Cage-Larks

Overview

Cage-Larks are the songbirds of the Gilded Cage. They sing only the songs the plane permits, at the hours it permits, and the same songs everywhere. A lark that sings off the tune is about to be corrected, and travellers learn to watch the larks for what the plane is about to do to anyone who strays.

Appearance

A Cage-Lark is the size of a sparrow, neat and upright, with a slate-grey back and a breast of polished gold that catches the plane's even light like metal. Its feathers lie exactly in place, never ruffled. Its eyes are small and black, its beak short and pale. It perches upright on the clipped trees and gilded railings, sits still between songs, and flies in short, straight lines. Its song is sweet and precise, a short phrase repeated without the smallest change. It has no smell.

Habitat and Range

They live wherever the plane has trees or railings to perch on: the manicured gardens, the squares, the corridors of the gilded halls. Each lark has its perch and keeps to it.

Behaviour and Temperament

Larks sing on the regulated hours, all of them together, the same phrase across a whole city. Between hours they sit silent. They do not quarrel, court, or forage where anyone can see. Now and then a lark sings a wrong note, a phrase out of time or a trill that was not there before. The plane answers at once: the bird stiffens on its perch, and either an Enforcer comes and lifts it away or it simply sits, unmoving, until it is singing the right phrase again.

Abilities

A Cage-Lark's song does not vary, and its notes carry the plane's order: travellers say that a person who hums along with the larks finds it easier to walk the grid. A lark is also a sign. Before the plane corrects a visitor, the larks nearby fall out of tune, as if the disorder reached them first.

Life Cycle

No one has seen a Cage-Lark nest, hatch, or die. The Gilded say the larks are as many now as when the city was laid out.

Uses and Dangers

They are harmless and give nothing but warning. Visitors who come to store goods in the plane's vaults or to seek a judgement learn to listen for a lark gone off the tune near them, and to stop, stand straight, and follow the path again before their own limbs begin to stiffen.

Lore and Belief

Travellers bring home Cage-Larks in tales, and sometimes say they have brought one home in fact, in a gilded cage, singing its phrase; the birds are said to fall silent forever once through the Veil. In the lords' halls and counting-houses of the Material Plane, a "cage-lark" is a steward who repeats his master's word and nothing else.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Natives of the Planes