Llew Garthmor blows glass at Wernfach, and he knows an efreet is near before anyone sees one, because the gather on the end of his pipe sags and runs a full minute early. The furnace has not changed. The air outside has. He sets the pipe down, closes the damper, and waits, since a furnace at full heat reads to an efreet as an invitation.
The first writing about efreets is a potter's grievance pressed into a clay tablet at Rhydcarrow: his kiln lit itself overnight and every pot came out glazed with a face. Caravan masters who crossed the dunes after him describe the creature walking at noon, a column of white-orange flame twice the height of a doorway, with a torso of packed gray ash and hands far too large for its arms. It has no mouth until it speaks. Each step fuses the sand beneath it into a cup of green glass the shape of a foot.
That glass made a trade. Footglass pickers follow a track an hour behind the creature, in canvas gloves, lifting the prints with a trowel and carrying them home in sacks of wet straw. Lens grinders pay well, because efreet glass holds no bubbles. The pickers also know that an efreet stamps again over any print that comes out cracked, and sulks for the rest of the afternoon if it catches someone watching. It eats lamp oil, pitch, dry thatch and the heart of a cookfire, which it drinks down to a pale smear of ash. Left alone, it does little worse than blister paint and warp doors. Crossed, it lights a roof from the ridge down, one purlin at a time.
At Wernfach nobody throws water across a doorsill between noon and mid-afternoon. They carry it to the cistern, because an efreet takes a splash on its heels personally and remembers the house. Roofs on the dune side of the village are slate. Pickers say each efreet began as a bonfire lit for someone who never came back to put it out. I cannot check this. Every account above makes the efreet hungry, vain and wasteful. The exception stands at the lime kiln outside Rhydcarrow, where one has stayed eleven winters, holding the burn at an even heat on whatever the burner feeds it and not a splinter more. It leaves no prints. Llew has walked the ground around it twice with a trowel and found only ordinary sand.
- Classification
- Fire elemental, desert-dwelling
- Habitat
- Dunes, kiln yards, forge towns
- Danger
- High
- Size
- Twice the height of a doorway
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Dune country and kiln districts
- Binomial
- Ignis vitripes
- Diet
- Open flame, lamp oil, pitch
- Temperament
- Vain, hungry, easily slighted