Scan'uun

Origin

Nobody designed them. The Scan'uun are the crossing of the Iziaka and the Nu'uman, "a random scaled folk," and "an older Hybrid species, hailing from the last 15,000 years," born of the age "when species began mingling amongst themselves, building communities and tearing down differences." That makes them the oldest hybrid people by a wide margin and older than most of the political map. Fifteen thousand years of smithing has bought them a grudging place at a Nu'uman forge and nothing above it.

They are shunned in the upper circles of every town they serve and live in the lower ones, where they are at home. Where a town will not have them at all, they have built their own places, below the walls and outside the gates.

Body

Nu'uman first and reptile second, and the ratio is exact: "90% of their form hails from the Nu'uman." What comes through of the Iziaka comes through as texture and hardware. No two are alike: "Varying bodies, and skin tone, as dependant on the Nu'uman and Iziaka variant they are bred between, the Scan'uun are a random scaled folk." The head carries it: "The top of their head is covered in protruding bumped scales, with slightly pointed scaled ridges peaking up and running down to the back of their skull." The ears are Nu'uman "but almost flat to their skull." The toes are webbed, "and from each toe a claw protrudes, shaped like a nail, but sharp and down curved." The eyes are "green, with a yellow circle within before their black pupil."

Five to six feet; one hundred to two hundred pounds. Eighty to a hundred and twenty years, because a scaled and climate-hardened people outlives a bare Nu'uman. They carry infrared sight from the Iziaka side, heat resistance enough to work a forge with far less protection than a Nu'uman needs, and "they can withstand intense climatic differences without suitably being prepared."

The ninety and the ten are not distributed at random, and knowing where the ten went explains the whole people. The skeleton is Nu'uman entire: the same joints, the same shoulder, the same grip, the same stance at an anvil. That is half the reason a Nu'uman town keeps them. A Scan'uun can wear Nu'uman mail, swing a Nu'uman hammer, stand at a Nu'uman bench and hand a Nu'uman a tool he recognises, and the guilds have never had to change a single fitting for them. The Iziaka came through in the skin, the eye and the handling of heat, and nowhere else.

The scale is Nu'uman skin thickened into plates, a dense layered composite of horn over a bed of small bone platelets, seated into the living hide so that the plate itself is dead and the ground it sits in is not. Between the plates runs the seam: a narrow channel of ordinary soft skin, which is where sweat leaves, where dirt collects, where a knife goes in, and where the species' commonest ailment lives. A smith runs a hand over his own arm at the end of a day the way another man checks a hem.

Heat is the great difference and it is not resistance in any simple sense. A Scan'uun does not shed heat well and does not need to for a long time, because the body stores it. A dense capillary bed lies under the throat, the inner arms and the belly, and through the working hours the blood carries heat inward and banks it in the mass of the body, which rises through the day and is dumped at night through those same beds, lying still, in the cool, with the arms turned out. A Nu'uman at a forge is cooking and must stop. A Scan'uun at a forge is filling, and has hours before he must. This single fact sets the shape of a Scan'uun day, which is divided into the heat and the cooling, and it is why they eat together at the end of the day's heat and not before, and why a forge-row goes quiet at dusk in a way strangers find eerie.

The infrared sight sits in a line of shallow pits along the upper lip and under the brow scales, and it is not vision in the ordinary sense; it arrives as a second picture laid over the first, coarse, slow, and exact about temperature. A Scan'uun looks at iron in a fire and reads its heat the way another smith reads a colour, but earlier, and through smoke, and without a test piece. Everything the world says about them as craftsmen follows from those pits. "Blacksmiths due to their intense heat resistance" is the Nu'uman explanation and it is the wrong one. They are the finest blacksmiths known because they can see the temper.

The second picture shows them other things they would rather everyone did not know they could see. They see a face flush, a hand warm on a purse, the hot line of blood in a limb, a man sweating under a cloak on a cold night, and a lie in a merchant with poor control of himself. They see a living body through smoke and through thin board. Tarrowsmoke works in a permanent haze that no Nu'uman can see across, and the forty forges of the row are laid out for heat rather than for light, without a lamp among them. It is also why the guild halls of four cities conduct their business with Scan'uun in cold stone rooms by candle, a courtesy that nobody has ever had to explain.

What they are bad at is colour, particularly in the blue and the violet, which arrive muddy and thin. The consequence runs right through their craft. There is no Scan'uun enamel, no Scan'uun dye trade, no painted Scan'uun anything. Their ornament is relief, chasing, punchwork and texture, read with the fingers and with the heat-picture, and a Scan'uun blade is the most beautiful undecorated object most people will ever hold. They also find Nu'uman art baffling and rarely say so.

The blood runs dark and cool and clots according to temperature, fast when the body is hot and slow when it is not. A wound taken at the anvil seals itself in minutes. The same wound taken in the yard in winter bleeds for an hour. They cauterise as a matter of course, without ceremony, and a Scan'uun household keeps an iron in the fire for it. The webbed and clawed feet go unshod on hot stone and on the wet floor of a quench-house, and a Scan'uun cannot comfortably wear a boot; the claws come down-curved and the webbing has nowhere to go. A hall that requires footwear has excluded them without writing anything down, and three cities have such a rule, and all three of them insist it is about mud.

Life

Infertile outside their own kind; Scan'uun breed Scan'uun. They lay. A mother carries for three months and lays a clutch of two to four leathery eggs, and the clutch is set where every Scan'uun clutch has been set for fifteen thousand years: in the ash-bed of a cooled forge, where the warmth lingers a day and a night after the fire is out. A forge with eggs in it is not lit, and the smith works a borrowed one. That is the whole of Scan'uun courtesy and every Scan'uun keeps it. The eggs hatch in four months. The young come out scaled, clawed and silent, and they stay silent longer than Nu'uman children do; a Scan'uun child that speaks before its second year is thought forward.

The setting of the bed is the most careful hour in a Scan'uun life, because the heat of the ash decides what hatches. A bed set warm gives daughters and a bed set cool gives sons, and the woman who sets it is the oldest mother of the row, who tests it with the pits of her own face and takes as long as she takes. A row short of smiths sets cool for a decade and then finds itself short of mothers, and the long slow correction of that error is the only kind of politics a forge-row has. Nobody outside the people has ever been told this, and a Nu'uman guild that learned it would have a lever on the row within a year.

A gravid woman eats quench-scale, charcoal and crushed slag by the handful, and the taste for it never entirely leaves her afterward. A clutch from a poor row comes out soft-shelled and mostly dead, which is how hunger in this people is counted: not in bodies, in eggs.

They name five stages, all of them out of the fire. An egg in the bed is ash-set. A hatchling is shell-out, and shell-out lasts until it speaks. From speech to sixteen a child is in the silence, and is expected to watch and to fetch and to say very little, which outsiders take for sullenness and which is simply the age. They are grown at sixteen and their scale hardens through their twenties; a Scan'uun of thirty has a brow you could strike a spark from, and that hardening is the scale-set. The last stage is named, which begins on the day the first blade is finished and never ends.

Old age comes at a hundred, slowly, and the eyes go last. The dead go to the forge. The body is burned in the smith's own fire, the ash is worked into the next blade, and a family's oldest sword carries in its steel a little of everyone who ever held the hammer before it. They call such a blade ash-iron and will not sell one. They are omnivores leaning to meat, and to meat eaten hot, smoked or salted; they drink whatever the low taverns pour and are thought to hold it well, which is a misreading of a body that banks heat and processes drink in the cooling hours rather than at the table.

Frailty

Everything that threatens a Scan'uun is a question about temperature, and the great one is cold. Heat is banked and cold is not resisted at all. A Scan'uun caught out in a hard winter night without a fire slows: the second picture dims first, then the hands, then the judgement, and a smith in that state will sit down against a wall with every intention of getting up. They die in snow more than any other people in the northern towns, and they die a few hundred yards from a door. This is the true weight behind the taboo of the cold forge. Letting a family fire go out is the one shame a Scan'uun cannot work off because a cold forge kills the clutch in the ash-bed and can kill the oldest person in the house before morning, and the shame is the memory of every time it has.

At the other end is the stall. A smith who works past his banking capacity in high summer goes into a heat stupor: the second picture whites out, the hands keep working, and the man does not notice he has stopped thinking. Half the bad accidents in a forge-row happen in the stall, and the row's custom of ranking forges by the age of their fires exists partly so that the oldest and least steady smiths work the fires nearest the door.

Seam-rot is the occupational disease and every working Scan'uun over fifty has it somewhere. Salt and ash pack into the soft channels between the plates, the channel inflames, the plate loosens at one edge, and the soft skin beneath it goes bad. It stinks, it is slow, and it ends with a plate coming away and leaving a patch of bare hide that never scales again. Scale that has been burnt off does not return either, so an old smith is a map of bare places, and the bare places are exactly where he is soft. A Scan'mor with an unscaled patch over the ribs will not turn that side to a stranger for the rest of his life.

They shed in patches through their twenties and again, badly, in old age, and a shed that goes wrong traps the old scale over new and festers. Their parasite is the scale-tick, flat as a coin, which gets in under a loosening plate and cannot be reached; a smith with ticks gets a friend to lift the plate with a chisel, and it is one of the ordinary intimacies of the row.

The cruel failure is the pits, and it comes early. The heat sight fades from about ninety, a decade or two before the ordinary eyes go, and the sign of it is unmistakable to everyone in the row: an old master starts using a test piece. He takes a scrap, heats it alongside the work, and watches its colour the way a Nu'uman does. Nobody says anything. The apprentices quietly begin checking his tempers, the commissions drift to another fire, and within two years he is the oldest working smith of nothing at all. More than one great name in Tarrowsmoke has gone into the river in the year the pits failed.

Some are born without the pits entirely. A blind-pitted child is found out at about four, when it cannot tell a hot bar from a cold one by looking, and it will never smith. Those children become the hunters and the trackers of the people, which is the second of the three professions the world lists for them and which the world has never connected to anything. A blind-pitted Scan'uun has the ordinary eyes, the dark-adaptation, the claws and the patience, and no future at an anvil, and the woods are what is left. Every Scan'uun tracker in the world is somebody who failed the only test that matters at home.

Starvation takes the scale first. The body strips the plates for their mineral, and a starving Scan'uun goes soft and pale at the crown and along the spine ridge within a month, which is visible from behind, at a distance, through smoke. A row can count its own hunger walking past it.

Country

The Surface Realm, inside Nu'uman settlements, in the lane behind the guild hall and the shed against the wall. Three places are their own. Tarrowsmoke is a forge-row built against the outside of a city wall, below the postern, where the smoke of forty forges rolls up the stonework and the city complains of it and buys from it all the same; it is the largest Scan'uun place there is and the model for every other. Kesh Vaddren is a hill-camp of stone huts and cold fires kept by the Scan'vael, where townsfolk climb to ask a question and pay to be told the answer slowly. The Undercinder is a hold cut into the mouth of an abandoned Do'urssan mine, where Scan'uun who have been driven out of somewhere else go to work ore nobody else will dig.

A forge-row eats a country and everyone involved knows it. Forty fires burn charcoal, charcoal comes out of standing timber, and the woods within ten miles of Tarrowsmoke have been coppiced, cut and cut again for eleven hundred years until the hillsides carry nothing but rods on old stools. The streams run grey with quench-scale and fines, the fish went out of them before anyone thought to write about it, and the ore seams in the near hills are worked out to a depth nobody can reach any longer. Against that, the row feeds a city's entire tool supply, its ploughshares, its nails, its hinges, its armour and its blades, and it does so at prices the guild fixes and the row accepts.

They have domesticated nothing. There is no Scan'uun beast, no Scan'uun crop, and no Scan'uun field. What has been domesticated is the people, by the guild system, over fifteen thousand years, and the Scan'uun say so among themselves in the plainest language they have.

When a row leaves a town, the town keeps the smoke stains on its wall and loses the edge on everything it owns within five years, and the complaints about the smoke stop within one.

Society

Beaten flat and put to work. Two lines of temper are given them and both are about suppression: "Calmed and beaten into subservient mindsets" and "Silent voices, busy minds." The professions are blacksmith, hunter and tracker, and common labour. "Blacksmiths due to their intense heat resistance," and blunter still, "the finest blacksmiths known." Their place in Nu'uman towns rests on an ordinary prejudice working in their favour: "the Nu'uman would much rather have a Scan'uun mastering their sword than an Iziakan lizard." A Scan'uun is tolerated because he is the lesser of two reptiles.

Above the stairs they are not welcome; below them they are at home. In a Nu'uman town a Scan'uun may run the forge under a guild hall and may never sit in the hall. The guilds take his work, mark it with a Nu'uman master's sign, and sell it on, and the smith who made it is paid in coin and silence. In Tarrowsmoke the order inverts. The oldest working smith holds the row, the forges are ranked by the age of their fires, and a Nu'uman who wants a blade comes down through the smoke and waits his turn behind the Scan'uun who were there first.

The silence the world takes for subservience is substantially the shape of their day. A people that works in long unbroken heats and talks in the cooling has no habit of conversation while standing up, and a Scan'uun asked a question at the anvil will finish the heat before answering, which reads upstairs as insolence and downstairs as competence. The whole of Scan'uun social life happens after dark, off iron plates, at the one hour when their bodies are dumping the day, and no Nu'uman has ever been at one of those meals.

The forge customs are the culture. The first blade a Scan'uun finishes alone is named, and the name of the blade becomes the smith's second name for life. A smith's apron is buried with him, or burned with him, and never worn by another. They eat together at the end of the day's heat, off iron plates, and drink a black spirit distilled in the quench-troughs. Their music is hammer-time: work songs kept in the rhythm of the strike, sung low, in which the words hardly matter and the beat is everything. The oath is sworn on the anvil with the bare palm laid on hot iron, and what makes it an oath is that a palm has no plates on it: the scale of the hand is thin and the burn is real and the scar is permanent, and a Scan'uun with a seamed white palm has sworn something. The taboo is the cold forge.

Faith

The Scan'uun take the gods of the town, as they take its work, and keep them below stairs. Where the town's shrines are Nu'uman, the Scan'uun attend and are not asked to. Their own devotion is smaller and hotter. They keep the First Heat: a word said over the first fire of the day to Tantis of the Mountain, from whom the ore comes, in the Iziaka manner of giving a god the face that suits the place, and the face they give him is the smith's. They hold that the dead return to the ore, cool there, and are dug up again in a thousand years to be worked into something. That is why the ash goes in the blade.

It is a gentle faith for a hard people. Tantis keeps no such realm and the ore holds no one; the Scan'uun dead go to the auction of the star gods with everybody else's.

Tongue

Common Tongue. The Iziaka parent's tongue "moves in unique ways, allowing them to speak most languages," and most Scan'uun inherit none of that facility. What they have is an ear for the speech of whatever town they serve, and the forge-cant, a low Common of the smithy in which every tool and temper has a word that Nu'uman smiths have borrowed and pretend they have not.

A good half of the cant is untranslatable for the reason that it names temperatures the borrower cannot see, and the Nu'uman words for those tempers are all approximations of a Scan'uun word for something visible.

A Scan'uun carries a short birth name in the style of the town and a forge-name earned at the first finished blade, which is the blade's name and is used thereafter as a surname. A Scan'uun without a forge-name has not finished anything yet and is addressed accordingly. Vaskel Redtemper; Dunmar Coldquench; Teshka Ninefold; Halvric Splitseam; Ketta Truehaft; Marrow Ashbrand; Ossek Slagborn; Brannic Twicehammered.

Regard

"Scaled Freaks." "A fouling of the Nu'uman perfect form." The second insult measures a Scan'uun against the parent he is held to have spoiled, and everything a Scan'uun hears is said in that register. The Iziaka call them "the soft-scaled" and mean it as a courtesy, which the Scan'uun understand and do not accept.

Harvest

The hide. Scan'uun scale is heat-proof, a smith's apron cut from it is the best a Nu'uman can buy, and Nu'umans buy them. What makes it better than any lizard hide on the market is the seam: the soft channels between the plates give the cut sheet a hinge in every direction, so an apron of it lies flat against a body and does not crack across the fold, which is precisely the failure that ruins Iziaka hide within a season. The trade is legal in most central places and is spoken of in none. Among the Scan'uun it is the deepest taboo they have: a skinned smith is a curse said over an enemy, and a Scan'uun who learns his apron was cut from one of his own will burn it in his own forge and take the loss. Both parent peoples yield hide as well; the Scan'uun hide is priced as forge equipment rather than as leather, and costs more than either.

Remembered

The great houses keep no roll of Scan'uun names. The forge-rows keep their own, and two travel further than the rest.

Halvric Splitseam. Master of the oldest fire in Tarrowsmoke, whose blades hang on knights who will not say his name.

Teshka Ninefold. A Scan'vael of Kesh Vaddren, who was asked by a Nu'uman lord how long his house would stand, took nine days to answer, and was right.

Kin each has a page of its own

The Scan'uun lineages divide by how much of the Iziaka came through and where it landed: in the bone, or under the brow. Neither line smiths, which is why both are strange to their own people.