"Who is inside it?" the girl at Eryllan asks me, standing on the bottom step of the hall with her hands behind her back. Nobody, I tell her. I have put a candle to the visor slit and seen only frost, white and furred, lining the inside of the helm. She does not look comforted. The suit stands on a pine rack between two windows, a plain man-at-arms' harness of gray steel pitted brown at the knees. The left pauldron is bronze, hammered flat, green at the rivets, and does not match the rest. A hole the size of a plum is punched through the breastplate over the breastbone, its edges curled outward, and at dusk a pale green light sits in it like a coal gone wrong. Those are observations. Everything else is testimony, and I have three accounts.
Ffion Tegwen sweeps the hall at Eryllan every dawn. The village has kept a sweeper since the suit arrived, and the post passes from aunt to niece. She carries a tin pan and empties it onto a sheet of newsprint, where she reads the rust the way a dairymaid reads a pail. In her account the suit goes to the dead hearth at night and holds its gauntlets open over the ashes until the stones are cold. Then it goes home to its rack. She has never seen it move. She has only seen where it has been.
A carter at Vaenglas, forty miles east, owned the suit for one winter before the buyers sent it back. He says it follows his wagon on moonless roads, never nearer than forty paces, and halts when he halts. He kept a lantern lit under the seat. He thinks that was a mistake. The schoolmaster's widow, who dusted it that winter, says it never walks at all. It turns. Every Friday she found it facing the wall, then the door, then her, the visor tipped a finger's width down as though reading her sleeves.
Laid together, the accounts agree on the cold and on the visor and on nothing else. Both towns wedge a wooden spoon into the visor hinge so the helm cannot close, because a shut visor, they say, means it has finished listening. A spoon found on the floor brings the whole household out of bed. The suit feeds on warmth: hearth embers, lamp heat, the palm left too long on its shoulder. It leaves a trail of rust flakes in the shape of sabatons, and that trail is how it is followed and how a room is judged safe to sleep in. On my second evening I laid a pewter cup of water on the breastplate beside the hole and timed it with my pocket watch. The surface skinned over with ice in eleven minutes.
- Classification
- Animated undead harness
- Habitat
- Armories, great halls, old roads
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 6.5 ft tall, about 61 lb
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Castle halls and stone armories
- Binomial
- Armatura frigescens
- Diet
- Warmth from hearths and hands
- Temperament
- Patient, watchful, unreadable