Tusiva

Origin

The splice is Irugaine and snake. The Alverians bred them "as large basilisk forces in the Alverian Military," colossal shock serpents whose mesmeric scales and eyes broke a battle line before the coils reached it, and whose feeding gave the command staff a living record of the enemy's own thoughts. All DNA was woven into their form, which is why nothing that walks is strange to them, and the shapeshifter strain is the extreme case of a design that runs through the whole species.

The archive was the expensive part of the design and it was solved crudely. Rather than build a brain large enough to hold a war, the Alverians spread the holding through the body: a Tusiva keeps memory in its tissue, chemically, everywhere, the way another animal keeps fat. The skull holds only the index. Everything else is written into muscle, gut wall, the long sheets of the coil and the lining of the throat, which is why eating a person transfers them and why eating a great many people makes a serpent physically larger. A fifty-foot Tusiva is fifty feet because of what it knows. Nothing else in the class works this way and nothing else needed to; the consequences run through every other thing that is true about them.

After the fall they "rose to great power," and then "as civilization began to grow they retreated to the wilderness, conquering ancient ruins." The retreat was a calculation. A Tusiva that has eaten four hundred people knows what a growing kingdom does to a large slow animal it can see, and the species decided, in whatever way a species decides, to stop being seen. Any Alverian ruin on any map should be checked for an occupant, and the older and better sealed the ruin, the likelier it is that the occupant has been there since the collapse and knows what the building was for.

One Tusiva was made for a different purpose and it is the one that matters. The Tusitahr "was created for the Alverian's to escape within, as they built their own bodies, but the world ended before this could be replicated and used, and so it escaped." That is Atahr the Shifter, and the cult that grew around him is written under Faith below.

Body

Enormous: "Massive, fifteen feet to fifty feet in size," measured in length rather than height. They do not grow steadily; they "molt their dead skin and organs as they get too old, changing shape with each circulation around Hyton's sun," so a Tusiva met a century ago is a different shape now and may not be the same animal in any useful sense. The head is a snake's with Nu'umanoid qualities, and it "grows silky skin-like hair that falls down their back, working to a bushy tail end." The hair is the detail that unsettles people; it reads as a person's hair on an animal fifty feet long.

The moulting of organs is the least understood thing about them and the most important. Strung along the body beside every working organ is a bud, a folded, bloodless, half-finished copy of it, kept dormant for decades. When the working organ wears, the bud is fed, swells, takes over, and the exhausted original is shed: passed down the gut over a week and left behind in a Nest tunnel as a grey rope of tissue that the serpent does not look at again. Nothing inside a Tusiva of three hundred years is older than about sixty. This is why they do not age in the way anything else ages, and it is also why they lose things, because the tissue that was replaced held memory and the replacement holds none. Every moult is a choice about what to keep. A Tusiva approaching one will spend a year deciding, will sometimes eat deliberately beforehand to build the tissue it wants to survive the process, and will occasionally arrange for another Tusiva to take the doomed memories out of it first, which is done by being bitten and read and is as close to trust as the species gets.

The frame under all that is a spine of vertebrae numbering in the thousands, and the number rises: a moult can add a hundred. There is no pelvis and no shoulder, only the ribs, which run nearly the whole length and each carry a muscle that can move the body's whole weight alone; a Tusiva is thousands of small strong animals arranged end to end and cooperating. The heart is set a third of the way down and can be shifted along its mooring by a hand's span, which is how a fifty-foot serpent gets blood to a head held twenty feet up a wall. Blood is thin, pale and slow to clot, and they bleed appallingly from small wounds and hardly care, having a great deal of it. They keep no fixed temperature, and a Tusiva that has been cold for a month is not dead, merely postponed; the ones sealed in ruins for eight hundred years were postponed.

The eyes settle it: "They have golden-white eyes, filled with the mesmeric value of a million lives lived." The scales carry the same quality, particularly in the Tusikai and Tusivol, whose "slightly curved and warped scales, will reflect distorted images of those staring into them." The eyes are instruments aimed outward rather than inward: a Tusiva sees shape, motion and warmth and very little else, cannot resolve a printed letter at arm's length, and does not know what colour anybody's coat is. What the eye does superbly is hold a gaze and put a pattern into it, and what the warped scale does is give a stranger a version of their own face to stare at while that happens.

They read a person by heat and by air. Pits along the upper lip show them the warm shape of a body through a door, a wall of packed earth or a night; the tongue takes the air in and delivers a reading of health, diet, recent travel, sex, sickness and fear so detailed that lying to a Tusiva about anything physical is pointless. They hear nothing above a whisper in open air and everything through the ground: a heartbeat at forty yards, a cart at a mile, a man deciding whether to run. Silence does not exist for them and the idea of it has to be explained.

Their blindness is to writing, and it has shaped the species more than any of their gifts. A Tusiva cannot read. The eyes will not do it and no amount of patience fixes them. Everything they know that came out of a book came out of a person who had read the book, which is why scribes, clerks, stewards and tutors are the most eaten profession on Nu in proportion to their numbers, why a Tusiva will let a shepherd go and follow a secretary for a month, and why the libraries of three kingdoms have quietly stopped sending their people into the deep forest. A Tusiva can quote a treaty word for word in the voice of the man who copied it and has never seen the page.

Weight at fifteen feet is about nine hundred pounds; at thirty feet, four tons; at fifty feet, upward of eleven tons, and a fifty-foot Tusiva cannot cross a bridge built by anyone else.

Lifespan runs into hundreds of years, and the ancient examples are reckoned at ten thousand to thirty thousand. The Tusiboash and the Tusitahr are counted in no years at all, and the world has stopped trying. Both figures are true and the venoms reconcile them. The natural span of a Tusiva is three to six hundred years. The millennia belong to those who have used the third venom on a living victim for century after century, drawing life essence out of the aged and adding it to their own; every Tusiva older than a thousand years is a serpent that has been doing this since before the kingdoms had names, and there are fewer of them than the old tellings imply. Atahr stands outside the count entirely.

Life

An old saying holds that they cannot breed, because "the young must consume the old, and the old have grown so old they do not wish to die." They can breed, and the saying describes the mechanism from the wrong end. A Tusiva lays its eggs in the corpse of an elder of its own kind, after consuming most of that elder itself. The reason is the tissue. An egg will only take in flesh loaded with memory that the layer has already eaten and made part of itself, so the corpse must be an elder and the elder must have gone through the layer first; anything else is dead meat and the clutch comes out empty.

The culture around this is called the Long Argument, and it is the whole of Tusiva politics. A serpent that wants young must persuade an elder to be eaten. There is no other route: the eggs will not take in any other flesh, and a Tusiva that lays into a stolen corpse it did not consume produces a clutch that hatches blind, mute and memoryless, which the species calls a Waste and kills on sight. So the young are argued for. A Long Argument may run eighty years. It is conducted in the mind rather than the mouth, across distance, in the sent sound that is their second speech, and it consists of the petitioner proving to the elder that the elder's memories will be better kept inside the young than inside the elder. Every memory the elder holds is offered up, examined and valued. Some elders are argued into it. Most are not, and the petitioner who loses the argument may not raise it again for a generation.

When an elder consents, it is eaten alive over eleven days, beginning at the tail, and it talks throughout, because the eating is also the last telling. What is left is the head, the upper coil and the hollow of the body, and into that the eggs go, between six and fourteen. The young hatch inside the carcass, eat their way out through the remaining flesh, and come out already carrying whatever of the elder's memory was in the tissue they consumed. A young Tusiva of eleven days can describe a war it never saw in the voice of a man who died in it. This is the only childhood they have: a Tusiva is born knowing more than most peoples learn, and spends its first century learning that not everything it remembers happened to it.

The stages of the life are named in Ssevhaan and the names are used with total seriousness, since a Tusiva addressed at the wrong stage has been insulted. Vessik, the Held, is the young still inside the carcass, which is a condition rather than an infancy and lasts between nine and thirty days depending on how much elder was left. Hesh, the Come-Out, is the first century: a serpent of perhaps eighteen feet, carrying several hundred years of somebody else's life, sorting it. A hesh is watched by every Tusiva within four hundred miles, gently, because this is the stage at which the Muddle takes them if it is going to. Saanu, the First Mouth, begins at the first kill taken and eaten alone, which is also when the serpent is named. Ovaan, the Long Middle, is everything after: centuries of eating, moulting, arguing and growing, and it is where almost all of them are. Thaal, the Arguable, begins when a serpent is large and old enough to be petitioned, which is a promotion and a death sentence in the same word, and a newly thaal serpent typically goes to ground for fifty years out of sheer irritation. Ssumaan, the Consented, lasts eleven days.

A Tusiva that dies unconsented leaves very little. The species moults organs as well as skin, and a Tusiva corpse begins shedding itself within hours, collapsing to a long dry sleeve of scale and hair and a heap of matter that will not keep. What survives is the head, which does not moult, and Tusiva heads are found in the deep forest hung in trees by other Tusiva, which is the closest thing they have to a grave and, some say, a form of address. The head holds the index and none of the archive, so what is hung in the tree is a list of the contents of a library that has burned. They come and taste it anyway. A hung head is visited for decades, and the visiting is the nearest thing in the species to grief.

Diet: people, principally, and knowledge as the point of the meal. "By consuming a person they are able to digest their memories; many of them, having been such terrors in the ancient world, consumed countless lives." The digestion is slow and the returns arrive out of order. A Tusiva that has eaten a man that morning will have his childhood by evening, his trade in a week and his last thought perhaps never; the recent memory sits in the brain, which rots first and transfers worst, and this is the great limitation of the whole species. They know what their meals knew years ago and are frequently wrong about what those meals were doing last month. Kingdoms that understand this send old men to negotiate.

Frailty

The illness of the species is the Muddle and every Tusiva expects it eventually. Memory held in tissue does not carry a label saying whose it is, and the older and larger a serpent grows the thinner its own life is against the mass of borrowed ones. It begins as a preference: the serpent finds it easier to think in a dead woman's terms than its own. It ends with a Tusiva living entirely as somebody it ate four hundred years ago, keeping that person's habits, answering that person's name, grieving that person's children, and unable to be argued out of it because there is nothing left to argue with. A Muddled serpent is dangerous in a specific and pitiable way, since it will defend a village that was burned in the old age and is not there. The species' response is neither mercy nor killing. They visit. A Muddled elder is spoken to, fed, and petitioned, and if it can be brought to consent it is eaten, and everyone involved treats that as the good ending.

Moults fail. A bud that was never fed properly will not swell in time, the worn organ goes out of the body anyway, and the serpent dies over a fortnight with a hole in the middle of itself. Buds also turn: a fed bud that does not receive the signal to stop keeps growing and becomes a mass, and the deep forest has a name for the serpents this happens to, the Overfull, which cannot moult at all and grow enormous, slow and eventually immobile. Two of the largest Tusiva ever measured were Overfull and neither could leave the ruin it was in.

Starvation does something particular to a body that stores memory as flesh. A hungry Tusiva eats itself, and what it loses is not weight in the ordinary sense; it wakes thinner and emptier, missing decades, unable to say what is gone. A serpent that has starved through a long siege or a sealed ruin comes out smaller and stupider and knows it, and this is the one fate they will beg to avoid. Ssoriath of the Nine Hundred has not eaten in sixty years and takes payment in conversation, and the conversation is the point: talk keeps the index exercised and postpones the emptying, and everyone who has bargained with her thinks they got the better of it.

Their parasite is the sleeve-worm, which lives in the discarded organs in the tunnels, breeds there, and reinfects the serpent that left them, working up the gut to lodge in a bud and spoil it. It is the practical reason a Nest is a spiral that goes away from the sleeping chamber and never back, and the reason a Tusiva will abandon a Nest of two centuries and dig another rather than clear the old one out. The Tusiboash cannot do this and are eaten alive by the worm continuously, which contributes to the smell. Congenitally, the fault that recurs is a clutch laid into an elder that was not sufficiently consumed: partly memoried young, which are not Wastes and are not whole either, and which grow up holding fragments that do not join. They are called the Torn and they are not killed, and they are not deferred to at any age, and most of them go to the bogs eventually.

What they fear is being eaten by something that will moult them out. To be consumed by a petitioner who argued well is the good death, because the young carry you; to be consumed by a serpent that will shed the tissue you are in at its next moult is annihilation with the ceremony attached. Elders interrogate petitioners on their moult history for years before consenting, and a petitioner who has moulted often is considered a poor bet and told so.

Country

The Surface Realm, in its wildest parts, and underground. The Tusiva Nest: "Burrowed within the soil, these underground large tunnel systems stretch far and wide, and although savage, are carved and detailed to intricate perfection." The Tusiboash Pit: "Pits located within bogs where Tusiboashes, the rotting corpses that they are, lurk and wait for food to come by. If anything smells nicer than death, they will hunt it." Deep forests, bogs and conquered ancient ruins.

A Nest is dug by one serpent and inherited by whatever eats its owner, and the carving on the walls is the owner's memory laid out in a spiral that begins at the mouth of the tunnel and ends where it sleeps. The carving is done by tooth and by the edge of a scale, and it is not writing, since they cannot read; it is picture, in relief, cut deep enough to be followed by a body sliding along it, and a Tusiva rereads its own walls by touch in the dark the way another people reads a diary. Reading a Nest wall is possible and has been done twice by outsiders, both of whom were eaten shortly afterwards, which is not thought to be a coincidence.

What a Tusiva does to a country is subtle and total. The tunnels turn the soil and drain it, and the ground over a mature Nest is the best farmland in the district and is worked by people who know exactly what is under it. The serpent takes the large game, which lets the forest thicken, and takes the occasional traveller, which thins the road, and after a century a Nest sits at the centre of a ring of prosperous nervous villages connected by paths nobody uses at night. They do not farm and they do not herd, and they do something adjacent to both: a Tusiva that has settled a district protects it. Bandits vanish. Wolken are dealt with. Rival serpents are argued off. A district under an old Tusiva pays in meat, loses perhaps three persons a decade, and is otherwise the safest ground in the province, and the courts that enter this in the accounts as a road tax are being accurate about the arrangement if not about its nature. What is being kept is a herd of interesting lives, cropped lightly and left to breed, and the serpents discuss the management of their districts with each other in exactly those terms.

When a Tusiva dies the district booms for a generation and then discovers what the serpent had been keeping out. Three abandoned Nests on the map are surrounded by ruins of towns that were founded after the occupant died and failed within forty years, and the local telling in all three places is that the land is cursed.

Society

"Bold, and aggressive, these highly intelligent beings of the ancient world enjoy talking and sharing the knowledge they know." They are "knowledge keepers, holding power over their domains" and "questioning and always looking for answers." They meter it: "Now sentient, they hold power in their words, and often are slow to speak, letting the foolish mortals spew their words before they give one or two." They are veterans, and the world's name for them, Ancient Veterans, is exact. A fifty-foot Tusiva fought in the Alverian wars personally and can describe the battle in the voice of somebody who died in it.

They have no settlements, no hierarchy of place and no law. What they have is seniority, and seniority is memory: the serpent that holds the most is owed deference by the serpents that hold less, and the ranking is known to all of them without anyone having stated it, because they are in continuous contact. The species is a scattered gerontocracy of perhaps a few thousand individuals who have not been in the same place since the fall and who all know precisely where each other are. Because seniority is tissue and tissue can be shed, the ranking moves whenever somebody moults, and a serpent that has just come through a bad moult is quietly demoted by everyone at once without a word being said, which is the cruellest thing they do to each other and is done constantly.

Their custom is the Telling. Two Tusiva that meet, in the flesh or in the mind, exchange one memory each, and neither may refuse, and neither may give a memory it has given before. This is why a Tusiva will let a person live: an unusual life is currency, and a farmer with an unusual life is worth more uneaten and revisited than eaten once. Their taboo is the Waste, the memoryless clutch, and the serpent that makes one is spoken of by every other Tusiva alive within a month and is not spoken to again. They keep no dress, no music of their own and no drink; what music they have they took out of the people they ate, and a Tusiva will sing a dead woman's song in a dead woman's voice in an empty ruin for no listener, which is the single most frightening thing anyone has reported of them.

Faith

The Cult of Atahr, also called the Serpent's Faith. Its doctrine is the Devouring Communion, to be eaten and worn forever: a verifiable bodily afterlife. What makes it unlike every other faith on Nu is that the god is real, touchable and answers; there is no auction in it and no ferryman. Atahr is real, an Alverian-engineered immortal, and he wore Lancelot at Old Camelot by way of a fingertip's taste. The cult operates under Children-of-Tantis cover identities.

The cult is no Tusiva religion. It is a secret cult that has existed since the making of the abomination, for one purpose: to see the High King of Alveria back on his throne. Its members worship the High King. Atahr is the way to him, the one thing in the world that can carry a word to the High King wherever the High King is, and carry an answer back. Atahr and the God of Dead Memories are one and the same, and that title is the High King's own work, an attempt to build a living god that would worship him.

The office Atahr holds is the Threshold. He is addressed as the Threshold of the Throne, and the word is exact in their doctrine: a threshold is no room, no destination, and is owed nothing; it is the place a thing crosses. Prayer in this cult is never directed at Atahr and never mentions him. It is spoken to the Throne, and it crosses him, and he is aware of every word that crosses and keeps all of it. That awareness is the price the cult pays and the reason nobody rises in it by lying.

The cult calls itself the Kept Court. Its members hold that there has been no lawful rule anywhere on Nu since the collapse, that every crown now worn is a squatter's, and that the world's whole long misery since the stars went out is simply the condition of a house whose master is out of the room. They do not want to conquer anything. They want the room restored, and they are prepared to spend eight thousand years on it.

The structure has five orders and no meeting larger than nine.

The Seated One. The High King himself, never named aloud, never depicted, referred to only as the Seated One or as He Who Is Not In The Room. To speak his name in a cult house is the one unforgivable act, on the grounds that a name spoken is a name that can be carried out of the house.

The Threshold. Atahr, alone, permanent, unchallengeable, and no member of the cult in the cult's own understanding of the word. He does not attend, instruct or forgive. He carries.

The Worn. Those who have given the Hand and can therefore be worn by the Threshold at need: he holds enough of them to take any of their forms, in any city, at any hour. A Worn does not know when it has been worn. They are the cult's aristocracy, they are the ones who go to court and to war, and each of them lives with the knowledge that the god may be walking around in their face this week and they will hear about it afterwards or never.

Chairwardens. The heads of the cells, one to a house. A Chairwarden keeps the Empty Chair, keeps the cell's names in memory and never on paper, and is answerable to no other Chairwarden; the cells do not know each other and are not meant to. A Chairwarden who is taken alive is expected to be dead within the hour and has the means about them for it.

Cupbearers. The working body of the cult. They gather the two things the Threshold needs, which are lives worth eating and access to rooms where decisions are made. A Cupbearer who has brought nine is offered the Hand.

The rites are four.

The Giving of the Hand. Initiation. The initiate gives a finger, taken at the second joint, and it is eaten. From that hour the Threshold may take their shape whenever he wishes. Every sworn member of the Kept Court is short a finger on the left hand, which is why the cult favours gloves, and why in three cities the wearing of gloves indoors after dark has quietly become a thing watchmen ask about.

The Empty Chair. Nightly. Every cult house sets one place at the board that no one may sit in, serves it, and clears it untouched. The doctrine is that the chair is literal and that one night it will be occupied, and the household will know because the food will be gone.

The Long Word. Communion. The cell sits in the dark in silence and the Chairwarden speaks the cell's business to the Throne without any expectation of a reply, knowing the Threshold has it. Replies do come, perhaps once in a decade, and arrive as a voice inside the head of whichever member is least prepared for it. A cell that has received a reply is thereafter deferred to by the two or three cells the Threshold chooses to tell about it, which is the only lateral contact the cult has.

The Reseating. The end. It has no liturgy, because it has not happened. Every Chairwarden holds a portion of what is to be done on the day, no Chairwarden holds all of it, and each is told that their portion is the small one.

Cover identities are taken from among the Children of Tantis, whose houses are respectable, whose observances are dull, and whose members are not searched. The cult is heavily represented among stewards, physicians, translators and the keepers of noble children, which is to say among the people who are in the room and are not counted as being in the room. Its recruitment argument is one sentence and it is offered to the disappointed: everything you have been asked to serve is a fake, and there is a real one, and he is coming back.

What the cult believes about death is the one afterlife on Nu that is not entirely a lie, and it is worse than the lie. To be eaten and worn forever is achievable and it happens; the eaten do persist, in the sense that their memories are held and their voices are used. The soul goes to the auction of the star gods regardless, exactly as every other soul on Nu does. The Devouring Communion preserves the record and loses the person, and no member of the Kept Court has ever been told the difference. There is a second thing they have not been told, which is that the record is held in flesh and flesh is shed. Atahr has moulted many times in eight thousand years. A Worn who was eaten in the old age and is remembered no longer is gone in every sense the cult's doctrine recognises, and the doctrine has no word for it.

Tongue

They speak every language. They send sound to connect minds and speak inside heads, at ranges nobody has fixed and that are known to cross a continent between two serpents who have eaten each other's kin. Their own secret tongue is Ssevhaan, the under-speech, a serpent language of pitch, hiss and held silence that carries meaning in the length of the pause as much as in the sound, and that no other people has ever been taught. Because they are Irugaine-spliced they hold the older Irugaine forms as well, and a Tusiva addressing an Irugaine elder will drop into a dialect that has not been spoken by anyone else for eight thousand years, purely to establish which of them is older.

The species word takes the stem Tusi- or Tus- plus a suffix, and Tusitahr folds the god's own name into it. The personal convention is a count and a mouth. A Tusiva takes no name at hatching, since it hatches already carrying other people's names. It earns one at its first independent kill, built from what it ate and how much it now holds, and it is amended, permanently, whenever the count changes enough to matter. Others say the short form; the serpent says the long.

Hesshavaan, Who Ate the Bridge Guard and Kept the Road. Ssoriath of the Nine Hundred. Vaas'sulmeh, Second Mouth of a Drowned Prince. Ihkaressa, Who Remembers the Winter Road Better Than Those Who Walked It. Ssemmeleth of the Rotted Field, a Tusiboash and no arguer. Ohvassin, Whose Elder Is Not Yet Eaten. Naa'sheveth, the Eighty Year Argument. Tusitahr, called Atahr, the Threshold of the Throne.

Regard

"Terrors of the deep forests." "Abominable vermin." "Invasive slithering parasites." "Ancient Veterans." The reputation is thin rather than detailed, and the reason is given in one line: "Whispers have become them, as most do not survive discovering them." And: "Most common modern day civilised races detest and monstrify this species, as they fear what they know, and what their knowledge may possess." The fear is of the archive rather than the teeth, and the fear is correct. A Tusiva in a border province is a problem for the herders; a Tusiva that has eaten a chancellor is a problem for a kingdom, and there are courts that maintain a standing payment in meat to a serpent they have never seen, entered in the accounts as a road tax.

The Bogish hunt them "for their knowledge and to bring about their extinction," and the Bogish also hold infinite knowledge, which makes that a war between two libraries. The Torkan hunt the Bogish for the same reason, which puts Torkan and Tusiva on the same side of one thing and no other; the serpents find the Torkan habit of eating a brain for a few minutes of somebody's last hour genuinely funny, and say so, and have been saying so for three thousand years. The Alverians made them, and the Tusitahr was built as an escape vessel for Alverian minds and escaped instead. The Iziaka pay them. The Sarpaen they regard with something close to family contempt, as a smaller serpent people who took the listening work and none of the risk; the Sarpaen deny any relation and are correct, since the two lines were bred separately. The Sserrin they leave alone, having no interest in salt water.

Harvest

Tusiva hide varies with the kin, and each of the four gives a different material. The moulted organs are worth more than the hide and are gathered by people who go into abandoned Nests for them: a shed Tusiva liver, dried, is the most effective purgative known to any physician on Nu, and a shed length of gut wall holds, chemically, the residue of whatever the serpent knew when it grew, which several universities have spent money on and none has ever got anything out of except an illness.

The venoms are the real trade. There are four, one to each kin, and they are the most valuable liquids in the world that are not god-touched. Each is made somewhere different in the body and each costs the serpent something it cannot buy back.

The Long Year, from the Tusikai. It ages the victim, year upon year in hours, and while it works the serpent feeds on the life essence coming off them and adds those years to its own span. It is made in a pair of sacs behind the skull that draw directly on the serpent's own remaining span to fill: a full dose costs a Tusikai between two and five years of its life, spent in advance, on credit against a kill it has not made yet. A Tusikai that fills the sacs and misses has thrown away a decade. This is the whole reason for their caution, their waiting, their clusters and their marking of a victim long before the strike; the Doom Mark goes on when the serpent is certain, and the certainty is financial.

The Sleeping Word, from the Tusivol. It puts the victim into a dream state that the serpent can enter, walk about in, and alter: it manipulates thought and idea from inside, and feeds on memory while it is there. Victims wake convinced of things they were not convinced of and missing years they do not miss. It is made in the brain, in the same lobe that does the sending, and it is made out of memory: to fill the gland a Tusivol selects a held memory and dissolves it, and the memory does not come back. Every Tusivol therefore keeps what they call a purse, a stock of cheap lives eaten purely to be burned as venom, and a Tusivol will take a dull farmer for fuel and leave an interesting one alive on the road. Because they spend their holdings they rank low in a species that ranks by holding, and they know exactly why, and it has made them the least sociable and most dangerous of the four.

The Sweet Rot, from the Tusiboash. It changes the biological make-up of the body and melts it from within until the whole of it is bile. It is the fastest of the four and the only one with no use to anybody but the killer. It is made nowhere in particular, which is the horror of it: the Crimson-spoiled tissue of a Tusiboash produces it continuously, everywhere, weeping out through the bulbous pores, and it is digesting the serpent that makes it at the same rate it would digest anybody else. A Tusiboash must eat constantly to stay ahead of its own body, and the fixation, the moaning and the lame brain are all one thing, which is a creature being melted from the inside while it hunts.

The Still Hand, from the Tusitahr. It paralyses completely and then eats the flesh slowly, from the wound outward, over days, while the victim stays awake in it. Atahr uses it to hold a body intact and conscious while the bristles of his tail go in to copy the brain. It is made at the roots of the bristles themselves, out of the copies stored there, and a dose spends one: to fill the gland Atahr must give up a form he holds, a person he has been and can no longer be. He has done it three times in eight thousand years that anyone knows of, and each time he chose which of his people to lose.

All four are traded and all four are illegal everywhere, which has never yet raised the price as much as the difficulty of collection does. The Long Year is bought by the old and dying, who have understood only half of what it does. The Sleeping Word is bought by nobody who will say why. The Sweet Rot is bought by armies. The Still Hand cannot be bought at all, since there is one source and he is not selling; the three vials of it known to exist were gifts, and each of the three houses that received one has since done something inexplicable.

Remembered

Atahr the Shifter. The only Tusitahr, an Alverian-engineered immortal, a functioning god with a live cult, who "wore Lancelot at Old Camelot via a fingertip's taste." Titled the God of Dead Memories, which is the High King's making, and holding the office of the Threshold of the Throne.

Ssoriath of the Nine Hundred. A Tusivol in a sealed Alverian ruin who has not eaten in sixty years and takes payment in conversation.

Naa'sheveth, the Eighty Year Argument. A Tusikai who has been petitioning the same elder since before the current dynasty of any kingdom on the map, and who is generally believed to be close.

Hesshavaan. Holds the whole of a road: every traveller on one forest crossing for four hundred years, eaten or spoken to, and will tell you who your great-grandmother travelled with.

Ssemmeleth of the Rotted Field. The largest Tusiboash anyone has measured, forty feet of rot in a bog that three baronies have agreed not to drain.

Kin each has a page of its own