Lunch on the BAS Fernmarvel

There's still no sign of the road, but we found something much more interesting today.

We had been walking for most of the morning, passing hot springs and salamander hunters crouched over lava pools, when the scraps started appearing. They were widely scattered at first - just a shred here and there, pieces of the tough grub silk used for airship balloons. The airtight wax had melted off long ago.

We followed them for a while, having nothing better to do while looking for the road. I picked them up idly as we walked.

There were more of them the farther we went. It was getting hard to find a spring or patch of ground that didn't have a scrap of cloth in it somewhere when we came around a steam vent and saw the gondola.

It was obviously the source of the scraps: an old airship gondola, practically an antique, covered with old-fashioned Caroque scrollwork and tarnished brass. It was half-submerged, nose-down, in a steaming hot spring. The cockpit was completely underwater. It had been brightly painted once; faint patches of red and gold remained in crevices and the frames of the shattered windows. The steam had taken most of it off.

It took me a moment to realize what it was, as I'd never seen an airship gondola without its balloons before. They were completely gone. That was hardly surprising, though, as their remains were spread over several miles of the canyon. The hydrogen must have ignited at some point. The support ropes drooped forlornly from their hooks, rotting in the damp.

As we got closer (after all, if you find a crashed airship, how can you not investigate it?), we saw that the spring it was sticking out of was an odd gray-green color. It smelled like an explosion in a tea shop. Some sort of mineral thing, I assumed. That happens to some hot springs.

We were sitting there staring when a man came out of a small hatch near the back (now the top) of the airship. All we could see from the ground was that he was small and purple.

"Ahoy, visitors!" he shouted. "That's the sight I like to see, yes sir, it is! Got any tea? No? No, you don't look like the type. That's all right, we can't all have tea, after all. Well, what are you waiting for? Come in, come in! I haven't got all day! Well, actually I do, but who cares about that? I've got lunch, that's what matters! Come in and we'll eat it!"

With that, he disappeared back inside, still talking.

We hesitated for a moment. It had been a rather unusual greeting. After walking unsuccessfully all morning, though, I was rather tired of it, and an invitation to lunch was no less welcome because the person who gave it was a bit odd. Most people are a bit odd.

Fortunately, there was another door farther down the airship; there was enough ornamentation on the hull that I could have climbed to the upper door, but Plack couldn't have managed it. Llamas can't climb vertical surfaces. He was reluctant to go in at all at first, but the promise of lunch was enough to tempt someone who had been eating nothing but cube turnips since we left the upper jungle.

The man we had seen opened the lower door as we reached it. He was a reptile of some sort, about four feet tall and stocky, with the most enormous ears I've ever seen. Except for his silver-tinged purple scales, he looked almost like a flightless bat. He was wearing an old captain's uniform, very worn and faded, patched with scraps of the same fabric that lay all over the ground outside. I think it had once been blue. The shoulders and lapels were trimmed with scuffed gold braid.

"Ah, there you are, good!" He beamed up at us. "Come right in, I got lunch all ready on the boiler, we can use the good china from the old days! You must be wondering who I am, eh? I'm the captain of this here ship! Been sailing the skies for thirty years! Been sailing this here puddle for the last twelve, actually, but I likes it here, so that's all right. Only problem is there's no one to talk to. Had to talk to myself since last week. You're here now, though, so I can make up for lost time! Come in and eat!"

The captain spent the next few hours showing us around his airship - the parts of it still above water, anyway - and served us a lunch of boiled cacti (deflated), geyser shrimp, and scones on chipped, fern-patterned gilt china. Apparently, he boiled his food in the hottest part of the spring. It had the same strange herbal smell that the water did. I don't normally drink water that smells strange; the captain seemed perfectly healthy, though - almost frighteningly so - so I didn't worry about it. It did make the food taste good.

The airship was magnificent. It was gradually disintegrating in the heat and the damp of the Boiler Room, but it must have been one of the most splendid airships in the sky before it crashed. Every room was a masterpiece of lightweight Caroque architecture. Carved float-wood panels made up the walls, every unmildewed curve and curlicue still gleaming in the dim orange light coming in through the cracked gallery windows. Light bronze leaf coated the banisters of the stairs. The grand ballroom was missing the entire upper wall; trees grew there, sheltered from the heat outside. Their branches echoed the arches of the broken Palladian windows. Fifteen years of fallen leaves and branches from the jungle overhead had turned into a thick layer of soil, perfect for their fallen seeds.

"Not much of a ballroom now, this place," the captain commented. "A conservatory, that's what it is, and you won't find better on any other airship, they got to be retired like the old Fernmarvel here." (That was how we found out the airship's name; the gilded letters on the hull had long since vanished, either fallen off or stolen.) "You like jellyapples? Course you do, who doesn't like jellyapples, no one I know, and I got 'em growing right over there by the staircase. I'll get us a few after lunch."

We finished lunch (and the promised jellyapples) in the old navigator's cockpit, a small, cozy room full of rusted machinery and water that had leaked in through the shattered observation windows. Like the water outside - even more so, actually - it was green and steaming and smelled like tea. The captain sat right in the middle of the rising steam, perched on the back of an old swiveling chair bolted to the deck. It stuck out diagonally over the water now.

The cockpit was full of souvenirs of the airship's travels: fossils from the Golden Desert, cyclonoscopes from Mount Moler, a compass still faithfully pointing to a tree in Bannarbangle, seashells resplendent with spines and spirals, a tiny lizard saddle, a four-foot havernack tooth from Morianny carved into the shape of a lighthouse, tasselled Tetravanian tapestries, coins from all over Hamjamser strung from the ceiling... An airship can pick up a lot in thirty years. An antique pipe crawler, still ticking, slept in a glass case to keep its clockwork dry. None of the airship's plumbing worked anymore; the captain had replaced its pipe-wrench claws with scissors and a sewing machine needle so that it could repair his uniform. The strange green scent of the water filled the room.

The captain sighed happily and settled down in the middle of it all to chew his jellyapple. "I've never liked the cold." He shook his head fiercely. "Not even when I was young. Never liked it. Only thing I didn't like about flying an airship, well, that and snobby passengers, never liked them either. I'm more comfortable here than I've been in decades. After we crashed, the crew, passengers all left. I stayed behind. Went down with my ship, I did, and I'm not about to come back up without it, no sir! (That's me, you see - sir - since I'm the captain.) I like this place. I got heat, I got steam for me old lungs, high altitudes weren't good to 'em, and-" he pointed to the steaming, greenish water below - "I got the biggest teapot in the world!"

That explained the smell and the odd greenish color, then. Not minerals after all. It was an entire spring of tea.

He grinned. "You must be wondering where I gets it, yes?" (I was, in fact, but he didn't wait for an answer.) "Hunters bring it to me. All kinds. Green tea, chamomile, Vinchess Purple, mint, fruit zinger - I got 'em all mixed in there. I gives 'em information, you see. I know where the big salamanders hide. I can hear 'em." He tapped one enormous, leathery ear. "Hear 'em all the way from here, humming to themselves down in the lava."

We sat there in the tea-steamed clutter of the cockpit for several hours, listening to the captain tell stories of his travels. I might post a few of them someday if I remember. He sent us off near sunset with the leftovers; there was far more food than the three of us could eat in one meal. We've got a whole bag full of cacti, shrimp, and everlasting ship's scones. Overall, it was the best lunch I've had since eating at the Potted Pumpkin in Cormilack. I don't think the salamander hunters just come for advice.

Neither Plack nor I had a chance to say a single word the whole time. The captain talked constantly. We did say goodbye when we left, but he had started an impassioned monologue to his pipe crawler by then, and I don't think he heard us.

I'll have to remember to bring some tea the next time I cross the Greenhouse Cliff.

The Sentinels

No one knows what the Sentinels are. No one has ever found them deliberately. The only people who have ever found them at all have been lost, wandering in the rain without the slightest idea of where they were. The Sentinels show no sign of noticing them. They just stand there, silent, standing in a row in the rain with their backs to the wind. Their cloaks are long and tattered.

Most people think they're watching for something. If so, it hasn't come yet.

Beauty and the Beast

The Boiler Room

The Greenhouse Cliff is actually a canyon - and a relatively narrow one at that; you can throw a chicken from one side to the other - but for some reason, it's always just a cliff at the top. The two edges never come near each other. That's why no one's ever built a bridge across it. On top of the cliff, you can see across the countryside - whatever countryside is visible, that is, under the havoc the Cliff's leaking clouds always make of the weather. Once you reach the bottom, though, you always have to climb the other side.

If you can find the road on the other side, that is. We haven't yet. Nothing but dripping vertical stone.

We're at the bottom of the canyon now, below the cloud layer, walking between the geysers and steam vents it comes from. It's so thick overhead that it blocks out most of the light. The darkest parts are like an overcast sunset, even when my pocketwatch says it's noon. The only noticeable light comes from the occasional cluster of lava pools. They just sit there in the ground, bubbling away like pots of soup. Inflatable cacti grow over them, floating upside down in midair with their leaves hanging down toward the light. The mist that condenses on their balloonlike roots is all the water they need. Most of it boils off fairly quickly. Very few large plants grow down here; it's too hot for them.

This part of the Greenhouse Cliff, below the Greenhouse part, is often called the Boiler Room. It's easy to see why.

The smaller lava pools have a salamander hunter each, sitting patiently like fishermen at ice holes; the larger pools have frameworks built across them, made of rusted metal or charred wood (nothing lasts very long down here, between the fire and the fog). The more agile hunters stalk across these, metal tongs held ready to grab any salamander that sticks its head above the surface. The small salamanders come up now and then to let off little bursts of flame. Their ability to absorb and release whatever energy is nearby is what makes them so useful, and predators so reluctant to mess with them, but it also means that only the big ones can stay beneath the lava all day. The small ones have to release excess energy now and then to avoid exploding. Every so often, bolts of lightning or bursts of multicolored light flash up from the lava when one of them decides to get creative. Energy is energy, after all, no matter what flavor. The slower-moving salamander hunters usually look as charred as their perches. They stare intently at the lava and shush you if you try to talk to them.

Troll Booth

All was going well today. Plack and I had been walking along the Greenhouse Cliff road for several hours, having slept at a slightly wider spot covered in moss last night. There are flowers and mushrooms everywhere. Moss covers every inch of rock rough enough to grip, trees and flowering plants grow out of the moss, and more moss and flowers grow on the branches of the trees. It's the same in every direction - left or right, up or down. The roots of the trees above the road hang down and embed themselves in the miniature gardens growing on the trees below. The Cliff jungle grows on itself as much as it grows on the cliff. The trees are only one layer thick; beyond the row of trunks is nothing but empty gray fog. Insects fly everywhere, drops of condensation fizzing off of their rapidly beating wings. Small birds of every possible shape and color are almost as common. Some of them visit flowers; others eat the insects. They have to work harder to find the green or cloud-gray ones. Whole colonies of small frogs fill every rock crevice and bromeliad.

We had just navigated the hairpin turn onto yet another switchback (half the road had crumbled away at the corner, which made it interesting) when we saw a small house ahead. It was two stories high, wedged beneath an unusually high part of the overhanging rock, and about six feet wide. Only two thirds of it actually fit on the road. The remaining two feet hung out over empty space. Another story - a basement? - stuck out of the cliff face beneath the rest of the house, supported by a network of rotting wooden beams.

Though the basement level was sagging and covered with moss, the upper floors of the house were perfectly neat and painted spotless white. A little stove chimney hung out over the cliff on the top floor.

We were standing there, staring at this odd little house built right across the road, when the troll came out.

Like most of the turnstile trolls that plague bridges and narrow roads all over the world, he was large and lumpy, with gray scales and hair. Unlike most of them, his hair was neatly combed (even his mane and ear tufts), and he was wearing an embroidered tunic and stockings. There were buckles on his shoes. Obviously, this was a rather successful troll.

"Your house," said Plack bluntly, "is in our way." He was still behind me, due to the narrowness of the road where we were; I suddenly wished that he wasn't.

"I knows it is," said the troll. With a wide grin full of gleaming white fangs, he then gave us the traditional turnstile troll greeting.

"Your money or your life!"

(This is not strictly true, as trolls have rarely actually killed anyone. It causes them more trouble than it's worth. The worst they usually do is hit people when they're irritated. It sounds scarier this way, though.)

Plack was not scared and not amused. "Why don't we keep both and you move your stupid house?"

"Your money or your life!"

"Or we could move it for you."

"Your money or your life!"

"Oh, shut up," snapped Plack. "Besides, what are you going to do if we don't pay you, you overdressed mushroom? Sit there and blind us with your teeth?"

I was starting to feel rather nervous by that point. When someone is insulting a troll, it's generally not a good idea to stand directly between them.

"You no pays me?"

"No. We doesn't."

The troll then proved himself to be one of the few trolls in the world who had never met a llama. With a slightly more evil grin, he pulled what looked like a four-foot spatula from inside the front door. "Then I wallops you until you does-"

A brown blur flew over my head, landed with a CLANG, and became Plack, standing in front of me and glaring at the troll. The spatula was bent in half in the middle. The troll was standing about a foot farther back than he had been; his feet had left skid marks in the dirt of the road.

His grin didn't even flicker. "-Then I lets you through right away and gives you breakfast."

He proceeded to do just that, showing us through his tiny and spotless kitchen (the entire first floor of his house) with all the care and politeness of a Clam-Porklian waiter. It was less than two minutes before we were on our way again, Plack with a basket of salad and a bottle of grundle juice, me with a sort of mushroom omelet that turned out to be better than what you get in most restaurants. The troll waved us happily on our way and sat down to wait for the next travelers. He might not have known about llamas before, but he does now. Trolls don't become successful by being stupid.

"'Never happened before,'" Plack snorted as we continued down the road. "Hah." He didn't say another word all day, but the smug smile didn't leave his face until after he was asleep.

In the past, several turnstile trolls have made a fairly good living for themselves thanks to me. I should have started traveling with a llama years ago.

The Edge of Sconth

We're leaving Sconth today. I'd like to stay longer and see more of the city, but the art most people like here is a lot more geometric than anything I do. Only two people have bought drawings since we arrived. Besides, we've been here over a week, and if we're going to reach the Railway Regions, I'd rather be on the Train before it starts snowing.

There's no sign of the slope we climbed on the way to Sconth. It's moved on to some other part of the Mountainous Plains. At the moment, the Plateau of Sconth seems to bordered on all sides by the Greenhouse Cliff, one of the only completely vertical regions of Hamjamser. Ever since the Cliff arrived, Sconth has been surrounded by the thick cloud bank that always follows it. The Plateau looks like an island in a sea of mist. Owners of dirigible leaf carriages are flying around on the surface of the cloud, pretending they're in boats. The butterflies that run the hotel have been back and forth to the Cliff all day to gather the bright tropical flowers from below the edge and enjoy the rare warm weather in November. It hasn't been warm enough for them to fly outdoors for over a month.

In a few places, where the cold air meets the mist, small showers of rain have been forming a few feet above the cloud's surface. I've heard there were a few four-foot-high snowstorms last night.

Looking down over the edge of the Cliff, past the scrub and scraggly trees that protect the Plateau's farms from the constant wind of the Mountainous Plains, the glistening canopies of rainforest trees are just visible through the mist. It's a surprising sight in late Autumn. Bright beetles and hummingbirds fly up now and then from the seasonless clouds, hit November in Sconth, and hurry back down again. Farther down, a faint orange glow is just barely visible through the gray. The volcanic vents that keep the Cliff tropical are down there somewhere. We're bound to meet at least a few salamander hunters when we cross them. (Salamanders breed perfectly well in captivity, but the farms like to get wild ones from volcanoes now and then to prevent inbreeding.)

I had hoped to get to the Railway Regions directly from the Mountainous Plains - it would have meant considerably less climbing, for one thing - but I've always wanted to see the Greenhouse Cliff, so I don't mind that much. The climb should be interesting. We've brought several cube turnips, hung by the leaves from Plack's harness like blocky purple saddlebags. They'll be a nice change from my usual diet of potatoes, smoked sump squid (my apologies to Commander Squish, but it travels well and tastes good, no matter how badly I cook it), and whatever else happens to be growing nearby.

Plack, incidentally, is not happy about the appearance of the Cliff. He's just started growing his Winter coat; tropical weather is the last thing he wants to travel through right now. It's not as if we have much of a choice, though, unless an airship shows up before we leave.

The main road through Sconth now reaches the edge of the Cliff and takes a sharp turn over the edge, twisting along between the lush undergrowth that sprouts from every crack and patch of dirt. The road was carved centuries ago into a groove in the stone; the Cliff hangs overhead like a damp gray roof. With the trees growing like leafy pillars at the edge of the road, it feels almost like the cloister of a monastery.

It will probably take us a while to get to the bottom of the Cliff. It's hard to travel quickly when the entire road consists of switchbacks.

Farm Geometry

The farmers of Sconth are near the end of the annual harvest; there's hardly anything left in the fields now except the icicle tapers, which won't be ready to harvest until they've frozen solid. Everything else has been packed away into storerooms. Many of the insectoid farmers, having emptied their fields and closed down their farms for the Winter, will spend the next five months in hibernation. That's really the only choice for cold-blooded people in the mountains.

Today, the streets of Sconth were rumbling all day long with carts full of the city's famous cube turnips. Nearly everyone in Sconth eats cube turnips. They're nutritious, easy to grow, and fairly tasty, if you can chew them. Those who can't either mash them or grind them into flour.

In addition to this, cube turnips are probably the easiest vegetables in the world to store. Once the leaves are cut off, they can just be stacked up like blocks. Many farmers build houses out of them and gradually eat them over the Winter. They come out of their houses every day, climb up on the roof, and take a piece off the chimney for dinner. The fields no longer growing turnips sprout turnip huts instead. One particularly ambitious turnip architect to the West of town is working on a full-scale castle, complete with crenelated turnip turrets.

Cube turnips are best known, though, for what the bakers do with them. Not everyone has heard of turnip architects; not everyone has even heard of Sconth, city of mathematicians. But everyone has heard of its famous Square Root Pie.

The Lookout

A lot of things get lost in the Golden Desert. Some of them have been there for a long time.

Rodent Invasion

The bakery near the hotel had been having trouble with mice in the basement recently. They'd been chewing open crates, taking food, and generally making a mess of everything. The traps the restaurant owner set out had all disappeared. No one had even seen the mice.

Finally, frustrated to the limit of his patience, the owner decided to stay awake in the basement all night. If the mice came, maybe he'd be able to tell why they were so hard to get rid of; if they didn't, well, he'd know he could hire someone to sit in the basement every night as a last resort.

As it turned out, the mice did come... sort of. The owner was kind enough to show me the photograph he had taken before running back upstairs as fast as he possibly could.


He still hasn't managed to catch it yet. It might take a bit longer than he expected.

Descending

Spending the night at the top of the Needle Tower was surprisingly comfortable. The beacon salamander keeps the entire room quite warm - warmer than the hotel, in fact - and the aluminum floor wasn't as uncomfortable as I expected.

Sunrise was much earlier than usual.

Getting down was surprisingly easy as well. The elevators might reach less than halfway up the tower, but the ratchet baskets go almost to the top.

They're fairly simple little contraptions: a basket hung from a rope, much like the elevators, but with a weight on the other end. The pulley at the top has a ratchet mechanism attached to it. When the baskets are empty, the weights pull them up to the little platforms next to the pulleys; when someone gets in them (someone heavy enough, anyway), the ratchets let them down slowly and gently. It takes about thirty of these to get all the way to the ground.

Unlike the elevators, the ratchet baskets don't need anything but passengers to move them, so they can be built all the way up the tower. It would be impossible to bring waterwheel power up all three miles of it; salamander engines might work, but they're far too delicate to just leave three miles above the ground. The ratchet baskets hardly ever need repairs. Of the thirty or so I used on the way down, I only had to skip one. It was having its rope replaced. According to the repairman, who seemed glad to have someone to talk to, it had been six months since the last time he'd had to fix one of the baskets. They don't need much.

I wonder if some sort of hot-air balloon would work as an elevator? Maybe if it ran on a rail or something up the outside of the tower... It would probably take a while to get to the top, and the descent would have to be very carefully controlled, but it might work. I'll have to ask the repairman about that if I run into him again.

Until then, I have libraries to visit.

Climbing the Needle Tower

Well, I couldn't very well stay in Sconth and not climb the Needle Tower. When am I ever going to have another chance to climb three miles above the ground using only my feet?

The Needle Tower is one of the oldest buildings in Sconth. It's by far the tallest building anywhere in Hamjamser. The foundation is stone, twenty feet thick to support the immense weight on top of it; the tower gets gradually thinner from there. The top floors are barely ten feet from one wall to the other, made of aluminum bars and silk rope.

So far, the fastest person ever to climb the tower - a cliff squirrel gymnast by the name of Tatrika - took eight hours to get to the top and collapsed from exhaustion when she got there. Most people prefer to take the elevators. There are two of them, one on either side of a massive loop of rope hung from an even more massive pulley partway up the tower. A system of gears in one of the tower's basements connects a matching pulley at the other end of the loop to a waterwheel in the river Kastel (yes, the Samrath Kazi coins were named after the river - its main tributary runs through where the village used to be). A large clockwork mechanism, like the escapement of a clock, switches the direction of the elevators (after a pause for boarding) when one reaches the top and the other the bottom.

Unfortunately, the elevators don't go even halfway up the tower; any rope, even the foot-thick rope the elevators use, would snap under its own weight if it were any longer than that. You have to walk the rest of the way.

Fortunately, I'm used to walking, so it only took me ten hours and fifteen rest breaks to reach the top. I was barely able to breathe by the time I got there - partly from the exertion, partly because the air up there is so thin. The wind is freezing. It comes straight through the top room, which is really little more than an aluminum platform with a railing and a pointed roof. It's there mostly for the few anyway. You can see the curve of the horizon from there. The city was spread out beneath my feet like a very small postage stamp, perched on top of the tiny little bump that is the Plateau of Sconth. The clouds hid it from view occasionally. Off to the left, I could see the great metal hulk of the Cormilack Earthmover, gleaming like a tarnished silver toy in the sunset; to the right, the perfectly conical peak of Mount Moler was just visible, deep in the heart of the Railway Regions. There was a thin line of gold on the horizon that just might have been the Golden Desert.

It took me a few minutes to realize that I could see the entire Mountainous Plains. The edges were visible in every direction.

The core of the tower is a single straight rod of hypersteel three miles long - and that's just the part above the ground. It's driven deep into the bedrock beneath the city for stability. Even in the strongest winds, the tower doesn't even wobble. Hypersteel is not flexible. The only sign that the wind touches it at all is a low, metallic humming as the core vibrates in its stone sheath. It's almost too low to hear at all.

All anyone knows about the core is that it was dug up hundreds of years ago and stood on end in a hole dug through the stone (no one knows how anyone managed to lift the whole thing); the tower was then built around it. Like all hypersteel, it's a leftover from the Hill Builders' civilization, and therefore thousands of years old. No one knows how to make the stuff anymore.

The tip of the core is visible in the top room of the tower, protruding five feet above the floor. It's easily the oldest thing in Sconth. Its surface still has the same mirror-smooth shine it probably did when it was made. You can see your face in it.

It's hard to see all of the core's tip, though; draped in a reptilian curl over the top of it is an ancient salamander larger than most true dragons. Its mane of spines is large enough by now to rival the Sun Dragon's, and it fills the entire room with the light and heat of a bonfire. It's been there longer than anyone in the city can remember. No one is quite sure whether it was put there deliberately, possibly to warn airships and floating cities of the tower (yes, it's that tall), or whether it just found its way up there accidentally and decided to stay. It's the perfect place for a salamander that size. The core is the biggest lightning rod on the planet. Entire storms can strike nothing but the tower, if they're high enough, and almost all that electricity goes straight through the old salamander. A smaller one would be vaporized; this one simply drinks it all in. There probably isn't a better source of energy anywhere outside the salamanders' native volcanoes.

Whether or not its light was meant to be a beacon, it works. It's possible to see the light of the Needle Tower even when the rest of Sconth is well below the horizon.

I've been sitting up here so long, looking at the view and writing, that it's gotten dark. I got on the elevator before dawn; it was already sunset when I reached the top. Fortunately, the salamander provides more than enough light for writing. I'm sending this by a postbird who conveniently happens to be resting on top of the tower. I'll climb down again tomorrow.

The Owl

Yesterday, I visited the Sconth Museum of Historical Art and was lucky enough to see the Owl, an otherwise unremarkable statuette famous for being the most stolen artifact in the world. I did a quick sketch while I was there. (I'll try to post it later.)

Today, I went back to the museum. One of the local linguists is attempting to read the entire Epic of Rampastula out loud, using the version written in hieroglyphics on the inside of a three-thousand-year-old sewer pipe, and I didn't want to miss Act Three. The pipe amplifies his voice quite nicely. He had a fairly large audience by the end of Act Two.

When I got there, the Museum was crawling with soldier beetles. I asked one of them what was going on; he or she (it's impossible to tell unless you can see ultraviolet) explained that the Owl had been stolen last night. They were there to investigate.

They didn't really have much hope of finding it. Hardly anyone ever does. In a few months, it will show up in some other museum after being bought anonymously for some exorbitant price. Then it will be stolen again. The museums just never learn.

Sometimes, I wonder if it's all some sort of game among thieves. "Ha ha, the Owl's in the Vanister museum now. Sold for five hundred railway tickets and a Geint. Tag, you're it."

Incidentally, Act Three of the Epic was splendid. The linguist can translate dimly lit ancient Mirulian hieroglyphs into spoken English without skipping a beat.

The Essentials

Having spent all of yesterday and the day before in the Illegible Library, admiring the glorious clutter and the menagerie of letters scrawled on every surface in sight, I decided to do something different today. I went to see the Essentials.

Technically, the book's title is Essen Chile's Essential Book of Essential Essentials - it's embossed in foot-high purple letters on the cover - but this is a bit too long and ridiculous for most people's tastes, especially the ones who want the Essentials taken seriously. Most people hope the author was using a pseudonym; almost as many people hope that, given the choice, he or she would have chosen a better one.

According to the keepers of the Essentials, the book contains all the knowledge anyone in Hamjamser could ever need. No one's been able to prove otherwise. In fact, no one has actually lived long enough to read the entire book, so no one's been able to prove much of anything about it. Some people have pointed out that the book must have had multiple authors; no one could possibly have lived long enough to write it all.

There are only three copies of the Essentials in existence. (No one knows who had time to copy the whole thing, much less twice, but there they are.) Several people have tried to make more copies. None of them have ever finished the task. Sooner or later, one of their descendants always loses interest.

One of the three copies, of course, is in Sconth. It's kept in a thick-walled old stone building that used to be a fortress back in the days of the locust marauders. The Essentials keepers live there, spending their lives reading as much of the book as they possibly can and looking things up for anyone who asks. They are all Wayfinders. The book is large enough that its pages and paragraphs behave like geographical features and are never in the same place twice. Wayfinders are the only people who can find anything in the Essentials except by chance.

I didn't have anything I particularly needed to know, and I couldn't really afford to ask anyway - Wayfinders, and the information in the Essentials, are rare enough that they can charge more or less whatever they want - so I just watched. I was allowed to look at a few pages by the short, thickset burreler who was looking through the book when I came in. She was too short to read the book from the floor; instead, she just walked around on the pages in a pair of enormous fuzzy slippers.

She introduced herself, rather distractedly, as Snuffbox, which happened to be the title of the section she was reading. I never was sure how much attention she was paying to anything outside the book.

Apparently, the last person to come in had asked for advice on getting blue floo shrews out of a thugroffler's nose. Snuffbox (or whatever her name was) hadn't asked why. She thought she might have read something about that particular subject on page 736008, though, so she was now trying to find it. The pages are ten feet wide and not numbered in any order that makes sense. While I watched, she turned pages 42, 7758020, 96.24, 145AM, *, and TRUFFLE. Being Wayfinders, though, the Essentials experts can eventually find any page they've read before; page 736008 came up while I was asking about the building (which Snuffbox said was built by the 15th Baron of Sconth as a safe haven for his collection of cookbooks). Sure enough, there on the page were three paragraphs on the subject of removing blue floo shrews from the insides of noses. The section was in tiny letters, written sideways, in the middle of a larger paragraph on pocketwatch maintenance.

The best ways to remove blue floo shrews from a thugroffler's nose, according to the Essentials, are to lure them out with goat cheese or play Thiglian mop opera all day (though it's best to give the thugroffler earmuffs before trying the second method). That'll be good to know if I ever own a thugroffler.

There were a few Essentials keeper apprentices there as well; two spindle beetle nymphs and a little three-foot centipede spent the entire time crawling in and out between the pages Snuffbox wasn't reading. Each one carried a magnifying glass and a small salamander lantern. Just think - children all over the world stay up late reading between the covers, and these three get to do it for a living.

Trenchcoat Guy

I don't know who this man is. He's about eight feet tall, and he never talks (at least, not to me). He never takes off his sunglasses. He never stops grinning. I see him fairly frequently while traveling, especially on the floating cities and the Train of the Railway Regions. He spends quite a lot of time on the Train. It's a bit odd how often I see him, in fact; we just happen to be in the same place, coincidentally, more often than should really be possible. Several other travelers I've met have said the same thing. We actually have a theory that there isn't just one Trenchcoat Guy, but several - a group of identical septuplets, maybe. Still, we've never quite been able to prove that we've seen him in different places at the same time.

It's no good asking him. We've tried. He just grins at us.

Last year, I asked him if I could draw his picture. He didn't say anything, of course, but he grinned (well, kept grinning) and posed like this, which I took as a "yes." He stood perfectly still while I sketched him. When I finished, he took his enormous suitcase off the luggage rack (he keeps his spare trench coats in it) and got off at the next stop, the Flange Mountain Aviation Supply and Ice Cream Parlor. I didn't see him again for a month.

I'm looking forward to seeing him again if I make it to the Railway Regions this year. He's as much a part of the Train by now as the immaculate striped Conductor.

The Illegible Library

Today, I found the Illegible Library. It's no wonder I missed it yesterday. Apparently, when it was built, the only space the builders could find for the front entrance was an alley between the massive Fiction and Entomology Libraries. It's about five feet wide. The front door (fifteen feet high and just wide enough to get through if I turned sideways) opens onto a magnificent entrance hall, floored with a single row of mosaic tiles, with a colonnade of marble half-pillars against each wall. They're offset from each other, so there's room to sort of zigzag between them.

Walking this way, ducking under the occasional lantern, I eventually reached the front desk. It's wedged between the walls six feet above the floor so that people can walk under it. I asked the receptionist, a large, white-furred samoval, how they got it through the door; she replied in a distracted voice, without taking her nose out of the volume of triptych semaphore she was reading, that it had been built there. A ten-foot-long pair of fireplace tongs hung on the wall by her seat. I assumed they were for picking up dropped papers.

The heart of the library, once you get past the entrance, is a much wider space, though it's not immediately obvious. The high-ceilinged rooms are only sporadically lit and have been divided up into labyrinths of bookcases.

In them, and surrounding them, are the books.

Most of the libraries in Sconth - and everything else in Sconth, for that matter - are kept rigidly organized at all times. The Illegible Library isn't. Books and scrolls and tablets are stacked and piled and crammed onto shelves with no organization whatsoever. There's no way to organize them when nothing in them makes sense. Bookshelves stand and lean at odd angles to each other, forming high, narrow passageways lined with incomprehensible titles and lit dimly by the occasional lantern in the gloom overhead.

I think the building may have been a cathedral at one point. In the thin trails between stacks and piles of books, it's just possible to glimpse the paths of an old cathedral floor labyrinth, twisting invisibly beneath the newer wood-and-paper labyrinth piled on top of it. The passages open out occasionally into open, irregular rooms, piled high with books and the occasional piece of furniture. Sofas and armchairs are the most common, but I also saw several papasan chairs, a hammock, and the leather-padded cockpit of an antique airship.

Theoretically, the purpose of the Illegible Library (besides providing a habitat for linguists and a Place To Dump All This Gibberish) is to keep the incomprehensible writing in a place where people can find it. The hope is that it will all eventually make the proud journey to the Library of Obscure and Extinct Languages, an old and dusty building that holds about three times as many books as it actually has. Each translated book is shelved with several more books explaining how to read the original.

Books don't actually make the journey very often, though. Only one or two get translated every year. Most of the ones that make any sense at all have already been translated. The few brave linguists who still frequent the Library build their own little dens down in the stacks (formerly the crypts?) and hoard the books they're attempting to translate. If someone moves a book before they decipher its language, they'll never find it again.

(Many thanks to the Library denizens who came at least halfway out of their books to explain things to me. I admire your ability to talk and read at the same time.)

Compass Trees

I spent all day trying to find the Illegible Library, walking from one end of Sconth to the other, and had no success whatsoever. I'm exhausted. I don't feel up to writing much of anything tonight, especially not in the fifteen minutes left in this day, so here's something I wrote a few months ago instead. I thought it might be interesting. Most people who don't travel much aren't familiar with compass trees.

A piece of wood from a compass tree is always attracted to the tree, like iron to a magnet, and can be used to pull a compass needle in its direction. This is a great way to find a place; tree compasses work much better than magnetic ones, which only tell you which way is North. Really, what use is that? You can tell which way is North any time you can see the sun, and there's no telling what happens to be in that direction at any given time. Magnetic compasses are generally little more than harmless toys for mapmakers.

Tree compasses are much more useful. You can use them to find any place where there's a compass tree. You can only find one place per compass, though, and it only works as long as the tree is alive.

That isn't as simple as it sounds. Compass trees are extremely delicate. They have to have exactly the right temperature, the right nutrients, and the right amount of sun and water. They only like to live on top of hills. They have no defenses against insects. They can't compete with any plant bigger than a tuft of grass. They weren't always that way, but after centuries of being pampered by compass-makers, they've gotten spoiled. All but a very few compass trees look like bonsai trees; any conditions short of absolute perfection are as hard on them as a desert or a mountaintop would be to another tree. They grow extremely slowly. Tree compasses are extremely expensive, as a sliver of wood for a compass needle can take weeks or months to grow back. Only the most successful compass makers can afford to buy whole twigs.

Compass tree caretakers make a very good living, but only because they work so hard. They generally grow the trees in greenhouses, so that they have absolute control of the temperature, sunlight, and humidity. Mirrors direct extra sunlight onto the trees in the Winter; many caretakers import sea ice in the Summer. Most greenhouses are reinforced with steel bars to discourage thieves.

Compass trees also, for reasons known only to them, refuse to grow within twelve miles of each other. This further limits the places they can grow and makes reproduction extremely difficult. Every caretaker opens a few tiny holes in the greenhouse each Spring, not enough to let in any chills or aphids, in the hopes that a stray speck of pollen will manage to make it across the countless miles from another compass tree that happens to feel like blooming that year. In the incredibly rare instance that pollen is blown that far, and meets the receiving compass tree's standards, the tree will grow a seed. Just one. Compass tree seeds are about the size of poppy seeds and exactly the same color as their bark. Any caretaker lucky enough to get a flower on their tree will search with a magnifying glass for months afterward, hoping to find the little brown speck that will give them the slight chance of growing another tree. It's a good thing the seeds grow where the flowers do; otherwise, the caretakers would never find them. If a compass tree's seed isn't found in the week or two after it grows, it falls off onto the ground, where it dies. Compass tree seeds need three years immersed in constantly moist earth with an exact combination of nutrients before they'll even start to consider growing into a tree. Most caretakers simply sell the seeds for exorbitant prices, as they're too busy and too sensible to try to raise them themselves.

Despite all this, compass trees have not yet gone extinct. There are actually several hundred of them on Hamjamser, if not more, though no one has ever managed to count them. Nearly every town has one somewhere nearby. Caretakers in swamps and deserts go to great lengths to keep their trees alive.

A few of the richest travelers in Hamjamser have assembled compasses with many needles, each one pointing to a different tree in a different town. They're incredibly expensive and require updating whenever a tree dies, but they're almost as good as a Wayfinder guide when they work properly.

It has become a custom among travelers-by-compass to visit the tree their compass points to whenever they reach its home. It's brought them all the way there, after all; they might as well follow the needle a few extra miles and visit it. Most of them bring some sort of present for the tree or, more often, for its caretaker.

No matter what they're given, though, none of the caretakers ever let anyone else inside their greenhouses. You can never tell who might try to break off a priceless twig when you're not looking.

Father Virgil's Seven Random Facts

That's what I get for catching up with your blog, son. Tagged. I was preparing for bed here in Glee Fiddler's Onion, having spent the day in the shadow of my mountain (such a gratifying way to prevent sun burn - I much prefer it to smelly sunblock) when I thought I'd just peek at your blog. And lo, I've been tagged and bedtime is postponed.

1. This is my fact to share, but it's actually about you. When you were still small enough to ride in the big front pocket of my knickersnock sweaters (the ones with the tourmaline buttons and the professorial looking elbow patches made of flexbeetle elytra), you loved to arrange all the pencils on my desk. You'd climb up on the back of our pet hrumph, who waited by my desk in hopes of pencil shavings, and sort the pencils by length, then by color, then by smell, and finally by taste. So I can't say I'm surprised that pencils are still among your favorite things, and that you're still putting strange things in your mouth (how many kinds of slugs? Escargot is one thing - slugs are another.)

2. At lunch today I had the great pleasure of being hooked to an apparatus that mapped my sinuses and brain as I flashed them with deliciously painful bursts of gas from the wonderful green paste served with smooshi and sashaymi at the local froongian raw bar. A lovely girl in native dress used her top two hands to hold the large rush paper sheet and her lower two hands to paint the map as revealed in the device. Her dexterity with all four hands at once, and her ability to capture all the assymetry of my brain, amazed me almost as much as my pleasure at the intense pain. Or maybe it's the tearful relief as the pain subsides after each mouthful. Anyway, I now have a diagram on my study wall that looks like one of those psychiatric blotch patterns, but I know it's really all in my head.

3. Before breakfast many mornings I look at myself reflected in my spoon. Then I flip the spoon over and look at myself upside down. While staying on the concave side, I slowly revolve the spoon handle upward, then, as if this would right my image, and I never get tired of the sensation I feel when it does not.

4. The first time I ever rode a kilopede I was a rebellious teenager. My parents were quite angry at me for climbing up on top and running towards the tail, trying to stay abreast of the station as we embarked. At first I was able to gain a little on the downhill side of each segment, but I lost more and more on the uphill sides, especially as the creature gained speed. I gave up after thirty or forty segments and, too tired to return to the segment where my parents were, I slid down and rode with a pair of drunk teleekian octopi, who had exchanged the water in their travel globes for gin toddies. They kept giggling, blowing bubbles, and belching gin fizz, but it was better than the lecture I knew my father would deliver about travel etiquette and manners to creatures large enough to be mapped geographic features (if there were any maps in Hamjamser, which is, of course, impossible).

5. Speaking of the impossibility of maps, and thinking of your fact about places not existing after you visit... I once visited a place of such wonder and beauty that I have never been able to describe it to others without passing out. I cannot find it again, and no one else seems able to tell me anything about it after they bring me to with a dash of cold water in my face.

6. I get words stuck in my brain. They go round and round like a hard candy in my mind's mouth. Words like integument, or adumbration, or circumambulation (which is sort of a round and round word in its own right). This is all OK until the words start popping out of my real mouth at inopportune moments, like when going through toll booths, or when ordering coffee. I worry sometimes that I will get punched in the nose for blurting, "proboscis," or that I will offend a waitress with "obovate."

7. Finally I have this weird recurring dream that you and I are in math class and our heads are shown overlapped in a diagram on the chalk board. The teacher is asking all of us about the sets represented by the different sections of our heads, like the portions of some bizarre venn diagram. "Now class, what is represented by the set of the conjuntion of Virgil Tangelo and Nigel Tangelo." Every time I raise my hand, the teacher calls on me, and I wake just as I answer, "Hamjamser!"

I am even more lazy than you, my dear boy, and I will not tag even those who read this. They have, perhaps, been punished enough already. Travel safely, and do continue to write.

Your loving father, VT.

A Picture of Someone Else

That little blank spot on my profile has been blank long enough. I'm putting a picture there!

Not a picture of myself, though. Who wants to see that? Instead, here's a picture of the main character from a comic strip I've more or less half finished. (Yes, it's been more or less half finished for months now. I'll finish it someday.)



According to the instructions, posting this picture here will let me then put it on my profile as well. We'll see how that goes.

City of Chitin and Codes

Only three days of traveling, and we've already gotten somewhere! Plack and I arrived in Sconth, the magnificent city of linguists and mathematicians, early this afternoon. The city was buzzing. It still is tonight, actually; an unusually large number of its inhabitants are insects, so there are always wings rattling overhead. There are spindle beetles everywhere, all different colors (though mostly orange, of course), with every possible number of limbs. A Kilopede was resting a half-mile or so of its length on the roof of a library hive. The buildings are all domes and spires in odd, fluid shapes, like termite mounds in brick and stone.

We spent most of the day wandering around the city, trying to find a hotel and getting lost in back alleys instead. The alleys are... strange. Some of them are laid out in a relentless grid pattern; others twist and turn so much they almost tie themselves in knots. I have a sneaking suspicion that they would form fractal patterns if seen from the top. Professional polyglots wander through them in groups, talking in half a dozen languages at the same time. Mad cartographers lurk in corners and attempt to steal pens from passersby. The graffiti is all mathematical formulas.

The hotel we finally chose is several hundred years old. It used to be a library. Most of the rooms were converted from the old reading chambers; they used to be as tiny and spartan as a monk's cell, but now every spare inch of wall is covered with paintings and tapestries and ribbons and little things made of copper wire and brightly colored beads. The hotel is run by a family of giant butterflies, and they can't stand dull colors. Gray stone has to be painted or covered up or it drives them mad. They live in a maze of ropes and painted platforms hanging from the vaulted ceilings of the central reading room, which has more than enough room for them to fly wherever they want. They let the caterpillars paint murals on the walls. One of the caterpillars wanders around the hallways, using the walls and ceilings just as much as the floor, and follows any guests who look like they might have vegetables.

Tomorrow, I'm going to try to find the Illegible Library and look through all the incomprehensible writing there. The hotel was all we had time to find today; it was getting dark when we stumbled upon it. I'm writing this while listening to troubadours chirping outside.

There are no crickets in Sconth. They can't compete with the people.

Conveniently, there was a pen and a stack of paper in my room already; apparently, there's one in every room. I can hear Plack chewing on his paper next door. The butterfly who came around to light the lamps this evening said (well, wrote, as they can't pronounce English) that that's standard for hotels in Sconth - every room has to have beds and blankets, soap and water, and pen and paper. Just the essentials.

Traveling Companion... or... something

First of all, O relative of mine who has a birthday today, happy birthday!

Second of all, I am now traveling with a llama. I came across a stable yesterday, by the side of whatever road this is, next to a small market and a lemonade stand. The two reptiles that run the stand are trying to get rid of all their remaining lemonade so that they can switch to hot tea and cider for the Winter. They don't see the point of wanting to cool off in the first place, being reptiles, but they make good lemonade anyway.

I'm not one to pass up opportunities like this, so my meals for the last two days have consisted of baked paisley slug and carrots from the market (they're not selling much else that isn't pickled by this time of year), paisley slug stew from the llama stable (it doubles as an inn, so it serves more than hay and salt. Guess where the owner shops), and half-price lemonade. It's been interesting.

There were no llamas staying at the stable when I got there, so - rather than keep lugging my bags around - I stayed overnight. It could be weeks before I find another one. Fortunately, I didn't have to wait long; when I woke up this morning, there was a llama in the stall next to mine. (Doubling as an inn doesn't mean they have any actual rooms.) He was wearing a pair of rather scratched spectacles and chewing some thorny plant as if he wanted to break its bones.

We introduced ourselves. Since I was looking for a llama and he was looking for someone looking for a llama, it was really the only thing to do, but I don't think he enjoyed it much.

His name, he said, was Plack; he didn't care much for people at the moment; the last one whose luggage he carried ran off after a two-month journey without paying him. He had to spend all the money he had left just to stay in the stable last night. He would have skipped the stable altogether, but it's November in the Mountainous Plains, and it was raining. He was not happy. He informed me that I would pay him the full four Loundas before he would carry so much as a sock for me; that my luggage would be padlocked to his carrying harness; and that he would keep the key in his mouth. That way, if I ran off before the trip was over, it would be my problem.

You might think that after being paid, he wouldn't care what I did, but the money is less than half the price to a llama. Customers of llamas are expected to groom them, take care of their traveling equipment, and do more or less anything else that requires hands. In a way, travelers don't hire llamas so much as they trade the use of their hands for the use of the llamas' strength. That's why llamas charge so little. They only need money for stables and repairs to their carrying harnesses.

As if carrying luggage weren't enough, llamas often protect the people they travel with as well. Very few things, no matter how nasty, will mess with a llama. They bite as hard - well, almost as hard - as they kick. Plack wanted to make sure I knew that, especially when he found out I had only a vague idea of a destination and generally just wandered around the countryside.

"You've traveled with llamas before, then?"

"No, actually. I've always carried my own luggage before."

He stared at me, as if luggage were the least of my problems. "What if you get attacked by bandits who've run out of pencils? What if a wild cathomar decides you look like a stupid, edible creature who wouldn't put up a fight?"

"It's never happened before..."

He gave me a disgusted look. "Well, it certainly won't happen while you're with me. Watch this."

With that, he walked over to a tree that was standing innocently nearby.

Fifteen seconds later, it was missing several branches and had four small, round holes straight through its trunk.

I didn't know llamas could spit THAT hard.

Seven More Random Facts

Having been tagged with this meme by Leia, tagged with this meme by Megan Doyle (soon to be Hansen) , and not tagged with this meme by Ginaagain, I will happily do it again. There are a lot more than fourteen random facts about me, and writing down another seven will provide one more post for the month. I'm still eight days behind.

Besides, today is the thirteenth, which is seven times two minus one, and two plus one is three, and three times seven is twenty-one, so it all works out. How can I overlook an opportunity like that?

1. I have never heard a song with a sitar in it that I didn't love immediately. No exceptions. If it has a sitar, it's going to be good.

2. A complete stranger once gave me a clockwork pipe crawler, for no reason I could see. He didn't speak any language I knew. He just handed me the little machine in a Train station, said something very solemn and full of consonants, put on his spectacles, and marched off into the night.
It was a very nice pipe crawler. Unfortunately, I don't actually own any plumbing, so I gave it to a troglodyte the next time I passed through Baconeg.

3. I keep exactly one of every kind of coin I ever get. Gold Loundas, extinct Kastels, Toli beads in various colors, purple Lint... There are far too many to carry around all the time, so I keep them in the Bank of Bannarbangle.

4. I don't seem to be able to post anything before ten PM. I can post pictures earlier in the day, but no long pieces of writing. I don't know why.
Come to think of it, you probably knew that already. Oops.

5. Every time I travel anywhere, I always end up at a slug farm at some point (which is odd, as they aren't really all that common). As a result, I can now identify 36 different kinds of slug by taste.

6. I always whistle in any room that has stone or tile walls. Nothing makes whistling sound as good as a smooth wall does. I scare people in bathrooms a lot.

7. Almost a fifth of the places I've been have shown no sign of existing before or after my visit.

Having said all of that, I am going to break the rules now and not tag the seven people I'm supposed to tag, because I'm lazy. I am going to tag whoever reads this. Yes, you, at least if you feel like doing this and happen to have seven random facts about yourself and time to write them down and a blog to post them on. Go right ahead. Or not. Either way.

On the Road Again, Except Without the Road

Well, I've left Cormilack. Just in time, too - the rainy season started the night before last. The one road along the floor of the spiral valley is already under five feet of water. I'm not getting out that way. I'm leaving over the ridges instead, alternating between dirt (mud) roads, deer trails, and mountain forest barely open enough to let my umbrella between the branches.

I said my goodbyes yesterday - a very short one, in the case of Lady Akistria Xeredile. She's a busy Grand Duchess, after all. There was a whole pack of recently captured bandits sitting in the entrance hall, miserably, waiting to be lectured.

After getting lost a few times, I managed to find Chiliska's burrow under the Earthmover; she's getting ready to move to higher quarters before the caverns flood for the winter, but she stopped to shake my hand in about six of her own and click goodbye. At least, I think it was goodbye. We still can't understand a word of each other's languages. It's quite possible that she was only complimenting me on not falling down a hole. I think it was goodbye, though.

It didn't take long to pack. I never really unpack, no matter how long I stay somewhere, so it was just a matter of stuffing the few things I'd been using back into their various bags and cases. I could swear some of my clothes are still damp from the last rainy season.

I must have gotten out of shape over the last year, staying in one place for so long, because my luggage seems to weigh about twice as much as it did last year. Hopefully, I'll adjust in a few days. Maybe I'll grow another pair of arms. I've got too many bags to carry easily. Food, traveling supplies, art supplies, drawings, notebooks, ambiguous novels,* pocket gramophone music, clothes, my new salamander lantern... I wish I could travel lighter, but there's nothing there I could really do without. Certainly not the books. I could sell some of the clothes if it were Spring, but with the weather getting colder, I'll have to start adding to them soon. Oh well. Maybe I could hire a llama to carry everything, at least until I reach the train.

That's not a bad idea, come to think of it. I don't know why I didn't before. I'll be watching for a stable while I try to reach the Railway Regions. I'm not a Wayfinder, so all I can do - unless I run into a singing sand rat, a Kilopede, or someone with the right compass - is keep walking uphill and hope. There's no telling how long it will take.

*I have a few normal novels as well, four or five of my very favorites; when traveling, though, it's not enough to carry books that always have the same story in them. You'd go through them all in a matter of weeks. Unless you like reading the same book over and over again (and I don't, unless I have a year or two in between) or are willing to exchange books at every bookstore you find (and I'm not, as I don't find them frequently enough), ambiguous novels are really the only choice.

The Hunting of the Grunk

It's always sunset in the Blue Desert. It doesn't matter where you are or what time of day it is; it's always sunset. Like every other place on Hamjamser, the Blue Desert moves around constantly, but it somehow manages to stay just on the edge of night. When the famous blue sand is brought to other places, with different light, it turns a dull blue-white color - except during sunsets on clear, dry, hot days. Then it gleams its usual indigo blue, shining with flecks of all the colors of the rainbow. No one has ever been able to figure out why it does this.

Most of the creatures of the Blue Desert are various shades of blue, for camouflage, as much as camouflage is possible in a place where even a shadow sticks out like a dragon in a slug farm. The tribes of striped avians that live there are some of the few exceptions. Their feathers are a flashing array of green, black, deep purple, bright red, dark bronze and gold, and every imaginable shade of brown. The bold, angular stripe patterns are the same on almost all of them, but hardly any two have the same combinations of colors. They practically punch holes in the Desert's overpowering blue.

The avians don't need camouflage, though. They can outrun anything in the Desert - especially the Grunks, which are their favorite things to hunt. They're big, mean, nasty things, much faster on their huge feet than they look. This, apparently, makes them more fun.

One tribe let me watch a Grunk hunt, provided I stayed in the bushes and kept quiet. That was fine with me; I didn't want to draw the thing's attention any more than I could help. Some of the hunters were discussing using its tusks for tent poles. The rest took their time, waiting for the Grunk to wander closer, keeping watch or fixing their spears while they waited. One had nothing else to do and talked to me the whole time.

Apparently, the hunters' spears are made of flint, which the avians find occasionally in the Desert, and which is much stronger than wood or the more common blue sandstone. The avians use Grunk tusks for quite a lot of things, as they're almost as strong as the flint; knives, jewelry, the aforementioned tent poles, and even coins (the elaborately carved Kerfolio, currency of the Blue Desert, which can be carved by anyone with spare time) are all made out of Grunk tusks. They're stronger and easier to find than wood. The hunters use flint for their spears, though, as they consider it distasteful to kill an animal with its own relatives' teeth.

The feathers on each hunter's spear are from his or her husband or wife (both men and women hunt, but I still can't tell them apart). They keep the best ones when they molt and give them to each other for luck.

The hunt, when it started, wasn't exactly what I'd been expecting. Once the Grunk got more or less within range, the hunters picked up their spears and charged out of the bushes at it. It immediately charged right back at them. Grunks attack anything that moves. When it looked like they would be trampled at any second, the hunters jumped into the air and grabbed whichever of the Grunk's wrinkles they could as it passed by. The Grunk started running around in circles, trying to find the little feathered creatures again so that it could squash them, while the hunters clung to its sides and whooped at the tops of their lungs. A few of them yelled in the Grunk's ears to make it angrier. Eventually, kicking up clouds of blue sand and shaking the ground, the Grunk got so angry that it forgot to watch where it was going and ran headfirst into a rock. The rock split in half; the Grunk collapsed. The hunters jumped off, narrowly avoiding being squashed, and promptly killed the Grunk while it was unconscious.

It is possible to kill a conscious Grunk, barely, but knocking it out first is easier for everyone involved. That way, the Grunk doesn't feel anything - and, just as importantly, neither do the hunters.

The whole tribe celebrated that evening by roasting the meat from the Grunk's front left foot. An entire Grunk can feed an entire tribe for a month. The meat tasted a bit like evil ham with sand in it - but still good, somehow - and took me forever to chew. Everyone else swallowed their meat whole (one advantage of having beaks) and watched me chewing. They obviously found the concept hilarious.

Since it took me three hours to eat a piece of meat the size of my fist, I can't really blame them.

Moving On

Well, I've enjoyed my time in Cormilack, but I think it's time to leave. It won't be long before the rainy season starts again, and one rainy season in Cormilack was nice, but I'd rather spend this Winter in a place with less water than air. I think I'll head up to the Railway Regions next. It's been a while since I've ridden the Train and seen the Trenchcoat Guy. If I can't find the Railway Regions, I'll just go wherever I end up instead. It's bound to be interesting, wherever it is. I'm leaving tomorrow; once the rain starts, it won't be long before the roads dissolve.

I spent today at the palace, saying goodbye to all the other artists there at the moment and exchanging parting presents (sketches, cards, chocolate, carved snail shells, engine fish bacon, et cetera). When she heard I didn't have one, Lady Xeredile even gave me a small salamander from her own furnaces, on the condition that I buy a good lantern for it (it is a palace-bred salamander, after all; a common jar wouldn't do).

I'll be writing quite a lot more about Cormilack, of course. I haven't written down even half of what I've been doing here this year, much less posted it anywhere. I'm not that organized. In addition, I've still got that very large picture of the Earthmover to finish. I've been carrying it around rolled up, weighting the edges with luggage or rocks when I want to work on it. It will be quite a while before it's finished.

I can't believe I'd never heard of Cormilack before I saw the Earthmover from the Kilopede. I hope I can find my way back next year. Maybe I can find the same Kilopede. I can't remember its full name (most Kilopede's names take several minutes to say, if you can pronounce them at all), but I think it started with Itsropleklcanramplikia. Something like that. I've probably got it written down somewhere in my scribble-heap of a journal.

I love this place. I'll certainly be back when it's dry again.

NaBloPoMo

I know I'm not the greatest correspondent; it's been... let's see... five months since I last wrote. Sorry about that. I've been doing fine, no serious problems or anything, but I just... haven't gotten around to writing. Or, when I have gotten around to writing, I haven't gotten around to sending.

In other words, I'm as absentminded and disorganized as ever.

Anyway. Apparently, it's a tradition among a lot of Cormilack's writers (and some in other places as well) to try to write something every day of November. Some of them take the opportunity to write entire books. I only found out about this a few days ago, with the result that I've already missed over a week; apparently, though, it's all right to start a bit late. I'll see if I can write a bit more than once a day, to try to make up for that a little. I can't promise a picture a day, but I'll try to send at least a few of them.

Let's see if this helps me write more regularly. It's certainly worth a try.