Bats

Overview

Bats are the small dark flyers that come out at dusk over every village pond and ruined tower. They eat the night's insects by the thousand, roost by day in caves, adits, barns, and broken walls, and are noticed by most people only when one gets into the house. The Kobold crews who work the vents and margins of the deep holds notice them more: a flight of bats boiling out of a working is a warning that the air behind it has gone bad.

Appearance

A common bat would sit in a child's cupped hands with room to spare, its body no bigger than a mouse, its wings a thin brown-black skin stretched between long fingers. Folded, it is a small furred knot of dull brown with a pug face, large ears, and black bead eyes. Its flight is fast and fluttering, full of sudden turns, and most people hear it before they see it: a dry flicker of wings past the ear, and from a roost a high, thin chittering at the edge of hearing. A large roost smells sharply of ammonia, and the dung lies in drifts beneath it.

Habitat and Range

Bats live wherever there is a dry, dark place to hang by day and open air to hunt by night. They roost in natural caves, in the outer adits and abandoned workings of the Ironspine, in the towers, culverts, and storework vaults of the Broken Marches, and in barns and shrine roofs in every farmed country. Roosts reach some way into the openings at the edges of the Roothollows, but no deeper than a bat can fly out in an evening, since all of them feed under the open sky.

Behaviour and Temperament

A bat sleeps hanging head down through the day and wakes at dusk. The whole roost leaves together in a stream, hunts moths, gnats, and beetles over water and field edges through the night, and comes back before dawn. Bats are timid and avoid people, but a roost disturbed by day will burst out in a shrieking cloud. They are quick to leave air they cannot bear: smoke, damp heat, and the trapped gases of a deep working drive them out before a lamp flame shows any change.

Life Cycle

Bats sleep the winter away in the deepest, coldest part of a roost, clustered and still. Females gather in warm nursery roosts in early summer and each bears a single pup, which clings to her and then hangs beside her until it flies in late summer. A bat may live ten years or more, and the same roost is used for generations.

Uses and Dangers

Bats keep down the gnats over fens and the moths in the granaries, though few people thank them. Old roosts hold deep beds of dung, dug out in some places to feed fields and gardens; the diggers wrap their faces, because the air of a long-used dung-cave is foul and has felled careless men (see Bad Air). A bat found on the ground in daylight should not be picked up: sick bats carry biting madness.

For Kobold vent crews a roost near a working is a living warning. When bats pour out of a shaft at the wrong hour, the crew withdraws first and asks why afterwards, and a vent that the bats have abandoned is checked before anyone sleeps near it.

Lore and Belief

A bat that flies into a hall is held in many Human villages to mean that the house will soon stand empty, by death or by leaving, and it is driven out with a broom and the doors left open till dawn. Goblin salvagers say a ruin with no bats in it is a ruin that is about to fall. Children are told that bats tangle themselves in hair; they do not.

Old delvers say the bats of an elder ruin know its treasure rooms, since they roost where the air comes in from below, and that a cloud of them pouring out at noon means something woke down there.

Where It Appears

• Biting Madness