Thylem

Origin

Nu'uman spliced with slug, in the invertebrate work, and made for the wet levels. The Alverian holds had drains, sumps, condensation galleries and flooded lower workings that no dry-footed servant could keep, and something was needed that could go into a half-full pipe and come out of the other end alive. The Thylem were that. They were made to clean, to seal and to crawl into places, and the mucus that everyone finds disgusting was the point of them: a Thylem trail seals a hairline crack in stone, and a wet-hold that had Thylem in it did not leak.

The severed slug head on the floor of Larunthel's laboratory is a Thylem, and that gives the people their history, which is the history every invertebrate people has: they were still being dissected when the Age of Alveria ended, the work was not finished, and nobody now alive can say what was being looked for.

After the collapse they had no purpose and no land, and they did what a people with no purpose and no land does. They went where the water was, took the ground nobody contested, and became the reason the drains work in four cities that have never thanked them.

Body

Four and a half to five and a half feet if a Thylem rears up, which is uncomfortable and cannot be held for long; at rest and in motion they are lower, long, and laid along the ground. Two hundred to two hundred and sixty pounds, most of it water. The body is a single muscular mass from the shoulder down, without legs, and it moves on a broad foot in the slug manner: a slow ripple, silent, and faster than anyone watching expects on a wet surface.

Above the shoulder they are recognisably of the Nu'uman pattern, and that is what makes them hard to look at. Arms, hands with four thick fingers, a neck, and a face with grotesque lips, wide and soft and always working. The eyes sit on two short retractable stalks above the brow, and a Thylem that is thinking pulls them halfway in. There is no nose. There is a breathing pore high on the left of the back, which is why a Thylem never lies on that side and why holding one face down in water is the standard way to murder one.

There is no skeleton. There is one bone in a Thylem and it is not a bone: a flat chalky oval, the size of a palm, seated under the mantle behind the shoulders, which anchors the great muscle of the foot and does nothing else. Everything above and below it is held up by pressure, a body of packed fluid in a muscular bag, which is why a Thylem cannot rear for long and why a wound that opens the mantle is so much more serious for them than a cut of the same size on anybody else: it is not bleeding, it is deflating. The four thick fingers are the same construction in miniature and have no joints anyone would recognise, which is why Thylem hands can hold a curved pipe from inside and cannot hold a hammer.

The mouth works on a rasp. Behind the grotesque lips lies a broad ribbon of fine backward-facing teeth that scrapes rather than bites, drawn over soft matter again and again, and the sound of a Thylem eating is the reason nobody sits with them. The gut that follows is long and slow and built for rot and fibre. The blood is pale and thin and carries very little, which is why they cannot exert themselves hard or for long, and it clots badly.

Colouring runs from a pale grey-cream through mottled amber to a deep near-black, in the pattern of the ground their line came off. The mucus is constant, copious and clear, and it is neither sweat nor saliva; it comes from the whole surface, it is what keeps them from drying out, and a Thylem out of damp air for a day is in serious trouble. They leave a trail. Everywhere. It dries to a silver film that lasts weeks and cannot be got out of wood, which is the practical reason so few taverns will take them and the stated reason is always something else.

Their senses are built for a pipe. The eyestalks give a wide, low, blurred picture and are useless at distance and superb at movement; a Thylem sees almost nothing across a market square and detects a rat in a dark sump at twenty feet. They do not smell and taste separately. The whole of the lip and a good deal of the forefoot is one chemical sense, so a Thylem tastes the floor as it crosses it, reads the water it is lying in, and knows by the mouth whether a cistern has gone bad three days before a Nu'uman can tell by the smell. Cities that have Thylem have safe water for that reason and no other. And they feel vibration through the whole underside, so a Thylem lying flat in a gallery knows that somebody is walking two rooms away and can tell how many. They are functionally deaf to anything in the air and hear a great deal through the stone.

Sixty to eighty years, and they age visibly from the middle: the mantle thickens, the colour goes, and the mucus thins, which is what actually kills them.

Life

They are of both sexes at once and neither exclusively, and pairing is mutual: two Thylem exchange, and both carry. The courtship is long, silent and conducted in the dark, hanging from a beam or a pipe by a rope of their own mucus, and it is the one thing in Thylem life they will not discuss with outsiders under any circumstances. Both lay, twelve to twenty eggs each, in a clutch pressed into wet clay or into the silt of a sump. The eggs are pearly and soft and go bad if handled.

The young hatch in six weeks at the length of a forearm, fully formed and entirely helpless, and they are kept in a communal wet room, a nursery of standing water and warm stone, for their first two years. They are grown at eighteen. A Thylem child learns to seal before it learns to write: the first craft, taught to everyone, is laying a trail across a crack and knowing when the seal has taken.

They are herbivores and detritivores, and they eat quantities that startle other peoples: soft fungus, rot-fruit, boiled root, waterweed, and the sweepings of a brewery, which is why they are found near breweries and why the tavern remembers them drunk. They drink enormously and hold it poorly, and a Thylem who has had too much cannot keep the eyestalks up, which reads to everyone else as insolence.

The dead are laid in running water. A Thylem body dissolves faster than any other people's, having almost no structure to leave behind, and within three days there is nothing left but the small chalky remnant of the internal shell, a flat oval the size of a palm, which the family keeps. A house of any age has a shelf of them. To be given someone's shell-plate is the deepest gesture the people have.

Frailty

Drying is the whole of it and everything else is a variation. A Thylem in dry air loses water through the entire surface and cannot stop, and the sequence is quick and public: the mucus goes tacky, then the trail stops, then the eyestalks will not extend, then the foot cannot ripple and the creature is lying on a floor unable to move while entirely conscious. A day of it does harm that takes a month in a wet room to undo. Two days kills. Salt does the same thing faster and deliberately, which is why the rivalry with the salt merchants has killed people and why every Thylem in a city knows exactly which streets have salt stored on them.

The breathing pore is the second weakness and it is a single point of failure. One pore, high on the left of the back, and anything that covers it, silt, a fall of grease, a hand, ends the Thylem in minutes. Sump workers get pore-block from working head-down in filth, and the Thylmurk have a tool for clearing one another's, carried on the belt, that other lines find disturbing to look at.

Their disease is the fluke. Standing water breeds a flat pale worm that enters at the foot and lodges in the mantle, and a Thylem with mantle-fluke goes thin, loses colour, and produces mucus that will not seal, which ends its trade before it ends its life. Clean-water lines get it rarely and sump lines get it constantly, and the whole of the Thylavane's insufferable sense of superiority rests on this one parasite.

Age kills by the mucus thinning, and the thinning is gradual enough that an old Thylem can watch it happen for a decade. What goes with it is the work: a sealer whose trail no longer takes is finished on the day, and the succession custom of the hold, which looks so calm and so reasonable, is in practice a people watching an old man's mucus and waiting.

Starvation makes them shrink, literally and visibly, since a pressure body with nothing in it loses volume, and a hungry Thylem is a smaller Thylem. A hold that has gone short for a season is noticeably lower to the ground. Their great fear is fire, which they cannot outrun, and the second is being carried anywhere; a Thylem taken out of damp air by somebody else is being murdered slowly whether or not that was the intention, and three courts have been asked to decide the difference and have all declined.

Country

A Thylem settlement is built into the water infrastructure of somewhere else: the cistern galleries, the aqueduct undercrofts, the flooded lower streets of river cities, and the drain systems of holds the Do'urssan abandoned. Three carry names. Sillowvane, a cistern-town under a river city, the largest there is, with perhaps two thousand of them living in vaults the city above believes are empty. The Weeping Gallery, in an old Alverian condensation works, where the walls have run continuously for eleven thousand years and the Thylem there have never seen dry stone. And Meruk's Bore, a wet-hold in a mine sump, poor and small and stubborn. Above ground, the one place a Thylem has been seen by the rest of the world is the Angwood tavern.

What a Thylem population does to a city is measurable and is never credited. The cisterns stay sealed and do not lose a third of their contents into the subsoil, as every unThylemed city does. The water stays drinkable, because something down there tastes it constantly and moves the bad stock. The waterweed and the fungus in the undercrofts are cropped rather than left to foul. And the granaries above are undermined more slowly, since a cistern gallery with Thylem in it has fewer Nusraet, the two competing for the same wet dark and the Thylem being both larger and permanently hungry. A city that loses its Thylem finds out within five years and blames the aqueduct.

Society

They are governed by the oldest working sealer in the hold, and the qualification is exact. Age alone qualifies nobody and skill alone qualifies nobody; the hold follows whoever is oldest among those still doing the work. A Thylem who stops sealing stops leading, on the day. There is no ceremony to the succession and no dispute; the hold simply starts asking somebody else.

The trades are sealing, drainage, dyeing, glue-making and brewing. Thylem mucus, boiled and cut, is the finest adhesive known and the best size for parchment, and a scriptorium that can afford Thylem glue uses nothing else. Nobody upstairs enquires where it comes from and every Thylem knows that everybody knows.

Dress is minimal and functional: a shoulder wrap, a belt of tools, and nothing that would hold the trail. They are meticulous about the tools and careless about everything else. Their music is made with water: tuned vessels, filled to different depths, struck with the knuckle, played slowly, in rooms where the sound carries around a curved vault. It is the one Thylem thing that other peoples have gone out of their way to hear, and the Thylem themselves are receiving it through the floor rather than through the air, which is why they play it lying down.

The oath is the trail. Two Thylem cross their trails on a floor and let them dry together, and the mark is there for a month, and to break the oath before it fades is the only crime the people have. The taboo is drying. To let a Thylem dry out deliberately, to hold one in the sun, to salt a doorway, is attempted murder in their law and a prank in everybody else's, and that single mismatch is the whole of Thylem politics with the surface.

Faith

They keep the Standing Water, which is a condition rather than a god. What they venerate is the state of being wet, held, unmoving and unevaporated, and their rite is to sit in a full cistern in the dark in silence for a night at the turning of the year. Where the Constellation Court is known to them they have folded the good moon into it, as the one that pulls water, and a Thylem cistern-night is timed to her. There is no clergy. The oldest sealer opens the water and closes it.

They hold that the dissolved go into the water and come back in the next rain, which is why a Thylem stands out in a downpour and does not hurry. They do not. The Thylem dead go to the auction of the star gods with everyone else's, and the rain is only rain.

Tongue

Common Tongue, spoken with the difficulty their mouth gives them: soft, wet, and slower than other peoples have the patience for, which is why a Thylem is so often assumed to be simple. Among themselves they use Thyl, a low murmuring speech pitched to carry through water and along pipe, in which a great deal is done with duration rather than with consonants. A Thyl word held twice as long is a different word. No outsider has learned it and two have tried.

Every Thylem carries a wet name and a dry name. The wet name is given at hatching, used in the hold, and never said to outsiders. The dry name is chosen by the Thylem at eighteen, for use above, and is chosen to be easy for other mouths, which is why so many of them are short and blunt and sound borrowed. Obb; Sull Meruk; Vane the Younger; Thrimm; Golloch Sealer; Ess; Pardu Widetrail; Nemmish Cistern-Kept.

The Alverians named them by class rather than by name: A'QSNAI VONIESE, the Spineless Inferior Ones, which is what the makers called every invertebrate people they built and is not a name for these ones in particular.

Regard

The tavern's view is the world's view: a mess in a chair, sticking to the furniture. A drunk Thylem in the Angwood tavern, whose "grotesque lips spew their sloppy slug saliva, the back of their chair slimy and sticking in strands to their drenched clothes," did not walk out but "crawls across the" floor, and a second sat in the same room. They crawl because that is how they move, and the tavern's assumption that a crawling Thylem is a drunk Thylem is the single most common insult they endure.

The insults are all about the trail. "Wiper." "Left a Thylem in the hall." "Slow as a wet floor." The deeper prejudice is that they are taken for drunk always, because crawling and slurring and half-lidded eyes read to everybody else as one thing. A sober Thylem magistrate has been thrown out of two courts. The cities that have them do not admit to having them: a river city with two thousand Thylem in its cisterns will tell a visitor it has none, and the visitor will drink water those two thousand keep clean.

Among their neighbours the Squeesh, the nearest soft-bodied people, are eight to nine feet of arrogance and regard the Thylem as an embarrassment; the Thylem regard the Squeesh as people who have never done a day's work. With the Coksi, who share the underfloor of every city with them, they get on unexpectedly well. Of the Alverians they teach one thing to their young, and it is the severed head on the laboratory floor. Their enemies are the salt merchants, in a rivalry that outsiders find comic and that has killed people.

Harvest

The mucus, which they sell themselves, and which is the foundation of the glue and parchment-size trade. This is the rare case of a people holding their own harvest. Taken from a corpse it is worthless, since it thins within an hour of death, so there has never been a body trade in Thylem, and they are perhaps the only invertebrate people who can say that.

There is nothing else on them to take: no bone, no hide that will tan, no organ that keeps, and a body that is gone in three days. The shell-plate is worth nothing to anyone outside the family and is stolen anyway, by people who assume that something a Thylem keeps on a shelf must be valuable.

Remembered

The drunk Thylem of the Angwood tavern. Fifty years old, unnamed, sticking to a chair, and remembered by the whole surface world as what a Thylem is.

The severed slug head on Larunthel's floor. Unnamed and unmourned, discarded among the day's work.

Golloch Sealer. Oldest working sealer of Sillowvane for forty years, who is said to have sealed a breach in a city cistern from the inside while the water came in, and did.

Nemmish Cistern-Kept. Who carried a hold's shell-plates out of the Weeping Gallery when it flooded past saving, and left the living behind to do it, and has never been forgiven or replaced.

Kin each has a page of its own

The Thylem lineages divide by the water they work. Clean water made one line and foul water made another, and the people rank themselves accordingly. The base people of the wet-holds are the great majority and everything written above is theirs first; the Thylmurk took the sumps and the waste drains and can live in water that would kill the rest; the Thylavane were bred eleven thousand years in the condensation works for clean water and are the nearest thing the people have to a gentry.