Torkan

Origin

The splice is Irugaine, Nu'uman and freshwater alligator; the shorter old formula runs "Huuman + FreshWater Alligator," and the three-part making is the true one. The Alverians bred them "as the marine support in the Alverian Military to charge the land from the water and troll the great rivers and lakes for run away slaves." They were the Iziaka's "stronger militaristic commanders in the great Alverian wars." They are aggressive, near-cannibal carnivores who have spent the last age turning savagery into manners without giving up any of the savagery.

The base epithet is the Sweet Mouth, and it belongs to the river peoples rather than to the Torkan. It comes off the saying every mother on a Torkan waterway teaches: do not be deceived by their words, to a Torkan you are meat, and that will never change. The Torkan know the saying, use it themselves, and have taken the epithet as a compliment.

Their history since the collapse runs in four ages and the fourth is the dangerous one.

First, the wilderness. For centuries after the fall they were savage tribes on the waterways, with a handful of cities built on the single principle that the strongest rules, taken and retaken by whoever could hold the water gate. Nothing built in this age lasted, and the Torkan speak of it with a kind of embarrassed affection, the way a rich man speaks of a hungry childhood he is glad happened to him.

Second, the hiring. As the world grew back, the Torkan entered other peoples' armies and alliances: "Since the fall, they have continued their militaristic ways, taking to a conquering way, building their own clans. Due to blind brutish/ greed filled ways, they have fallen beneath the control of other empires, joining those who seek further blood lust and destruction across the world. They are blood hungered and politically greedy people." They conquered their way onto somebody else's payroll.

Third, the gifts. After the wars they were gifted settlements: river marches, bridge towns, delta country, the wet ground nobody else wanted to garrison, handed over in lieu of pay by kingdoms who were relieved to have somewhere to put them. Population followed the land, and standing followed the population. Every Torkan noble house on the map today can name the war its ground was paid for, and most of them keep the original grant nailed to a post at the water gate where anyone can read it, which is a boast rather than a legal precaution.

Fourth, the present: a civilised savagery. They wear the coat, they sit on the council, they keep the accounts, and they have not changed one thing about what they are. Other peoples' politics amuse them, and they play it the way new money plays at an old board: too loudly, too well, and with open enjoyment of the fact that the old houses cannot say anything. A Torkan lord will fund a cathedral, endow a school, marry his son into a viscounty, and eat a rival's steward in a private room in the same month, and will be genuinely puzzled that anyone thinks these are different kinds of act.

Body

"Hulking/ muscular forms, big guts of muscle, beneath heavily armored by their large scales." Jagged edges litter the body. The hands are webbed and sharply clawed, and the claws "have the crushing capacity of a falling tree." Colour is typically dark green and yellow-brown, with variation by strain. The face is "a blend of huuman and Alligator, creating an even more terrifying look from their ancestor lesser species." Brutius Bristletooth has "a long slender, jagged toothed snout." The Torkan are a horned species.

The soft spot is worth knowing before you fight one: "Their belly has scale plating on it, but is slightly exposed to show a softer scale surface." The back shell is near impenetrable and everything of value is on the underside. The mass is the first thing anyone notices: Torkan soldiers carry "nearly double the muscle mass" of the men around them, and Hugor "propels himself up by sheer force. His muscular gut bounces down."

The back and the jaw are one structure and this is the central fact of the species. The plate along the spine is anchored to a sheet of bone over the shoulders, and off that sheet runs the great closing muscle of the jaw, a slab of meat the size of a man's chest that comes forward over the skull and down into the lower jaw behind the ear. The armour is the anchor. Take the plate off a Torkan and the bite goes with it, which is why no Torkan has ever been lightened for speed, why the belly went soft to pay for the back, and why the strains with the heaviest shells also have the heaviest mouths. The jaw shuts with a force nothing else in the class approaches. It opens with almost none: the muscles that open a Torkan jaw are thin straps, and a strong Nu'uman with a rope and a free half minute can tie one shut and keep it shut. Every Torkan alive knows this about itself from childhood.

Everything social follows from those two sentences. Rank inside a clan is bite, measured and not guessed: every water gate of any standing keeps a bite-log, a length of banded hardwood that is bitten once a year by everyone who wants to be counted, and the depth of the mark is the ranking, and the marks are kept for generations in the hall where guests can see them. Bite is fed, since jaw muscle is built by luxury, protein and years without want, which means the log is a record of who has been eating well, which means a clan's ranking is a public accounting of its wealth, which means the person who allocates the food allocates the rank. The Torkgahr, whose jaw is a needle full of fish teeth, cannot mark a log at all and cannot be a lord anywhere. The Torkar, who "can grow up to eleven feet tall and to over 900 lbs" given "the right luxury and environmental presets," mark it deepest and rule. Against which, the jaw-tie is the ultimate humiliation and the standard end of a Torkan duel: not a killing, a binding. A lord who is tied at his own water gate and carried through his own hall is finished, and the rope is kept.

Their stillness is a matter of the blood. "Their stillness capability allows them to hold completely still for days before pouncing on their prey," and what makes it possible is a heart that drops to a handful of beats a minute and a valve that sends the blood past the lungs entirely, so a waiting Torkan is using almost nothing and is not obviously breathing. In that state they can go a season on one large meal. Coming out of it is the opposite and the two states are all they have: a flood from the glands over the kidneys takes the heart from four beats to a hundred and eighty in about two seconds, and everything the body has goes into the next ninety seconds. "It is rare to find a calmed Torkan, as many are either slow bold or hyper sharp" is an accurate description of an animal with a switch instead of a dial, and a Torkan who seems moderate is either Torkgahr or lying. The "strength of ten huumans" lives in that ninety seconds. So does the thing that kills them: the surge is hard on the heart, and a lord who rages weekly for forty years dies at sixty with a burst one, while the still ones live to a hundred and thirty. Every long-lived Torkan in the histories is a quiet Torkan, and the Coldtooths, who can hold under ice for a week, bury more grandmothers than anybody.

They breathe water and swim extremely fast; a flap at the back of the throat seals the gullet so they can open the mouth under the surface without drowning, which is the whole of their fighting doctrine in water and the reason a Torkan can bite a swimmer and keep swimming. Across the face, the jaws and the underside of the limbs sit thousands of small black domes that read pressure, and they read it at a fineness nobody landbound quite believes: a Torkan lying still in a river knows the weight, direction, speed and panic of everything moving in the water for eighty feet in every direction, in absolute dark, in mud, through weed. This is what they were made for. It is why "troll the great rivers and lakes for run away slaves" was a job description rather than a boast, and it is why no one has ever escaped a Torkan province by water, and it is why every Torkan hall is laid out so that no guest is ever seated between the host and the river, which the guests take for a courtesy and which is a sentry post. Their eyes shine in a torch and see well at night; underwater they are largely blind and it makes no difference to them. In air they hear perfectly well, which is why volume among them is a form of politeness. A Torkan who lowers his voice has stopped negotiating.

Heights run six feet in the Torkab, roughly nine in the Torksash, eight for a clan lord, and up to eleven in the Torkar, at over nine hundred pounds. Lifespan is ninety to a hundred and thirty years, base and all four strains. Weights elsewhere: a six-foot Torkab runs three hundred and forty pounds; an eight-foot lord about six hundred; a nine-foot Torksash seven hundred and fifty and soft over the plate; a Torkgahr, lighter framed for the water, four hundred and fifty at seven feet.

Life

Their breeding culture is forced. Females are subdued and held in breeding dens to bear the clan's young, and the practice is not hidden, apologised for or disputed among them. A den is a low walled compound at the back of a clan house, warm, wet, guarded, and the best-fed building on the ground; clan wealth is measured in it before it is measured in land. The females held there are taken in raids, taken in settlement of debts between clans, and increasingly bought outright from clans with more daughters than standing, which the older houses consider a decadence and the newer houses consider business.

The body makes it possible and the Torkan have built the whole system on that one weakness. A female is barely smaller than a male and bites nearly as hard, and for most of her life she is as dangerous as anything in the river. Shelling a clutch of thirty eggs takes mineral out of her own plate, and for four to six months after laying, her belly plating is soft enough to open with a claw and her jaw is weak from the same drain. She is at her most valuable and her least defensible in the same season, every season, for as long as she is kept laying. That window is the den. Keep a female laying and she never comes back out of it; let her stop for three years and she hardens, and a hardened female in a den is a disaster that has killed clan lords. The dens are therefore run on a schedule, and the schedule is the most closely kept record in a Torkan house.

It is also the root of the Bank Oath. To swear belly up, exposing the soft plate to another who lays a claw on it, is to put yourself in the position of a female four months out of the nest, and every Torkan present understands the reference exactly. That is what makes the oath binding: no other people's oath asks the swearer to be, briefly and publicly, the thing their whole society is built on holding down. An oath sworn any other way is no oath and both parties know it, which is why Torkan treaties with other peoples are worthless and Torkan treaties with each other hold.

Clutches run twenty to forty eggs, of which perhaps a dozen are allowed to hatch; the rest are eaten by the clan, at a meal that is the closest thing the Torkan have to a holy day. Which dozen is not a matter of chance. The eggs on the warm side of the nest come out male and the cool edges come out female, and the clan decides where the heat goes; a house that wants soldiers builds the nest one way and a house that wants to sell daughters builds it another, and the gullet-man who reads the nest temperature is doing the most consequential work in the building. A clan that miscalculates by a season has no heirs in twenty years, and two of the seven houses are where they are today because of a warm autumn.

Against all of that sit the matriarchs. A few females of exceptionally powerful bloodline dominate their clans, settlements or cities outright, and every spawn that comes from them carries that bloodline and its rank. A bloodline matriarch has not escaped the den; she is a female whose line is so valuable that the den was built around her and then handed to her. She chooses her own mates, holds them at her pleasure, has them killed when she is done, and no male in the clan will contest it, because his own standing is her arithmetic. There are perhaps eleven true matriarchs in the world. Two of them rule cities. A Torkan clan with a matriarch outranks a clan without one regardless of numbers, land or arms, and clans without one spend generations trying to steal a daughter of a line that has one. What a matriarch actually controls, underneath the ceremony, is the feeding: she says who eats, the eating makes the jaw, the jaw makes the rank, and so the ranking of every male in the clan is a thing she has been building since they came out of the nest. They all know it. It is why no lord contests her and why the eleven of them are, between them, the most powerful persons in the wet country.

The young come out of the nest at three, fight for position for ten years, and are counted adult when they hold a stretch of bank alone for a season. Diet is meat, including people, openly and by preference; they eat Nu'umans, Do'urssans and Lathonians without comment from anyone present. Hulkor's boast of tearing "open a Do'urssah's skull and slurp his memories" is literal, and it is a boost rather than nourishment: eating a fresh brain gives a Torkan a short hard surge of the dead thing's recent memory, minutes of it, vivid and disordered, followed by a headache and nothing kept. They use it on the field, on prisoners, at the moment it matters, and a good clan interrogator does not question a man at all; he waits until the man is nearly dead and then finds out directly. It teaches them nothing old, which is the whole difference between them and the Tusiva and the reason the Tusiva find them funny.

Frailty

The burst heart kills more Torkan lords than any enemy. The surge that gives them the strength of ten is paid for out of a heart that was built for four beats a minute, and the bill comes in around the sixth decade for those who have lived loudly; a lord drops in his own hall between one roar and the next, and his clan says he died of himself, which is a compliment. The still strains outlive the loud ones by forty years, and the whole of Torkan gerontology is the observation that the quiet ones are still here.

The fourth age brought them a new disease and they are extremely embarrassed about it. Cloth over the plate traps damp against a hide that was built to dry in the sun twice a day, and what grows under a Torkan lord's good coat is a spreading grey fungus of the plate seams called lord's rot, which softens the anchor sheet, which weakens the jaw, which drops a lord down his own bite-log. It is treated by physicians who are very well paid and never introduced, it is the reason a Torkan hall is kept hotter than any guest finds comfortable, and it is quietly understood that the coat, the gold and the council seat are costing the species its bite. The Torkab, who work half naked in the reeds, do not get it.

Teeth replace throughout life, a new one rising under each old one for as long as the jaw is fed, so a Torkan is never toothless and an old Torkan's mouth is as good as a young one's. That is why the head goes on the claim-post: the teeth are the proof of the clan, countable and unfakeable, and a post with a young skull on it is read by every passing clan as a house that could not spare an elder. What does wear out is the jaw hinge, which grinds and then seizes in the very old, and a lord who cannot fully close is hidden from visitors.

The Torkar carry the congenital faults and carry them because of the luxury clause. Eleven feet at nine hundred pounds requires a childhood of unbroken plenty and a bloodline kept narrow enough to be worth feeding, and the narrowness tells: bowed spines, a hip that fails at forty, and a joint disease of overfed heirs that comes on in the twenties and is treated by feeding them more. A Torkar heir who is ill is still fed, because a small Torkar is no Torkar. What a bad year does to this species is therefore very precise. Famine does not kill Torkan; they can go a season on a meal. Famine stops an heir growing, and an heir who finishes at eight feet is a clan demoted for a generation, and a clan demoted for a generation sells its ground. Every Torkan house on the map can name the lean year that cost it a rank, and House Rendmaw, founded by a Torkab, exists because a great house once had three lean years in a row.

The parasite that specialises in them is a fluke of still water that lodges under the belly plate and ulcerates it, which is survivable and which softens exactly the surface the Bank Oath exposes, so a Torkan with the belly fluke cannot swear and cannot be sworn to and must sit out of clan business until it clears. And the thing they fear, which they will not discuss with outsiders and joke about constantly with each other, is the rope. To be tied at the jaw is to be made harmless by a person weaker than you in under a minute, and there is no Torkan alive who has not had the dream.

Country

The Surface Realm, along every waterway: rivers, lakes, coasts, mangroves and bogs. Northmarch in the Kingdom of Corbenic is Torkan-ruled and is the seat of House Bristletooth; Brutius Bristletooth is "son of the ruling lord of Northmarch." Beyond it lie the river realms of the Torkgahr, the coastal reaches held by the Torksash, and the gifted settlements of the delta and the bridge country.

The Torkan Perimeter is their claim marker: "Pikes made from the bones of whichever species they had taken over, with several skulls piled up on top, and a head of one of their fallen brethren speared through its top; this marks a region that has been claimed and should not be ventured within." They spike one of their own dead at the top of every claim.

The settlement pattern is the water gate: a clan house built half in the river, with the hall above the waterline and the sleeping and breeding quarters below it, entered by swimming. Guests are received above. Anyone taken below is no guest. The gifted settlements have grown proper towns around these houses, with quays, markets, tanneries and a wet-ground trade in fish, reed, salt and bridge tolls, and the town is always laid out so that every street ends at the water.

A century of Torkan tenure changes a river permanently and mostly for the better, which is the awkward thing about them. They are the finest wet-ground engineers on Nu and they became so by living half under the water they were managing: a people who can feel a current with their faces and work for hours on a riverbed in the dark builds levees, weirs, fish traps, revetments and bridge piers that nobody else can match, and the bridge towns they were given as a dumping ground are now the only reliable crossings in three kingdoms. They also strip the water. The great river fish go first, then the turtles, then the eels, and a mature Torkan province runs on penned fish and farmed reed because the wild stock has been eaten out within two generations of their arrival. They tend the pens ferociously and steal each other's. What they have half-tamed is the river itself; what has half-tamed them is the bridge toll, which turned a raiding people into an accounting one inside four generations and is the single biggest cause of the fourth age.

When Torkan leave a country, the levees go. Nobody else maintains the underwater work because nobody else can do it without draining the channel, and a delta that loses its clan houses floods within fifteen years. Two abandoned Torkan marches are now open water with the tops of claim-posts still standing in them, and the local peoples row out to them and do not land.

Society

Clans. Lords address each other as Lord. Named houses run as father-and-son units. They are "intelligent, yet bold and brutish." "They are an old species, and know what they want, and often claim it without negotiation." And there is no middle register: "It is rare to find a calmed Torkan, as many are either slow bold or hyper sharp." Class runs on strain and the strains do not mix roles: Torkab are the working and peasantry class, Torksash run coastal extortion, Torkar are the near-extinct ruling nobility, Torkgahr are the river-realm strain with refined combat skill.

Cannibalism and predation are conversational. "Let's get some meat, boys!" "I'd take a bite into Lord Grey if 'e wasn't so damn smelly!" "before I get hungry, DIG!" Hulkor rips the face off an old prisoner and says "Much better..." The war cry is fixed and it is the sound the riverbank makes before an ambush: "WE TAKE TO THE RIVER, BOYS!" and the Torkans join in a roaring chant after him. Their ordinary register is rough, clipped and loud, and what a Torkan shouts down at a captive in the water is not repeatable; "A stinky vermin e' is!" is the polite end of it.

What has changed in the fourth age is the dress and the paperwork. A Torkan lord keeps a scribe, usually an Iziakan Ink Scale, paid extremely well and never insulted, because the accounts are the instrument by which he beats the old houses at their own board. He wears cut cloth over the plate, gold on the horns, and a coat he does not need in a climate he does not need it in. He hosts. He is a superb host: the food is enormous, the drink is strong, the entertainment is expensive, and every guest is seated above the waterline and knows it.

Their drink is bank-rum, a black molasses spirit brewed in the delta towns, drunk from the horn; their music is drum and horn and the low chanting of the clan lines, sung at speed, with the names of the eaten in the third verse. Their oath is the Bank Oath, sworn belly up: the swearer lies on his back and exposes the soft plate to the one he swears to, who lays a claw on it. Their taboo is short: never eat a matriarch's spawn, never break a claim-post, never lie to a clan-brother about food, never tie a jaw outside a formal duel, and never, on any account, swear the Bank Oath and mean it lightly, since the one who takes the oath is entitled to open the belly he was shown.

Six houses stand beyond the Bristletooths, each a crude tribal name that hardened into a noble one, and each with the history that made it.

Marrowjaw. Took their name in the wilderness age from the practice of cracking and eating the long bones of everyone they killed, on the belief that a people leave no ghost if you finish the marrow. They hold bridges now, and their toll is coin like anyone else's, and the bone yard behind the water gate is still in use and the town has stopped asking about it.

Kettletooth. A coastal house that made its first money boiling captured crews alive in ship kettles and selling the fat back to the ports as lamp oil. They are the wealthiest Torkan house in the world, they own three shipping concerns under other peoples' names, and their crest is a kettle, which every harbourmaster on the coast pretends not to understand.

Gallowtooth. Grew out of a tribe that hired itself to a kingdom as executioners because it was the only trade that paid to do what they wanted to do anyway. Nine generations of hangmen, and the family still supplies the gallows staff of two capitals; the joke in both is that the Gallowtooths are the only officials who never take a bribe, which is true, because they would rather do the work.

Rendmaw. The one house founded by a Torkab, which the others have never let them forget and which is the reason they fight so much. They took their ground by killing every Torkar in a river province across one night, an act no clan has repeated, and their standing rests entirely on the fact that everybody remembers it.

Ashgullet. A delta house that survived an ash winter by eating its own dead and then its own living, in an order decided by the matriarch, and came out the far side with a bloodline the other clans now pay heavily to marry into. Ludda Ashgullet is the great-granddaughter of the woman who did the deciding, and keeps the list.

Coldtooth. The house that went north when no Torkan goes north, took a frozen river nobody wanted, and learned to hold still under the ice for a week at a time. They are the quietest Torkan alive, they are the only clan other clans are afraid of, and they have never once broken a Bank Oath, which the rest of the species finds more unsettling than the ice. Cold slows the heart they were already slowing on purpose, and a Coldtooth in winter runs at a beat a minute and is, functionally, a piece of the riverbed with opinions.

Faith

They align to a Void Prince, whichever fits, and the fit is appetite. Torkan clans worship the Prince of the taken thing under a name of their own: Ghar'oth the Full Mouth, who does not create, does not build and does not promise, and whose only doctrine is that what is inside you is yours and everything else is somebody else's until you deal with that. Which Prince of the Court wears the face of the Full Mouth is a thing no gullet-man has ever needed to know. Their clergy are clan-priests called gullet-men, who are the clan's butchers as well, and the two offices have never been separate. The gullet-man also keeps the nest temperature, sets the hatching, holds the bite-log and reads the marks, which makes him the only person in a Torkan house whose work touches every part of it, and he is chosen young, from the Torkab, and never permitted to breed. There is no temple. The rite happens at the claim-post.

That is the meaning of the fallen brother speared at the top of the Perimeter, which no outsider has ever understood: the head is an offering and a receipt. The clan gives the Full Mouth one of its own at the boundary of every new claim, on the doctrine that a claim not paid for is a loan. The bones beneath are the conquered, who are no offering and count for nothing; the brother at the top is the price. A clan that takes ground without spiking one of its own is held by every other clan to have stolen it, and the ground can be taken back off them without dishonour.

Their afterlife is that the Full Mouth eats the dead and that is all. There is no reward in it and none is expected. The truth, which they would not much mind, is that their souls go to the auction of the star gods with everyone else's.

Tongue

Common Tongue, spoken in a rough dialect with dropped aitches and clipped endings. There is no separate Torkan language and there never was; the Alverians did not give them one and they have never felt the lack, holding that a people who need a private tongue are a people planning something they cannot say out loud. What they have instead is the water speech, a set of tail slaps, bubble bursts and jaw claps used under the surface, which carries perhaps forty meanings and all of them are about hunting. It works because of the face domes rather than the ears: a slap is felt rather than heard, and a Torkan hunting party spread across half a mile of river coordinates by pressure alone, in silence, in mud, which is the thing that makes them impossible to fight in their own water.

The rule is a hard two-syllable given name, often ending in -or or -en, followed by a jaw-themed clan name, and every clan name in the world is a tooth or a maw compound.

Hulkor Bristletooth, clan lord of Northmarch. Largen Bristletooth, his father. Vorgen Marrowjaw, a bridge lord of the middle water. Braeken Kettletooth, a coastal captain of the extortion houses. Gharruk Gallowtooth, a gullet-man and butcher of three claims. Osher Rendmaw, a Torkab foreman who bought his own name. Ludda Ashgullet, bloodline matriarch, ruler of a delta city. Sethka Coldtooth, bloodline matriarch, who has outlived four consorts.

Regard

"Monsters." "Cruel and without care." "Fast to talk, even faster to bite." The sound of a river turning dangerous is "TORKANS?! HERE?!" and the resigned local wisdom is that "The Torkan be safe within the river." The Lathonian Akkanar dismiss them as "a few reptiles," moments before it stops being true. In the courts they are laughed at behind the hand for their coats, their gold and their volume, and invited to everything, because a Torkan lord pays for the evening and because the alternative is not inviting him.

The Iziaka were their subordinates in the wars and "hold distaste and revelry towards them." The Vultari are mercenary allies: the Torkan serve the Trikarian Company under Lord Marshal Hedrik Karkos, contracted by Lord Steward Harold Grey of Camelot, and the alliance is not solid; they are "already privately planning to flip; their loyalty has a price tag," and "Torkans aren't trusted by the Vultari rank-and-file." Hulkor puts it himself: "I'd sooner make amends with Lancelot's loyalists than lose our heads to Arthur. My new oaths be damned," and "burn every single river settlement to the ground." The Lathonian are prey and the mismatch is enjoyed: a Lathonian woman taken in the water is entered in the day's talk with an insult that will not be repeated here, and then the observation that a cat in water is an odd sight. The Bogish are hunted, alongside the Tusiva, "for their knowledge and to bring about their extinction." The Do'urssan are eaten. The Sserrin are the one people the Torksash houses will not cross, since a sea-serpent people that holds the shipping lanes can end a coastal extortion house in a season, and the two have an arrangement that both call an alliance and neither trusts; what actually holds it is that fresh water ulcerates a Sserrin and salt water is no place to wait in the mud, so neither can invade the other and both have known it for a thousand years.

Harvest

Torkan plating: "Pulled from their bodies, their jagged thick plate scaling is highly sought after as it is near impenetrable." Torkab scaled bone is reckoned denser than horse-iron. Back plate is the most valuable armour material of the reptile class, priced above the hardest Iziaka hide and below Iziakinie; belly plate is worth a tenth of it and is bought by people who want to say they have some. Claws are made into tools. Torkar plate, from a strain that is nearly gone, is not sold; the three known suits of it are royal gifts and the Torkar know exactly where all three are.

The other things that come off a Torkan are the jaw muscle, dried and sold as a strengthening food by charlatans in four ports, and the face domes, which are cut out as a sheet and sold to instrument makers who use them as a pressure membrane; a drum skinned with Torkan face is the only drum that will sound properly under water, and the Sserrin buy every one that is made. The teeth are worthless in quantity because they never stop coming, and a bag of Torkan teeth is the standard cheap fake sold to travellers who want a story.

Legality is not the issue. Supply is. Nobody skins a living Torkan, and a dead one is usually eaten by his clan before he is cold, so almost all Torkan plate on the market came off a battlefield the clan lost, which means every piece of it is a public record of a defeat and the clans buy it back at a loss whenever it surfaces.

Remembered

Hulkor Bristletooth. Clan lord, eight feet tall, marine-lord in the Vultari siege under Karkos, openly planning to break his oath.

Largen Bristletooth. Father of Hulkor and of the house's standing. A noble and an epic warrior of horrible deeds, and the reason the Bristletooths hold Northmarch at all. He took the march in a single winter war remembered chiefly for what was found in the granaries afterwards, spiked two of his own brothers at the claim-posts because one was not thought enough for ground that size, and is alive, very old, and kept above the waterline in a warm room where nobody goes without being sent for. He is kept warm because the jaw has begun to seize, and a lord who cannot close his mouth is not shown.

Hugor Bristletooth. Son of Hulkor. Backhands a man and shatters "his entire face to a bloodied pulp."

Brutius Bristletooth. Son of the ruling lord of Northmarch, with "a long slender, jagged toothed snout."

Trikarian Officer Braken. A Torkan serving in the Vultari company.

Ludda Ashgullet. Bloodline matriarch, ruler of a delta city, keeper of the list from the ash winter, and the only Torkan in the world other clans send gifts to without being asked.

Kin each has a page of its own