Air-Finches

Overview

Air-finches are small yellow songbirds bred in the Dwarven holds and carried in cages on the vent rounds and into the workings. Their use is simple: they sicken from bad air before people do, so a finch that stops singing, or falls from its perch, means the air is going bad. The Kobold crews who walk the vent runs say their own sound codes are older and better, and that a finch only warns when it is already too late.

Appearance

An air-finch is the size of a sparrow, slim, with a short conical bill. Hold-bred birds are bright yellow all over, some with a little green or brown on the wings; the wild stock they came from, long ago, was streaked green and brown. The cock sings a long, rolling, trilling song almost without pause; the hen chirps.

It hops restlessly about its cage. In bad air it fluffs out its feathers, goes quiet, sways on the perch, and drops. Rounds carry it in a small wooden cage with a little brass door, often hung from the end of a staff.

Habitat and Range

Air-finches live only where Dwarves keep them: in the holds of the Ironspine and above all in the Stonewake Deeps, where air comes first. Each hold breeds its own in a lamplit finch-room near the outer halls and keeps the breeding lines in its tallies.

Behaviour and Temperament

Air-finches are bred tame. They eat seed, greens, and the crumbs of a round's food, and they sing in the dark if a lamp is near. They do not live long in the deepest levels without being brought up for light and air between rounds.

Life Cycle

Hens lay four or five eggs in a small basket in the finch-room in spring and summer. A finch may live ten years in care, though most carried on the rounds die sooner.

Uses and Dangers

They give warning, which in the Deeps is life. A round carries a finch alongside its lamps and listens to it as it listens to the draught. They do no harm. The danger is relying on them: a finch warns of gas, foul air, and heat that has built up, but not of a brace about to fail.

Lore and Belief

Dwarves count a finch that died on a round as having saved the round, and some holds mark the finch's cage-hook in the vent run with a small notch. Kobold crews say the finch is a Dwarven habit, honest but slow: by the time the finch falls, a Kobold has already read the draught's sound, the change in the stone, and the marks the last crew left, and has turned back. Dwarves have learned to read those marks without being able to make them, and still carry the finch.

Hold songs remember the finch that fell at the head of a rescue round during a fire-damp burst, and the warden who carried its cage on through the bad air and brought eleven miners out alive.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Animals