The azer stands upright in the mouth of a brick kiln, a barrel-chested bronze dwarf with orange light running through the cracks in its skin, and it picks its fuel the way a cook picks flour. It burns seasoned oak and leaves the pine in the stack, because pine spits. At the Rocamora brickworks the naturalist measures one against the kiln wall by counting courses. Fourteen bricks, each three inches thick, put the top of its head at forty-two inches. The crest of flame adds another hand's width.
Three people describe it, and they do not agree. Gaspar, who fires bricks at Rocamora, calls it a partner. It eats dry oak and refuses pine. When he once fed it pine, it sat on the kiln roof with its back turned for three days while the bricks came out underburned. His remedy for the burn an azer's handshake leaves is a cloth soaked in cold black tea, wrapped on overnight. A glassblower's widow at Dos Fornos calls it a thief. It takes nails from every crate that comes through the yard, and the green glass fused to its left forearm, she says, was once her husband's paperweight. A carter hauling charcoal past the works calls it a vain child. He says it preens on the wall above the road, chin raised, the tips of its copper beard glowing like the ends of cigars.
Set side by side, the accounts agree on the oak, the nails and the pride. Dos Fornos also keeps one rule that none of the three breaks: nobody throws water over a kiln wall, and nobody says the word "quench" inside the glasshouse. The carter's boy, not yet taught, tips out a bucket on the cobbles below the wall. The azer comes off the bricks in a twisting jump, one arm flung out, flame streaming behind it, and lands beside the anvil with its chin up as if the leap had been planned. The cobbles steam. The boy is sent home.
The naturalist leaves by the brickworks gate at midday. The hinges are held with wooden pegs. Every nail hole in the post is bare and bright, as if it had been scraped clean.
- Classification
- Fire elemental, dwarf-shaped
- Habitat
- Kilns, forges and glassworks
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 3.5 ft tall, barrel-chested
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Planes of fire and brick
- Binomial
- Pyrodunus aeris
- Diet
- Charcoal, dry oak, iron nails
- Temperament
- Proud, territorial, fussy about fuel