The gremlin is a fae of about fourteen inches standing, and it weighs less than a loaf of rye. I have measured eleven in three seasons by the simple method of catching them asleep in toolboxes. They are lean, long-eared and quick, and they live wherever people keep something with gears in it.
In early autumn the gremlins of Embrelyn Mill come down from the rafters and take up residence in the housing of the great grain wheel. Their routine at this season is dull to watch. Each morning a gremlin walks the length of its own beam, touches every third peg with one finger, licks the finger, and goes back to sleep. It does this without hurry and without any harm done. The millers call it the counting walk, though nothing is counted. The one I follow most closely, whom the miller's widow Ulla Brandt calls Rivet, has a notch torn from the rim of his left ear and a band of dull green verdigris across both palms, from the copper pins he prefers to handle. His eyes are the yellow of a struck match, and in the dim of the housing they show before the rest of him does.
Winter changes the habit. The cold stiffens the mill, and the gremlins grow restless and sullen. Pins go missing from the sluice gate. Oil turns up on the wrong side of a latch. Nothing is broken outright; things are loosened by a quarter turn, so that a cart wheel runs a mile before it comes off. The people of Embrelyn follow one rule without exception: no one repairs a machine on the day it first fails. They leave it until the next morning and put a thimble of linseed oil beside it. By the following day the fault has usually corrected itself, and the thimble is empty. Tracking a gremlin is mostly a matter of looking for droppings, which are tiny gray pellets of rust and wax, and for the smear of grease along a wall at the height of a child's knee.
By spring the animals have moved to the ferrier works at Amvarro Cross, where the first carts of the season come in for mending. Rivet has gone with them, and the green is fading from his palms. In the mill housing, where he slept all winter, the beam still has its worn groove, and in the groove lies a single copper pin, bright at one end and licked clean.
- Classification
- Mischief fae, machine-dwelling
- Habitat
- Mills, forges, cart sheds, workshops
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- 14 inches standing, under 2 pounds
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Human workshops and mills
- Binomial
- Mechanophagus pellucidus
- Diet
- Rust, candle wax, copper filings
- Temperament
- Idle, spiteful in cold weather