Nobody in the hill farms above Rookmound hangs a coat on the iron post in the lower corridor of the old garrison, and nobody lets a child lean a hand on the plate that stands beside it. Visitors take this for superstition. The neighbors say it is manners, the same as not stepping on a grave, and they keep it because the armor was there first.
The argument in the parish is about what the armor is for. Joss Harrow, who sells cheese from a cart at the garrison gate, holds that it guards the hall and only wants to be left to its post. His neighbor Marta Dunning holds that it is a leftover, a thing that never learned the war ended, and that it should be dragged to the quarry and sunk. I have watched it for eleven days and side with neither. It does not guard anything, because there is nothing in the hall to guard. It does not hunt anything either. Each morning, an hour after the light reaches the west window, it walks the length of the corridor, turns at the wall with a scrape of greaves on flagstone, and walks back. Then it stops. It repeats this at midday and again before dark, and on one afternoon it paused to straighten a cracked floor tile with its toe and moved on. That is the whole of its work.
I measured it with a knotted length of twine and a plumb weight. The suit stands six feet four inches, four inches taller than the doorframe's marks suggest a man of its period should be, and its stride is thirty-one inches, even to the quarter inch across twelve passes. The helm holds no face. When I held a lantern to the visor slit, the inside showed only rust-brown dark and a faint smell of cold oil. It left behind a trail of flaked red scale along the corridor, which the Rookmound women sweep up on Thursdays and scatter on their doorsteps. They say scale from the armor keeps iron-eating moths out of the wool chests, and I saw no moths in any house I entered.
Joss and Marta settled nothing while I stayed. Marta left a pail of lye at the corridor's end, and Joss moved it back to the scullery without comment. On my last morning I walked out past Bramblestone Ford, where the road drops toward the river, and looked back once at the garrison. In the lower window the helm turned a quarter turn to follow me, then returned to its line, and a flake of rust fell from the sill into the grass.
- Classification
- Animated suit of plate armor
- Habitat
- Garrison halls and empty keeps
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 6 ft 4 in tall, 31 in stride
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Constructs of old fortifications
- Binomial
- Ferrum vigilans
- Diet
- None; sheds rust scale
- Temperament
- Patient, habitual, indifferent