The Shah Mira

The tribe that left. Generations ago the Shah Mira walked out of the Hedges and into the cities, and they have never gone back — every fur colour and pattern, no discernible clan structure, and no interest in acquiring one.

Their country is the Gutters: the alleys, backstreets, roof-runs and disused spaces of the Eternal City, Mousehold, Tidewell, the Duskmarket, and everywhere else large enough to have a wrong side.

The Layer

The Gutters are not a territory but a layer laid over other people's cities, and it is continuous in the way a rumour is continuous. A Shah Mira from one city can read another's Gutters within a day, because the grammar is the same everywhere even when nothing else is — the same use of drains, the same roof-etiquette, the same signs cut into doorframes at ankle height.

Within their own turf the social order is complex, contested and revised constantly. The moment an outsider enters it, all of that stops and they move as one, and then resume arguing the instant the intruder is dealt with.

The Trade

They are cunning and resourceful and entirely at home in built space: traps in stairwells, ambushes across rooftops, and a working knowledge of which walls are load-bearing in cities whose architects are centuries dead.

What they sell is information. A Shah Mira knows who came in on the night barge, whose shutters have been closed four days, and which noble house's steward has started paying cash. They sell it cheaply, to many buyers, and this is why every Chancery office in the Kingdom has a standing account with people it does not officially acknowledge.

Ways

The Kingdom has never formally accepted that a province's population lives largely outside it. The Chancery's position is that the Shah Mira are Hedges subjects temporarily resident elsewhere; the position has stood for four hundred years and the word temporarily has never been revisited.

The Shah Hadiz will not discuss them. The Shah Mira find this very funny and mention it often.