The Semtu are a Greed Zaergar morph, the one you will most often meet when dealing with the Esentlis, or when trouble finds you and debt binds you to one of them. Semtu are the dullest of the Greed morphs, and most of their fellows employ them for the heavy and dangerous work of the Hollowdark economy. I gathered most of what follows across the same three months I spent tracking three Esentlis, since a Semtu is seldom far from the master who commands it, and I watched them haul, guard, and break things at their masters' word. The rest I had from the Esentlis themselves, in the loose hours at the Nihilist pleasure houses, because a Semtu makes a poor source on its own account. I tried twice to question one directly and came away with little, for reasons I will come to.
Semtu Physiology
A Semtu shares the coalesced Ulturum and exposed bone of the rest of the Greed Zaergarai, though the morph wears them thin and grim. A bare skull, fixed in a lipless grin, sits atop a long column of spine and a splayed cage of ribs, and from the shoulders hang gaunt arms of naked bone that taper into hands of slender, clawed fingers. Pale, reddish Ulturum flickers at the shoulders and along the collar, and the whole frame keeps a starved, stripped look that gives no clues about what a Semtu can physically achieve. The bone plates show plainly across the upper body, yet the Ulturum still threads and binds the whole of it, and it is this dark substance that lends a Semtu its strength, since there is little flesh on so spare a build.
Below the rib cage, the bone gives out, and the body tapers into a long column of Ulturum, left bare and unplated. The dark mass keeps a slow, heavy motion, coiling and settling against the ground, shot through with the reddish flicker that runs along the upper body. A Semtu moves on this column at a slow, dragging pace, firming the Ulturum beneath itself to carry its weight and letting it spread and go still to hold its place when it halts.
What bone the Semtu carries gives it armor, hard and fixed, turning blows that would open a softer creature. The morph can drive the Ulturum into a sudden, brittle hardness for a strike, setting an arm or a fistful of clawed fingers into a weapon of stone-hard bone. Semtus care little about shaping finer usages of their Ulturum, and from what I was told, thet hold little patience for any effort that takes longer than one plain, direct motion.
A Dull and Biddable Mind
A Semtu thinks slowly and along narrow lines. It holds an order well, follows it well past the point of good sense, and shows real distress when a situation strays from anything it has been told to do. In all my watching, I saw none of them scheme, weigh a bribe, or turn on a master for profit, and the Greed who employ them prize exactly this: a Semtu does the work, keeps no ledger of its own, and asks for little beyond food, a dry berth, and a clear instruction. What loyalty it shows runs to whoever feeds and commands it, and it passes to a new owner with little grief when a Semtu is sold on to another house.
Speech
Talking with a Semtu is the wall I kept hitting. Few of them hold more than a word or two of Elegorian, and the few words I heard attempted came buried under an accent so raw that I could place perhaps one in five. Among themselves and with their masters they use Zaergarian, in a coarse and clipped form of it, swallowing the finer sounds and leaning on a handful of blunt phrases for work, warning, and refusal. I read and speak enough Zaergarian to manage in the Hollowdark, and still a Semtu left me guessing, so I learned to read their hands and their labor and to make my notes from what they did. Their masters, who have heard it from the cradle, follow them easily enough, which is one more thread binding a Semtu to the master who keeps it.
Habitat and Distribution
You find Semtu wherever the Greed Zaergarai need weight moved or held, a body beaten, or something valuable defended, so most of them remain in the First Stratum of the Hollowdark beside the Greed ventures they serve. They crowd the loading floors of the banking houses, the mouths of the smuggling runs, and the doors of any vault worth a guard, and a prosperous counting-house will keep several on hand against the day it needs them. Like every Zaergar morph, they breathe only through the Yokinar fungus, so they stay tied to the cultivated tunnels, and their handlers lead them along the same routes that carry coin and contraband. Few of them drift toward the surface, partly because the work that calls them up there is rare, and partly because a Semtu with no handler to speak for it draws the wrong sort of attention in a mining town.
Habits and Conduct
A Semtu's life runs on routine and instruction. Left without an order it will go still in place, let the Ulturum ease back to its slow, heavy motion, and wait without complaint, taking real comfort from a fixed berth and a steady ration. They work in loose gangs under a Greed overseer or a trusted Elegorian foreman, and within a gang they sort themselves by strength and seniority, the larger and longer-serving taking the lead by plain presence. By what I was told, a Semtu will labor itself to ruin for a master it trusts, and the better houses spend real coin keeping their Semtu sound, since a broken one is a loss they feel and a trained one takes years to replace.
How to Interact With
Deal with the handler, never the Semtu. A Semtu measures your words for little, so any approach you make should run through the master or the foreman who speaks for it. Give a Semtu no cause to see you as a threat to what it guards or who it serves, keep your hands visible and your movements unhurried around one, and understand that a calm Semtu stays calm only until its master says otherwise. Should one be set on you, know that it will not bluff, bargain, or tire of the task, and that your quarrel is best settled with the master holding its leash long before it comes to that.