Xacrie

Origin

The splice is Irugaine, Nu'uman and bat, and the Nu'uman strand is the one that has since begun to show. They were bred in mass amounts to terrorise as many people within the Under Realms as possible, and the target was named in the making: the remnants of Aezithis's Thojar, and the civilised peoples of the deep. They were loosed in swarms into the Thojar holds and into every cave-town that would not kneel, and the holds went quiet.

When Alveria collapsed the swarms had nobody left to call them back. They fell on the Do'urssan underground and raped and pillaged it, and the Gorklin are what came of that. In the long dark since, they have changed. Their intelligence has evolved past simple death; they have become expert torturers and night conquerors, dealing in blood magics and forming legions of cults, and they reside in the dark parts of the world where the sun never shines, "waiting for the ever-night to fall upon the world."

Their bodies have changed with their minds. The Nu'uman strand has grown more prevalent with the centuries and the overall form is more noticeably Nu'uman with every generation. A Xacrie of this age has more of a face than its grandmother had. The eldest of the nests call the drift a rot and hang apart from the smooth-faced young. The young call it a disguise, and say the dark gave it to them so they could walk among the sunlit peoples and choose.

They are pure monsters and they are highly sentient. The two facts sit together in them without strain.

Body

Seven feet and more of bat, four arms beneath a wingspan of sagging flesh, a body littered with tumours all over the tough skin, and a blood that eats stone. The fur is thin and stringy and covers the body in patchy, spotted amounts, running black through grey-brown, failing altogether over the tumours, which show as bare shining grey lumps along the spine, the shoulders and the throat. The massive wings are thin, saggy flesh with three clawed fingers at the end of each and foul long talons on the outer edge. Beneath the wings are the arms proper, jagged and gross, ending in two long sickly blades of hand. At rest the silhouette lies: with the leathery wings wrapped around the body they look like black-robed cultists, and the faces are not visible.

Most run seven to eight feet; the soldier kin reach eight and a half. A grown Xacrie weighs a hundred and eighty to two hundred and sixty pounds, light for its height, because the long bones are hollowed toward flight and the wing-flesh weighs almost nothing. A dead one feels wrong to lift, like a body that has already been drained. The eyes are small and red-black and set deep. The nose is a ridged leaf, the ears stand tall and ribbed, and the mouth holds two long canines in a hedge of needle teeth. What a stranger notices first is the smell, which is old blood and ammonia. Then the robed shape. Then that the robed shape has four hands.

The skeleton is a paradox of engineering: flight bones thin enough to snap between two fingers, carrying a torso and two extra limbs that no flying thing should have to lift. The great flight muscle is anchored to a keel across the chest, and the lower pair of arms hangs off a second, lighter girdle slung under it, which is why the underarms have their terrible reach and no strength at all in a push. A Xacrie can cut with four blades at once and cannot shove a door open. Its speed in combat is intense and it is all pull, all closing, all the inward collapse of something that has decided to be on top of you.

The blood is the fact of them and they do not control it. It lies quiet in the vein, thick and dark, and turns the instant it meets air. A wounded Xacrie smokes. Their vessels are lined with a waxy inner sheath that the blood does not touch, and where that sheath is torn the blood eats outward through the body it came from, so every Xacrie wound cauterises itself and widens itself in the same second. The fur around every old injury is burnt away, which is one more reason the coat is patchy, and the scar left behind is glassy, hairless and permanently tender. They cannot be stitched, since thread rots in the wound before it holds. They cannot be bled by a healer, cannot take a graft, cannot share blood with one another, and have no surgeons of any kind. A blade that opens one comes away pitted and must be rewaxed that night.

What follows from that is the thing their enemies learn slowly and expensively. A cut Xacrie is a dangerous Xacrie to stand beside. A killed one in a press of bodies takes the faces of the two nearest it. Armies that have fought them more than once fight them with poles, nets, slings and fire, and never with a short blade, and the reason is not courage. It is also why blunt force kills them where steel does not: a Xacrie struck hard enough to bleed inside its own chest digests itself over about two hours, and they fear the club and the long fall more than they have ever feared a sword. A Xacrie that bleeds in its own nest scars the nest, and the older nests are mapped in their own burn-marks, a history of every wound anyone brought home.

Disease rides on them without effort. By the simplest of scratches or bites they spread any assortment of mutated diseases, because their saliva and their gut carry strains that live in them without troubling them, and a Xacrie is a warm dark cave that happens to fly. They see in the dark, they screech to find their way and to break an ear, and they sleep hard, hyper in waking and completely docile for a few hours while resting.

Their senses make a world with no distance in it and no colour. The eyes are good in near-black and useless in sun, and they see in greys and reds and nothing else, so no Xacrie ornament has ever been chosen for its colour. What they have instead of sight is the screech, thrown and caught, which paints the air out to sixty yards in a resolution fine enough to read the grain of stone and count the rungs of a ladder. Beyond sixty yards the world simply stops, which is why a Xacrie in open country flies low and nervously, and why the sky above a plain is the one place they will not fight. They hear a heartbeat through a wall. They hear the change in a heartbeat when a person begins to lie.

That last sense has built their whole politics. You cannot lie to a Xacrie in a room. Nest business is therefore not conducted in rooms: the nests negotiate at distance, in writing, through couriers, and every nest keeps blood-scribes who set the cult's books down on cured wing in blood that is not their own. A Xacrie deal done face to hanging face is a deal in which both parties already know the answer, so those meetings are short and are mostly ceremonial. The Xacri'mor exist because the truth cannot be spoken safely in person.

Their building follows their hearing in the same way. A hive is grown and not planned, because a people who navigate by echo have no use for a straight line or a sightline, and a nest has no floors, no stairs and no doors. Every surface is ceiling. Down is where the dead go and up is where the powerful are, and the entire architecture of Xacrie rank is a literal reading of a building that has only one dimension worth having.

Life

They breed as bats breed, and they nurture their young in dark caves, or in castles if they have taken them. One pup to a birth; twins are rare and are held to be a bad sign for the nest. The mother carries eleven months and gives birth hanging, catching the pup in the cradle of her folded wings.

The stages have names and every Xacrie counts itself by them. The ssukh, the carried, is the pup of the first year, which rides on the mother's chest inside the wings, drinking milk, and from the sixth month drinking the blood she brings up for it. The khirreth, the hung, is the pup of the creche-wall, the warm inner chamber of a Hissing Nest where the young hang in their hundreds and each mother finds her own by voice alone. The vaun comes at four years with first flight and a roost-name. The ithra is the hunting young, first kill at ten, grown at forty. The ulakhra is the aged, and it is not an insult.

The blood turns to acid slowly across the first decade, which is the mercy in their childhood and the reason there is a childhood at all. A pup's bite is merely septic. A pup can be held, carried, nursed, cut free of a tangle, and pups are therefore used in the nest for nothing more dangerous than carrying, since a nest that put a child to war would lose the child and the soldier next to it. The day a young Xacrie's blood turns is the day it stops being touched, and no Xacrie past the vaun is ever embraced again by anything that loves it. They are aware of this. It is the subject of half the mourning songs.

The tumours come with age and the fur goes with age, and a Xacrie of five hundred is a rag of lumps and strings with the mind of a general. Death comes when the blood turns inward. A dying Xacrie dissolves over a single night, smoking, and leaves no bone. There is nothing to bury and no Xacrie has ever had a grave. The nest hangs its dying in the lowest chamber, the drip-floor, and the stone there is glassed smooth by centuries of it, and a nest can be dated by the depth of the glass.

The diet is blood and flesh. They take cave beasts, herds and the sleeping; they lift a sheep or a child off a hillside without landing; they drink first and eat after. They will eat carrion when nothing lives, and they will eat the Do'urssan, whose flesh they say tastes of tar. They cannot stomach plants and they rarely drink water, since blood is drink.

Frailty

A body built around a weapon it cannot holster fails in specific ways. The commonest death among the middle-aged is the slow burn: a wound in the deep muscle that the blood keeps opening from the inside, closing and reopening for years until the limb has to be taken off, which cannot be done cleanly by anyone including them. The commonest death among the old is the vessel wall giving way behind the eyes or in the gut, which is why the very old hang still, are carried to the Re-hanging, and are treated with a care that looks like reverence and is partly terror of jostling them.

The splice is unstable at both ends of the drift. A pup whose blood turns in its first year dissolves in the creche-wall and takes a section of the nest with it, and this is the single event a nest will not speak of afterwards. At the other end there are the too-smooth young, born with almost a Nu'uman face and a mouth that cannot hold the needle teeth, who starve slowly among a people that tears. Twins carry both faults more often than singles, which is the reason behind the superstition rather than the other way around.

Wing-rot takes the careless: the membrane is living skin with no fur to protect it, and a tear that will not close becomes a crawl of mites and then a hole, and a Xacrie that cannot fly is dropped from the roost by its own nest without discussion. Starvation works on them in a particular order, because the body eats the wing before it eats anything else. A hungry Xacrie loses its flight first and its life second, and a famine in the Under Realm leaves a nest of walking, hissing, grounded things that can still hear a heartbeat through a wall and can no longer get to it.

They fear fire, which they cannot smother because they cannot roll; they fear open sky; and they fear a physician of any other people, correctly, since every attempt ever made to treat a Xacrie by another people's medicine has killed the Xacrie and usually the physician.

Country

The Under Realm. Their settlements are the Hissing Nests, suspended from the ceilings of caves, built from their own faecal matter formed into a cavernous hive, and a nest of full size houses four hundred Xacrie. When more Xacrie wish to join a nest they add onto its side. A nest grows by accretion and an old nest is a record of who arrived when, read in the grain of the dung courses the way a tree is read in rings.

Four hundred bodies hanging in a sealed chamber produce heat, ammonia and a standing haze that would kill anything else, and the nest is built to use all three: the crown is warm because the nest breathes upward, the creche is warm because the crown is above it, and the drip-floor is cold. The country around a nest changes within a generation. The cave beasts go first, then the herds of the nearest surface valley, then the people who kept the herds. The guano feeds a fungal country underneath, pale and enormous, and the Under Realm's best mushroom grounds are all downwind of a hive and all shunned. When a nest is finally burnt out, the fungus dies within five years and the ground beneath is sterile for a century.

A nest is named for its eldest, and the name changes when the eldest dissolves. Four great nests are spoken of in the cults: Ssekhavaun, the First Hanging, the oldest nest in the world; Khirr-Ulath, hung above a Thojar hold that was emptied in the age of the empire and never resettled; Vessukhra, whose galleries reach the surface under a Nu'uman city and are that city's worst secret; and the Black Roost of Mor'thaen, a surface castle taken in a single night whose lord still hangs from its bell-rope, cured like leather.

They live in cities too, and they are feared there. Many cities outcast them and will not have them within or near the walls; a city that has chosen nails a burnt wing above its gate. In the cities that tolerate them the Xacrie roost in bell-towers, under bridge arches and in the sewer vaults, and the quarter is called the belfry whether it has a bell in it or not. Where they have taken a castle, they raise their young in it.

Society

The social unit is the nestmate. They fight as skirmishers, falling back into their skirmishing instincts and intending to tire an enemy out, and they lose formation when grief takes them, losing their sense of strategy while their rage guides them. They mourn aloud, in bone-chilling screeches and screeches filled with mourning rage, and a nest in mourning can be heard through forty feet of rock.

Rank is height on the roost. The eldest hangs highest, at the crown where the warmth gathers, and is called the Crown-Hung. Once a year, on the night the dark moon is full, the whole nest re-hangs itself, and a Xacrie climbs by the deaths above it or by causing them. Below the Crown-Hung hang the elders; below the elders the soldiery; below the soldiery the scouts and the miners; below them the creche; and at the bottom the drip-floor and the priests. Professions follow the kin: the Xacri'vak hold the line, the Xacri'mor carry word between nests and cults, the Xacri'aen go into the cities to kill, the Xacrithal dig. Every nest keeps blood-scribes, and torturers, whose craft is the one the sunlit peoples pay for.

The wing is the garment. What clothing they wear is cult-robing cut from the wings of their own dead, which lose their acid with their life and cure like vellum, and bone hooks to close it. Nothing is worn on the feet. They eat hanging. Blood is drunk warm from skulls, which the acid does not etch, and a nest that has raided well hangs its prisoners alive in the creche so the blood keeps. The drink is old dark, blood soured with cave fungus until it thickens.

Their music is the chorus: the greeting screech, which measures whoever it is aimed at and returns its size, its distance and the state of its heart to the whole nest at once; the night-call before a raid; the mourning screech after one. An oath is sworn on the dark moon and sealed by a single drop of the swearer's own blood let fall onto stone, and the hiss the drop makes is the witness, and the pit it leaves is the record. It is taboo to face the sun by choice, to roost alone, and to speak Xier where the sunlit peoples can hear it.

Faith

The Xacrie believe in the darkness. They worship the Void Princes and the dark moon, they believe in the realms of the void gods, and they wish to roam the black skies for eternity. The whole of their scripture is one clause: they are "waiting for the ever-night to fall upon the world."

In Xier the darkness is Ssuveth, the Waiting Dark, and it is a thing, a place and a promise at once. When the ever-night falls the sky of Nu will go black for good, the Xacrie will fly up into it and never land, and the black sky of the world will join the black realms of the Princes. That is the whole of the afterlife they expect, and they expect to reach it on the wing rather than by dying. Each nest hangs under one Prince, and the Prince of plague and pestilence, whose curse Zhurx carries, claims the most nests, since his gift is already in their bite. The dark moon they take to be the Wastes of Zaona, and they call it the Lidless Eye.

The clergy are the Unlidded, priests who have cut away their own eyelids so that they can never close their eyes to the dark. They hang lowest of all, on the drip-floor above the dissolving dead, and they conduct the Re-hanging each dark moon and the sacrifices under it. The blood of a victim given to a Prince under the dark moon becomes void fluid, and the Xacrie nests are among the chief suppliers of that fluid in the world, which is the true reason the Void Cultists feed them and the true reason the cults tolerate being mocked by their own patrons.

The truth is closer to their faith than to most. The Princes hold realms; the worldly gods hold none. Whether any Xacrie has ever flown into one is another question, and every soul that leaves a Xacrie goes where every soul goes, to the auction of the star gods. An Unlidded priest, told this, would say that the auction is the Princes' own market and that the Xacrie sell high.

Tongue

The ancient tongue of the Xacrie is Xier. They speak ancient tongues lost to the world of Nu, and the species is ancient in language, belief and purpose. They also speak Common, hissed.

Xier is a tongue made for a throat that screeches: sibilants, hard stops at the back of the mouth, and a falling pitch that the sunlit peoples hear as a hiss with a shape in it. The apostrophe in a written Xier word marks a click of the glottis. Much of it is pitched above what a Nu'uman ear can catch, and a Xacrie can hold two conversations at once, one audible and one not, which is the ordinary condition of any room with two of them in it and is the single greatest difficulty in negotiating with them.

A Xacrie carries a roost-name and a nest-name. The roost-name is given by the Crown-Hung at first flight and is made from the sound the pup made at birth; the nest-name is simply the nest; titles accrue with height. Eight roost-names: Vess'akh, Khiru Ssal, Ithavaun, Morr'ekh, Ssevith, Ulakhra, Naeth Kirr, Zhavess.

Regard

"Terrors from above." "Night Stalkers." "Flying filth." "An outcasted invasive species that has no other purpose than to destroy; not many like them." The Void Cultist Leader who summons eight of them mocks "how hungry these beasts are," and that is how their own patrons speak of them.

They are feared in the cities, and many cities will not have them within or near the walls. In the cities that do, a Xacrie goes hooded by day, which it can bear briefly and in pain, and the common word for one is "hood." Children in the belfry quarters are told that a Xacrie can hear a heartbeat through a wall, which is true, and are told that it can hear them thinking, which is close enough to true to be worth the telling.

Their patrons are the Void Cultists, who summon them, use them and use them up. Their enemy is the world. Their particular enemy is the Do'urssan, whose underground they ravaged after the fall, and their first enemy was the Thojar, whose Under Realm remnants they were made to destroy. The Gorklin they neither claim nor deny. They eat them.

Harvest

Xacrie venoms. If one knows what to look for, Xacrie venom can be extracted and boiled down into various different disease strains, and the extraction is done at the gland behind the jaw within an hour of death, working fast, upwind, with the body hung over a stone trough.

Xacrie raw materials. The wingspan material is used by the Void cultists in all assortments of their clothing design. The black robe of a Void Cultist is a Xacrie, and the cultists know it, and so do the Xacrie, who regard the trade as their own dead going out to work.

Xacrie blood. It cannot be kept in glass, iron or leather. It is kept in the cured gut of a Xacrie or in a Xacrie skull, and it is sold to etchers, to lock-breakers and to torturers. The trade is a hanging matter in every city that outcasts them and a licensed one in a few that do not. Among the Xacrie themselves, to sell the blood of one's own nest is the one crime, and the seller is hung alive on the drip-floor until the drip finishes him.

Nothing else survives long enough to be taken. There is no Xacrie bone in any collection anywhere, no Xacrie skull that was not cut out and cured within the hour, and the great difficulty of the trade in all three commodities is that the source destroys itself on the way to market.

Remembered

Ssekhavaun, Crown-Hung of the First Hanging, past seven hundred years and beyond the recorded span, who has not flown in a century and is carried to the Re-hanging by her soldiers.

Morr'ekh of the Black Roost, who took a surface castle in one night and hung its lord from its own bell-rope.

Vess'akh Hoodless, who walks a city's streets unhooded by day and serves a cultist house as its torturer, and who has never been asked to leave.

The eight summoned by the Void Cultist Leader, who have no names on any page and whose patron's contempt for them is the only thing about them that was written down.

Kin each has a page of its own

The kin of the Xacrie are divided by the bat in them and by the work that bat was good for, and the nests treat the division as a roster rather than a lineage. The one exception is the Xacrikar, who are not a kin so much as a fate.