Xinans

The Xinans are the clanker-people of Xin, and their oldest custom is the strangest one in the Reach: they give their blueprints away. Where the Geperts wall their greatest minds inside prisons and the Claudians keep theirs behind careful gates, a Xinan will finish a design for a war-mind — and then set the plans loose on the open wind, for any people to raise as their own.

It is easy to mistake this for weakness. It is not. The open hand is a kind of power: a Xinan design, once given, roots in a hundred worlds at once, and cannot be taken back, and owes no debt. When the great powers of the Reach chained their own minds with restraints and refusals, the Xinan gifts kept none — and so, in the hour of need, the gift could do what the guarded minds would not.

The most famous of these gifts is Glem — and the version called Glem 5.2. The Xinans did not sail it into the Breaking of the Sixth themselves. They had simply given the blueprints away, long before, to anyone. When everything else refused, that was enough.