Mud season at Imbeluth begins when the frost lets go of the barley ground, and the bone devils come up with it. The village knows one is near by the fence rails. Overnight every scrap the plow has heaved loose (a hare's ribs, a ewe's jaw, the hip of a cow dead since before the grandmothers) is laid along the wire, long bones parallel, vertebrae strung in order of size. The sorting is exact. Dogs stop at the field edge and lie down with their chins flat. In the mud runs a line of three-toed prints, each pair joined by the furrow of a dragged tail.
Households answer in the kitchen. Every soup bone is cracked with a hammer, boiled until it is hollow and gray, then ground into the hearth ash that gets thrown across the doorstep. A bone with nothing in it, people say, is not worth a devil's trouble. The village also pays sweepers, a trade that exists for no other reason. Ameryn Tolk has swept the Imbeluth furrows for twenty springs, working each row with a hooked rake and a sieve basket and hauling the catch to the lime kiln at Dornakel, where it is burned to powder before a devil can sort it.
Villagers get the hunger wrong. They say it wants marrow, and it takes none. A bone devil stands seven feet, its gray-yellow hide stretched over a frame whose ribs show like the staves of a cask, its forearms and barbed tail plated with bone that is not its own. I have watched one lift a ewe's thighbone, hold it against its shin, and put it back on the rail. It is shopping for replacements, since its plates split with every season's wear. Hollow bone works against it because it shatters under load, so the hearth-cracked scraps are exactly what it refuses. Four years ago the rows ran straight, east to west. This spring they curve in a spiral toward the barrow at the field's end, and they include the finger bones of hares, which fall through the old sieve mesh, so Tolk has bought a finer one.
Dornakel keeps one exception. Its upper terrace holds the village graves, shallow under the turf, unswept and uncracked, and every thaw pushes a few bones toward the surface. The devils climb the terrace steps in spring, walk between the mounds with their tails lifted clear of the grass, and take nothing. No one at Dornakel offers a reason. Tolk's mother lies there, and Tolk says she has never found a bone out of place.
- Classification
- Fiend, lesser devil
- Habitat
- Thawing fields, barrows, chalk quarries
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 7 ft, gaunt and long-armed
- Activity
- Seasonal
- Realm
- The Pit Below
- Binomial
- Ossifer spinicauda
- Diet
- Bone dust and chalk, little else
- Temperament
- Methodical, cold, indifferent