(urth) Short Sun notes: Inhumi and their sources

[Andrew Mason]

We know that each humanoid inhumu/a has a human spirit, which is derived
from someone one of their parents fed on before their birth. In the case we
know most about, Krait, it’s his mother, but I’m not sure it has to be in
every case. Indeed, one might wonder if sometimes one of them might have a
double spirit, derived both from their father and their mother.


I suspect that for each featured inhumu/a we are meant to be able to work
out who their source is.


Krait’s we know is Sinew.


Quetzal’s, I suspect, is Pike. (I think this has been suggested before.)
The only positive evidence for this is that at one point, when they are
walking together in the dark, Silk mistakes him for Pike. But it would make
sense of some things about his character. When he says ‘Some people love
birds so much that they want to keep them caged, and other people love
birds so much that they want to set them free’, that is amazingly
charitable both to Pas and to Echidna – it has a ‘see the good in everyone’
quality worthy of Silk. That would make sense if Quetzal’s source is Silk’s
mentor.


Jahlee’s, I agree with many people, is Chenille. There’s several pieces of
evidence for this; in astral travel she seems to have red hair; Mora, on
first meeting her, says ‘She looks like a whore’; and when she is drunk in
Dorp the Rajan mistakes her for Chenille. (It might be that Chenille is the
woman she has just fed on, but I don’t think so; she knows who Chenille is
– ‘that lady on Green’ – and doesn’t recognise her as her victim.)


I do wonder in particular about Jahlee whether she might have a double
source, which could explain how she can switch so easily between looking
like an old woman and a young woman. (Fava can also look like both, but she
has to feed on children to keep looking young, while Jahlee seems able to
change at will.)


Juganu’s, I propose (and I think this is new) is Lemur, or possibly Loris.
We are told that Juganu, in astral travel, has a hawk nose and eyes the
colour of ice.  Lemur has an aquiline nose, and while his own eyes aren’t
described, his brother, Loris, has icy blue eyes.  (These are their chem
bodies, of course, but presumably they are modelled on their bio bodies.)
In the conversation with Remora at the end, the Rajan says Gyrfalcon was as
bad as Juganu, and Remora then (a bit cryptically, as is his wont) compares
Gyrfalcon to Lemur.


This leaves us with Fava. I’m not sure about Fava, though we get enough
descriptions of her astral body (which is said to be quite similar to her
physical body when in disguise) to suggest that her appearance is
significant in some way. It is possible, of course, that her source was in
Grandecitta – the shape-changing witch about whom Salica tells a story
might have been Fava, or perhaps her mother. Could it be that Salica
herself is the source? Fava does claim to remember her youth in Grandecitta
– though it’s not clear the memory is her own – and is at one point
described as looking like a woman who had been beautiful thirty years
before.
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