Entry 61 in the Ustrovka brickmakers' book, dry month: eleven thousand green bricks turned on edge overnight, none cracked; one footprint at the east gate, sunk to the knee. The clerk has written nearly the same line every dry month for forty years, and the book gives it no more weight than a delivery of straw.
Ustrovka tells it this way. The elemental is the first brick of Ezhrova Pit, baked hard when lightning struck the founder's drying shed, and on the third day it stood up to finish the work. It is nine feet of red clay pressed into the rough shape of a man, with quartz grit in its knuckles and a charred seam down its back where the ridgepole burned out. Its face is two thumb-holes and a crack. It does not speak or eat. Each night it walks the rows, turns every green brick onto its edge so the other face can dry, and goes back to the hollow in the pit where it stands. The hollow has begun to fit it. Nobody has caught it mid-turn. The night watch reports only that a row is crooked when they pass and square when they come back.
Living beside it is mostly housekeeping. The east gate of the drying yard stays unlatched, because a latched gate is only a wall, and the elemental walks through walls the way anyone walks through a curtain. The guild pays children, called tampers, to fill its footprints before the sun bakes them into pits that turn an ankle; a quick tamper clears forty holes before breakfast. Fresh prints shed flakes of red slip, and carters read the trail to learn which row it has finished. The paths on the pit side of the yard are marked with white lime, and anyone carrying a full hod keeps to them, since the elemental does not look down. It keeps one petty grudge. Eleven years ago the widow Maryna Kralova told it to wipe its feet, and it has walked three hundred paces around her wall ever since.
What Ustrovka gets wrong is the offerings. Cracked bricks are set along the pit's rim at every full moon, on the belief that it hungers for its own kind. It ignores them until the pile leans, then restacks the whole heap square against the fence, and the town takes the tidy result for thanks. Marek Zlatnik, who has mixed clay at Ezhrova for fifty years, only shrugs. "It isn't thanks," he says. "It just wants the stack straight."
- Classification
- Clay elemental, earth-bound
- Habitat
- Clay pits and brickyards
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- 9 ft tall, built like a kiln
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Surface clay country, plane of earth
- Binomial
- Lutum surgens
- Diet
- None; draws damp from clay
- Temperament
- Patient, fussy, holds petty grudges