A form of military camouflage The earliest model of this disguise is be heved to have been developed for Sheset X the Comno Emperor, in 9731 The hood was one of several devices Sheset requested from the Ixian Council of Scientists during the first two months of his reign, all providing concealment of protection The emperor had assumed the throne knowing that several factions wished to assassinate him, and his enlistment of Ixian technology was his way of trying to protect himself against them One of those factions succeeded m 9732, only a year after Sheset came to power The cibus hood, however, survived the man who CONE OF SILENCE 165 CONTRACEPTION had commissioned it and went on to become one of Ix's most popular exports The hood was a purposely shapeless sack of deepest black material, the secret of whose manufacture remains known only to the Ixians to the present day Cibus cloth absorbed not only visible light but all known forms of radiation, this characteristic rendered the fea tures of its wearer mdetectable even to the sublest investigative instruments It is be lieved that part of the manufacturing process for the cloth involved treating it with chemi cals similar to those used on Guild ship heatshields but this theory has yet to be proven The Ixians neither confirm nor deny it Some property of the cloth limits its effectiveness m accordance with the amount used, with a sharp decrease in concealing power first observed when hoods larger than those needed to fit the average human head were manufactured during the 9800s After many experiments were conducted, the notion of using cibus hoods as military camouflage was reluctantly abandoned even by the most determined of the Great Houses, and personal sized hoods became standard issue for assassins and spies COME OF SILENCE.