Clockrats

Overview

In the Stopped Clock nothing moves but the traveller, and the Clockrats. They were not caught in the moment. They came in afterwards, through the same membrane travellers cross, and found a town whose food never rots and whose people never sweep. A Clock that has stood long enough has a colony.

Appearance

They are brown rats, larger and sleeker than a cellar rat, with glossy coats, long bald tails, and teeth gone orange from gnawing. Against the Clock's washed-out stillness they look shockingly alive, as travellers do. Their scurrying is the loudest sound in the zone: claws on flagstones, the scrape of a crust being dragged. They smell of rat and, faintly, of fresh bread.

Habitat and Range

They live where the moment left food: bakeries mid-bake, larders, market stalls, a family's table set for a meal that never ended. They nest in the gaps behind walls and under floors. Not every Clock has them; the youngest have none, and a Clock in an empty place has nothing to feed them.

Behaviour and Temperament

They are bold and quick, and they have learned that frozen people cannot strike back. They run over a baker's arm and a sleeping child's blanket alike, and they eat from hands that cannot close. A traveller is the only thing in the Clock that can hurt them, and they treat travellers as rivals: they bite when cornered and come at a dropped pack in numbers.

Abilities

They are not changed by the stillness. Inside it, though, they need little: the bread they eat is fixed at the instant of the moment and does not stale, and what they gnaw away stays gnawed, as anything a traveller moves stays moved. Each crust they carry off is a change in the snapshot.

Life Cycle

They breed as rats do, but more slowly, and live longer than rats outside. When a Clock collapses and time resumes, its rats are simply rats in a town that has woken, and are hunted with the rest.

Uses and Dangers

Their bite is a rat's bite and can fester. The greater harm is what they leave behind: every loaf they hollow and every larder they empty is waiting to be found when time resumes, and the Frozen watch it happen. Travellers who come to bargain with the Clock-Keeper sometimes find that the Keeper's grief now includes the rats.

Lore and Belief

Visitors argue whether the rats suffer the Clock's silence or are glad of it. Some say the frozen hear every scratch, and that the rats are the cruellest thing in the zone because they are the only ones that do not care. The tale that a Clockrat carried out of the zone ages a lifetime in a night is told often and has not been tested.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Natives of the Zones