The shutters at Fenna Quillon's chandlery do not close flush anymore, because something has been nicking the wax from the sills for three seasons, and she has stopped asking what. She opens at first light on the market street of Corvandel, wipes the grit from her scales, and sets out the tallow cakes in a row with the thick ends toward the road. The thri-kreen who come through the town do not steal. They simply do not understand a windowsill as a boundary.
By midmorning the first one arrives, a long-limbed shape the height of a door, stepping through the crowd without a sound on its hooked feet. Its hide is the yellow of old cheese rind, with a rust-brown saddle of plates across the back. The head is triangular and carries two large compound eyes, black at the center and pale at the rim, so that it seems to be looking at everything and nothing. Its four arms stay folded against the chest. One hand, the lower left, is missing its last claw, and a fitted cap of hammered copper covers the stump. Fenna weighs out a pound of tallow for it and takes in exchange a packet of dried locust paste, which she does not like and which she sells on to a dyer. The creature clicks its mandibles twice and goes. That is the first of the two times it appears in her day.
The afternoon is quarrels over weights, a cracked mold, and a boy who wants to buy a single wick. Fenna sells him one for nothing. The town of Corvandel has a rule about the thri-kreen that she keeps without being told: no one names a child in front of one, and no one says a child's name aloud while one is within earshot. The reason given is that they remember what they hear and repeat it back at the wrong moment, in the speaker's own voice. Fenna has heard her late husband's cough come out of an alley at dusk, and she keeps the rule.
At closing the creature returns, this time with a second behind it, and they stand at the sill. Fenna sets two cakes on the stone without a word. They take them in the upper hands and leave the lower ones empty. The peeling shutter swings, and she wedges it with a folded rag, as she does each night. On my first visit the copper cap was not there, and the stump had been bare and pale. By the time I left for the salt road toward Tessarune, the cap had dulled to green at the edges. Behind me, on the sill of the chandlery, a clean crescent of missing wax caught the last light.
- Classification
- Insectoid desert nomad
- Habitat
- Dune flats and salt roads
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 7 ft tall, 6 ft long
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Dune Sea
- Binomial
- Mantisoma saltans
- Diet
- Locusts, carrion, tallow wax
- Temperament
- Aloof, curious, literal-minded