Unexpected Arrivals

I believe I mentioned, perhaps a week or two ago, that my salamander was getting a bit fat. I may also have mentioned that I still didn't know whether my salamander was male or female, as it's nearly impossible to tell unless one is an expert.

Any doubts on the matter were settled this morning, however, when she laid her eggs.

This came as a complete surprise to me. I'm not particularly knowledgeable about the reproductive habits of salamanders, and I hadn't even known that mine was old enough to lay eggs. She's barely longer than my hand. She must have met someone while visiting the burning man in Twokk; as far as I know, that's the only extended period of time she's spent with other salamanders in the last few months. She meets them occasionally, but they usually just exchange polite puffs of smoke and go about their business.

I had absolutely no idea how to care for salamander eggs. Fortunately, I managed to keep from panicking. Instead, I asked random people on the streets - they were quite helpful, probably recognizing the signs of desperation - until I got directions to a salamander breeder in town. He keeps a shop in the basement of a pump house near the Grand Hat's palace.*

In a city where the rain never stops, there are a lot of pump houses. This one keeps water in the Grand Hat's fountains and out of the Grand Hat's gardens. It's a good place for a salamander hatchery; there's plenty of water close at hand when things catch on fire. I had to circle the building, nearly deafened by the thunder of the pumps, before I found a narrow staircase leading down under the street. There was a door of soot-stained metal at the bottom. It was open, so I walked in.

I felt as if I'd stepped into the Minotaur's labyrinth. Salamanders were scattered throughout the dark room behind the door; when I entered, a dozen lizard-shaped flames lifted their heads to stare at me. The man in the middle of the room turned around a moment later. He was built like an ox, and in fact rather resembled one, with wide-set eyes glowering under a broad, shaggy forehead. When I entered, he rose to his feet - hooves, rather, bigger than my head - and clomped over to me, glaring down from somewhere near the ceiling. The floor creaked under his weight, as did all the leather he was wearing. His horns would have scraped the ceiling if he hadn't been hunched over under a massive pair of shoulders. His beard and mane - it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began - were blackened and ragged. Small flames flickered in his hair. He frowned and let out a rumble that might have been a question, or possibly an earthquake.

Attempting to produce something like a smile, I held up the lantern full of eggs.

His expression changed, instantly, from monolithic hostility to wide-eyed delight. "And what is THIS?" he boomed, taking the lantern and peering into it. It nearly disappeared in his hand. "Look at all these beautiful eggs! Who is their mother? Is it you?" He reached a leathery finger as thick as my wrist into the lantern and gave my salamander a gentle rub under the chin. If she'd been a cat, she would have purred. "Of course it is! Such pretty eggs could only have come from such a pretty salamander! You must be very proud, you beautiful thing, and well you should be!"

He continued to make adoring noises over her for a minute or two, then looked up at me. "This is her first clutch of eggs?"

I wasn't quite sure of my voice, so I just nodded.

He grinned, showing several gold teeth. "Your first as well?"

I nodded again.

"Well, you were wise to come here. I am Karloff Hajrastarn, keeper of the finest salamanders in the two cities. Come. I shall tell you everything you need to know." He clomped back over to his chair, motioning for me to follow. The chair had the well-worn look of an old boot, as if it had been crushed into a comfortable shape by the weight of its owner, and the leather upholstery was mottled with singe marks. It creaked when he sat down. The fireplace in front of it held an enormous fire; it would have lit the whole room if Hajrastarn hadn't been sitting in front of it.

It took me a moment to realize that the logs in the fire were actually a pair of salamanders. They were the size of small alligators. One of them grinned and gave me a long, slow wink.

"You have kept the eggs in the fire." At the sound of Hajrastarn's voice, I looked away from the giants, suddenly relieved that my own salamander is a more manageable size. "Good. Do not let it go out; that is the most important thing. Salamanders are creatures of fire, and they must stay in it until they are grown, just as tadpoles must stay in water. This lantern will serve, though you will need a larger one when the hatchlings grow older. Have you been feeding the mother coal?"

I had. She's been much more insistent than usual about it lately; now I know why. I nodded, hoping that that was a good thing.

Apparently, it was. Hajrastarn nodded in approval. "Good. Keep doing so. She will need to build up her fire again after making so many little embers. She is from Cormilack, yes? They are strong salamanders there, and she has been well cared for. It will not take long. Now, when the eggs hatch…"

He spent the next few hours giving me instructions - enough for the next few years, I think, until the hatchlings are old enough to go out on their own. He would pause occasionally to feed his own salamanders (I counted at least fifty just in the one room) or to do various things related to their training.** Sometimes both of us would pause to just look at the eggs.

The eggs are quite beautiful. They're soft-shelled, like most reptile eggs, lying in a leathery heap at the bottom of the lantern. My salamander dug a little nest for them in the smoldering wood shavings. I can't tell what color the shells are through the flames; waves of quick orange light flicker over their surfaces, as if they were burning coals. Occasionally, I can catch a glimpse of the tiny embryos silhouetted inside.

I left the hatchery with ten pages of detailed notes, a bag of supplies,*** and considerably more confidence than I'd had this morning. Hajrastarn wedged himself up the steps of his shop - he had to climb them sideways - and waved as I left.

"Take good care of the little lady!" he bellowed, grinning. "And bring the hatchlings back to see me when they are old enough!"

I'll certainly do my best.



* This is a literal translation of the title of the ruler of Thrass Kaffa. It sounds much more impressive in Kafri - "Shishra Samakat" - but it means the same thing. The title could also be translated as "Biggest Super Hat," but that sounds even sillier.

** Several of his newer salamanders are at a rather overenthusiastic stage, which is why his hair was on fire when he answered the door.

*** My favorites are the little sticks of yellow incense. They're for nutritional purposes. Salamanders originally lived in active volcanoes (the first domesticated ones were caught laying eggs in brimstone deposits near the surface), and the embryos need certain volcanic gases to develop properly. I think the incense is mostly sulphur. It smells like fireworks.

Umbrella Crystals

Another caravan came through Thrass Kaffa today. They had heavy cargo and were moving very slowly. In wetter parts of the world, wagons this heavy would be driven by oxen or pushpigs; in the Golden Desert, they're pulled by tortoises. Tortoises, in fact, are the favorite slow animal in the Desert. They're slightly less stubborn than mules and far less vulnerable to heatstroke. They pull carts and carry people who don't need to get anywhere quickly. (Camels are faster, but a little too unpredictable for day-to-day use.) Nothing speeds them up, and nothing slows them down. A tortoise might take hours to get to town, but it will move just as quickly - or just as slowly, rather - whether it's carrying tiny children or pulling three tons of umbrella crystal in a cart.

That's exactly what these had. Behind the tortoises, sturdy wagons braced with steel rumbled along under the weight of at least thirty umbrella crystals. They were rolling mountains of honey-colored stone; even the smallest crystals were taller than I am. The smoothest ones distorted everything on the other side, squashing houses into narrow towers or inflating them to bloated yellow mansions. Children walked alongside the caravan and made hideous faces at each other through the stone. So did quite a few adults. Umbrella crystals are rare in the Golden Desert, and practically nonexistent everywhere else. They're some of the only stones in the world to be created by plants.

Umbrella palm trees get their name from their leaves, which are the same shape and just as watertight as an umbrella. The divert the water of the Desert's infrequent rainstorms directly onto the ends of a tree's outer roots - which are often nowhere near the trunk - and keep the base of the trunk dry. That's where the trees grow their crystals. The inner roots absorb sand and cement it together into massive stones, anchors against the relentless winds of the Golden Desert.

Nor surprisingly, the crystals have become incredibly valuable all across Hamjamser. They grow at the same speed as their trees, which - while still slow - is still much faster than any crystals that form by ordinary geology. Most of all, though, they're valued for their size. No gemstone on the planet can rival the size of even an average umbrella crystal. Queens and Emperors have had entire sets of dining room furniture - chairs, tables, dishes, even the knives and forks - carved out of a single crystal. The Sultana of Fasra Koum, according to legend, lived in a palace carved from a single stone. It's not hard to believe. The oldest crystals in the Desert, the ones that no one found or harvested before they grew too large to move, are at least large enough to make a respectable mansion. The wind and rain have eroded them into strange, fluid shapes. On some, they've eaten away at the hieroglyphs of long-dead civilizations. Archaeologists make pilgrimages to them with rock-climbing gear or lifter giraffes. They've found whole mythologies carved into a single stone.

Most of the time, though, the trees are cut down when their crystals are still small enough - just barely - to be moved. Most of them don't live that long anyway. Being the only tall things in many parts of the Golden Desert, umbrella palms are frequently struck by lightning. The branching twists of fused sand left by Desert lightning end up stuck to the bottoms of the crystals when that happens, as if the crystal had grown roots. Until only a few centuries ago, most scientists believed that the crystals grew by themselves, like giant stone turnips.

It doesn't matter much when they're harvested, though; the sale of even a relatively small crystal can keep a small village supplied with everything it needs for a whole year. The keepers of umbrella groves guard their locations as fiercely as compass makers guard their twigs. Stone farmers take their jobs quite seriously.

Healthy umbrella palms grow clear, egg-shaped crystals the color of honey; unhealthy ones (much more common in the harsh Desert weather) produce stones full of bubbles and the elegant black traceries of dead roots. In one particularly old and enormous crystal, a group of explorers found the skeleton of a dragon. It had been preserved like an insect in amber, the bones covered layer by slow layer over the course of decades. It's currently in the Museum of Antiquities in Karkafel, where I saw it on my last visit. The skeleton looks like it's sleeping.

I have yet to find a way into Karkafel on this visit. I've caught a few glimpses of it - vague, shimmering towers in the distance - but all the alleys I've tried have simply led me back into Thrass Kaffa. I'll try again tomorrow. I'd rather not have to find my way there through the catacombs again.

Thrass Kaffa

We felt Thrass Kaffa before we saw it. After days in the dry air of the Golden Desert, the breeze this morning carried tiny droplets of water, which collected on every surface in the caravan. People walked along with their mouths open, drinking the water that condensed on their tongues. We were soaked by the time we reached the city.

The city of Thrass Kaffa is built beneath the Neverending Waterfall. The Waterfall comes straight out of the sky; if there were ever any clouds, it could almost be an exceptionally precise rain shower. Most of it has spread into a fine mist of spray by the time it reaches the ground. The constant wind of the Golden Desert blows the spray over the entire town, so everything is constantly wet. Rainbows appear at random in the air. Somehow, a whole collection of jungle plants ended up here many years ago; they've thrived in the dripping heat, growing over and through the entire city. Thrass Kaffa is a tiny patch of rainforest in the middle of the Desert. It's like being back on the Greenhouse Cliff. The buildings are draped with vines; orchids and bromeliads sprout from sandstone gutters. The streets are full of sunlit mist and the dripping green explosions of tropical plants.

There used to be a lake in the middle of the city, but by now, the jungle and the surrounding farmland drink up all the water that reaches the ground. The fish have taken to the trees instead, since there's nearly as much water in the air as on the ground. You can see them occasionally, wriggling up and down the trunks. Groups of Kaffans gather occasionally to race them.

Surprisingly, the city's aquifrax has never complained about the disappearance of its lake; it only seems to care about the Waterfall. The water that reaches the ground is no longer important. The aquifrax refuses solid gifts, disdainful of anything coarse enough to be affected by gravity, but it happily accepts offerings of music and poetry. It's said to have exceptional taste. When walking through Thrass Kaffa, it's common to find writers and musicians with their heads raised, blinking, singing or reciting their work to the rain. Every so often, the rain gives them an answer.

No one knows where the Waterfall comes from. Several of the city's avians have flown as high as they could, trying to find its top, but they all ran out of strength before they ran out of water.

Of course, not many avians live in the Golden Desert; most avians capable of flight need to eat nearly half their weight every day, and food is not quite that plentiful here. There are far more avians in the comparatively lush Blue Desert. In Thrass Kaffa, there are actually a surprising number of amphibian people - nearly all of the ones in the Golden Desert, I believe. Men and women with glistening, speckled skin pass by with perpetually damp clothes and brightly colored lap-frogs, only a few streets away from the waterless dunes.

The city of Karkafel often connects to Thrass Kaffa, though you can only travel between the two through catacombs and obscure back alleys. The cities are only visible to each other in the occasional mirage. Thrass Kaffa is built around the Waterfall, Karkafel around its famous Library; the cities trade life for information, nature for culture. Farmers pick fruit in Thrass Kaffa and bring it to Karkafel to trade for music. Archivists from Karkafel sneak into Thrass Kaffa when they've had enough of dust and dry paper and need someplace green. It's an unusual relationship, but the people of the two cities seem happy with it.

About half of the caravan is staying here; the rest is moving on, taking the jazz birds off to who knows where. I'll miss traveling with their constant warbling improvisations. I have friends in Karkafel, though, and I want to at least stay long enough to try to find them before I leave.

Fish of the Ground, Beasts of the Air

The people here have a great deal of trouble with flying camels. The beasts just swoop down out of the sky on bristly wings and carry off small children, spiriting them away to their camel fastnesses in the desert, where they raise them on the fruit of the hazzle-cactus and teach them the mystical secrets known only to flying camels. The rare camel-snatches who return to the villages are famed for their wisdom. Most people are willing to overlook their eccentricity and their refusal to explain anything (not to mention the spitting). Still, most parents here keep a close watch on their children while they're small enough to be snatchable.*

One of these camel-snatches was Hanzifan Krickl, who found a fish in the Desert and founded a town on it. The town is called Kellekath, the local word for "coelacanth." The caravan stopped there for water today. According to the legend, Krickl discovered the system of caves beneath the town thanks to a fossil of one of the ancient fish, which pointed the way for him. The water that collects in the caves is all that allows the town to exist. There's an aquifrax in the caves, as there is in every oasis in the Golden Desert, but it allows the town to use the water in exchange for honey and the occasional shiny marble. It probably has hundreds down there by now, unless it's been eating them. You never know with an aquifrax.

These days, the coelacanth fossil is considered to have been a sign from Gilliva, Lady of the Waters, to whom fish are sacred.** Fish show up seldom enough in the Desert that they're generally considered to be a sign when they do. Kellekath is particularly devoted to the Lady; the town keeps a pool full of koi in her honor. Like most koi, they - or their distant ancestors - were imported from Mollogou. Unlike the piebald Mollogou koi, though, the ones in Kellekath have been bred to be shades of blue and green; they range from the deepest ultramarine to the pale green of new leaves and a turquoise the dry desert sky has only seen in its dreams. The townspeople love them and spoil them terribly. Many people wish they could have actual coelacanths in the town, besides the fossilized one, but bringing a whole population of misanthropic saltwater fish to the Golden Desert would be all but impossible. The koi were difficult enough.

Coelacanths aren't the only fossils that show up here. According to geologists, the whole Golden Desert used to be the floor of an ocean. The tall rocks that stick up from the sand often have fossils in them, fish and ammonites and strange spiny beasts with compound eyes. They speckle the stone in layers, like jeweled rings around sandstone fingers. Other parts of the Desert have larger things. The bones of whales and great sea-serpents emerge from the dunes now and then, breaching between the waves of sand, until the wind covers them again. A few travelers have found a mountain that, when seen from the right angle, is unmistakably the skull of a giant fish. The smaller peaks of its vertebrae stretch out in a line behind it. The most dedicated wanderers say they've even found shipwrecks out in the sand, buried up to their bone-dry masts, with shreds of ancient sail flapping in the Desert wind. Archaeologists have found books in some of the wrecks. Their pages are speckled with strange pictograms, beetles and blowfish and delicate assemblies of gears. No one has deciphered them yet. Linguists believe that even the gears are a language, but any meaning remains lost in the machinery.

Perhaps one of the camels' pupils will decipher them one day.



* A few parents with different ambitions send their children outside every day wearing brightly colored clothing. It all depends on your hopes for your child's future, I suppose.

** Fortunately, fish are rare in the Golden Desert. This religion has never caught on in coastal towns.

Charcoal Chrysalis

Back in the Autumn, I visited the village of Glimrack. It's a tiny village in a barren corner of the Scalps. The whole area looked as if it had been burned recently; there were plants here and there, but the soil they sprouted from was completely black. It seemed to be mostly ash. On the way to the village, I passed through a whole burned forest, a field of blackened sticks poking into the sky. None of the plants sprouting beneath them looked more than a year old.

There was very little soil, even ash, around Glimrack itself. Most of the village is built on bare stone. The villagers make their living by farming mushrooms in caves; most of their food comes from the nearby village of Gramfimly. All the buildings are made of stone with slate roofs. There are wooden beams underneath, but they're well hidden. When I arrived, the only wood in sight was piled up in tall heaps on the plain outside the village - broken chairs, dead branches, and what looked like several years' worth of firewood. Everyone in the village was running back and forth, adding more wood. Wagons rolled into town, one after the other, piled high with dead logs from the surrounding forests.

All the people I saw were reptiles, which was interesting by itself; even the smallest villages usually have at least a few mammals and avians as well. I asked a few of them what it was all for. "For the moths," they said. "They hatch tonight." None of them would tell me any more. They kept running back and forth, their arms laden with wood. I stayed and watched. Eventually, I started helping; there didn't seem to be much else to do. The piles of wood kept growing until they covered most of the plain. The bare stone was still visible, but more than half of it was buried under the splintered heaps.

After dark, they lit them.

It was the largest collection of bonfires I've ever seen. They turned the plain into a fiery maze, paths of bare stone between walls of flame. The air had been chilly all day, but it quickly grew so hot that I had to back away. The villagers didn't seem to care. They walked out into the maze, shedding their coats and jackets as they went. Slowly, solemnly, they began to dance.

The reason for the burned forest became clear when moths of flame emerged from the bonfires, swirling up and out in cindery clouds, sparks dripping from their burning wings. They swooped in wild curves through the flames, rising on updrafts and whirling around each other. The people danced through the flames, most of them stripped to the waist or further, spinning in graceful circles with the tiny scraps of living fire.

It seemed to be special when a moth landed on someone. Whenever it happened, the person would stand perfectly still as the moth dripped fire on their skin, smoke rising from the singed scales. Everyone else would do wild leaps and turns around them. When the moth finally left, the standing person would press their hands to the burns left behind, then throw themselves back into the dance with renewed vigor. I must have seen it happen more than twenty times during the night.

I learned later that this is actually part of the life cycle of the moths. They return every year to lay their eggs in the ash, the way monarch butterflies lay their eggs on their native patches of milkweed or viperwort. The caterpillars are gray and ordinary-looking. They live ordinary lives all year, eating ash and charred wood, until a fire burns away their solid bodies and releases the adult flame moths inside. A hundred years ago, there was a forest where Glimrack is now; its frequent fires provided the moths' first hatching ground. The trees are long gone, but the people of the village still gather wood all year long for the Autumn bonfire. The moths have been part of the villagers' lives since the days of their forest-dwelling five-times-great-grandparents. They don't want them to find another place to lay their eggs.

I still don't know exactly what the moths mean to the villagers. Whatever happened that night is obviously quite important, to be worth enduring so much pain, but I don't know why. No one I spoke to offered any information, and I didn't ask.

It was almost dawn before the fires finally burned down to embers. The dancing slowed down as the fires died. A few people paused to receive a last fiery kiss; then, all at once, the whole burning cloud of moths lifted into the sky. The villagers watched the moths until they vanished in the glow of the rising sun. Then, silently, they turned and walked back to their houses.

In the morning, they emerged with the shapes of tiny wings burned into their scales.

The Shell of a Town

I'm not sure exactly when we crossed over from the Pinstuck Plains to the Golden Desert; perhaps we haven't yet. There's no clear border between the two, and what there is shifts constantly.

Rain is capricious in the outskirts of the Golden Desert. People settle in the green spaces, plant crops and build towns, only to have the rain move on a decade later and turn their farmland back to dust. There are ghost towns all over the Desert's outskirts. The dust piles up against cracked boards and peeling paint, drifting through the broken glass of carefully shut windows. Years later, if the rain returns, the exiles of a different town will move in and bring the ruins back to life. The people of the outskirts are used to living with someone else's ghosts.

CheChmit is one of these towns. It's new and old at the same time. The people only recently moved in, settling down in the abandoned husk of the town after weeks of traveling. Their old town dried up several months ago. A few months more, and it will look exactly like this one did.

At the moment, though, CheChmit is coming back to life. Weeds grow up around the buildings. In most parts of the world, people would pull them out, but not here. Weeds are a sign of life. When they start dying, you know it's time to leave. The town well has water in it again - though the bucket is rusted through - and the farmers are busy plowing the soil around the town. Families are clearing the dust from the houses, putting new glass in the windows, and replacing curtains worn to white rags by the wind. The children keep finding old wooden toys and glass marbles that have lain in the empty houses, forgotten, for decades. The town is like a hermit crab's home - a dry, discarded thing filled with sudden, bustling life. Before it was abandoned, this place was known as Kelikeff. The place its current inhabitants came from no longer has a name. This is the outskirts of the Desert, where whole villages pack up and move all at once; a town's name goes with its people, not with its buildings.

I walked around the streets for a while (there aren't very many), looking at the deep cracks the wind has worn in the stone and wood of the buildings. People were painting a few of them. Mostly, they limited this to a touch of red here, a yellow door frame there; in the Golden Desert, the texture of well-aged wood and stone is considered at least as beautiful as a coat of paint. I stopped for a while to help a family of reptiles patch the roof of their new old house. They were doing it very carefully, so as not to harm the tree growing up through it.

Their daughter stayed on the ground (her mother didn't want her up on the roof) and drew things on the walls with a piece of charcoal. I came down to take a look when we all took a break for water. She had drawn a procession on the walls; strange, solemn-looking shapes marched in a rough black line around two sides of the house. There were tall ones and short ones, smooth and spiny, bare-faced and hooded, fat and thin. Mostly thin.

"These are the quiet people," she said, without waiting for me to ask. "I see them every time we move. We've moved a lot. They always leave the towns before we get here, because they don't like noise. That's all my mother would tell me. She said it's not polite to talk about them. Too noisy." She returned to drawing. One of the taller shapes was covered in what might have been stripes or bandages. "She didn't say anything about drawing them, though."

I didn't ask anyone else about the quiet people - I wouldn't want to be rude - but I'll have to keep an eye out for them if I visit any more abandoned towns.

FlunDitChukk delivered the jazz birds and musical instruments to the leader of a caravan in town. They'll be moving on to some city or other in the next few days; the caravan is only in CheChmit to pick up the birds and replenish their water supply. I don't know how they managed to schedule the meeting so precisely. In return, FlunDitChukk picked up a load of palm-tree crystals to bring back to SuyMaTmakk. His wagon settled noticeably lower on its wheels when the chunks of honey-colored stone were loaded onto it. I said goodbye before he left, and he replied with a grunt that sounded almost friendly. The caravan leader noticed me a bit later, when I was painting a border of morning glory vines around the window of a house, and offered me a seat on the caravan. Apparently, they need someone to touch up the paint on the wagons.

I accepted. It's been years since I've visited the Golden Desert.

Pins in the World

The road reappeared today, leading off across the plains instead of leaping over the Edge. It's a relief, and not just because it means we can get the wagon started again. That abrupt end was making me nervous. FlunDitChukk got the dunderblub started again, and after saying goodbye to the geographers, we set out along the new road. It continued to wind through the long grass of the Scalps all day.

After a week in SuyMaTmakk, I'd forgotten just how much open space there is out here. Nothing interrupts it. There are no mountains, no buildings, no hills higher than my waist. I still haven't seen any of the Scalps' precious forests. We did see the occasional single tree - acacias and lightning pine, for the most part - but most of them had jaglars reclining in the upper branches, so we stayed well away. Jaglars are rather possessive about their shade.

For most of the day, though, the wagon was the only thing in sight that wasn't grass. When the wind blows - and it always blows here - the low hills look like waves, an ocean of shimmering grass stretching to the horizon and beyond. I'm not the first to think so, not by any means; many people have written of the Scalps this way. There are even some who build prairie-boats out of lightweight wood. They have sails and run on polished runners, skimming over the grass as if it was snow. A well-built prairie-boat can hold one person - two, if they're small. You can't take much with you, but they're the best way to travel here if you travel light.

Of course, weighed down with art supplies the way I am, they're out of the question for me. I've never been particularly fond of speed anyway. I'll stick to wagons for now.

The grass got thinner and drier the farther we went. Dust rose from the wagon's wheels in dry orange clouds. A few of the jazz birds started coughing halfway through an improvisation, and FlunDitChukk kept me busy bringing them water all afternoon. Patches of dry ground began to creep in between the short clumps of grass - bald spots on the Scalps - and though the grass still shimmered, it was because of heat, not wind. I doubt this is the kind of country that sees many visits from the rainwalkers. With every mile, there were fewer trees. Instead, there were the poles.

I'd heard of them before, but until today, I'd only seen them from a great distance. Most people on the Scalps believe they were left by the Hill Builders. They do have that look. They're battered poles of black metal rising from the ground, probably five times my height where they haven't broken off. Each one has a different shape at the top. You can see them from miles away, silhouetted against the sky, as if they were the glyphs of a very tall language. If there's any logic or meaning behind them, no one's deciphered it yet.

No one is sure what they were for, though there are plenty of theories: radio antennae, vertical shrines, tent poles, the markers of a mysterious game, the dead trunks of metal trees. A compass will go mad if brought too near to one of the poles. Birds don't seem to mind them; there isn't much else to perch on on the Scalps, though, so that could just be a matter of convenience. They seem to have no effect on people, though those who live near them sometimes speak of having unusually vivid dreams. Whisperlings say they can hear the poles humming occasionally. Some of the humming is music, melodies in strange and secret keys, but it never has words.

They've become part of the landscape of the Scalps by now. Birds nest on them. People build sod houses around their bases for support. (Sod houses have a tendency to slouch, especially when it rains.) Unlike many of the things the Hill Builders left behind, the poles are not made of the mysteriously indestructible hypersteel. They're obviously made of a fairly tough metal - they've withstood centuries on the Scalps, after all - but they've been worn and battered over the years. The poles are full of scratches and dents and crookedness. People have carved words into a few of them. Often it's just their names, but I've been surprised at how often the graffiti turns out to be poetry.*

The people of the Scalps call them Kucha, which roughly translates to "pin." This is why the Scalps are also called the Pinstuck Plains.

Archaeologists have tried to dig to the bases of the poles a few times. They always have to stop when they hit bedrock. Some flat-worlders believe that the poles hold the world up, like the pilings of a pier; round-world theorists believe that they go all the way through it, like a giant's hatpins, holding the world together - or perhaps keeping a few specific places apart. Here on the hairy Scalps of the world, that doesn't seem too far-fetched.

* One had a copy of the Recursive Sonnet on it, of course. Quite a few have nonsense poetry by Carlis Rowell.

Mist-Wolves

They came up over the Edge this morning. It was cloudier than usual; this close to the Edge, there are occasional full-sized clouds, not just the little puffs of white that usually float over the Scalps.* The sun was a bright blur through the gray. At first, there was just the mist, drifting up from the cliff as usual - until it formed itself into shapes and came out into the geographers' camp.

They were gray and silent shapes, great beasts of cloud that drifted through the camp on misty paws. It was hard to tell where one ended and the next began. They were a pack and a cloud-bank all at once, a blur of paws and tails and hunched backs. Pale eyes and teeth gleamed in the mist. They flowed around and through the camp, passing through tripods and tent-poles as if they weren't even there, only occasionally pausing to glance at us. Mist-wolves aren't interested in solid things.

Most creatures in the world are solid - made from earth, as the elemental philosophers would say - but a surprising number are not. There are sea-horses that run in foaming herds across the waves near Kennyrubin, born in the froth of their crests. Fire-dancers hold wild, leaping gatherings over forest fires in the Railway Regions. Most parts of the world have creatures of fire and water such as these. Mist-wolves are creatures of air.

On the plains, they only come out at night or in the early morning. It's too dry during the day. I don't know where they go then; perhaps they sink into the ground or simply become so thin that we can't see them. That's what they do in the Winter. In January, mist-wolves are only visible on the most humid days, spread so thin in the cold, dry air that they can step over houses. These ones were smaller and denser; it's humid near the Edge. They were barely twice the size of solid wolves.

They left dewy paw-prints in the grass.

It was the first time I'd heard the jazz birds in the wagon fall completely silent. Normally, even when the rest of them are asleep, there's at least one still noodling to itself (tu-WHEET-a-deedle-deedle awk awk awk), but when the mist-wolves arrived, all they did was watch. Everyone did. The normal mathematical bustle of the geographers' camp gave way to complete stillness. I found myself holding my breath, half-afraid that the wolves would melt away if I disturbed the air. The only thing that broke the silence was a cup of coffee boiling over on a camp stove. No one moved to take it off.

One of the wolves padded over and sniffed at the steam rising from the coffee. It licked its muzzle with a pale white tongue, as if considering the flavor, then sneezed silently and flowed away. The others grinned at it as it rejoined the pack. I could see tents and wet grass through them. With the graceful unity of a cloud, the whole pack turned and padded out across the plains. A moment later, the sun came out and broke the spell. the mist-wolves vanished instantly, as though they'd never existed. They'd been transparent even under the clouds; in full sunlight, they were completely invisible. If we hadn't all seen them, I'd probably suspect that I'd dreamt the whole thing.

Later in the evening, the geographer with the echo-frogs showed me the reading from his sonograph. (Like a seismograph, it draws a line on a roll of paper.) For just an inch or two, early in the morning, there was a faint zigzag - a rhythm as soft as a whisper. One of the mist-wolves had passed around the sonograph, and the instrument had picked up its heartbeat.

* Some people, if they're used to bigger clouds, refer to the ones over the Scalps as "dandruff."

The Edge

After barely a whole day of traveling, we had to stop this morning; the road had come to an end. For that matter, so had the ground. The road led straight off the edge of a sheer cliff.

This is not what one expects to find on the Scalps. After months of flat plains, it's easy to forget that the world even has vertical surfaces. I certainly wasn't expecting a cliff.

The River KleMit skirted dangerously close to the cliff, but only a small branch of it actually went over. it vanished into the mist that rose up from below. It was impossible to tell how high the cliff was. Looking to either side, it was equally impossible to tell how wide it was. There was just the edge, tufted with grass and small bushes, winding away into the mist.

The Edge, as I found out later, is one of the areas most hotly debated by theoretical geographers. If it truly is the Edge of the world, it would prove the round-world theorists entirely wrong, as a sphere cannot have an edge. They maintain, of course, that the Edge is merely a very large hole. The flat-world theorists insist that it is indeed the Edge, while the mosaic and amalgam theorists don't really care one way or another. According to the mosaic-world theory, the world is neither round nor flat. It's merely a bunch of small pieces of ground that happen to be connected to each other at random (and constantly changing) points. The world doesn't have a shape; it just shares edges. You might as well say that literature has a shape because books share words.

To be honest, this has always sounded like the most reasonable theory to me.

The amalgam theorists maintain that space is an illusion and that every place in the world is simply a different facet of the same single location - similar to the way that, in geometry, an infinite number of circular slices can be taken from the same sphere. Every place is the same one looked at from a different angle.*

The debate between the four theories (and numerous more eccentric ones) has been going on for centuries, and everyone is still unsure whether the Edge is the actual edge of the world or just an unusually large hole. The mist never clears, so it's impossible to see. No climber or flier has ever found a bottom. Explorers have walked along the Edge for months, even years, and never returned to where they started. The cliff doesn't appear to curve in either direction. Of course, the constant mist makes it hard to tell; it just sits there, drifting up and down in plumes, wafting through the cliff's fringe of hanging grass, making it impossible to see any distance below or beyond the Edge. Possibly the Rain Dragon could be persuaded to do something about the mist, but no one ever knows where to find him.

I heard all of this from a team of experimental geographers staying at the Edge. It's a popular place for them, as you might expect. Some of them have been here for years. They have that disheveled-but-enthusiastic look that scientists often get when they've found something interesting; they're too busy to care if their coats are inside-out.

While I talked to the geographers, FlunDitChukk sat on the wagon and didn't look at the road. Every few minutes, he'd take a quick glance at it, just in case it had decided to lead somewhere else while he wasn't looking. So far, it hasn't. Maybe the dunderblub has been peeking at it. I doubt anyone could tell.

The geographers have a small forest of instruments set up at the Edge. There are telescopes, mist-lenses, all manner of surveying tools,** and dozens of other things I couldn't identify - devices like giant sextants and exploded clocks on carefully calibrated tripods. One geographer was inspecting the Edge with a sonograph and a trio of specially bred echo-frogs. Salamander lanterns burned everywhere, more for heat than for light. The mist makes it almost chilly near the Edge. A group of large samovals - research assistants, I assume - were gathered around one lantern, scribbling busily in tiny notebooks like a scientific sewing circle. Their thick fur is less help than usual here. The mist condenses in it, making it stick out all over in damp spikes.

The assistants, when they aren't busy, amuse themselves by throwing things over the Edge. If there's anyone down there, they're probably not amused.

* I have probably explained this entirely wrong. I don't pretend to understand the amalgam world theory in the slightest.

** Contrary to common belief, these actually have some practical uses and are not merely amusing mechanical curiosities. Surveying is not as pointless a pursuit as cartography. It can be quite useful in measuring the heights of large objects, such as mountains or termite mounds.

Leaving SuyMaTmakk

Farewell to SuyMaTmakk. Today I left behind the whirlpool lake, the wicker buildings, the endless living cacophony of life on Market Street. As the wagon rattled along the road by the River KleMit, the bird's-nest skyline and its crown of waterfall mist faded into the distance.

I've enjoyed my time in SuyMaTmakk, but it's time to move on before I get too attached.

I said goodbye to the TiLeKraNas before I left this morning. As thanks for their hospitality, I gave them a set of origami birds in bright paper, the kind that can be folded up and put into an envelope or a pocket. I learned how to make them in Mollogou. To my surprise, the family gave me a beautiful salamander lantern, a fluid shape like a turnip of blended metal and glass. HmoTan said it was an experiment that went slightly wrong. It makes a perfect home for a salamander. Apparently, the children have been playing with my salamander while I've been out,* and they'd noticed that its lantern was getting a bit small. My salamander has grown a lot since I got it. In fact, it's starting to get a bit fat. Maybe I should feed it less coal for a while.

The TiLeKraNas are going to spend a few more days in the city before heading back up the Hley. Instead, I got a ride with a merchant on his way out of town. His name is FlunDitChukk. Whether it's his first name or last name, I have no idea; he's said maybe six words since I met him, and that many only if you count grunts. His cart is pulled by something called a dunderblub, which looks something like a hairy mushroom with four stumpy legs. If it has a head under all the fur, I haven't been able to find it. I can only tell which end is the front when it's walking; even that's only a guess. I'm not entirely sure that it's even an animal. Its name is Tupp.

FlunDitChukk is taking a shipment of jazz birds to CheChmit. They look a bit like roadrunners, but they have clever faces and black-and-white magpie stripes. When they spread their wings, the feathers look like piano keys. They sit in wicker cages in the back of the wagon and warble syncopated improvisations to each other. Occasionally, one of them gets its talons on a trumpet. (FlunDitChukk has a shipment of those too. I'm not sure whether this is a coincidence or not.) I have no idea how they can play a trumpet without lips; whenever I look around, the music stops. All I ever see are a bunch of birds sitting around and whistling innocently.

This could be an interesting trip.

* I was surprised at this, but not particularly worried. My salamander was well trained even before I got it - Cormilack salamanders are some of the most reliable in the world - and children on the dry plains of the Scalps learn fire safety at about the same time they learn to walk. I wasn't worried that they'd hurt each other. I'd watched TiLi and HnerKipPeLo catch fireflies and phosphor moths on the way to SuyMaTmakk, and I don't think they harmed a single charcoal scale of their wings.

Market Street, Day 5: the Lucky Bungler

Kekehruy Square is one of several small open spaces that are often connected to Market Street. Today, it was the site of a three-tower clockboard tournament.

Clockboard is generally considered the most elaborate board game in Hamjamser. Each board is unique, laid out to serve the personal strategy of its creator, or simply to make the game work the way they think it should.* People often say that a clockboard looks like a chessboard; this is true, in the same way that a city looks like a brick. Clockboard uses chessboard as a building material. There are multiple layers of black-and-white squares - checkered terraces, spiral walkways, bridges, rotundas, and the checkered towers by which the game is ranked.** The more adventurous clockboards look like mad model cities in harlequin dress. Each board contains some amount of clockwork as well. At the very least, there's a clock in the board somewhere; it usually has three or more hands, only one of which has anything to do with time. The functions of the others vary from board to board. Advanced boards also include clockwork that changes the game, shifting and rotating sections or dropping pieces down hidden chutes to bring them closer or farther from wherever they're trying to go. Half of playing clockboard is anticipating your opponent's moves; the other half is anticipating the moves of the board.

I've never quite been able to figure out three-tower clockboard. It's possible that I could if I took the time, but so far, my experience is limited to the single-tower variety.

This tournament was in its fourth day, so most of the players were seasoned experts. The beginners have been out of the running since Friday. I couldn't understand half of what was going on. The tournament seemed to be going well; nothing particularly exciting was happening, but the players and the audience were interested. Then Spud showed up.

No one has ever managed to find out Spud's last name - or, for that matter, anything else about him. His response to every question is usually something like, "yes, I'm Spud. Where are the doughnuts?" He shows up occasionally at tournaments (some say he's drawn to large concentrations of board games) and usually doubles the size of the audience once word gets around.

He had neglected to bring a clockboard of his own. This was a requirement for the tournament. It's customary, especially at a tournament, for a pair of clockboard players to play pairs of games - one on each player's board. It wouldn't be fair otherwise. A well-built clockboard gives its creator a significant advantage. If one player wins both of the first pair of games, he or she is the winner; if the first pair is a tie, the players move on to a second pair of games. This continues until one player or the other wins both games in a pair.

It often takes a while for this to happen; the Duchesses of Shimrick and Marbelsack once continued a single match of clockboard for almost ninety years. They met every day to play it over lunch. The match was said to have consisted of four thousand and thirty-six separate games (two thousand and eighteen on each board), and it only ended when the Duchess of Shimrick died of such extreme old age that everyone had lost count. The Duchess of Marbelsack is said to have been quite irritated at her timing, as she was winning the current round. It was just like Shimrick, she said, to die at such a contrary moment.

Fortunately for Spud, one of the other contestants had to drop out at the last minute to have a baby. As she left with a doctor and her husband (who looked by far the most nervous of the three), she gave Spud permission to borrow her board, with the clear understanding that she would kill him if anything happened to it. He nodded vaguely, thanked her, and waved as she left.

He proceeded to win every game he played. This is what always happens. Spud has been the world champion of clockboard - and several other games - for years, despite his apparent lack of any strategy whatsoever. I certainly couldn't find any when I watched him play. He moved his pieces seemingly at random; occasionally, he had to ask his opponent what one of them was.*** Several of his opponents appeared to be winning at first, taking full advantage of mistakes a novice player could have avoided, but his luck always changed by the end of the game. Player after expert player saw their detailed strategies overcome by what looked like randomness and sheer luck.

Board game enthusiasts have argued about Spud for years. A third of them think he's a genius who's impossibly good at hiding it; another third think he's an idiot who's impossibly lucky. The remaining third just think he's cheating. If he is, no one has ever managed to catch him at it. Experienced players who've matched wits with Spud - if wits have anything to do with it - are usually certain he's not cheating. What exactly he is doing, they don't know. They just wish they knew how to do it themselves.

Someone - no one remembers who - once called him the Lucky Bungler. The name has stuck. Clockboard players speak of Spud the Lucky Bungler in a tone of voice normally reserved for only the most insane emperors.

The tournament had narrowed down to the last eight players, seven of which were looking rather nervous, when Spud simply got up and wandered off for no apparent reason. Everyone waited for a while to see if he'd come back. In a game that can take years to complete, players quickly learn patience.

He never returned. After a few hours, during which most of the players mobbed the surrounding shops for food and news of Spud's disappearance, the tournament continued without him. The winner and runners-up continued to play well, though they all looked a bit shaken when accepting their checkered clockwork trophies at the end.

I heard later that Spud had shown up at a Go tournament that happened to be taking place simultaneously on the other side of the lake. He won, of course. The city's reigning Go champion, an ancient and brilliant woman named Trihakna Start, reportedly asked him to marry her on the spot. Accounts vary as to what he replied. On his last comment, however, everyone agrees. When asked about his miraculous success at the tournament, Spud simply blinked and replied, "tournament? I thought this was a yard sale."

And then he left.

* For many serious players of board games, the object is simply to play as well as possible; if a game goes well, it doesn't matter who actually wins. An elegant strategy is often all the more satisfying if your opponent surprises you with it.

** Three-tower clockboard is the most complex variety commonly played; double- and single-tower clockboard are more common. I've heard that the game goes up to seven towers, but I've never even seen a board with more than four. Beyond three, it gets so complicated that you might as well try to predict next year's weather as your opponent's next move.****

*** Clockboard has seventeen basic pieces per player, nearly three times as many as in chess. Each piece has its own unique abilities, and advanced players of the game often invent their own.

**** Unless, that is, you're a Weather Dragon. In that case, the weather is easy to predict, as you're the one making it.

Swarm

I haven't had time to write or draw much today, I'm afraid. A swarm of locusts arrived in SuyMaTmakk this morning. This happens periodically - perhaps once every month or two, in the Summer. It always becomes a contest: the locusts eat the city, and the city eats the locusts.

As in Twokk, locusts are something of a staple food here, along with fish, potatoes, wig-root, and a few species of grains. Cooking on the Scalps tends to be full of crunchy bits and the nutty taste of insect meat. Every swarm that comes within a mile of SuyMaTmakk stops for a snack; apparently, all these wicker buildings are too appetizing to resist. (In addition to being the most available building material on the Scalps, grass also seems to make excellent bait.) Once the locusts arrive, descending insatiably on the city, the people of the city descend on them. Wielding scythes, hammers, hatchets, badminton rackets, or whatever else they can lay their hands on - often just their own claws and teeth - they swat and smash the locusts from the air and walls of the city. The best climbers sweep them from the rooftops. I caught a glimpse of Emiline and Katal at one point, cleaving their way through the swarm. Katal swung her trangaban in whistling, deadly arcs; Emiline took a sword she'd gotten somewhere and became a glittering blur too fast for the eye to follow. I can see why they've been so successful at hunting. Everyone tried to stay out of their way.

Other people, the ones less willing to kill things in such large numbers, gather the dead insects as they pile up on the ground. This was what I did all day. I dislike killing things for any reason, and though their numbers and appetite can make them a plague, locusts are still beautiful animals. Fortunately, they're tasty as well. It was easier if I reminded myself that I was gathering food.

It took all day. Everything else in the city stops when a swarm arrives; the locusts have to be caught as fast as they land, or they'll eat the buildings. In the past, when the city hasn't reacted fast enough, whole blocks have simply vanished down a thousand tiny throats. Everyone comes out to catch locusts, taking only occasional breaks when the heat and the noise become overwhelming. The air is filled with spiny legs and hungry jaws and the incessant rattle of insect wings. It's impossible to hear anything else; even Hmakk is inaudible over the noise. The people of the Scalps have developed a sort of sign language to use during swarms. Unfortunately, I don't know it, so I just went where people pointed.

Up in the air, the avians of the city - those capable of flight - cut swathes through the clouds of locusts, using claws or beaks or antique weapons left over from more warlike centuries. A black-feathered man named Katahweet was particularly skilled; he used a saber passed down from his grandmother, and the sky rained bisected insects wherever he flew. Everyone tried to stay out from under him. A few of the other avians have discovered a particular note, inaudible to most vertebrates, that knocks locusts unconscious when sung. They only use it when they're too high to hear from the ground, so that they don't knock out the city's chitinous citizens as well.

Only the herbivores took any breaks for meals. Most of them don't eat insects. When the rest of us got hungry, we just ate the locusts as we caught them.

It was sundown before the swarm was gone. The fastest and nimblest locusts ate their fill and flew on, clattering away in a much smaller swarm than when they arrived. Their fallen comrades remained behind, piled on the street, filling barrels and baskets and a great many stomachs. The buildings around us were in surprisingly good condition; they were a bit chewed around the edges, but nothing a few days' patching won't fix. Most of the locusts hadn't had time to eat much. The people of SuyMaTmakk have had a long time to get good at this.

About half the people went home, exhausted, to rest until tomorrow. The rest of us spent the next few hours gathering the remaining locusts and carting them off to the city's storehouses. These are enormous subterranean buildings built solely to hold locusts; they're called Hlatakanit (from hlataka, the Hmakk word for locust), and they're as large as the city's granaries. Over the next month or two, the heaps of locusts gathered today will be dried, stored, and gradually reintroduced as breakfast, lunch, and supper.

I've eaten a lot of locust dishes in my time on the Scalps, but tonight's supper was the best yet. I don't know whether the reason was freshness or satisfaction. Food always tastes better when you catch it yourself.

Market Street, Day 4: the Singing Huntresses

These two looked like an interesting pair. I could hear them laughing from across the street (one of them, anyway). I introduced myself, and they agreed to let me draw them if I bought them another round of drinks.

Their names are Emiline and Katal. Emiline was drinking green tea with mint; Katal had something that steamed and turned the table black when it spilled out of her mug. They were in good spirits and talked while I drew. Emiline says she grew up in Ganraminga, a coastal city in Minann, just far enough from Mollogou to stay intact. It's a city of mist and elegant manners. Katal told me a long, detailed story about how she was raised by wolves on the Scalps, and how she left when she realized she was bigger and stronger than any of them. About twenty minutes later, she told me another story about how she was raised by shark-riding bandits on the Mandible Coast. An hour after that, it was sky-monkeys in the floating jungles.

The two of them make their living by traveling across the plains, hunting and singing ballads. There wasn't much hunting to be done in town, but I did get to hear them sing in the inn this evening. They say people are often surprised to find that both of them are equally skilled at hunting and singing. Katal has a lovely alto voice, sweet and clear between her fangs, and as delicate as Emiline looks, she's apparently rather deadly with her bow. It's almost as tall as she is.

There's a lot of space on the Scalps. Of all the creatures that cross them - thunderbeast, rainwalkers, candlegiraffes, wild horses, lightning hyenas - very few ever come within sight of a town. Katal and Emiline say they find some creature no one's ever heard of on almost every trip they take. This month, it was a strange elephantoid beast with multiple tusks; they grow in rows out of its mouth, curling up and over its head in ranks, like a second ribcage. There's a whole herd of them on the plains. The two huntresses caught "the best one" and brought it back to the Museum of Natural Philosophy in SuyMaTmakk, where it will probably spend the next month being cleaned by carrion beetles and then stuffed. It took the huntresses two weeks to drag it back on a wagon. This is what they were celebrating when I met them.

At this time of year, though, they mostly hunt thunderbeast and speckled antelope. Katal seemed to be wearing most of an antelope already; she wore one of the speckled skins as a dress and several particularly interesting bones around her neck. One of the songs the two of them sang this evening comes from the Scalps, and they performed it the traditional way, with drums made of antelope skulls. The clack of bone went perfectly with the clattering Hmakk words.

The songs came from all over Hamjamser. There were sea shanties, hop-fugues from Kennyrubin, lightning-fast breakdowns from the Railway Regions, arzenroyds with chords that made the silverware vibrate. I recognized love songs (frequently estimated to be half of the music ever written) in at least five different languages. They sang a few hymns, a cappella; the harmonies were breathtaking. They even sang the Saga of Neinrak, one of those bleak Northern song-tales of ice and revenge. It takes half an hour and leaves every character dead. They had the entire room spellbound by the third verse; by the eighth, we were joining in for the choruses (there are five different ones, each repeated throughout the saga). By the sixteenth verse, most of us were too choked up by the story to trust our voices anymore. It took several patter-songs and ironic ballads before anyone could smile again.

While they sang, I touched up the paint on Emiline's quiver. It had gotten scratched while she was wrestling a cathomar in the foothills of the Railway Regions. Though she's modest about it, Emiline has trained rather extensively in the kinds of martial arts that let you toss around creatures five times your size. She's the only person I've met who's chosen the contest of strength - usually the least popular of a cathomar's traditional three choices - and one of the only ones I've even heard of who's actually won it. The cathomar must have been quite surprised.

Some of my favorite songs were the ones from Mollogou, crooked melodies with strange, metallic chords. Katal's instrument is called a trangaban; it's an enormous stringed thing, like a five-foot banjo made of steel. It looks like she occasionally uses it as a club (presumably when her actual iron hunting club isn't handy). For the Mollogou songs, she played the trangaban with a pair of tin spoons, producing a sound somewhere between a steel drum and a dulcimer. Emiline plays the soolian, a relative of the clarinet. It has a flared opening carved to look like a dragon's head. The two of them showed exactly how good they were with their instruments when they performed a traditional haknit from SuyMaTmakk; soolian and trangaban skittered up and down the scale, forming complex, glittering harmonies with Katal's powerful voice. The angry words of the haknit would have been slightly more convincing if they hadn't been grinning so widely the whole time.

Market Street, Day 3: the Animals

There are probably more animals for sale on Market Street than there are people to buy them. Their snorts and clucks and shrieks occasionally drown out even the songs of the vendors. Horses, mules, oxen, emus, and a variety of cart-lizards pull wagons between the crowded stalls. Klepts lurk silently in the shadows. Fish circle in barrels and tightly woven baskets. Messenger monkeys scuttle over the rooftops, screeching to each other in raucous code. Below them, people stop to listen to the songs of the Kelleries, birds as drab as kiwis and as musical as nightingales. Their voices have outgrown their wings. Some of them sing counterpoint with the calliope cicadas.

The spotted hens this one boy seemed so fond of are only one of the hundreds of kinds of poultry in the market. There are ducks and geese, chickens and kaklbirds, paihens and pahareets, bred for meat or eggs or feathers. One breed of tiny bantams produces eggs the size of grapes, with all the iridescent colors of an opal in the shells. There are jewelers who use them in jewelry; they spend hours hollowing out the eggs, filling the shells with something more durable, and coating them in substances that make the colors last. The recipes for these are jealously guarded by each jeweler. Only their apprentices learn the secret.

The russet crabs are raised to turn food scraps into useful meat, like pigs. They get to be about the same size. The ones at the market are usually sold small - palm-size at most - but they never seem to stop growing. A man once kept one for twelve years to see how big it would get. At the end of the twelve years, it ripped its way out of his basement and cut a thundering path of destruction through the city before plunging into the depths of Lake Twiliat. The hole it left revealed that the man had quadrupled the size of his basement to make room for it. It was taller than his house. As far as anyone knows, it's still somewhere in the depths of the lake, growing bigger every year.

Since then, everyone makes sure to eat russet crabs before they get much larger than a pig. Almost every family has one if they can afford it. You can see them all along the canals, scurrying around in wicker pens under the water. There's never more than one crab to a pen; they have an unfortunate habit of eating each other. I can't say I blame them. I've tasted them once or twice myself, and they're delicious.

There are pets in the market too, of course. This girl seemed to have fallen in love with one of the house-spiders, as so often happens with small, fuzzy animals. It had pink feet. Her brother didn't seem quite so sure about them.

House-spiders are a fairly common sight in SuyMaTmakk. They're descended from the wild tarantulas of the plains, in much the same way that lap-dogs are descended from wolves. The poison was bred out of them a long time ago. They can still bite, but it's only painful, not deadly, and they've long since lost the aggression of wild spiders. You're more likely to be bitten by a hamster. They're kept for the same reason as cats; they're soft, they're affectionate, and they catch mice. Many people prefer house-spiders to cats. They're more easily housebroken, and they get rid of ants as well.

There are dozens of kinds of fish in the market - this is a lake city, after all - but these are some of the strangest. In the wild, jar-fish live in the abandoned tunnels of muskrats and water-snakes. Only the most vertical holes will do. They sit in the holes all day, dangling their long fins down through the entrances, and only come out when they can sense that nothing's moving nearby. No one's sure what sense they use. It could be hearing, or a form of echolocation, or the strange electric awareness used by sharks.

Jar-fish are always kept in tall jars like this, hence the name. If they're kept in larger containers, they develop acute agoraphobia and stop eating. The TiLeKraNas knew a scientist once who kept one in a beaker and used it as a seismograph. He said it was the only reason his workshop survived the eruption of Mount SanCheLi; the tremors were still too gentle for him to feel when the fish panicked and tried to hide in its own mouth.

This is one of my favorite parts of Market Street, second only to the scavenger docks and the booksellers' alley. The animals of the market come from all over the plains. There are birds from the forests, beasts from the open spaces, strange and wondrous fish dredged up from the lake. Parts of the city have become whole ecosystems of their own, narrow wicker forests between the lake and the plains. Many of the creatures here were bred in SuyMaTmakk and exist nowhere but in the city.

Every day, it gets harder to leave the market without bringing some of them with me.

Market Street, Day 2: the Waitress

Gisella Peliak is a waitress at the Krolem Hmuytebit, a restaurant on Market Street. Its name means "the Affable Troglodyte." In SuyMaTmakk, it's called a yanyanitlekka, which means something like, "sunrise, sunset, all night long." It never closes. In other parts of the world, it would be called a diner.

There was some sort of festival today - just a minor one, I think. Crowds of people lined up along the docks and threw weeds into the lake, which sucked them down into itself (except where people had brought bladderwort or floatweed. I'm not sure whether or not this counts as cheating). The festival is called the Eating of the Weeds, or something of the sort; it has something to do with farming. A few people tried to explain it to me, but I couldn't hear them very well. I'm fairly sure at least half of them were drunk.

The crowds got to be too much for me after a while, so I ducked down a few alleyways to find a more peaceful spot. Alleys in SuyMaTmakk are even more like crooked birds' nests than the rest of the city. No one bothers to weave neatly on the back of a building. I eventually came out on the quieter end of Market Street. There was hardly anyone there; they were all at the festival. A tall person in a striped cloak - male or female, I couldn't tell - was poring over a bookseller's stall, running a slow finger along the spine of each book, as if reading an unfamiliar language one letter at a time. It looked as if this had been going on for a while. The bookseller was snoring. Other than the two of them, and a couple of construction workers napping on a half-woven building, there was no one on the street.

I stopped for lunch at the nearest restaurant, which turned out to be the Affable Troglodyte. It was nearly deserted as well. There were a few people reading at solitary tables, a couple who appeared to be quietly celebrating an anniversary, and an insect mother and child playing some sort of pencil-and-paper game between crumb-scattered plates. That was all.

I stayed there for most of the afternoon, sitting in a back corner and sketching the other customers. Not many came in. The ones who did usually stayed a while, sitting still, which made them easy to sketch.

Ms. Peliak noticed what I was doing when she brought me lunch. (I forget what it was. Something made of locusts.) Her nails were painted bright pink; so were the tips of her tusks.

"Hmm," she said. "Not bad. Have you been here after dark?"

I hadn't.

"You might want to come back then," she said, and moved on to refill someone's coffee without another word.

The sun was hot and the crowds were noisy, so I decided to simply stay there. It wasn't as if I was taking up needed space; not even half the tables were full.

At about midnight, someone turned the lamps down, and the diner became a dim cave. The customers were stranger after that.

It started with the usual mix of troglodytes and nocturnals - people with pale skin and large eyes, snakes and ferrets, the kinds of miners who never leave the house without a pickaxe. Many of them wore dark glasses and wide-brimmed hats. A bat-woman came in wearing a waistcoat fastened with magnets. There were so many rings in her ears that she jingled when she turned her head. A group of werewolves came in soon after midnight, on two legs or four or something in between. They were laughing and talking among themselves as they ordered meat and green tea. The topic of conversation always seemed to be the moons.

A steady procession of fishy people went in and out all night, dripping with lacy fins and clear lake water. Most of them were wearing weeds, the same little stalks and flowers that had been thrown from the docks that afternoon, tucked into their pockets or gills. They ordered soup and ate it with great slurping gusto.

The person in the striped cloak came in carrying a single book. It was small, but obviously carefully selected. The person sat down at a table and unwrapped the cloth from its head to reveal more cloth. This layer was in a dark gray houndstooth pattern. There was a horizontal tear near the bottom of what I'm assuming was the person's head, into which it tucked tiny slices of potato for almost three hours.

At a table in the back, a man with four ears sat and muttered to himself while he made painstaking repairs to what looked like a disembodied hand. I assumed he was either a shapeshifter or an expert on clockwork. He crunched peanuts from a bowl as he worked. After an hour or two, he unfolded a third arm from his coat and attached the hand to its wrist. He grinned in satisfaction as he flexed the fingers. I'm still not sure whether it was real or clockwork, but whichever it was, he seemed to have gotten it to work.

Vague upright shadows flitted across the floor to lurk under tables, as if even the dim lamp light was too much for them. They gave their orders in flickering sign language. What they got was either ink or the blackest coffee I've ever seen.

Two men sat down on opposite sides of a small table. "It is time," said one of them.

The other man nodded. "Have you the Tome?"

The first man pulled an enormous book out of his coat - I have no idea how it fit - and thumped it onto the table. It was bound in green leather, singed at the corners. The two of them stared at it for a while.

Eventually, the other one reached into his own coat and pulled out one of the little booklets of crossword puzzles that you can buy at the market, three for a Packle.

"Ah. The Tome," said the first man.

"What dreadful checkered mysteries it contains." The other nodded solemnly.

"This night shall see their unraveling."

"Indeed. Let us begin."

They spent the rest of the night doing crossword puzzles with the solemnity of a burial. They were still there when I left.

Ms. Peliak served everyone with equal cheer, pink nails shining in the dim lanterns. Apparently, she's used to them all by now, or professional enough not to show it if she isn't. She asked several of them about their families.

"I visited my parents at their home last night. Then I woke up."

"My sister has been dead for ten years now. She said to thank you for the flowers you sent last week."

"My aunt is downstairs, my uncle is upstairs, my grandfather is on the roof. When it rains, he is the first to know."

"Fam'ly? Whazzat?"

"My children number in the hundreds. They knit me socks to make me proud. Whatever shall I do with so many socks? I have only three feet."

A drifting, diaphanous thing came up through the floor at three o'clock, wreathed in smoke. I'm fairly sure it came through the cracks between the tiles. It sat slightly above a table and drank the smoke from a bowl of incense as if it was a fine wine.

That was when I left. I was too exhausted to tell if the thing was real or a sleep-deprived hallucination. In fact, I wonder the same thing about most of the people I saw last night. Ms. Peliak is the only one I'm sure was real. She was there all night, solid among shadows and phantoms, serving eggs and pouring coffee. I don't know when she sleeps.

This, as you may have guessed, is the reason my letter was late yesterday; I was up all night at the diner. I think it was worth it - for this picture, if nothing else.

I haven't included any of my other sketches. I'm not sure I believe them.

Market Street, Day 1: the Scavenger

After a day spent exploring the market district of SuyMaTmakk, I'm afraid I'm too tired to write much tonight. I did come back with some pictures, though; perhaps they'll make up for it. Here's the first.

This is Harzifan Scrath, scavenger and merchant. He spends most of his days climbing over the islands of flotsam in the center of the lake. On Tuesdays, he brings back what he's found over the week and sells it at the market. His stall is set up by the docks. It's full of old clothes, boxes, and assorted bits of furniture; he found a whole butter churn last week, perfectly intact. A heap of tableware in materials that float (wooden spoons, bone-handled forks) sits next to an array of mismatched jewelry.* There are books so waterlogged that they're shaped like fans, their pages splayed and wrinkled and all but illegible. There's a china doll that looks like the survivor of a shipwreck. Perhaps she is. She has one shoe, patent leather with a brass buckle, and lake-weed in her hair.

A row of bottles stands in an uneven line in front of the stall. They're full of the small, smooth gouges left by the vitreous snail, which makes its shell out of glass. Any glass object left in the lake will be full of the same little pockmarks within days. The snails normally eat sand, processing it into glass in some strange pocket of their digestive system, but they've developed a taste for pure glass since people first settled by the lake. The TiLeKraNas have a colony of them at their house; they bring the occasional shell to the market whenever a snail dies of old age. There were none this time, but the shells are apparently quite lovely. Surprisingly, they're also quite practical. Most of the predators in the lake eat snails - if they like snails - by crunching them up, shell and all. Hail-storks and a few kinds of seagulls can crack even the toughest ones by flying them to great heights and dropping them on the docks.** Nothing bothers to do this with the vitreous snails, though; cracking their shells gives you nothing but a lump of meat full of glass shards.

An ornate wooden mantel clock sits on a back corner of the stall, ticking quietly. Harzifan says he's had it for five years now. It's made of some kind of hardwood - rare and valuable on the plains, where most wood comes in the form of small sticks - but no one has bought it. Harzifan says this might be because of the water stains, which have turned the clock charcoal-black in splotches, or possibly because it's run backward ever since he fished it out of the lake. I'm impressed that it runs at all.

Harzifan himself simply sits there all afternoon, grinning that same piratical grin at everyone who passes by. Every Tuesday, he says, he's more grateful than the week before to have the chance to relax. (His voice is deep and rough, like gravel on a lakebed, or the razor grin of a shark.) He's getting too old to be climbing over heaps of flotsam all day, he says. When someone buys the backward clock, or when it finally stops ticking, that's the day he'll retire.

I took a look at the clock as I was leaving, after I'd thanked Harzifan for letting me sketch him.*** The gears inside, where they were visible, gleamed with polish and good repair; the clock's price was higher than everything else in the stall put together, including the stall itself and possibly Harzifan's hat. Somehow, I don't think he's in a hurry.



* It's impossible to find a matched pair of earrings at a single scavenger's stall. It takes visits to at least a dozen to have the slightest hope of a match. There are people who spend hours going from stall to stall, playing the scavenger market like some sort of giant memory game, cataloguing hundreds of salvaged earrings in their heads in the hopes of finding a match. According to Harzifan, it's surprising how often they succeed.

** This, of course, is what hail-storks are named for. A whole flock of them can produce a short but devastatingly well-aimed shower of snails. This is why dock workers around Lake Twiliat wear such thick hats all the time, even during the hottest weather. They can't just drop what they're doing and run, the way everyone else does when the storks appear overhead; they have to have a different method of avoiding concussions.

*** I bought one of his books, as it seems rude to sketch someone's business and not buy something from it. It's called Hni Teli Paka, which could be translated as either "Greetings, O amusing one" or "Hey you, ugly." Some of its pages still look legible. This could be interesting.

SuyMaTmakk

According to the TiLeKraNas, SuyMaTmakk is the only real city on the Scalps. There are a few large towns that like to call themselves cities when they think they can get away with it, and a couple of ghost cities where no one lives except night-haunts and the intensely solitary, but SuyMaTmakk is by far the largest concentration of living people. It's built around the only lake.

When I first saw SuyMaTmakk, I thought it was on fire. The setting sun caught the cloud of mist that hangs constantly over the city, raised by its hundred waterfalls, and lit it all up in orange. The buildings, made of sticks and straw and sod bricks, cast scarecrow shadows against the sunset.

Every river on the Scalps eventually empties into Lake Twiliat. There are only four of them, so this is not quite as impressive as it sounds, but that's still a lot of water for the Scalps. The Hley comes from the East. The other three rivers are the KleMit (West), the HatPaLikk (South), and the Flyeek (Northwest, except during full moons, when it moves around to parallel the HatPaLikk from the South).

The entire lake spins slowly, as if someone's opened a drain at the bottom. According to those who live in the lake, that's fairly accurate. There's a giant hole in the floor of the lake. It's called the Hwuyk - literally, the Drain. Most lake-dwellers stay away from it; the current is too strong to resist past a certain point. Many people have gone into the hole, curious or simply unaware of it until it's too late. Only a handful have ever come out again. They've returned over land, all of them, stumbling across the Scalps on dusty feet or carried in barrels of water by traveling merchants. Their stories have made little sense. They've raved of moons, of coal-fish, of strange and secret oceans. As they recover their senses, they lose their memories of their journeys. No one has ever gotten any sense out of them. The world beneath the Drain remains a mystery.

Some call Twiliat the Lake with No Plug.

It's actually surprisingly difficult to reach the lake by water. Its constant spinning has carved a huge bowl in the ground over the centuries, and the banks are much higher than the water. In many places, they actually overhang it slightly. Fish lurk in the shadowy places underneath, waiting for prey that doesn't have a hook in it. Water only leaves the lake through the Drain; everything above ground flows into it, not out. The four rivers reach the lake as waterfalls. Only the stupidly adventurous sail over those. There are a few systems of locks around the banks, series of stepped pools that lift boats with clever arrangements of valves and gates, but few boats use them. Instead, most of the city's shipping trade takes place in a ring of canals around the raised edges of the lake.* Much of the city is built around and over these canals, or clinging to the steep banks below them. Many buildings slouch on piers over the slowly swirling water.

The dry part of SuyMaTmakk forms a ring around the lake; the submerged part of the city forms a somewhat smaller ring inside it. Their populations are about equal. The city is evenly divided between the people of the air, the people of the water, and the amphibians who travel between the two.

The only people who sail on the lake itself are fishers and scavengers. Whole islands of debris build up in the center of the lake.** The current draws them together, but it's not strong enough to pull them down into the Drain, so they simply float on the surface, spinning gently. Everything that falls into the lake and floats eventually ends up there. The islands are made up of broken furniture, lost toys, dead fish, papers blurred to illegibility, leaves and sticks and wood shavings and a hundred kinds of dust. Some of them are old enough to have sprouted grass and small bushes. There are people who make their living by rowing or swimming back and forth, scavenging in the shifting heaps of trash and lost things. They bring back what they find and sell it in the city's markets. Their booths are full of stained books, locked boxes with no keys, dolls with waterweed in their hair, wooden clocks with their gears full of silt. The scavenger's booths are the first places people go if they lose something. Chances are it will turn up in one of them eventually.

The city itself is a chaotic jumble of buildings. Wood is just as scarce here as elsewhere on the Scalps, so the buildings are made of wicker, of crooked sticks lashed into bundles, of piled sod bricks topped with grass, of bones taken from the elephant graveyards outside the city.*** I don't think there's a straight line in all of SuyMaTmakk. The city tangles around the edges of Lake Twiliat like the nest of an enormous bird.

I haven't actually seen all that much of it yet. The sun set shortly after my first glimpse of that crazed silhouette against the sky, and it was dark when we began to reach the outstretched fingers of the city's river docks. The lamps on them are lit by bottled fireflies and exquisitely trained salamanders. In a city made of sticks and straw, actual fires are extremely scarce. The streets are mostly dark after sunset.

The inn the TiLeKraNas usually stay at is on the Hley, so we didn't actually set foot on the streets tonight; we simply tied the raft up at the dock, next to a shack built on a huge floating dome, and went inside. I looked back as the door was closing and saw the dome lift its head out of the water. It was an enormous turtle.

The inn is called the Hmofrem Pekelli (the Eloquent Pig). It's a cozy, slouching building made of sod bricks. From outside, it looks like a grassy hill with windows. The walls are threaded with embroideries of living roots, some of which reach pale flowers out to the lanterns or the dusty windows. The most bored or drunk patrons of the bar pour various drinks on them; some turn the next day's flowers interesting colors, as if the plants themselves are drunk. A few regulars have become experts and can combine drinks to give the flowers multicolored stripes or splotches. The other patrons generally agree that they don't have enough to do.

All of this is still only what I've heard from the TiLeKraNas; they come to SuyMaTmakk often enough to be familiar with the most interesting parts of the city. It was late when we arrived, though, and the children went straight to bed (after some protesting), soon followed by the adults. I've only stayed up late enough to write this letter and hand it to the patiently waiting postbird. My own exploring will have to wait until tomorrow.

* Twiliat literally means "Ear." It is, after all, a hole beneath the Scalps. English-speakers call the city's main waterway the Ear Canal.

** This might explain why rafts on the Hley look the way they do.

*** Most of the bone-houses' inhabitants are immigrants from Trammelghast, where a house is not considered homey until it's haunted by at least one shrieking specter. They see the dead as something like eccentric pets. Their neighborhoods tend to remain politely out of earshot of the rest of the city.