The first sign is a field of turnips with every leaf bitten clean off and the roots left in the ground. Nothing has been dug. Along the headland of Gravelhound Farm the soil is pressed with bare, broad footprints, toes spread wide, heels dragging slightly to the left. A dropped sack lies slit along one seam, its flour licked from the cloth in long stripes. No grimlock is in sight. The tracks run to a drainage culvert and stop there.
In early autumn the notes are mostly of tracks. The grimlock comes up from the old quarry tunnels under Ravenstone Hollow in the dry weeks, when the culverts hold no water to muddy its trail. It is blind, with the skin where eyes should be smooth and gray as a river pebble, and it works by hearing and smell. I watched one stand quite still in a barley stubble for the better part of an hour, head tilted, while a farm cart creaked a quarter mile away. It is five feet tall, long in the arm, with a stoop that makes the knuckles brush the ground. The skin is the color of wet slate, but across the chest runs a band of pale scar tissue, thick as a belt, and the right ear is notched in three places. It carries a flat-bladed iron spade head with no handle, bound to its forearm with strips of sheepskin, and it uses this to scrape tubers from frozen ground.
By the first hard frost the behavior shifts. The grimlock stops raiding and begins hoarding, and the people of Gravelhound have a trade that exists for no other reason: the tunnel-sweepers, who walk the culverts each November with sacks of salted fish and leave them at the mouths. The rule is simple and everyone keeps it. Never speak above a murmur near a culvert, and never clap. A clap is a shout to a grimlock, and the farmers say a clapped-at grimlock remembers the house. Its one pettiness shows here. It will take the fish, but it returns the empty sacks folded in exact squares on the doorstep, and if the sack is a poor weave, it leaves it unfolded in a heap, which the sweepers read as a complaint.
Deep winter, I found no tracks at all. The ground was iron and the culverts silent, and I assumed the quarry folk had sealed themselves in. Then, on the shortest day, a grimlock came to the gate of Gravelhound alone, in full snow glare, with its face turned up to the sun it could not see. It set the bladeless spade head on the fence post, carefully, and went back down the road the way it had come. Nothing was taken that year, from any farm.
- Classification
- Blind cave-dwelling humanoid
- Habitat
- Quarry tunnels and drainage culverts
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 5 ft tall, long-armed
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Underground quarry country
- Binomial
- Troglodytes caecus
- Diet
- Tubers, grain, salted fish
- Temperament
- Wary, grudging, easily offended