The flank is cold enough to numb a palm held against it for a ten-count, even at noon in August. The surface has the grain of a whetstone, and the grit that comes away on the skin tastes of iron when it reaches the lip. The body is a stack of dressed granite slabs pinned over a frame of black iron, gray everywhere except at the joints, where orange rust has bled down the stone in streaks. At Bushel Cross, where the grain carts are weighed, the guardian stands at the scale house door. Carters halt their wagons short of an invisible line between it and Corliss Wray, who wears the amulet, and wait until she has crossed first. Nobody walks between the two of them. A boy who tried it last spring was lifted aside by the collar and set down, unhurt, three paces off.
The chest holds a socket the size of a saucer, rimmed in green copper, where the stone that answers to the amulet is seated. In full sun the stone gives off a thin amber-gold glow, still visible against the glare. A strip of frayed canvas crosses the chest from the right shoulder to the left hip. Wray says it began as a sling for hauling quarry blocks and that the guardian has never shifted it. Both shoulders are capped with riveted iron plate. The left forearm carries a dent with the curve of a barrel head. At Ewerwick, where the potters fire their kilns on the ridge, nobody will say who put it there.
The face is a single slab with a brow ridge, two narrow slots for eyes, and a jaw plate hinged at the sides. Behind each slot sits a pinprick of amber that never changes size. It does not blink and it does not follow strangers, though it turns toward Wray whenever she speaks, a quarter inch at a time. I measured it with a folding carpenter's rule against the scale house wall: eight feet two inches to the crown. For the footprint I laid the rule beside a print pressed into wet gravel: nineteen inches long. The prints are how it is tracked, each sunk to the depth of a thumb joint and each edged with a dusting of gray grit that the sparrows will not land in.
Most of its day is routine. At the end of each afternoon it scrapes the lichen from its shins against the scale house step, one leg and then the other, and in the shade it shifts its weight from foot to foot the way a cart horse does when the wagons back up. Wray's dog sleeps against its heel. I left Bushel Cross by the east road at dusk. On the road I noticed my right sleeve was still cold where I had leaned on its hip, an hour later and a mile off.
- Classification
- Bound construct of granite and iron
- Habitat
- Gate yards, scale houses, stone thresholds
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 8 ft 2 in to the crown
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Walled trade towns and gate yards
- Binomial
- Custos scutarius
- Diet
- None; runs on its amulet's stone
- Temperament
- Patient, literal, fixed on its wearer