Docket of the Wijnskamp assizes, 14 March, year of the long frost: "Defendant, a yugoloth, appears by its own hand, having paid the clerk in advance. Case dismissed for want of a plaintiff willing to stand in the same room." That is the earliest record in the district, and it already shows the creature's habit of arriving with the paperwork finished. Wijnskamp is a clay-roofed market town on a drained flat, and it has hosted the yugoloth ever since, on sufferance and at a distance of one full street.
The animal itself is a lean, upright fiend about seven feet tall, with ash-gray skin that has the texture of dry slate. The head is long and narrow, with a flat nose slit, a heavy brow and a mouth that stays shut when it listens. The eyes are a hard, bright amber. This particular one, which the Wijnskamp clerks call Jorrit, wears a split iron collar on its left horn, bent open at the seam, and a long coat of waxed oilcloth patched at the elbows. Its fingers are long enough to span a dinner plate. The sun lays a sharp amber glint on the collar and turns the gray hide almost blue at the shoulder.
Through the 1700s the record thins to margin notes. A survey of the Ijsselhof polder, dated 1788, lists the yugoloth as a fixed feature of the sluice road, to be left unmolested and not to be hired after noon. Hiring is the point of it. It sells its service to whoever offers the better terms, then to whoever offers better still, and it keeps every bargain to the letter and no further. Households along the road keep a pinch of coarse salt in the right shoe of the family member who signs anything, and they scrape the salt out onto the doorstep afterward. Nobody can say why it works. Contracts signed that way are, by the town's account, shorter.
On my last visit, Jorrit stood at the sluice gate with its coat buttoned to the throat. This season the coat hangs open, and a second, newer collar lies in the grass beside it, unbent. The iron one on the horn is the older, and it has not been removed. It eats nothing the town can find, but it leaves a clean rectangle of dry ground wherever it has sat to negotiate. I leave by the dike road at noon. Behind me, the grass on the sluice bank holds one such rectangle, empty, with a coin pressed edge-up in its center.
- Classification
- Fiend, mercenary lesser outsider
- Habitat
- Drained flats, sluice roads, waste ground
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 7 ft tall, lean
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Lower planes, hired onto the mortal flats
- Binomial
- Mercator infernalis
- Diet
- Unknown, never seen eating
- Temperament
- Patient, literal, loyal to terms