"It sets the kettle down for you, if you're quiet about it," said Dessa Hallowick, a salt raker, while she scraped brine crust off her boots at the edge of Eckersley Pan. She did not look up. She had said it the way another person might mention a neighbor's dog. I have kept notes on the ifrit of the Pan across one year. In the dry months it is a column of brown-black smoke the height of two men, with a torso of packed ember and a head like a hooded lamp. Its eyes are two slots of orange. It stays near the old pumping shed and does very little. Each morning, without fail, it walks the length of the shed and breathes once on every iron hinge, which dries them. That is all. There is no menace in it and no wonder either. It does the hinges the way a clerk stamps papers.
With the first autumn rain the behavior shifts. The ifrit grows thin and long, hisses where drops strike its shoulders, and leaves the shed to shelter under the lip of Ormsby Scar, a basalt ledge two miles north. Steam rises off it in sheets. In this season it will not approach water at all, and rakers who need to cross the flooded channels wait for it to pass first. Locals leave a flat stone of dry charcoal on the shed step before the rains. Nobody I spoke to could say who began the practice, but the charcoal is always gone by morning, and no raker touches the step after dusk.
Winter changes it again. Frost cracks on the shed roof, and the ifrit swells, glowing a dull red like a stove banked for the night. It sits motionless for days. Its heat is enough to melt a rind of ice from the pan at forty paces, and the rakers work that melted strip. Its tracks are scorched circles of glassy salt, each the size of a dinner plate, and they are the practical sign for finding it. Fresh glass is warm to the palm. Old glass is clouded white.
Dessa claims the ifrit is older than the Pan itself and was here before the salt. I have no way to check this. What I can report is that in spring it sinks into the ground beside the shed and does not come out again until the brine dries. Where it goes, and what it does there, and whether it sleeps or simply waits, nobody on the Pan has been able to tell me.
- Classification
- Fire-and-smoke elemental
- Habitat
- Salt flats, pumping sheds, basalt ledges
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 12 ft tall as smoke column
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Plane of Smokeless Fire
- Binomial
- Pyrodaemon cinereus
- Diet
- Charcoal, dry heat, hot embers
- Temperament
- Aloof, orderly, wary of rain