Rats and Vermin

Overview

Vermin follow stored food. Wherever a people keeps a granary, a cellar, a ship's hold, or a larder, rats and mice come to it, and with them the smaller pests of grain and cloth. They are the oldest quarrel between a household and its stores, and the reason magic of the threshold and the boundary does some of its most ordinary work. In the Confluence Basins, where every village keeps a granary against the bad year, a winter's rats can decide whether that store lasts.

Appearance

Rats

A grown rat is about the length of a hand from nose to rump, with a naked, scaly tail as long again. It is brown-grey above and paler below, coarse-furred, with a blunt muzzle, quivering whiskers, small dark eyes, and thin, pink-grey ears and feet. It runs in quick, low dashes along the foot of a wall, and its claws on boards, its squeal, and its gnawing in the dark are known to every child. A rat-run smells sharp and sour, of musty droppings and urine.

Mice

Mice are smaller, a thumb's length of grey-brown with big ears and a long thin tail, and get in where a rat cannot: through the gap under a door, into the sacks themselves. They are seen less than they are heard, a dry scratch behind the panelling.

Store Pests

With the rats come the lesser pests that spoil a store from inside: grain weevils, meal moths, and the beetles of the larder (see Insects and Bees).

Habitat and Range

Rats and mice live with people, not apart from them: in granaries and threshing barns, in cellars and larders, in ships' holds on humid voyages, and in the drains, culverts, and lower works of towns, where Kobold households know their runs as well as their own. They are fewest where stores are fewest, on the high herding country and on the move with travellers.

Behaviour and Temperament

Rats are bold in numbers, wary alone, and quick to learn which doors are kept and which are not. They feed at night and go where the food is, and a store left unguarded one winter is found by the next. Cornered, a rat bites. Mice are timid and endless.

Life Cycle

Both breed fast and often, a litter in a few weeks and many litters in a year, so that a pair in autumn is a plague by spring. Few live more than a year or two.

Uses and Dangers

Vermin give nothing but work for dogs and traps. They eat and foul grain, gnaw sacks, ropes, and bindings, and spoil whatever they touch; a granary count on the threshing floor that comes up short is often laid at their door before anyone is accused.

Against them the schools keep plain, useful workings. Pest Bar, laid along sill and seam, makes a boundary feel hostile to vermin and keeps grain stores free of rats through winter. Salt Ward, a blessed circle of salt, keeps rot and vermin from food stores, bodies, and medicines, as ships' surgeons guard their supplies on humid voyages. A hearth-and-threshold blessing, Household Grace, keeps vermin away among a dwelling's quiet everyday protections. None of these is sure against larger beasts or against magical vermin, which shrug off a boundary meant for ordinary ones.

Lore and Belief

Rats are counted bad luck in a granary and good sense on a ship: sailors say rats leave a hull that will not come home. A house where Household Grace has held for generations is said to have no mice, and an old healer's cottage whose stores stay whole without a trap set is taken for a sign of a blessing laid long ago.

Rat-catchers are among the least loved and best paid of town trades, and several towns swear it was their own rat-catcher who, cheated of his fee, led the rats into the granary.

Where It Appears

• Warding (Pest Bar, Household Grace)
• Surging Magic: Salt Ward