Market week at Oxgang falls in the second week of October, and the horned devil comes down off the limestone to meet it. It wants left boots. Only left ones, never a right, and no one in the valley has worked out why. It takes them from porches, from drying racks, from under benches in the cobbler's row, and once from the foot of a sleeping drover, who woke with a sock and a grievance. A good pair of right boots set on a thatch ridge as a test got no better treatment. The devil turned one over, sniffed the sole, and put it back with the face of a customer shown wilted lettuce.
It stands seven feet, narrow through the hips, with ridged horns curling forward past the cheekbones and a barbed tail carried like a hooked cane. In October it works in daylight, because the noise of the market covers its landings. Its hoofprints show in spilled flour outside the miller's, each one scorched brown at the edges. I measured the stride with a cooper's stave notched in inches: thirty-eight, heel to heel, the same across the whole square. It walks the same way whether it is stealing or not.
Through market week nobody in Oxgang says "pair." A pair is a brace, a set, a couple, anything else. The reason given is that the devil takes the word as an invitation. Nan Corwith keeps the only left-boot shop in the valley, selling singles at a third of the full price, and she cannot stitch them fast enough. Her trade exists because of the devil, and she has never once thanked it.
By December the devil has moved to Chaldron Fell, where the lime kilns burn day and night. It roosts on the warm kiln caps with its wings folded over its head like a wet coat and barely stirs when the burners rake the ash beneath it. It steals nothing in winter. The boots sit in rows on the stone beside it, laces done up. When the thaw comes, the horns shed their outer sheaths in curled plates the color of old piano keys, and the devil spends a week raking the rafters of the lime sheds with the bare horns, sulking and itchy. I left Chaldron Fell on a dry morning in March. From the ridge road I looked back and saw that every boot on the kiln cap had been turned with its toe to the west, and that the nearest one had been polished.
- Classification
- Winged infernal humanoid
- Habitat
- Limestone kilns and market rooftops
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 7 ft tall, 12 ft wingspan
- Activity
- Seasonal
- Realm
- Lower infernal planes, surface visitor
- Binomial
- Diabolus cornutus sinistrapes
- Diet
- Charred bread, lamp soot, mutton fat
- Temperament
- Petty, territorial, patient