Thennok

Origin

Something small is inside the walls of the castle and it has always been there. It weighs forty pounds, it has hands like a bundle of wire, its eyes take up a third of its face, and at dusk it comes out along the ledges with a taper and lights every lamp in a fortress of four hundred rooms in under an hour, and is gone before the household has finished sitting down to eat. The Thennok are nocturnal primates who live in the fabric of other peoples' great houses under a compact older than most of the houses, and the compact has two clauses, and the second one is why nobody breaks it.

The name is the one the peoples whose lamps they keep gave them: thenn is the trimmed wick and -ok the old Common agentive that survives in a dozen trade words, so the name means the wick-hands. They did not choose it and they have never offered another.

The splice is Nu'uman, Irugaine and a night primate stock, one to each kin. They were made late in the empire for the Night Office of the Alverian towers: to keep the lamps, to carry the watch, and to work in a darkness the Alverians themselves did not care to occupy. The design brief is unusually specific and unusually cold. The maker wanted hands that could trim a wick by feel in total dark, eyes that could work by the light of one flame, a body light enough to go along a moulding, and a disposition that would not require supervision, since the whole point of a night staff is that nobody is awake to supervise it.

What was not in the brief, and what the Alverians noticed too late to be interested in, is that a people who are the only ones awake in a tower learn everything that happens in it. The Thennok came out of the Night Office already holding six hundred years of the empire's private conduct, and they have never stopped holding the equivalent since.

After the collapse they did not leave the towers. They stayed, and the towers changed hands, and they stayed through that too. When the peoples who came after moved into the old Alverian works and later built their own castles in imitation of them, the Thennok moved in during construction, generally before the roof was on, and were established in the walls before the first lord slept in the place. Every great house of the middle age either has a lodge or has had one and knows how it lost it.

Body

Two and a half to four feet standing, thirty to fifty-five pounds, long-limbed and light-boned, with a tail longer than the body used for balance and for carrying. The head is round, the muzzle short, and the eyes are the fact of them: enormous, fixed forward, with a reflective layer behind that throws back lamplight in a flat coin-bright disc, so that a Thennok looking down at you out of a rafter is two bright rounds and nothing else. They see in almost no light and are half blind in day. The ears are large, thin and independently mobile, and can be folded flat and shut. The coat is dense and short, grey through to near black, with a paler mask around the eyes.

The hands are the tools. Long, thin, hairless-palmed, with a third finger on each hand markedly longer and finer than the rest, made for wick-work, for feeling into a gap, and for other things. The grip is disproportionate to the size: the tendons of the hand lock at the joint under load, so a Thennok can hang one-handed from a moulding for an hour without effort and without thinking about it, and sleeps hanging, and dies hanging, and has to be prised off a beam.

The eye that makes them useful costs them colour entirely. Their world is grey and grain and edge, with no red and no blue in it anywhere, so a Thennok cannot tell a livery coat from a mourning one and has never been able to describe a banner. What they have instead is the ear and the foot. They know every person in a household by the sound of that person's tread on a particular stair, and their records of a house are kept that way: not by face and not by name but by weight, gait, the hitch in a knee, the rhythm of a stick. A lodge's book of the household is a book of footfalls, and it is the reason a Thennok can tell you who went up to the solar at two in the morning eleven years ago and cannot tell you what he was wearing.

Their heat goes out of them by day. A sleeping Thennok drops its body temperature to a little above the stone around it, which saves a lodge an enormous amount of food and makes a sleeper hard to find and cold to the hand, and there are three well-attested cases of a renovator putting his arm into a cavity and reporting a corpse that was not one. In a cold house the lodge sleeps against the kitchen flue in a heap, and the heap is the only time they touch one another.

They are silent by construction: padded feet, no claw-clicking, a habit of moving only during the household's own noise, so that a lodge's working hours are set by the hours the house is loud and a Thennok crossing a hall waits for the fire to shift. The one sound they make in company is a soft two-note call used to locate one another in the dark, and the household hears it and thinks the house is settling.

Life

They breed slowly, one infant every seven or eight years, born in the wall-crèche: a lined chamber in the thickness of the masonry, usually over a kitchen flue for the warmth, which the lodge builds during the castle's own construction and never afterwards moves. An infant clings to the mother's chest for four months and is then parked, in the way of their stock, left hooked on a beam in the crèche while the mother works and retrieved before dawn. A parked infant does not cry, because the line that cried is not in the walls any more.

A child of the lodge is taught three things and in this order: the routes, which is the internal map of the whole building and takes nine years; the silence; and the lamps. It is taken out onto the ledges at six and does its first solo circuit at eleven, and the first circuit is the closest thing the culture has to a coming of age, and it is the night the child is given its lodge-name. It is taught reading young, because the compact requires the lodge to keep its own copy.

They eat what the household throws out and what they take from the pantry within the terms of the compact, plus insects out of the fabric of the building, plus grubs dug out of old timber with the long finger, and a lodge is genuinely the reason an old castle's beams are sound. They will not touch food set out for them as charity and are insulted by it.

They die in the walls and are walled in where they lie, in the crèche's own courses, and the lodge does not tell the household. There is no great house on Nu whose walls do not contain some number of very small skeletons that nobody has counted, and in three recorded cases a renovation has found them, and in all three cases the renovation stopped.

Frailty

Soot kills most of them. A life spent at the top of every flame in a large house, breathing the smoke of tallow and cheap oil in spaces with no draught, blackens the lung by the second century, and the cough of an old lamp-tender is a sound every lodge knows and no household has ever heard, because a Thennok who has begun to cough stops going out and is carried. Lodge oil is blended smokeless for exactly this reason, and the blending is the oldest craft they have, and it is a medicine before it is a convenience.

The long finger is thin as a pin and it breaks. A broken third finger sets crooked, will not trim a wick, and ends a tender's working life at whatever age it happens, and a lodge carries its broken-handed as watchers and as readers of the book. Burns take the young in their first year on the ledges. Falls take everyone eventually: a fall inside a cavity wall is not survivable and not reachable, and the body is left where it stops, since opening a wall is the one thing the lodge will not do even for its own.

Daylight is an injury and not a discomfort. A Thennok held in the sun for an hour is blind for a week; the vaer line is blind in a minute and does not recover fully. This is the whole of their vulnerability and every enemy they have ever had has worked it out: you do not chase a lodge out of a wall, you open the wall at noon.

The sai line poisons itself. The gland is worked into the mouth before a 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.

Country

Inside the walls of other peoples' castles, palaces, temple precincts and old towers, in every climate, always in a building of stone with a cavity in it. They do not build. A lodge occupies the void spaces: chases, flues, the gaps behind panelling, the space above a vaulted ceiling and below the floor over it, the hollows of a curtain wall. A large castle's lodge runs to forty or sixty individuals and has a mapped territory that overlays the household's own and shares not one door with it.

A house with a lodge is a healthier house, and nobody connects the two. The beams keep, because the grubs are taken out of them before the grubs are visible; the rats do not establish, because the cavities are occupied; the chimneys draw, because something small goes up them. A house that loses its lodge declines over about forty years in ways its owners blame on damp and on servants, and there is a specific kind of ruin, common across the middle countries, which is a great house that died of an empty wall.

They will not live in wood, will not live in a city's ordinary houses, and will not live in a building that has been abandoned, since a lodge without a household has no compact and no purpose. When a castle falls the lodge walks out overnight and goes looking for the next one, and a column of small grey people crossing open country in the dark is one of the few times anyone sees them in numbers.

Society

The lodge is the unit and the lodge is ruled by its Wick, the eldest Thennokvaer. Under the Wick the offices are simple: the lamp-tenders, who are the body of the people and do the work; the watchers, who hold the routes and the listening posts; and the one or two of the sai line, who exist for the second clause.

The Lamp Compact. Agreed once, with the founder of the house, and renewed at every succession by a ceremony that takes place in the dark of the great hall with the household's doors locked and one candle lit, at which the new lord speaks alone to a voice out of the ceiling. The terms are the same everywhere.

The lodge lights, trims, fuels and puts out every lamp, lantern, sconce and hearth-light in the house, every night, without being asked, without being seen and without payment.

The lodge takes oil, salt, tallow, the run of the pantry after the household has eaten, and the walls themselves, undisturbed, in perpetuity.

The household does not open a wall, does not follow a lodge member, does not count them and does not speak of them to outsiders.

The lodge hears everything said in the house and repeats none of it outside the house. This clause is the lodge's whole standing in the world and it has never been broken by them.

And the second clause: 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.

The second clause is why a house tolerates something living in its walls, and it is also why nobody sleeps easily in a castle with a lodge, since the clause names the lord as the one who may invoke it and says nothing whatever about who else has been offering.

Custom is silence, punctuality and precision. A lodge that is one lamp late has failed. They do not celebrate, do not sing, and do not gather except at the reading of the compact, which is done aloud in the crèche every year on the anniversary of its making, from the lodge's own copy, in full, so that every child of the lodge knows the terms before it knows the routes. Their oath is to hold the wick, sworn with the long finger through a flame, and every adult carries the scar of it on the same joint, which is also the joint that breaks.

Between lodges there is a thin and formal traffic: word passed by walkers who cross country at night carrying nothing, so that the lodge in one kingdom knows within a month what the lodge in another has been told to do. There is no Thennok government. There is a network, and everyone who has ever thought about it carefully has become very quiet.

Faith

The Unlit Court. They keep the Constellation Court, and they keep it on the strength of the only credential that matters to them: they are the ones who see it. Every night of their lives, from the roof-walks and the arrow slots and the lantern turrets, the Thennok look at the star gods while the households below sleep through the entire performance, and their theology begins from the observation that the peoples who talk most about the heavens have mostly never watched them for a whole night.

The doctrine holds that light indoors is a courtesy paid to the day-blind and that the true light is overhead, and that the lodge's work is therefore two-handed: the lamps below for the household, and the watch above for the Court. Every lodge keeps one high point, a turret, a chimney head, a broken merlon, called the sill, 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.

The rite is the Reckoning of the sill: the watcher's account of what was overhead, given to the lodge before sleep, in a fixed form, and written into the same book as the compact. Some lodges have unbroken sky records four hundred years long, and there are astronomers in three peoples who would commit crimes for one and who do not know they exist.

They do not fear the Void Princes and do not court them, and the Thennoksai, who kill for a living, are noticeably the most devout of the three kin, and 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 therefore honest.

The Court is real and holds real realms, which puts the Thennok, alone among the small peoples, in the unusual position of worshipping something that exists. It does not follow that anything is owed them. Their souls go to the auction with everyone else's, and it is the Court that runs it.

Tongue

They speak Common, quietly and correctly, with an old-fashioned vocabulary picked up from six centuries of overhearing their betters. Among themselves they use the wall-tongue, which is barely a spoken language at all: two vocal notes, a set of knocks on masonry, and a positional grammar in which where you are standing when you say a thing changes what it means. It carries through stone for the length of a wing and is inaudible in a room.

That grammar ties a Thennok to a building the way a name ties other peoples to a family. The same four knocks mean one thing struck at the crèche flue and another struck above the chapel vault, so the language cannot be carried out of the house that taught it, and a Thennok who moves to a new castle must learn to speak again in the new plan and spends its first year sounding like a child. This is why the house-name is dropped and replaced on moving, and why a lodge that walks sixty miles across open country arrives half dumb.

A Thennok has a lodge-name and a house-name. The lodge-name is a single soft syllable given at the first circuit. The house-name is the name of the castle they serve, and a Thennok who moves house changes it and does not keep the old one. Eight names, in the form they give to those few outsiders they speak to: Nen of Hollowgate, Sith of the Nine Turrets, Ammu of Redcourt, Vek of the Cold Chapel, Issa of Thornkeep, Ohl of the Drowned Stair, Mek of Kingsgnaw, Tuun of the Unlit Tower.

Regard

Most people in a castle with a lodge do not know there is a lodge. They know the lamps are lit and have never wondered by whom, in the way that nobody wonders who empties anything. The servants know. The servants of a house with a lodge leave the scrapings out in a particular corner and do not look at that corner, and this is passed down and never explained to new staff, who learn it by being hissed at.

Those who do know call them the wick-hands, the wall-folk, or the little lords, that last with the flatness of people who have worked out where the real continuity in a great house lies. Lords are divided between those who regard the lodge as the finest inheritance in the property and those who spend their whole tenure trying to get it out, and the latter group is smaller each generation for the obvious reason.

Other peoples' opinion is thin because there is nothing to see. The Librar, who steal knowledge for a living, know exactly what a lodge is and have never successfully bought from one. The Xacrie, who roost in bell-towers, loathe them and are loathed, and where a lodge and a belfry share a city there is a quiet nightly war along the roofs that the city below never notices.

They acknowledge no parent people and no cousins. Their enemies are renovators, the Xacrie, and any lord who has decided to open a wall. Their patrons are whoever currently owns the roof over them, which they regard as a weather condition rather than a loyalty. They have no allies and they have correspondents, which they consider better.

Harvest

The eyes. The reflective layer behind a Thennok eye is cut out, dried and set into lenses that gather light, and a pair of them in a glass will let a person read by starlight for about two years before they go cloudy. They are the most valuable small thing in the world of thieves and they are the reason the very few Thennok killings that happen, happen.

The long finger, dried, sold as a charm for opening locks, which does nothing.

Lodge oil, the mixture they blend for the lamps, which burns without smoke and is not sold and is occasionally stolen.

The tail, rarely, sold as a rope of a kind by people who do not know what they are handling and do not last long in the trade.

There is no law protecting them anywhere, because no law anywhere admits that they are in the building. A lord who catches a thief taking eyes in his own house does not hand him to a court. He gives him to the lodge, and this is the third clause that is not written in the compact and is understood by every party to it.

Remembered

Tuun of the Unlit Tower. Wick of the oldest continuous lodge known, whose compact was made with a founder nine hundred years dead and has been renewed through four dynasties and two conquests without alteration.

Issa of Thornkeep. A Thennoksai who invoked the second clause on the lord who had ordered it, having been offered the same work twice in one night by two people in the same household, and who was thanked by the survivor.

Nen of Hollowgate. Keeper of a sky record four hundred and eleven years unbroken.

Vek of the Cold Chapel. Who led his lodge out of a falling castle across sixty miles of open country in nine nights and lost two, and whose walk is recited in the crèches of eleven other lodges.

Kin each has a page of its own

One stock to each kin, three primates of the dark put into one people, and the division is by office rather than by rank: the ones who light the house, the one or two who empty it, and the old ones who keep the book. A lodge is nine parts the first.