Thennoksai
There are one or two of them to a lodge and they exist for the second clause. Slower than the others, heavier through the arm, with an appalling deliberate grip and a round unreadable face, and they move at a speed the eye slides off in a lit room and cannot follow at all in a dark one.
They are also the most devout of the three kin, and hold the sill more often than anyone.
Body
Slower than the others, heavier through the arm, with an appalling deliberate grip and a round unreadable face. The gland is theirs alone: a patch on the inner arm that yields a clear oil which the sai works into the mouth before a night's business, and a bite from a prepared Thennoksai swells the throat shut within a minute and leaves a mark like a rat's.
The shared body is under it: the coin-bright eyes, the colourless sight, the locking grip, the padded silent foot, the day sleep that drops the body to a little above the temperature of the stone.
Society
The second clause is the office. The lodge removes, at the lord's word, a named person inside the house, once per lord's lifetime, and the removal is done between the last lamp and the first light, and is never afterwards mentioned by either party. Deaths by the second clause are almost always recorded as a bad reaction to something eaten.
It is the clause that makes a house tolerate something living in its walls, and it is also the reason nobody sleeps easily in a castle with a lodge, since it names the lord as the one who may invoke it and says nothing whatever about who else has been offering. Issa of Thornkeep, offered the same work twice in one night by two people in the same household, invoked it on the lord who had ordered it, and was thanked by the survivor.
Faith
They are the most devout of the three kin, which surprises people who have heard what they do and nobody who has heard why. They hold that a killing done cleanly between the last lamp and the first light is done under the Court's own light, and is therefore witnessed, and is therefore honest.
They hold the sill more often than anyone: the high point of the lodge, a turret or a chimney head or a broken merlon, at which one member sits every clear night from dark to dawn and does nothing except look. The sill is not a duty. It is competed for.
Frailty
The sai line poisons itself. The gland is worked into the mouth before every night's business and a fraction of it always goes down, and a Thennoksai past a hundred and fifty has a slack face, a tremor in the good hand and a heart that goes suddenly.
They regard this as the terms of the office and the lodge regards it the same way.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Which crowns keep a Thennoksai on the compact
- Whether a sai has ever refused the lord's word
- How often the offer comes from someone other than the lord
- What the sai line is owed by a lodge, given what it does for one