Teodor Wick, who keeps the well at Ellwand, says the djinn is a thief. His neighbor Tabitha Orme says it is a collector of debts, and that anyone it robs had it coming. Both are sure, and neither will sit on the low mud wall at noon to settle the matter. The naturalist did.
The saucers were already out, a row of scorched clay dishes along the wall, each holding a spoonful of burnt sugar or a thumb of lamp oil. Ellwand sets them out every day the sun clears the roofs. Beside them, as the custom requires, lay one old left sandal, resoled twice and worn to the shape of no foot in particular. The villagers call it the decoy. At the hottest part of the afternoon the well shaft began to glow turquoise, and a column of dust stood up out of the ground and turned. Out of it came a long gray arm with orange seams along the forearm, like cracks in a baked bowl. The hand was too big for the wrist. It reached over the saucers and ignored the decoy entirely.
A boy was running across the lane with his sandals slapping. The djinn leaned out of the dust, took the left one off his foot in mid-stride, and let him go on hopping. Then it stood up straight. The naturalist measured it against the wall, which is forty inches high, using a folded surveyor's rod held at arm's length. The figure stood about eight feet, broad through the shoulders and narrow at the ankle. Its bare feet hung an inch clear of the dirt. The naturalist checked that by sliding the flat of a carpenter's rule under one heel. Dust rose along the blade and the rule grew too warm to hold. The djinn watched this with its eyes half shut, a brass ring swinging in its right ear, the left ear notched. It drank the oil from two saucers, tipped the sugar into its mouth, and set the empty dishes back in their row, rim to rim, as neatly as they had been.
It took the sandal down the well, or into it. The naturalist cannot say which. The shaft is twenty-two paces deep by the rope, and a lowered lantern found only damp stone and the sandal's own shadow, which was gone when the lantern came back up. Nor could the naturalist confirm where the turquoise light comes from. It stopped when the djinn did. Wick returned the empty saucers to his shelf and wiped the wall with his sleeve. Tabitha Orme met him at the gate of Gaugers' Flat, holding the boy by the shoulder and one bare foot in the air. She looked at the well, then at the naturalist, then at the decoy still lying on the wall. "Told you it doesn't want the old ones," she said.
- Classification
- Elemental of smokeless fire
- Habitat
- Salt flats and dry wells
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- about 8 ft tall
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Desert heat and old wells
- Binomial
- Ignivagus cinereus
- Diet
- Incense, lamp oil, burnt sugar
- Temperament
- Vain, touchy, unhurried