The sound is a wet sucking, steady as a slow pump, and it comes from a ditch that ought to be silent. Stanislav Orrick, who cuts reed at Jurnmeasure Fen, hears it from forty paces and stops his scythe. Nothing else in a fen makes that noise at that tempo. A bird would break off, a frog would argue back. This keeps on at the same pace, patient and unhurried.
He finds it where the ditch bends, a lemure up to its hips in black water, pulling one leg free of the mud and pushing it back in. It is the size of a sack of barley, gray-brown, and shaped like a candle left too near a stove: sagging, features run together, one long drip of a nose. The eyes are two pale blisters that never close. It has no interest in him. Lemures rarely do. They are the lowest rank of the Pit's rabble, loosed in numbers to the upper world, and what they do there is mostly nothing. This one is routinely, tirelessly sorting pebbles from the ditch bottom into a heap on the bank, then tipping the heap back in. It has done this since the thaw. The heap is level to a fingerwidth and the pebbles never match.
The fen people at Jurnmeasure have a habit for such days. They scatter a handful of wet oat husks across any doorstep within a mile of a lemure, because the creature cannot cross a threshold it has to count grains to enter, and it loses its place at forty or so. Stanislav's mother swore by it. His wife says the husks only draw mice. Both agree that the oats must be wet, and that nobody knows why. Over at Nailwright Landing, downstream, they skip the oats and simply leave a bucket of pond water on the step, and the lemure stands there studying its own reflection until it wanders off.
They do leave a mark. Where one has stood for a season, the water turns the color of strong tea and tastes of struck flint, and cattle will not drink there. Stanislav watches this one until the light goes, then lays a trail of wet husks along the bank and walks home the long way. Behind him the sucking carries on. He marks the heap on his scythe handle with a thumbnail: nineteen pebbles tall, at the last count, and one of them is a button.
- Classification
- Minor fiend, lowest devil rabble
- Habitat
- Stagnant fens, ditches and pits
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- the size of a barley sack
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- The Pit and its seepage
- Binomial
- Limus pigrus
- Diet
- Silt, rot and sulfurous mud
- Temperament
- Sluggish, indifferent, easily distracted