Vultari

Origin

The splice is Nu'uman, Irugaine and vulture. Under Alveria they walked the fields behind the armies and carried what lay there to the rendering works that turned flesh into fuel, and they were good at it, and they were fed on what they carried. Eight thousand years later the appetite is still the whole institution and the facilities are gone.

When the empire fell they took no ground. "This outcast tribe of Vulture-huumanoids (Vultari) took claim to no land, instead becoming blood-thirsty nomads and raiders known as 'Bloodbeaks'," working out of "the wilder provinces of Tyberia." They raided for two ages and allied with monsters to do it, and the alliance ended the way such alliances end. The Imperial Diet finished them at Trikar Valley. "Betraying them, the monsters fell upon their people during the night, and at dawn, the Imperial army cornered the survivors. Their entire race was taken in shackles."

Then centuries of forced labour under the Akkanar empire, and inside that labour the Vultari built the only institution they have ever kept. Halron the First "passed down the rite of kingship over their tribe to his son by burning their royal amulet into his flesh, all that they had kept from their past. This amulet was passed down from father to son for hundreds of years, as the Vultari grew in anger in their enslavement." A kingship that cannot be confiscated, because it is a scar.

Eighty years before the Pyre, on the day of a double solar eclipse, the slaves rose. "Without Hyton to guard the world, the stars offered up their mightiest magics to even the uninitiated." Most of the people died in the rising. The survivors ran into the trees: "Fleeing into the forests of the Irugaine, they pleaded for asylum and were granted it." Four generations grew up under Irugaine sufferance, and the fifth came out as soldiers for hire.

Hedrik Karkos "did something his people had never done before: he helped a king, free of any immediate charge." He held Camelot "when all other noble houses fled." Arthur made him Lord Marshal and "gave them land, and a city to reside over within his great duchy of Brenmor, named Bleakstone, a place fitting for the training of his company and the future empire's army." Eight thousand years after they were built to carry corpses off a field, the Vultari own a city, and the first thing they dug there was a shaft.

Body

Tall, hunched, and starving-looking whatever they have eaten. "Their long, lengthy, black-white feathered stalkers that have hunched backs, building down to their sickly bony figures. Husked, lean muscled bodies, relying on quick agile movements. Long arms, sickly claws, dry, droopy skin covered in warts, tumors and scratchy feathers."

The neck is the tell. It is "long, slender and arched," folding back on itself at a right angle, so that a Vultari at rest reads as a hook of bone and feather and a Vultari lunging reads as a spring let go. The fold is not held by muscle. Three of the cervical vertebrae carry a notch and a lip that seat into one another when the neck is drawn back, and the neck locks there and stays locked at no cost, which is why a Vultari sentry can stand in a doorway for six hours without shifting and why the first thing a nervous traveller does in a Trikarian camp is check whether the birds along the wall are alive.

The skull behind the beak is mostly nose. The upper vault is a labyrinth of thin scrolled bone carrying an olfactory sheet the size of a cloak folded small, which is the organ behind the claim that they can "smell blood one hundred miles away." The intake sits high, above and behind the nostril slits, which is why they sniff constantly with the beak tipped up, a gesture other peoples read as arrogance and which is simply breathing. What they smell is not blood as such. It is the particular sourness of a body that has been dead between one and four days, and the detection of it is so far beyond the rest of the world's senses that the Vultari have never understood why anyone needs scouts.

The beak is worn down and jagged from use and not from any tool, because the keratin of it grows continuously, a hand's breadth a year, and must be ground back against bone. This is the hinge on which the whole people turns. A Vultari that is not cracking marrow is a Vultari whose beak is closing over, and a beak left ungrounded for a season overgrows across the mouth until the creature cannot open it. Starvation among these people does not kill by hunger. It kills by the jaw sealing shut, slowly, in full view of everyone, and every Vultari alive has watched it happen to somebody. That is what stands behind the taboo on waste, behind the shared ration, and behind Officer Braken splitting a soldier through spine and sinew over a carcass and shouting "When one starves, we all starve!"

Among the elite, "their beaks bathed permanent red with blood" is rank made visible. The red is not paint and cannot be faked with any dye the market sells; it is staining driven into the keratin by feeding often on fresh warm kills, and it fades in a matter of weeks on cold meat. An officer who lets the red fade has not killed recently and everybody can see it, and is understood to be finished. Elrok Skriftos carried a "reddenned beak, worn and weathered from recent battles, with many cruel jagged shards to tear into people."

The gut is the other engineered organ. "Due to their complex digestive system, built for such consumption, they can withstand untold rot and still trek on." The crop is walled in horn and runs acid enough to strip bone white in a night, and below it the intestine carries a flora that would kill anything else that hosted it. Nothing a Vultari eats can poison it. What comes out of that gut and onto the teeth and claws is a different matter: a Vultari bite or a deep scratch goes septic within two days in a body that is not Vultari, and the peoples who fight them fear the small wounds more than the large. Surgeons in three kingdoms take the whole limb on principle.

The frame is hollow bone and sinew and almost nothing else. They squawk. They grind their beaks when angry, a sound the Nu'uman soldiery describe as a knife on a whetstone in the next room. They fight fast rather than heavy, "agile, fast combat skills," and they are hopeless in a grapple, which is why their kit is what it is: reach, barbs and something to hold a body at a distance. The claws are hooked for tearing and poor at gripping, which is the reason the trident handles are wrapped in rubber.

Males and unfed females stand five feet to six and a half. The brood-females are not the same creature: "eight feet tall and massive in bulbous size, being breeding engines for their ageing senior population." A lean male carries little more than a Nu'uman of his height, around a hundred and forty pounds, and almost all of it is sinew and hollow bone; a fed brood-mother deep in her decades below ground may pass six hundred. They live ninety to a hundred years, and a Vultari knows from early manhood what the last ten of those will be and how they will end.

Life

The lifecycle is the culture and there is nothing else underneath it. "They spend their last 10 years having children, before their corpse is feasted upon by their children. The females of their race are eight feet tall and massive in bulbous size, being breeding engines for their ageing senior population; the mother and her children feast on the dying fathers corpse as he reaches his death date (Sometimes they kill him sooner)."

A brood-mother is made and not born. Every Vultari female carries the capacity and none of them shows it, because the change is triggered by one thing only, which is being fed more than a body can use for more than a season. Under that load the pelvis unfuses along a seam that in every other people closes before birth, the sternum spreads, the gut wall stretches past recovery, and the leg bones, which are hollow and were never sized for it, begin to bow. Within three years she cannot carry herself. Within five she cannot turn over unaided. The transformation runs one way and there is no arrangement in the world, medical or magical, for reversing it. Nobody locks a brood-mother in. She goes down the shaft at the height of her strength, on her own feet, knowing precisely what the feeding will do, and the shaft is the last thing she ever climbs.

The dens are underground and putrid. A den is a pit with one shaft, cut beneath a nest-hold or beneath whatever ground a tribe holds long enough to trust. From the day she goes down she is fed from above and does nothing else. The corpse-collectors throw down what the tribe has gathered, the dead of the battlefield, the dead of the road, the dead of the tribe, and she eats and swells and lays. She will lay in clutches of twenty and thirty for thirty years or more, and the eggs hatch in the warm rot, and the young eat what falls, and by the time the first of them are fledged there are hundreds in the dark, all of one mother and of the several old males who went down the shaft in their last decade to sire them.

The fathers do not come up either. A male who has gone down lives out his last years among his own young in the filth, and they know his voice, and they keep count. When his death date arrives, or when the mother decides that it has, they take him together. The eating is the leave-taking. On the morning after it the shaft is opened, and the young climb into daylight for the first time, and from that hour they belong to the tribe and not to her.

They come up half blind. Years in a sealed pit under the ammonia of standing rot scald the eye, and a new-climbed Vultari sees shapes and light and nothing finer for most of a season, which is exactly the season it spends carrying, digging, stripping and fetching for the camp by smell and by touch. The people do not regard this as an affliction. They regard the first clear morning as the start of a life, and a Vultari can usually name the day.

A Vultari fledged in a pit is grown in a war-camp. There is no schooling and no childhood that any other people would recognise; the young carry from the week they can walk, and are given a beak-blade at about nine years and are expected to have used it by ten. They are grey by seventy. There is no age of honour among them and no council of elders, because the elders are underground. To be old is to be owed a den.

They eat anything that has died, and they do not exclude the peoples of the world: "Nu'uman soldiers for dinner!!" Karkos eats raw, "usually from an intelligent creature," and slurps down a captive's eyes after gouging them out. A tribe on the march carries no rations. It carries salt, and the ability to wait.

Frailty

The beak closing is the death every Vultari fears and most of them have seen. It comes in famine, in a long siege, in a winter camp with nothing but frozen forage, and it comes to the old fastest because the grinding surface has already worn back to the soft layer. A tribe will feed an overgrown beak by hand for a while, pushed past the lip in strips, and then it will not.

The gut that cannot be poisoned turns on them when it is breached. An internal wound in a Vultari floods the body with a flora built to digest carrion, and the death that follows takes two days and is spoken of in the camps in a particular flat way. This is also why Vultari very rarely bite one another in a quarrel and settle everything with edges instead, a restraint outsiders take for discipline.

The den is a disease in itself. Lung-rot from the ammonia, blindness that does not fully clear, a wasting of the leg in young that grew up without space to run, and, in every generation, a handful of hatchlings that never straighten. The brood-mother's own end is the plainest thing in the record: the bowed legs finally give, the weight settles on the gut, and she suffocates under herself over a week, surrounded by her own young, who are waiting.

And there is the Crimson. A tribe that camps too long on blighted ground begins to turn, slowly, over generations, and the turn shows first in a brother going quiet and then in the flesh going red. They have no word for pity and use the phrase "he went red," and they say it about a brother the way other peoples say a man died at sea.

Country

The Surface Realm. VultanHold is "the great nest of the Vultari where most, if they can make it, go to die and breed to continue their population." It is a destination and not a capital. It is the oldest den and the deepest, and every brood-mother in the world is descended from a female who came out of it, and the pedigree is recited before a new den is opened. A Vultari who feels his decade beginning will walk across a continent to be eaten there, and those who cannot make the walk are eaten at home and their skulls are carried to VultanHold by whoever is going that way.

The wilder provinces of Tyberia were the raiding ground of the Bloodbeak centuries: broken upland, poor law and long roads. Trikar Valley is the tomb, the shackling and the name the modern company carries. Bleakstone in the duchy of Brenmor is the present, Arthur's gift, a training city and the seat of House Karkos. Bleakstone was built for stone barracks and drill yards, and the Vultari accepted the stone and then dug beneath it, so that the city Arthur gave them sits on a den it does not know about.

What a Vultari presence does to a country takes about a decade to show and about forty years to undo. They clear a field completely, which sounds like a service and is not, because the crows, kites, wolves and pigs that lived off the dead of a war-torn province starve and move out, and they do not come back while the camp stands. The next plague year arrives in a country with no scavengers in it, and the bodies lie where they fall until somebody pays the Trikarian Company to come and deal with them, which is a business the Company understands perfectly. The ground itself goes sour under a long camp; the salt they carry, the lime of the bone middens and the ammonia of the pit kill a pasture for a generation, and a farmer can walk out a Vultari winter camp fifty years after the fact by the shape of the bare patch.

Society

Slave memory, organised as an army. The modern institution is House Karkos, motto "THE FEAST IS OURS," and its arm the Trikarian Company, "his band of dark Vultari mercenaries." The ranks are Lord Marshal, Trikarian Officer, Crimson Knight, Guard, Corpse Collector and Lab Assistant. Discipline is summary and public.

They are "hoarders of wealth and conquered treasures," and "strategic and cunning" about acquiring more. The sentence that sums the people is "No remorse for who is killed; men, women, cripples, children, it matters not."

Kit: "viciously sharp black plate armour"; a large barbed trident with rubber-wrapped handles; a prodding rod; a tank of one hundred tri-headed electric eels kept as a power source. Karkos's helm is old bone fortified with metal. The register of their speech is low, wet and cheerfully obscene, and the greater part of what the field records preserve of it is not repeatable; the printable end of it runs to "Smells fine t' me." They squawk when they laugh.

The dead are carved. When a Vultari dies above ground the tribe strips him within the hour, and the stripping is done by the corpse-collectors while the rest stand and name him. The long bones go to the armourers and become the ribs of plate and the hafts of spears, and they serve because a Vultari long bone is a hollow tube with a strut lattice inside it, light and stiff and already the right shape. The beak is set into a helm or a gauntlet as its striking edge. The skull becomes a drinking cup or the crown of a helm. The feathers are sewn into cloaks and hackles that carry the tribe's pattern and the wearer's rank. The flesh goes down the shaft. A Vultari soldier in full kit is a walking ossuary of his own line and can name every piece he wears and say who wore it before him, and Karkos's bone helm is his father's skull-plate with a smith's iron over it.

The law that follows is absolute and has no exception. An outsider found with Vultari feather, beak or bone is killed on sight and the thing is taken back, because it was somebody's father.

They drink a sour spirit fermented in gut-skins and call it black wine, and they drink it hot. Their music is a rasping barked chant over a drum headed in stretched hide and rimmed in teeth, sung in ranks and stamped rather than clapped. Their oath is sworn on the beak, in the form Karkos uses: "By the sharpened beak of every Vultari under my command." Their custom before a battle is to open the nearest den and eat, so that the company goes into the field full and stinking, and their custom after one is to count the enemy dead aloud before touching any of them. Their taboo is waste. A Vultari who leaves meat on a field is beaten, and one who leaves a Vultari body on a field is killed.

Faith

The Vultari have the only WildKin religion set down entire. "A secret Vultari religion grew around the wielder of the amulet. He became known as the Haldornak, the herald of feasts. It was he that was prophesied to bring the Vultari people out of slavery back into the greatness of their ancestors. After winning their freedom, they would pillage and punish the entire Empire for their transgressions. They would feast upon the Empire's carcass." Hedrik Karkos wears the amulet, and the brand under it, and is the Haldornak of this age.

Older than the Haldornak, and beneath him, the faith is tribal and cannibal, it promises no afterlife of any kind, and it is aligned to a Void Prince. The Prince is the one whose aspect is hunger, the maw that closes on everything and is never filled. The Vultari do not speak his name and hold that they were never given it. They call him the Open Beak, and they hold that the world is inside him already and that eating is agreement.

The rite is the feast, and every feast is the rite; there is no separate ceremony and no temple. The clergy are the corpse-collectors, who decide what is carved and what goes down the shaft, and who say the only prayer the people have, which is a plain recitation of what is being eaten and whose it was. A collector who says the list wrong is buried in the den alive, which is understood as a promotion of a kind.

There is no heaven in the teaching and no punishment either. A Vultari who dies is eaten, what was him is distributed through the tribe, and the tribe walks on carrying him. That is the whole of the doctrine of continuance and the people find it sufficient. The Haldornak cult sits on top of this without contradicting it: the herald does not promise a world after, he promises a meal in this one, and the meal is the Empire.

The truth of it is that they were closer than most. The worldly gods have no afterlife realms and every afterlife those faiths promise is make-believe. The void gods have realms, and the Open Beak has one, and no Vultari has ever gone there. Every Vultari soul that has ever gone down a shaft has gone where all souls go, to the soul auction of the star gods, and has been sold. No Vultari has ever suspected it and no Vultari would be much troubled by the news.

Tongue

Vultarian is a vulture bird-speak, a tongue of rasps, clicks, beak-grinds and squawks that carries across a battlefield and cannot be whispered, which is a fact of some consequence in a people who conspire constantly and must do it in Common. To every other people they speak Common, and they speak it with the low camp register the field records preserve.

Naming is hard and short: a given name of two syllables, often with a harsh surname; given names favour K, R and hard T, and surnames end hard or hiss. The attested are Halron the First, Hedrik Karkos, Elrok Skriftos, Braken and Lokan. In the same pattern: Torvak Hesskir, Ruknar, Drathe Vorkos, Halven Skarn, Brekka, Otrik Vesskal, Karnok Drelth, Hessa Kroun. A Vultari's surname is his den's name and not his father's, since a Vultari knows his mother's shaft and rarely knows which of the old males below was his.

Regard

"Cruel and Vicious." "Disgusting, filthy, blood covered creatures." "Vulturemen; corpse eaters, the lot of them." "An extinction of their kind is long overdue," which is said to their faces in the field. House Akkanar calls them "the birds" and "VULTURE FILTH." The Torkan lord Hulkor Bristletooth, who likes them, greets Karkos by name and with a coarse endearment not fit to set down. And the line that governs how a kingdom is read by its neighbours: "Only the foulest of kings and queens hire them within their armies; this is usually a sign of dark times to come."

Villages downwind of a Vultari camp know it a day before the outriders arrive, and the smell is described in the same three words across four provinces. Among quartermasters the Trikarian Company has a professional reputation that nobody says out loud: they never desert, they never loot food, and they cost less to feed than any other company in the field.

The crown of Camelot is their patron, and Arthur made Karkos Lord Marshal of Brenmor. House Akkanar is the enemy, and the Company is besieging Arkenfell, and the heir of Akkanar is dead. Clan Bristletooth are allies of convenience, Torkan mercenaries serving under the Company and not trusted by it. The Irugaine are owed a debt for the asylum after the revolt, and nothing has ever called it in. The Mekuhlian are the only people who buy from the Vultari without haggling and the only people the Vultari sell to without cheating, since a rendering house on the Dead Continent wants exactly what a Vultari camp has too much of.

Harvest

Rotten Vultari Mystery Meat: "various tumour and disease riddled flesh used for dark apothecary arts." It is the only harvest they will sell, and the reason they can sell it is that the tumours and warts of the hide are a normal product of a body that spends its life shoulder-deep in carrion. A Vultari trims himself. What comes off a living one is the same article as what comes off a dead one, and the corpse-collectors stall it at market with the tribe's mark on the wrapping.

Feather, beak and bone are never traded, never given and never legally held by an outsider. The Vultari carve them into armour, weapons and clothing for their own, and an outsider found with any of it is killed and the piece recovered. The black market prices them exactly as the risk suggests. A Vultari beak-blade fetches a knight's ransom in the cities of the Dead Continent, where the law is indifferent and the Company does not go, and it is worn nowhere else on the planet. Feather-cloaks turn up twice a century, always after a massacre, and always briefly. Apothecaries who buy the meat are careful to buy it from a collector at a stall, with the mark on the wrapping, because meat bought any other way means somebody took it, and the collectors will find out whose it was.

Remembered

Halron the First. Founding king, first bearer of the amulet, who burned it into his son and died a slave.

Hedrik Karkos. Lord Marshal of Brenmor, Haldornak, commander of the Trikarian Company. "Beaten regularly by his father to twist him into a tool of destruction and revenge." Lost an eye to Corthon Akkanar in a duel Corthon cheated. Rarely sleeps.

Elrok Skriftos. "The right hand of Karkos, loyal, brutal, and ruthless," who informed on his own officers and was killed mid-taunt by Lord Thuric Harscor.

Officer Braken. Camp discipline, and a Torkan holding a Trikarian officer's rank. When two starving soldiers brawled over a carcass he split the loser through spine and sinew and shouted "When one starves, we all starve!"

Officer Lokan. A talker who mocks prisoners and does little.

The Mother of VultanHold. She has no name and needs none. She has been in the oldest shaft since before the shackling, and every brood-mother alive is out of her line.

Kin each has a page of its own

One strain stands apart, and it is not a lineage. It is what happens to a Vultari that the Crimson reaches, and the tribe treats it as an event rather than a birth.