Deathwatch Beetles

Overview

Deathwatch beetles live in old, damp hardwood and eat it from inside for years before anyone sees the damage. They are known by sound. In spring the grown beetles knock their heads against the wood of their tunnels to call a mate, and in a quiet house at night the ticking sounds like a slow clock. Basin folk take it for a death coming. On the Greyspan at Greyford it means the braces.

Appearance

The beetle is the size of a little fingernail, dull chocolate-brown and mottled with patches of short yellowish hair, so that it looks dusty even when clean. Its head is tucked under a hooded shield, and when touched it pulls in its legs and plays dead. The grub is a fat, curled, cream-white thing with a brown mouth. Their sign is round exit holes the width of a pea in the face of a beam, and fine pale dust, like coarse flour, that sifts out of them and gathers in little cones below.

Habitat and Range

They want old oak and other hard timber that has stayed damp and begun to soften with rot: roof beams over a leaking gutter, the underside of quays, church and hall timbers, and the bridge braces and planking of the Greyspan, which stand over water and are never dry. They are common in the old towns of the Confluence Basins and along the quays of the Lower Serath. New, dry timber is safe from them for a long while.

Behaviour and Temperament

The grubs bore slowly, for years, in the soft heart of a timber, leaving the outer skin whole, so a beam can look sound and be hollow. The grown beetles hardly fly. They emerge in spring, tick for their mates, and lay eggs in cracks and old holes of the same timber, so a building's infestation is its own and passes down the generations of the beetle as the house does of its people.

Life Cycle

A grub lives in the wood for several years, longer in dry timber than in wet, then makes a chamber near the surface, turns to a beetle, and waits through the winter before cutting its way out in spring. A grown beetle lives a few weeks.

Uses and Dangers

They give nothing. Their harm is hollowed timber: a roof that comes down in a snow year, a quay that gives under a cart, a bridge brace that looks whole and is not. Greyford's Tollwardens tap the Greyspan braces with a mallet and listen, and a brace that rings dull is marked. Carpenters cut out the worst wood and burn it, and keep new timber dry. Goblins of Lowbank, who know the span's underside better than its Highbank keepers, count the exit holes in spring and say aloud which braces are going, which is one more thing the two banks quarrel about.

Lore and Belief

In the Basins, ticking in the beams of a sickroom is a death-omen, and the family sits up with the sick. Some say the sound counts the days left. On the Greyspan the saying runs the other way: when the bridge ticks, it is the bridge that is dying. Neither belief harms anyone; the second is true.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Animals