The erinyes has a woman's face. Her nose is straight, her jaw sharp, her brow heavy, and her hair is pinned up with an iron nail. She stands six feet tall on heron's talons, and her wings, dark teal outside and rust-red beneath, open to fourteen feet. She does not hunt. She waits for what has been promised. The naturalist has set down three accounts of her from two towns, and they agree on less than one would like. Lenka, who roofs in Jarovec, says she is tidy. Every gutter on the north side of her street is found scoured to bare tin after a visit, with no leaf or feather left in it, and the standing water is gone. Lenka tips her rain barrel on its side every dusk and props a plank across the downspout, since a dry roof gives the erinyes nothing to stay for. Her neighbors do the same. The one house that forgot, she says, had a man inside who slept badly for a month and never said why.
Lubor watches the idle smelter at Kostrava, and his account is about the doorposts. The plaster there is covered in thumbprints, pressed in by workers who swore to a contract on the day the furnace was lit. Lubor says she reads them the way a clerk runs a finger down a ledger. She reaches for one print at a time, and she does not touch the honest ones. He keeps his own thumb dry of plaster and swears nothing inside the smelter walls, not even that it is cold. He also says her left wing has a notch cut clean, as if with shears.
The third account comes from Lida, a plasterer's widow in Kostrava, and it contradicts the first two. She says the erinyes does not hunt oath-breakers at all, only sits above them in the rafters until they lie down, and that the sleep she takes is not stolen but handed over. The naturalist has no proof for or against this. Nobody it spoke to has watched the taking happen, and the sleepers recall nothing but a green light on the ceiling.
What the naturalist did measure was her mark. On a rafter above the crucible, three talon gouges sit eleven and a half inches apart, taken with a folding rule and checked against a second beam where she had landed on the other foot. The soot on the wall behind the beam is wiped in an arc fourteen feet across. Both numbers match the fact sheet. The notch in the wing was the only thing the naturalist saw clearly, for one breath, in the light from the channel. Lenka's erinyes cleans gutters, Lubor's reads thumbprints, and Lida's waits. If they are one creature, someone must know who gave her the first oath, and why she cut the notch herself.
- Classification
- Winged vengeance fiend
- Habitat
- Rooftops, gutters, idle smelters
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 6 ft tall, 14 ft wingspan
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Lower courts of the Pit of Oaths
- Binomial
- Vindicta pennaferrea
- Diet
- Standing rainwater; oath-breakers' sleep
- Temperament
- Patient, exacting, tidy