Chime-Bats

Overview

Chime-Bats are the bats of the Crystal Spire. They fly its galleries by their cries, as bats do anywhere, but in the Spire a cry does not fade: it is caught in the crystal and kept. Their roosts are walls full of stored cries, and those cries are mined, carefully, as sound.

Appearance

A Chime-Bat is a small bat, its body the size of a mouse, its fur a soft dark grey shot with amethyst where the light catches it. Its wings are so thin they are nearly clear, and when it beats them they ring faintly, like a fingertip on the rim of a glass. Its ears are tall and its face pinched. It flies in quick, swerving darts, and its cries are too high for most ears, felt as a prickle rather than heard. The crystals it passes flash white with each cry. Its roosts smell of crushed gemstones and droppings.

Habitat and Range

They roost in the Spire's crystal galleries in colonies of hundreds, hanging from the faceted ceilings, and hunt through the galleries and around the peak.

Behaviour and Temperament

They hunt the small moths and flies of the Spire's galleries by their cries, and in the Spire the cries come back to them from every crystal, layered on the cries of their ancestors. They are shy of people and flee loud voices, which in the Spire carry like thunder. They are silent only in their sleep, and the colony's stored cries go on humming in the walls while they sleep.

Abilities

Their cries are stored. A Chime-Bat gallery holds generations of them, and a crystal that has held bat cries a long time is charged with a high, fierce note. The colony keeps its galleries full of sound, and in the Spire, where a crystal emptied of sound shatters, the bats help hold the structure together.

Life Cycle

They bear one pup a year, which clings to its mother and learns to cry in the galleries of its birth. They live long for bats. When a colony dies out or moves, its gallery hums with its cries for centuries after.

Uses and Dangers

The Crystal Singers protect the colonies, valuing the bats as keepers of the Spire's sound. Miners who come for captured sounds take small crystals from old bat galleries, called chime shards, which are used for signals and alarms: struck gently, a shard gives a piercing note heard a long way off. Struck hard, it shrieks and shatters, and the shards fly. A careless miner can set off a whole wall.

Lore and Belief

Miners say a chime shard taken from a gallery where the colony still roosts will call the bats to it wherever it goes, and some sell them as charms against vermin. Travellers believe the bats can hear thoughts, since in the Spire to think is to sing; nothing shows that they can. The Singers are said to keep one gallery whose cries no one is allowed to hear.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Natives of the Zones