The gravel on the Marrowdeen shelf is warm through the soles of my boots, warm as a loaf pulled an hour ago, and it has been warm for four hundred yards. Nothing grows on it. Pale grit sticks to my fingers and tastes of struck flint. This is how a hell hound's range announces itself, by a temperature that climbs underfoot before any animal appears. Kestrin Obowe, who has worked the shelf as a cinder-sifter for twenty years, walks ahead of me with a sieve strapped to her back. Her trade exists only because of the hounds. Where one beds down, it leaves a crust of fused ash the size of a threshing floor, and in that crust are the glassy beads the dogs shed from their coats. Glassmakers in Bexaldu pay for them by the pound. Kestrin reads the ground as a farmer reads weather, and she stops me at a seam of black grit with a flat hand.
The hound is lying in the middle of the crust, chin on its forepaws. It is a long, narrow animal with a coat the color of a cooled forge, and in the creases of its neck the hide glows orange, dims, and glows again with its breathing. Its eyes are open and the color of a coal's heart. It does not look at us. It is busy with something Kestrin says it does every afternoon: it licks one forepaw clean, turns the paw over, and licks the other, with the flat, patient attention of a house dog after supper. A thread of smoke leaves its nostrils each time it sighs. I count eleven rounds of this before it finishes.
I take the one measurement I am allowed. Kestrin drops a pinch of ash from her pouch, and I lay a length of waxed string along the crust from the hound's flank to the nearest unburnt grass. Twenty-two feet of scorched ground separates them, and the string stiffens and curls at the near end before I pull it back. At the shelf's edge, Kestrin says, the dogs are never closer than the grass lets them be. Locals refuse to speak a hound's color aloud while standing on its crust. They say the dog hears it and takes the word for a request.
The hound lifts its head once, at a sound I do not hear, and the glow in its neck brightens to the shade of a lit stove. Then it settles. Kestrin begins sifting without hurry, and I back away over the warm grit. Behind me, where I had stood, each bootprint has filled with a thin gray powder that is already going cold.
- Classification
- Fiend, canine-shaped fire spirit
- Habitat
- Scorched gravel shelves and ash flats
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 4 ft at the shoulder
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Marrowdeen shelf and the Bexaldu uplands
- Binomial
- Canis ustorius
- Diet
- Charred bone and cinders
- Temperament
- Aloof, territorial, quick to ignite