The Quiet

Body

A Quiet Thojar is the shared Thojar body held still. Stone skin, jagged or smooth, over warm grey ash-flesh that is muscle, nerve and memory at once; crystal-cluster eyes, no two alike; luminescent blood that crystallises as it leaves; no skeleton, no organ, no cavity anywhere inside. What sets the Quiet apart is that they use the clay least. A Thojar who has spent four hundred years standing in one place holding a cliff road is a column with a face on it, and it is still the shape it chose, and it still has its four hundred years.

That is the whole of their importance to their own people. Memory lives in the grain of the ash-flesh and remoulding works the grain, so every reshaping takes something and there is no choosing what goes. The Quiet remould twice in a thousand years where a War-Made remoulds into a weapon and one of the Cut grinds itself away, and the consequence is that whatever the Thojar still know about the first age is being carried by the ones who never became anything else. Their grooves are centuries deep and are read by other Thojar the way another people reads a face. Their strike-note, which nothing they do to their own shape will alter, is the only identity any of them has.

What a Quiet Thojar is made of is almost never its own decision. What is eaten becomes what the body is, and in a Do'urssan hold the feed is set by the overseer according to what the Thojar is for: granite grit for a road-holder, chalk for pit stock, crystal shards for something strong and brittle, salt-rock for something that will slake in the first flood. The Quiet have known which lineages dissolve in water since before the Do'urssan existed, and tell one another unasked, and have never once said it out loud in a hold.

Society

The Quiet live inside the techniques and there is no part of a day that is not shaped by them. The groove worn into the chest or forearm and drawn with a thumb once for every step of a thought. The stone rolled against the roof of the mouth while listening, so that a Thojar who spits it out has lost the thread and everyone present stops and waits. The drone, a hum sustained on no breath by vibrating the stone of the chest, which pitches down when the point is going. The set, one exact pose held for the length of a thought, whose interruption is the closest thing the Thojar have to an insult. The tally cut into the forearm and smoothed away when the work is done. The anchor passed hand to hand, where only the holder speaks. The second, another Thojar whose only task that hour is to repeat back the last thing said.

There is no government among them and there never has been. There is precedence at a task: whoever has held a cliff longest decides matters about that cliff, and everyone defers, because arguing would mean holding a position through a whole conversation, which is expensive. Where they gather in numbers an anchor-holder emerges by consent and keeps it until the matter is finished, sometimes for years. An oath is the anchor put into another's hand and not taken back, and since nothing a Thojar makes ever wears out, every Quiet oath is permanent.

Country

They occupy and do not found. Every name their country has was given to it by somebody else who needed something to write down. The Mouth Lights are the cliff-brow caves where the surface light comes in, and the Quiet sit facing the opening, sometimes for a century. The Long Sit is the gallery in the deep west where the oldest have stood until the ceiling settled onto their shoulders, and it is now a ceiling with no other support, which the Do'urssan surveyors know about and route around. The Slake Runs are flooded seams that only the water-safe lineages will enter, and are therefore the safest places in the Under Realm for a Thojar who does not want to be followed.

Where they stand they take load, deliberately and for centuries, and a hold with two hundred of them in it is also being eaten, seam by soft seam, by the same two hundred. Three Do'urssan holds in the eastern deep drove their Thojar out in a single generation to save the cost of the pebbles, and all three have since come down, and the Do'urssan record all three as bad ground.

Regard

Some Do'urssan societies tolerate them and a few welcome them, and those Quiet work seams no Do'urssan can work, hold roads, carry, and are fed pebbles at the end of a shift as though that were wages. Most treat them as meat bags to abuse, sacrifice and tear apart. A Quiet Thojar is worked in the deep cuts where the air kills, bled in a lamp-house for the light in a hold's signage, cut for the gems in its eyes and taken apart on the block by butchers hunting the essence, and in a hold with a bad governor the same one may be all three across a decade. None of it is illegal anywhere.

What a hold actually wants is an emptied one, which is docile and capable and cheap, and holds pay a premium for them, which means there are overseers who set a Thojar four different tasks in forty years on purpose. The Quiet have no word for that and do not appear to have noticed the pattern. What they do have words for is the Cut, which arrives at the same blankness from the other direction, and it is the one subject on which a kind, slow, sporadic people will speak with real anger. Their answer to everything else has been to move further down, and they have been doing it for an age.