understood immediately that this was worth more than any weapon. The whole of Sarpaen civilisation since is the management of that fact.

Body

A single unbroken body from the crown to the tail tip, eight to fourteen feet, weighing ninety to three hundred pounds, thickest at the middle. The head is a serpent's widened toward the Nu'umanoid: high brow, a mouth that shapes speech cleanly, and a hood of loose skin behind the jaw that lifts when they are lied to, which is involuntary and which they train from childhood to suppress and never fully manage. No limbs. They move by coiling and can climb anything with a texture; a Sarpaen goes up a stone column faster than a man goes up a ladder. They handle objects with the tail tip, which is prehensile to a fineness that can thread a needle, and with the mouth. Colours are jewel colours: deep green, wine red, banded black and gold, and in the Sarpaeli an iridescence that changes with the angle of the light. Lifespan is four to six hundred years, and a Sarpaen of four hundred can repeat a conversation it heard in its first decade with the pauses in the right places.

Inside, everything is strung out in a line and there is only ever one of anything. A single lung runs two thirds of the body, the front third working and the rear two thirds a bag that holds air and steadies the coil; the second lung is a thread. The organs sit one behind another down the length with the liver drawn out into a long strap, and the gut can distend to three times the body's diameter to take a goat entire. The ribs, six hundred or more, each carry their own muscle and each can lift the whole animal, which is how a body without legs climbs a smooth column and how a Sarp'mor kills. The heart is slung loose and slides: a Sarpaen going up a vertical column shifts its heart down the body a foot and a half so that blood still reaches the head, and it is done without thinking about it and it is the single most important thing about their working lives. A heart that has stopped sliding, which happens with weight, illness or age, ends a career in a week, and a Sarpaen who cannot hold a column cannot hold a room.

Blood is pale and clots slowly. They keep no fixed temperature and are stupid when cold, which is why a witness-house is heated like a bakehouse all year and why a Sarpaen hired into a cold hall will ask, politely and immovably, for a brazier. They shed whole, in one unbroken piece, starting at the lip and turning the skin inside out as they crawl free, and the shed takes a day and a half during which they can see almost nothing and are not available at any price.

They have no hands and the consequences of that fill the rest of their lives. A Sarpaen cannot carry. It can climb any wall in a city and cannot take a cup up it. Everything a Sarpaen owns lives where the Sarpaen lives, which is why they own so little and why what they own is enormous and immovable: a chest, a stone, a room. When a Sarpaen travels it travels with a carrier, a hired person of another people who holds the money, opens the doors, sets the ramp and is paid extremely well and permitted to hear everything, since a carrier who is not trusted is useless and a carrier who talks is dealt with by the houses. The hand trade is respectable, hereditary in some families, and disliked by every kingdom that has tried to regulate it, because a carrier is a person of no rank who walks into rooms no minister can enter. Sarpaen buildings have no handles, no latches, no stairs and no drawers; they have ramps, rope loops, weighted doors that a body can push, and columns. A Sarpaen dropped into an ordinary Nu'uman house is a genuinely helpless creature and is aware of how that looks.

Their senses are built for the pillar and against the room. Airborne sound above a low pitch reaches them poorly, and a whispering conversation across a chamber is, to their ears, almost nothing. What they hear is the building. Jaw and belly laid along stone take the whole structure at once: the words spoken two floors down, the step on a stair, the difference between a man standing and a man sitting, the scratch of a pen. A Sarpaen wrapped around a load-bearing column of a stone hall hears the hall entirely, and the Alverians built those halls in continuous dressed stone for reasons of their own, which is the accident the species was made to exploit. Every witness-house since is built the same way, a single stone spine from foundation to roof with the columns keyed into it, and a Sarpaen asked to work in a timber building will quote double and mean it as a warning. The counter is old, simple and expensive: a soft room, floored on sand and felt, walls hung, no stone touching stone, where a Sarpaen in the corner is as deaf as anyone. Every serious conspirator in the settled world has one, and the presence of a soft room in a house is itself the most incriminating thing a magistrate can find.

Their eyes are poor and honest about it. They see motion, they see heat-coloured shape, they cannot read a face and cannot tell two Nu'umans apart by looking. What they have instead is the voice, held perfectly, and the air, taken on the tongue and read for health, sex, fear and identity. The hood is part of the same apparatus: a body under the strain of a lie gives off a change in the air that the Sarpaen's tongue catches, and the hood lifts as a reflex before the mind has caught up. This is why their testimony has the shape it has. A Sarpaen will swear to every word spoken in a room and to who said it only where the voice was known to it, and the courts of six kingdoms have built a whole procedure, the voice-showing, around that limitation. It is also why the houses can sell a second service they do not advertise, which is a list of who in the room was frightened.

Life

They lay small clutches, two to five eggs, in warm dark cavities, and they coil around them, which is the one time in a Sarpaen's life it is not listening to anything else. The young are talked to constantly from the shell, on the belief that a Sarpaen learns to hold before it learns to understand, and the belief is correct: a Shell-Spoken clutch that has been read to for eighty days hatches able to return sounds it has no idea are words.

The stages are named in Common, which they find unremarkable and everyone else finds strange in a people so careful about language. The Shell-Spoken is the egg. The Listening runs thirty years: the child is given passages, conversations and lists and is expected to return them exactly, and the punishment for paraphrase is severe out of all proportion, because a Sarpaen who paraphrases is a Sarpaen whose testimony is worthless and who therefore cannot eat. The First Column is the year of the first hire, and it is the coming of age; a Sarpaen is a person from the day somebody pays to have it in a room. The Kept is the long working middle, three or four centuries of it. The Full begins when the count passes three hundred years held, at which point the house stops sending them out and starts selling access to them instead. The Emptying is the death.

Courtship has no embrace in it, because there are no arms, and the species has made something of that. Two Sarpaen who intend each other coil together and stay coiled, entirely still, for anything from three days to a season, and talk. The word for it is the Knot, and it is the same word they use for a knot in a rope, and there is no privacy in it whatever: a knot is visible from the door, so every Sarpaen attachment is a public fact from the first hour. The houses regulate pairings ruthlessly for exactly that reason, since two witnesses who are knotted cannot both testify to the same matter and a house that lets its members pair carelessly loses half its evidentiary weight. Sarpaen are not touched as children, only spoken to. Sarpaen do not touch their dying, only listen. It makes them a people who read embracing peoples as slightly mad, and it makes the Emptying the most loving thing they do.

They are carnivores and eat rarely, one large meal a month, swallowed whole and slept off, a habit that makes them useless as guards and superb as witnesses. The meal is bought, delivered and recorded, which means the meat bill of a witness-house is a public document and the standard way for a magistrate, a rival or a tax officer to count how many Sarpaen are actually inside a building. Three houses have been broken by an accurate reading of their butcher's ledger.

They do not decline much with age. A Sarpaen dies when its body finally fails, still holding everything, and the death custom is the Emptying: the dying Sarpaen speaks continuously for as long as it can, sometimes eleven days, into a room of the young, who take it in shifts, and what they get is an archive rather than a will. It is a race and everyone in the room knows it. A house measures its own history by which Emptyings were finished and which stopped in the middle, and the great scandal of the profession is the Emptying that was hurried.

Frailty

The retirement illness is the heart that will not slide. It comes with age, with fat, with a long fever, and once it has come the Sarpaen can no longer hold a vertical column for more than a few minutes without going grey and dropping. Since a column is the whole instrument, this ends the working life absolutely, and a house that loses a member to it has lost a listener and gained a mouth: the retired are moved to the ground floor, given the lists to teach and the young to raise, and are addressed with a kind of courtesy that they universally describe as unbearable.

The physical dangers are all of the gut. A meal swallowed whole and then chilled will rot inside them, and a Sarpaen that must bring one up frequently tears itself doing it and dies of the tear. Mouth rot follows a bad meal and gets into the jaw, which is the bone they hear with, so a Sarpaen with a bad mouth also goes progressively deaf and hides it as long as it can. In the very old comes the Set: the coil seizes, the ribs lock, and the body cannot uncoil again. A Set Sarpaen is carried, as a single heavy ring, into a warm room, propped against stone so that it can still hear, and talked with until it dies, which can take two years. Every witness-house has one somewhere near the hearth and every child of the house is raised in that room.

The congenital fault runs in bloodlines and it is the hood. Thaluu of No Column is the known case; there are perhaps a dozen living. A Sarpaen born without the hood cannot be read for a lie by its own people, and since the entire social order rests on being readable, such a one is untrustworthy by definition from birth and is never hired by a house. The houses do not kill them. They simply never buy, which turns out to be worse.

The terror of the trade is the Doubling, and it is the reason the Full are shelved rather than sent out. A conversation held for three hundred years begins, in some of them, to acquire: a phrase that was never spoken, a pause in a place there was no pause, a fourth voice in a room that held three. The Sarpaen cannot tell. It comes back in the same voice with the same conviction as everything else, and the only way to catch it is to hold two Sarpaen against the same testimony, which is expensive, and which is exactly what the houses do when a matter is worth it. A Doubled witness who is found out is retired without announcement and never explained to, and the house buys back every testimony it ever sold from that member, at a loss, without being asked, because the alternative is the third ruin.

The deliberate version is called seeding: a child of the Listening fed a false conversation over and over until it holds it as true, then placed and grown for two centuries against a day when somebody needs a four-hundred-year-old fact to exist. It has been proved three times. Every one of the three houses involved no longer exists, and the Sarpaen destroyed them themselves and made sure everyone watched.

Country

The Surface Realm, in warm and temperate country, and by strong preference indoors. They live in other peoples' buildings: the ruined Alverian halls where their ancestors were left, which they hold and repair and will not discuss; and, everywhere else, the witness-houses, narrow towers in the merchant quarters of large cities, full of warmth and columns, where a Sarpaen may be hired. There is no Sarpaen countryside and no Sarpaen nation, and they consider both ideas vulgar.

They take almost nothing out of a country and put something odd into it. A witness-house of thirty members eats thirty large animals a month and consumes fuel like a foundry, and that is the whole of their draw on the land. What they do to a city is subtler and shows up in the records, or rather in the absence of them. Where the Sarpaen are cheap, nothing gets written down. Contracts are witnessed rather than sealed, wills are spoken rather than drafted, and the guilds of scriveners in two great ports were broken inside forty years of a witness-house opening, since a scrivener charges for the copy and the Sarpaen charges once and remembers forever.

A city that has lived with witness-houses for a century has a legal memory of extraordinary depth and no paper at all, and if the house leaves, burns or is driven out, that city wakes up with no record of its last two hundred years of property. It has happened twice. Both cities spent a generation in litigation that could not be settled by anybody, and both now pay their witness-houses a retainer whether or not they are used, which the Sarpaen did not ask for and did not refuse.

Society

They are organised as houses of testimony. A Sarpaen is hired to be present: at a contract, a marriage, a surrender, a division of an estate, a confession. It says nothing, it does nothing, and if the matter is ever disputed it is brought back and it repeats what was said, in the voices of those who said it. Its fee is paid in advance by both parties, and the profession's one law, which they enforce among themselves by killing, is that a Sarpaen never testifies to something it did not hear. They have been ruined twice as a people by members who did, and they are aware that a third time ends the trade.

What this makes them, quietly, is the largest information holding in the world outside the Tusiva, and the difference is that the Sarpaen sell access. Blackmail is forbidden by the houses and practised constantly by individuals, and the houses' response to a member who is caught at it is to hire that member's own testimony against them. They dress in wound cloth, banded along the body, in the colours of the house that trained them, wound by a carrier every morning, since nobody with no hands has ever dressed themselves. They eat alone and are embarrassed about it. Their oath is the Repetition: the swearer states the promise and the hearer repeats it back exactly, and a promise repeated with a single word changed has been refused.

Their war, such as it is, is documentary. A Sarpaen cannot fight and mostly does not try; three of them together can be killed by two determined men with spears, and they know it, and they do not employ guards beyond the Sarp'mor because guards suggest something worth taking. What protects them is the certainty that a house whose member is killed will spend the next two centuries testifying, at cost, in every court that will hear it, against the family that did it. Two noble lines in the settled kingdoms have been dismantled this way, slowly, without a blow struck, and the second one was dismantled largely so that everybody could watch the first one being done twice.

Faith

They keep Vaeyar under the name Vaesseth, the Carrier, the sky as the thing that takes every word spoken anywhere and holds it. Their doctrine is that nothing said is ever unsaid, that the air is a hall with no doors, and that a person's life is the sum of what they said when they thought the room was empty. Their clergy are the eldest of the houses and their only rite is the Emptying. Their afterlife is that the Carrier keeps the record forever and speaks it back at the end, to whom they do not say. The truth is that no worldly god keeps an afterlife, that Vaeyar is a storm and no archive at all, and that Sarpaen souls go to the auction with everyone else's. The archive is real; it is the one they are building themselves.

Tongue

Common Tongue, spoken more precisely than any other people speaks it, and every other language they have had cause to hold. They have no private tongue and consider the idea a professional liability, which is a principle built on top of a fact: a people whose whole worth is the exactness of what it gives back cannot afford a second version of anything. They cannot write either, or rather a Sarpaen can form letters with a tail tip at the speed of a slow child and gives it up. The exactness that made them the most trusted witnesses on Nu began as an inability to take notes, and they have never once said so out loud, and every carrier in the world knows it.

Their naming convention is the column: a Sarpaen carries a given name, then the place it kept, then the count of years it kept it, and the count is the part that means anything. A young Sarpaen with a small count is spoken over.

Ssaeleth of the Ninth Column, four hundred years. Nervassa of the Grey Audience, two hundred and ten. Sarr'oveh of the Low Door, ninety. Illisse of the Salt Counting House, one hundred and forty. Mehsarra of the Hall That Fell, six hundred and eleven. Ossivaen of the Third Bedchamber, sixty, and much in demand. Thaluu of No Column, who has never been hired. Vessreth of the Bridge Court, three hundred and eighty.

Regard

Feared in the way a document is feared. A city that has witness-houses has a different quality of silence in its wealthy rooms. The Iziaka call them crawlers and will not sit with them. Merchants call them the price of doing anything properly. The common insult is worm-in-the-wall, and the common practice, in the houses of anyone who has something to hide, is to check the ceiling, and in the houses of anyone who can afford it, to lay a carpet on a wooden floor over sand and hold the conversation there.

The Tusiva regard them as a lesser serpent people who took the listening work without the risk, and the Sarpaen deny relation, correctly: the lines were bred separately and a Sarpaen cannot eat memory, only hear it. The Sserrin they have no dealings with. The Mekuhlian are their best clients and the relationship is warm. Every kingdom's spymaster is either using them or trying to destroy them, and usually both.

Harvest

Sarpaen skin is a single unbroken sheet fourteen feet long, banded and jewel-coloured, and it is the finest bookbinding material in the world, which the Sarpaen find unbearable and will pay to prevent. The irony of the trade is not lost on anyone: the people who cannot write are bought by the yard to cover other people's writing, and a great library's shelf of Sarpaen-bound volumes is the single object most likely to make a witness leave a room. A shed skin, given freely, is worth a quarter of a flayed one and the houses sell theirs at that price and keep a register of buyers.

The hood-skin is used in instrument making, stretched over a small drum that gives a voice-like tone. Their venom is mild and used medicinally. The sliding heart, dried, is sold as a charm for climbing and does nothing.

What is actually taken from them, and what the houses lose members to every year, is the archive: a Sarpaen can be kidnapped and questioned, and a questioned Sarpaen will hold out longer than anyone expects and not forever. The houses' countermeasure is arithmetic rather than rescue. Every testimony of value is held by two members who are kept in different cities and are never knotted, so that taking one buys a kingdom half a record and a war with a house.

Remembered

Mehsarra of the Hall That Fell. Six hundred and eleven years old, the last Sarpaen who was in an Alverian hall while it was still occupied, and the only living thing outside a bunker that can quote a lord of Alveria directly. She will not, at any price, and three kingdoms have offered. She has been Set for eleven years and is propped against the stone spine of the oldest witness-house there is, where the children are raised in her hearing, which is a form of publication she chose.

Ssaeleth of the Ninth Column. Head of the largest witness-house, who fixed the fee schedule the profession still uses and who has personally executed four of her own members.

Thaluu of No Column. Born without the hood, unable to be read for a lie and therefore untrustworthy by his own people's standard, and now for hire to anyone the houses will not serve.

Kin each has a page of its own

Three, divided by the serpent stock each was cut from and by the room each was made for: the road, the doorway and the audience chamber. All three keep the Carrier, and each has bent the name to its own country.