The Gambrel
The gambrel works a district for a season and then it is gone. Malin Bridge had one the Newshoot before last: first a scullery maid on Holme Lane saw a figure on the ridge tiles across the road, folded up small, watching her window. The geraniums on her sill had all turned to face it, but then the geraniums at Malin Bridge do that anyway. Then a courier swore something dropped past him off the Owlerton gasholder and did not land, or landed somewhere he could not see and kept moving. By the third week the whole valley was sitting up after murkfall with the curtains open, and half of them had seen it, and none of them agreed on more than the eyes.
Everyone agrees on the eyes. Two points of banked-coal orange, low to a wall or high on a stack, holding still while the rest of it does not. The body reads as a long dark coat until it moves, and then it reads as too many joints. It goes up brick the way you or I go up stairs. It clears the gap between terraces without a run at it. On slate it makes a sound like someone laying out cutlery, and by the time you have placed the sound it is on the next roof.
It rarely comes down for you, which is the only good news. When it does, it comes from above and behind, drops onto your shoulders, and rides you into a wall or a railing before it lets go and is gone up the brick again. People have died of that. Not of the gambrel. Of the railing. The greater danger is the district itself: a valley three weeks into a gambrel gathers in the churchyard on a murkneet with lamps and billhooks, and a stranger walking through after dark is taking a real risk from the living.
Nobody has caught one. Nobody has found a dead one. Whether Malin Bridge's gambrel is the same animal that worked Wadsley the year before, or Attercliffe before that, is the sort of question you can start a fight over in the right bar. My own view is that there is more than one, that they do not overlap the way gritstrike do not overlap, and that a district only ever has to survive one at a time.
Field note: if you are out on a murkneet in gambrel season, walk in the middle of the road, not under the eaves, and keep your chin up. It wants the drop. Deny it the angle and it will usually wait for easier.
| Type | Blinker |
| HP | 4 |
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