Icebox

The village of Frish is a small place, its houses slightly shorter than the sand dunes that surround it. In spite of its small size, though, we saw the village long before we arrived - one part of it, at least.

Frish is built in the shadow of an enormous Hill Builder machine, a complex - though unmoving - engine the size of a large hill. The base is half-buried in the sand. There's a long metal spire sticking at an angle from its top. I do mean long, too - the spire is easily fifty times as tall as any house in the village. It's not just the tallest thing nearby; it's the only tall thing nearby. According to the villagers, every thunderstorm that passes over the village strikes the spire with lightning at least once.

Its size is not the strangest thing about it, though, nor is its affinity for lightning. Even in the most blistering Summers of the Golden Desert, the engine is always cold. The villagers caution their children not to lick it. (Some even listen.) I walked over to it after we arrived in the village. In the hot afternoon air, I could feel the chill coming off of the metal in waves. Faint clouds of mist drifted from the spire above me. The cold was pleasant from a distance; close up, I actually started shivering.

After a year in the Golden Desert, I'd almost forgotten what it feels like to be cold in the daytime. Cold weather here tends to be strictly nocturnal.

I don't know what the engine is, or how it works, and neither does anyone else in the village. This is normal for Hill Builder relics. Whoever the Hill Builders were, wherever they vanished to, they left their tools and toys and other creations scattered about the world in astonishingly large numbers when they left. Many of their old machines are still running today. The Train of the Railway Regions is one of these machines; so are all of the floating cities. The original radios, the elegant and relentless Guardians, the little crystal brains used in clockwork pipe crawlers, the Omnipresent Typewriter, the infamous Answering Machine of Miggle-Meezel… The Hill Builders left a lot of useful things behind.

It's a shame they neglected to leave an instruction manual.

However it works, the engine is cold enough to pull moisture out of even the dry Desert air. Beads of water condense on its surface every morning - and with the entire height of the spire, that's a great deal of surface. The windward side of the machine's base is buried beneath a drift of sand, but the leeward side shelters a depression in the rock, where the water dripping down the spire forms a small pool. This is what allows the village to exist. We're days away from the river Lahra; all of Frish's water comes from this one frigid pool, as clear and cold as snowmelt.

Very little lives in the pool. The Golden Desert does have a few aquatic species - mostly amphibians and the occasional lungfish. Pebble-toads bake themselves golden brown in the sun and disguise themselves as rocks. Raindrop frogs spend months hibernating underground, sealed beneath the cracked surface of dry stream beds, only emerging for a few exuberant hours when the rain comes and frees them from the hard ground. Desert-dwellers who know where to look come out sometimes to find them dancing in the rain.

None of these species live in the engine pool. The water is clean enough, but it's cold - so cold that the children of Frish often dare each other to stand in it until their feet turn blue.* Frost forms on the stones around it at night. Anything that wanted to live in the pool would have to come from a mountaintop somewhere, or perhaps the arctic wastes of the Stone Ocean, and it's a long way from there to the Golden Desert. For now, the pool remains uninhabited.

The caravan will not stay here long, sadly, as the village grows only what it needs and has little to trade. Many places with Hill Builder relics take them apart and use the pieces for other things - Cormilack, for instance, exports hundreds of ancient gears every year from its huge and motionless Earthmover - but Frish is understandably reluctant to do so. They rely too much on their silent engine, their great metal icicle, to interfere with its mysterious workings.

Besides, all of its openings have been frozen shut for centuries.



* Their mothers try to discourage this, but so far, it hasn't worked. A few of the mothers have given up and taken to wading with their children instead. This seems to work better.

Message in a Monolith

The stone stood in the sand directly ahead of us. We saw it long before we actually reached it; the vague dark shape had been rippling on the horizon for hours, motionless except for the heat that makes everything in the Golden Desert shimmer at a distance.

When we reached it, it turned out to be a rather unremarkable standing stone. It looked like sandstone of some kind. It also looked old, though - I didn't even recognize the characters that were carved into its single flat side - and nothing made of sandstone keeps its details for long in the gritty wind of the Desert. The writing was still legible.

There are far too many things hidden beneath the sands of the Golden Desert for anyone to even dream of counting them. The dunes roll back occasionally and uncover ruins, tombs, monuments from civilizations long forgotten. They might stay visible for a week, a day, or only a few hours before the dunes swallow them up again. Most travelers (especially if they're of the scientific persuasion) will stop to at least look at things like this stone. The common opinion is that if the Desert has unveiled something for you to see, it's probably worth taking a good look. You'll probably never see the thing again, after all - and even if it holds no meaning for you, who knows? There could be an archaeologist in the next town who's been looking for it for years.

This is the Golden Desert, where the history is deeper than the sand. People stop here for interesting rocks.

Predictably, everyone in the caravan took this as an excuse to take a break. The gafl were unhitched from the wagons, free to go snuffling around in the nearby sand; everyone else got out food or books or pillows and sat down to eat or read or snore for a while.

The team of scientists (I'm still not sure whether they're geologists, archaeologists, something more obscure, or perhaps a combination of all three) piled out of their wagon and gathered around the stone. They tested and measured it with various instruments, taking notes and chattering among themselves. One fished a dilapidated box camera out of her luggage and took a careful photograph or two.

Mirenza, the avian woman I spoke to earlier, stood back a bit from the others. She seemed to be focusing on the writing on the stone. I could hear her muttering under her breath. She squinted at the barely legible hieroglyphs for a few minutes, then turned back to the others with a funny half-smile on her face. I could only pick out a few words of what she said next. The other scientists' reactions ranged from chuckles to confused frowns.

Karlishek told me later that the inscription on the stone roughly translates as follows:

"You have seen the stone I carved, and read the words I wrote. That is all I really wanted. May your travels be happy and your path even."

The signature had been worn away by the sand.

Urban Bonsai

Nothing particularly unusual happened today, so I have little to write about other than what I told you yesterday. Instead, I think I'll tell you about my visit to Fresmareel.

It was a few years ago, during my trip to the Railway Regions. Fresmareel is one of the few villages in the Regions that is not connected to the railroad. Perhaps it will be someday. The town is built on land ruled by the dragon Agnathrommilax, a drake of middle years - three or four centuries - and somewhat eccentric tastes. He paints his scales in bright colors, wears the flags of extinct cities like scarves around his long neck, and collects gramophone records of Rampastulan opera. On clear days, the villagers can sometimes hear him singing along on distant mountaintops. They often mistake the sound for thunder.

The dragon lives alone in his cave. However, the villagers have known him to fly off for several days, carrying a plump mammoth or a particularly nice boulder of quartz, and they suspect that he might have a sweetheart on one of the other mountains.

He has allowed them to live on his land as long as they follow a series of rules.

They can hunt the deer and ground sloths in the area, but are forbidden to harm wolves, foxes, and dreadgoats, as many of the ones in the area are intelligent and the dragon's personal friends.

They must ask the dragon's permission before clearing large areas of land, and certain plants - such as wild lilies and whistle-sedge - are to be left alone entirely.

The village must be built in a perfect circle. Every building within it must also be a perfect circle. They are allowed to expand the village, but only in concentric rings around the current outlines, so that they preserve its shape.

The houses are to be painted white or other pale colors. They can paint their roofs in any colors or patterns they like, as long as they stick to a palette selected by the dragon. He seems to favor reds, oranges, browns, and the occasional intense blue.

Certain colors, such as black, mauve, and chartreuse, are forbidden except on special occasions, such as funerals. Other than that, the villagers may wear anything they like.

The dragon encourages singing; he has even been known to give lessons to those villagers whose voices particularly offend his ears.

The land is a rich and beautiful one, and aside from broad aesthetic decisions, the dragon leaves the people of Fresmareel free to govern their lives as they choose. Most of them see it as an exceptionally good agreement. Other than a certain care in their hunting and their choice of pigments, most hardly notice the effects of the dragon's rules at all. Many even consider themselves lucky to live in such a beautifully designed village.

The villagers note that several of the rules, such as those on expansion, have only come into effect when the colony reached a certain size; there had been no need for them before. Presumably, new ones will continue to be introduced as the population continues to grow. This might also be the reason for some of the more mysterious rules, such as the unusually wide streets.

Hunters have occasionally come upon the dragon perched on one of the many rocky cliffs that surround the valley, gazing down at the colony with a satisfied expression, as one might wear when observing a garden or a favorite work of art. Some have speculated that, rather than collecting art or metalwork - the most common manmade objects that dragons hoard - he is instead a connoisseur of urban planning.

It seems he is growing a bonsai town.

Dragons, after all, live for centuries and can afford to take their time. Who knows - perhaps Agnathrommilax is already planning what the city will look like hundreds of years from now.

Departure

The gafl have apparently eaten their fill, ballooning to three times their previous size, so the caravan packed up and left Denemat this morning. I was surprised to discover how many of the people I've seen around the village are actually passengers on the caravan. Denemat's population, apparently, is even smaller than I thought.

I went back to say goodbye to Fenbit and Hasisha before we left. They were sitting in the shade of their acacia again, though the tree had moved to the other side of their house. Perhaps it wanted a change of scenery. They gave me a package to deliver to their grandson, who apparently lives in a remote town called Snarkish. If the caravan happens to come across the town on its journey, I'll deliver the package myself; if not, I'll give it to someone else before I leave the Desert. It will find its destination eventually.

The package seems to weigh almost half what I do, which is why they're not sending it by postbird. The postbirds refuse to deliver anything that weighs more than they do. Heavy mail has to take its chances with foot travel. Inhabitants of the Golden Desert are used to waiting months or years for their packages to arrive.

The train of wagons had already lined up at the outskirts of the village when I arrived. Everyone was loading things aboard. The merchants in the caravan are transporting a wide variety of cargos. One entire wagon is full of parsnips and munchmelons; another holds cages of pahareets, jazz birds, and salamanders. Several harried-looking potter's apprentices were shifting towering stacks of ceramic tiles, glazed with brightly colored butterflies and sheep and squid and peacocks, and wrapping them in thick woolen blankets before loading them into crates. Further on, a team of the caravan's largest and strongest lifters were carrying heavy chests reinforced with iron bands and massive padlocks. I don't know what was inside them. Most of the lifters were samovals, who tend to be larger and stronger than average; there was also an upright elephant with painted tusks, a few of the masked people I've glimpsed occasionally in the Desert, and a pair of twins who looked almost human, aside from the armadillo scales across their backs. They lifted chests that were larger than I am, and must have weighed three times as much, without any visible effort.

A team of men and women in white robes were taking great care in loading crates onto one of the wagons. A few of the crates were still open, and I could see glimpses of complex machinery inside, all gleaming brass and polished lenses. One of the team - an avian woman with jet-black feathers, who was panting in the heat despite the hood shading her face - gave me an enthusiastic explanation when she stopped to rest.

"Is for, eh, measure the sand, yes?" She fanned herself with one feathery arm. "Is for… Look in sand, see what is before. Sand now is small pieces, but before, maybe is castle, or mountain, or glass, yes?" She pointed to a crate where an elaborate series of lenses sat, half wrapped in cloth, gleaming in the sunlight. "Look with this, see castle, mountain, glass. What sand is before."

I'm still not entirely sure what she meant. Some unusual variety of archaeology, perhaps? The equipment was nearly all packed, so a demonstration was out of the question. My Amrat, unfortunately, is nowhere near as good as her English, and I'm no geologist. Most of what she said went completely over my head. She didn't seem disappointed with my incomprehension; she just shrugged and smiled, a slight rumpling of the feathers at the corners of her beak. "Eh. When you maybe learn more Amrat, I tell you again. Yes?"

One of the wagons has been cleared out and altered to hold a single passenger. Normally, a caravan would not allow this; space is too limited to waste an entire wagon on one person. (I will be sharing a wagon with five other travelers and their luggage, as well as a shipment of assorted fossil shells, and sleeping on top of my luggage.) However, from what I've heard, this passenger is not only wealthy enough to pay for a whole wagon; he is also aquatic. The alterations to the wagon were mostly to make it watertight. The wagon bed has been sealed - I assume with tar, or snail glue, or something of that sort - and filled with river water. The canvas roof has been replaced with a silk canopy nailed down tightly on all sides. This, apparently, will hold moisture inside the wagon and keep the water from evaporating too quickly.

I don't know the passenger's name, but I've heard that he's from a wealthy family of river merchants from the Scalps. How he got all the way out here, I have no idea. I hope he doesn't mind being stuck inside a wagon for the next month or so.

The caravan set off shortly after noon. This was later than it was scheduled to leave - I could hear Tirakhai's voice from one end of the wagon train to the other, booming at steadily higher volumes the later it got - but it's nearly impossible to organize this many people, much less to do it on time. I'm impressed we only left a few hours late.

The gafl handlers had been maneuvering their charges into position all morning, checking harnesses and providing a few last snacks before departure. They steered the gafl with a sort of percussive code, thumping out quick rhythms on the shaggy hides that told the creatures to stop, go forward, turn left, and so on.

I managed to find a good place to sit when we left; it was a seat near the front of one of the central wagons, where I had a good view of the whole caravan. It was quite a sight. All the gafl started nearly at the same time, lurching forward with surprising speed as they stretched and compressed their massive bodies. Hundreds of soft feet hit the sand at once. The sound was like a pillow fight of operatic proportions.

The rest of the day's journey was largely uneventful. The wagons slid over the dunes fairly smoothly, though they seemed to find more bumps and pebbles than I would have thought possible in what looked like perfectly smooth sand. The springs on their shafts at least kept them from sharing the gafl's lurching gait.

There was always someone singing. Over the course of the day, I must have heard dozens of melodies from one wagon or another. Karlishek identified a few of them for me when he happened to be nearby; one was a love song, another a prayer, a third a comical ballad about a man who built a house out of sand.

The sun set an hour or two ago. The wagons are currently arranged in a circle around a large campfire. There is little wood in the Golden Desert, so we're burning gafl dung. The handlers collected enough over the course of the day to make a sizable fire. Thankfully, it has almost no smell at all. The gafl themselves smell strongly of rosemary right now, as their handlers have been rubbing the herb into their fur to keep away parasites. The gafl seem to like the smell; they stuff their faces into each other's fur and sniff happily every time we stop. Most of them are sleeping at the moment. Their silhouettes are like grassy hills in the dark, rising and falling slowly with their breathing.

All the passengers who are still awake sit around the fire. Supper was a bewildering array of shared food, contributed by everyone, followed by an hour or so of songs and storytelling. I missed most of the stories, but I was able to at least hum along with the songs.

By now, everyone is quiet. Most of the passengers have wandered off to their wagons to sleep. The few who remain sit around the crackling fire, writing letters or journals, or playing games with boards and decks of cards that I've never seen before. It's peaceful.

The moon and grandmoon are high in the sky above us, wearing the campfire smoke like veils. There must be a million stars around them. Bats and night birds fly overhead, black on black, little fluttering silhouettes that croon and squeak softly to each other. I have a bed of sorts set up in the wagon, but I might just sleep outdoors tonight.

After all, it's not as if it's likely to rain.

Gafl

The caravan's wagons run on sledges - better for sand - though they carry wheels that they can attach for hard or rocky ground. There are no permanent routes across the Golden Desert; caravans have to be prepared for everything. The wagons are lightweight, mostly wood with canvas roofs, and they're sloped on the sides so that the wind won't tip them over.

I really haven't paid all that much attention to the wagons, though, other than to get an idea for their basic shapes. What I find most interesting is what's in front of them.

The wagons are pulled by creatures called gafl. They are great shaggy beasts like enormous caterpillars. Each one has fourteen feet - soft, squishy pads the size of pie plates - and no legs to speak of. The mouth is somewhere between the little gripping claws and the fuzzy nub that serves as a face. The eyes are hard and dry, like an insect's - one less way to lose water to evaporation. They have no eyelids; instead, whenever the outer surface gets too scratched and dirty, a gafl will simply shed the lens and grow a new one underneath. Gafl handlers often collect the spent lenses and wear them as jewelry.

Gafl usually give birth to two or three calves at a time, which ride on top of their mothers until they're old enough to walk long distances by themselves.

I've only seen the creatures moving around a few times so far. When they do, it's with a rippling, elastic gait that moves down their bodies in waves. (This is why the wagons are hitched to them with giant springs.) The gigantic feet flop down onto the sand with a sound like dropped pillows. The holes in the sides of their body are for breathing; each one leads to its own simple lung, which is attached to one of the gafl's seven hearts. Like kilopedes and other large animals, most of a gafl's biological systems - nervous, circulatory, and so on - are evenly distributed between the segments of its massive body. If one heart collapses under the strain, the other six keep the gafl going until it grows a new one.

They seem capable of regrowing nearly anything, actually, which enables them to live virtually forever. Some of the caravan's gafl are over two hundred years old. The only visible difference between them and the younger gafl is an odd, subtle grace in their lumpy movements.

I wanted to ask if a gafl cut in two would grow a whole new gafl from each half, but Karlishek said that the handlers usually don't appreciate that kind of question. Karlishek is the insect who translated for me two days ago. I haven't quite grasped what his occupation is yet, but he seems to be taking a break at the moment; he spent several hours today acting as an interpreter between the gafl handlers and I. He also taught me a bit more Amrat, so I was able to thank him and the handlers in their own language - or a close approximation of it, at least. Several of them giggled at my accent.

Though they are twice the size of oxen, gafl are slightly less dangerous than overstuffed mattresses. The only way they could hurt someone would be to roll over and smother them. Their only defenses are their thick hides and, according to their handlers, a truly magnificent stench that they produce when frightened. Those who have encountered it describe it as somewhat like a sick skunk that has been fed too many onions and then set on fire. This is enough to drive off most predators - or, at the very least, to make them lose their appetite.

Wild gafl have no objection to the smell. Tame gafl are more sensitive. When something scares them, they belch out a cloud of noxious gas as a reflex, then cry pathetically until it blows away. Caravan passengers learn to tread very carefully around them and not make any sudden noises.

Fortunately, the smell dissipates quickly, as the gafl don't want to have to live with it. A gafl's nose is sensitive enough to smell vegetables ten miles away. This is an essential ability in the wild, where they don't have people to provide food; gafl don't eat often, but when they do, they eat huge amounts.

Camels use their humps to store fat and nutrients on long journeys. Gafl are all hump. Like caterpillars, they are basically a digestive system on feet. With their massive fat stores, they can travel for months without eating at all, though they are considerably smaller afterward. A caravan's usual method is to let its herd of gafl stuff themselves thoroughly at towns and villages, then just give them the occasional drink of water on the journey.

Like the rest of the caravan's herd, the gafl that I sketched had been eating nonstop for the last two days. That's why I was able to stay still and sketch it in such detail. Its handler was feeding it some sort of small fruits - she called them "kimish" when I pointed to them - that seemed to be something of a treat. The great beast gripped the little fruits between its claws and tucked them up into its blunt face, making happy little snuffling noises that shook its whole front end.

This was considerably slower than its usual eating speed. Normally, gafl eat voraciously, stuffing leaves and roots and even pieces of wood into their hidden mouths so fast that it's hard to believe they're chewing. The wild ones will eat whole trees if there's nothing better nearby. Their teeth, wherever they are, must be quite impressive. There seems to be no kind of plant matter that they won't eat. I've even seen a few of the handlers feeding them worn-out clothing - though only if it's made from plant fibers, such as cotton or flax.

After two days of eating, the caravan's gafl have nearly doubled in size. I can't wait to see what they look like by the time we leave.

The Baffled Banker

Most of the transportation in the Golden Desert is done either by caravans or along the Desert's few permanent roads. The times when a caravan arrives in a village on a road - such as right now - are prime opportunities for trade, so the caravan will be staying in Denemat for a short time, trading spices and cloth and various other crafts for basic supplies. (Apparently, the caravan's pack animals eat truly prodigious amounts of vegetables.) It will be another day or two before I leave.

I spent today wandering the village and painting various things for people. There is a surprising amount of color in Denemat once one knows where to look for it. Like CheChmit, which I visited last year, Denemat is mostly shades of gray and sandy brown. There's just the occasional red door or green window frame. Some people will just paint a few stones of a house, or a few posts of a fence, outlining them in white or pale yellow to accentuate the pattern of the material. It's a nice touch. It has obviously been some time since any of the paint was retouched, though, and much of it was peeling off. It was a busy day. Fortunately, in most cases, speech was unnecessary for the jobs; the villagers and I could communicate just by sketching and pointing at colors.

A few goat-like people wanted me to paint their horns, which took me a little longer to figure out. Seeing the results - only the most intricate patterns would do - several of the reptilian villagers asked me to paint their scales as well, requesting streaks and spots in bright yellows and oranges. Overall, I might have painted more people than buildings today.

The elderly couple I met yesterday have been kind enough to let me sleep on the bench in their garden for the next few nights. Their names are Fenbit and Hasisha. Before coming to the Golden Desert, I had rarely slept outdoors, except in the wild areas between towns. In the small Desert towns and villages, though, it's quite common; it rarely rains here, and there is little chance of having one's possessions stolen overnight, at least in the small communities. Travelers need little more than a spot out of the wind to spend the night. I'm glad to have met someone kind enough to provide one.

I was on my way back there, just before sunset, when I came upon a man standing just beyond the center of the village. He was dressed in an immaculately pressed tweed suit and carried a briefcase in one hand. Sand was blowing into his shoes.

"Excuse me," he said in English. "Could you direct me to the bank?"

I looked back at the main street of the village, bewildered; I'm not sure if Denemat even has a bank. The villagers usually pay in eggs or radishes and don't even bother with money. When I turned around, he was gone.

At first, I suspected that this was a hallucination brought on by the heat. The man had been rather too opaque to be a ghost. When I drew a rough sketch for Fenbit and Hasisha, though, they exclaimed over it, pointing out the briefcase and the decidedly out-of-place clothing. What I gathered, from the small amount of communication we could achieve, is that the man is a wanderer of an unusual sort. He pops up in town after town in the Golden Desert, constantly asking for directions. No one has ever seen him stay long enough in one place to actually find what he's looking for.

There are many stories of eternal wanderers, such as the Hat Man, the Stubborn Postmistress, and the Flying Dutchman.* I'm not sure what this one would be called. The Baffled Banker? The Confused Clerk? The Disoriented Office Worker? Fenbit and Hasisha had never heard of him introducing himself by name.

Whoever he is, I hope he finds the bank he's looking for.



* The origins of the Dutchman story have, sadly, been lost to history, along with the definition of what exactly a "Dutchman" is. Literary historians have speculated that it is a type of large echinoderm. This would explain why the flying is worth noting.

End of the River, End of the Road

Since Karkafel, I've been traveling through the cities and towns along the river Lahra. I reached the last one today.

The river begins with the Neverending Waterfall in Thrass Kaffa and flows through the Desert from there. In most places, rivers get wider as they go, joined by other streams and smaller rivers until they reach the sea. The Lahra gets smaller. There are no other streams or rivers in this part of the Golden Desert, and the hot air dries up more of the river the farther it goes. Numerous towns and cities have sprung up along the banks, diverting more and more water to irrigate their crops, which has only accelerated the process. By the time it reaches Denemat, the smallest and last village, the river is hardly more than a silty trickle. The villagers have to constantly clear sand out of its rocky banks to keep the water above the ground.

Obviously, further travel along the river is impossible at this point. There is no more river. What remains of it is spread out into Denemat's network of irrigation ditches, sucked up into the thirsty roots of the village's dates and drought-wheat.

The road - really just a path by now - continues a short distance past the village, parallel to the largest irrigation canal. I followed it this morning just to see where it led. It ended at a little mud-brick hut where an elderly couple was drinking tea in the shade of a small acacia. They shared a cup with me. The tea was a deep jewel-red, quite strong, with some sort of spice or fruit that made it taste like sunshine on hot metal.

The people of Denemat speak Amrat, a language only distantly related to Halsi. I couldn't understand a single word the couple said. It wasn't a problem. Like other older couples I've known, they were content to sit in silence, and so was I.

In return for the tea, I repainted the door of their house. It had a beautiful pattern of fossil ammonites that had faded nearly to oblivion in the Desert sun. It was a good way to spend the morning. Hospitality is hospitality, even when the guest and hosts can't understand a word the other says.

The hut was surrounded by a small ring of vegetable garden, arranged to take advantage of every drop of water from the vague damp patch that was all that was left of the river. There were Desert roses blooming between the cabbages and parsnips, laden with the occasional garnet-red rosehip. Perhaps that's what was in the tea. Beyond the little ring of flowers and vegetables, the Desert stretched to the horizon, shimmering in the heat, a parched ocean of dunes. It was unmarked by so much as a footprint, much less any sort of path.

It was obviously time for a different method of navigation.

Fortunately, I'd only been here for a day before the caravan arrived. It was late afternoon when the dusty train of wagons slid into the village. The wagons use runners, not wheels, for travel on sand; they seem to be mostly cloth, but I was too distracted by the gigantic hairy creatures that were pulling them to pay much attention. More on those later.

The leader of the caravan is a massive reptilian man named Tirakhai. He's a good foot taller (and wider) than I am, not counting the horns, with a booming voice and sharp golden eyes.

He speaks no English, I speak no Amrat, and both of us speak only a minimum of Halsi and Sikelak, but we managed to communicate well enough for me to ask to join the caravan. (I've found that pointing and offering people money often works almost as well as speech, at least if you're trying to buy something.)

Unfortunately, seats on a caravan are rather expensive, and the fact that my money consists of currencies from over a dozen different regions only complicated things. We were busy haggling over the price (I was losing) until Tirakhai happened to catch sight of the sketchbook in one of my bags. He pointed, and I took it out and showed him a few sketches. He seemed delighted at the sight. With a broad smile, he waved away my money, clapped me on the back hard enough to knock the breath out of me, and ushered me toward the caravan.

Needless to say, I was rather confused. Was he offering to buy my sketchbook? I offered it to him, but he didn't seem interested in the book itself, only in the fact that I had it.

After several attempts to explain why he'd changed his mind, answered by nothing but baffled looks from me, Tirakhai gave up and strode off to one of the rear wagons to fetch a tall insect in a striped vest. The insect (I'm not sure of his or her name, or gender, for that matter) knew a bit of both of our languages and was able to provide rough translations.

What had excited Tirakhai was the fact that I was an artist; they're in short supply here at the tail end of the river. (That explains the state of the door this morning.) He was offering to let me pay my way with skill instead of money.

Apparently, every caravan that travels in this region of the Golden Desert needs to have an artist along because of things called the "written ones," or something like that. I confess that I only had a vague idea of what Tirakhai and the insect were saying; my command of Desert languages, even the relatively familiar Halsi, is still not as good as it should be. This is something I intend to change during this trip. Neither Tirakhai nor the insect managed a clear description of what the written ones are. The claw-and-teeth gestures they made were enough to make me slightly nervous, but I haven't heard of any exceptionally dangerous creatures in this area, and no one else in the caravan seemed particularly worried. For free passage across the Desert, I'll take my chances.

You can tell caravans that have been through this area by the large amounts of decoration on their wagons. It's become something of a status symbol, as well as giving the caravans' artists something to do while traveling. While it's necessary to have an artist for each trip, for reasons I'm still not clear about, it seems that their skills are not always in constant demand, and no caravan will bring along a passenger who doesn't either pay or work the whole time. This caravan is new to the region and, compared to the others, woefully unadorned. They intend to keep me busy.

Being mostly cloth on top, the wagons are, quite literally, a whole series of blank canvases. This should be fun.

Pakals

Practically every area of the world has come up with its own method of putting food inside bread. There is the sandwich. The pasty. The pie. The calzone. From Froongia, we have smooshi and sashaymi, layered stacks and intricate little slices like edible millefiori wrapped in rice and seaweed; from the Great Shwamp, the gleaming boiled spheres called gulashlub; from Banterkrat, a hundred varieties of intricately folded flatbreads, like origami with food baked inside. If one prefers desserts, there is the cream bun, the eclair, the jambritch, the crepe, the scone, the krifle, the cannoli, the tanchee, the rangoon, the pillidesh. I have yet to find a place without its own variety of food-in-a-crust.

Wherever you go, the purpose is much the same. Everyone wants food they can carry around, food that won't dry out or get squashed or make their fingers sticky. The best way is usually to wrap it in some sort of crust and turn it into its own little self-contained object.

The Golden Desert's version is the pakal.

Pakals are collections of food wrapped in dough and baked, or fried, or occasionally boiled. They are the shape of rounded river pebbles. The crusts are hard on the outside, making a beautiful bready thump when you tap them. They can contain virtually any food that exists in the Desert. Meat, cheese, cabbage, chocolate, fish, fruit, an endless variety of vegetables and spices - if it's edible, you will find it in a pakal sooner or later. They come in practically every imaginable size as well, from tiny ones the size of marbles (popular among children and the Desert's rodent populations) to the steaming, house-sized pastries baked for certain festivals.*

Of course, it's impossible to tell from the outside what is inside a pakal. As a result, it's traditional to punch patterns into the outer crust before baking, like the holes in a pie. The holes let out steam and keep the pakal from exploding when baked. The pattern they form tells you what's inside. Market-goers in the Desert learn to read the crusts as they go. Little fish symbols mean fish of some sort, usually some species from the river Lahra. Triangles mean cabbage. Diamonds mean chocolate. Meat pakals usually have a simple picture of the animal on the top, unless the baker wasn't quite sure what it was, in which case they just have a star instead.

Some pakals are left unmarked, for the adventurous eater.

I have been largely living on these little pastries, in addition to my usual diet of meat and vegetables and chocolate and whatever else happens to be available. (The Golden Desert is sadly lacking in slug meat, but it makes up for it with its wide variety of tasty hoofed animals and edible cacti.) Pakals are common, varied, and cheap, and they travel well. It's what they were made for, after all. Though many modern pakals are essentially pies, juicy pastries of meat or sand-apple, they were originally a way to make dried meat and vegetables last longer and require less packaging on long Desert voyages. In less civilized centuries, some of the more warlike Desert tribes would skewer pakals on their spears, so that they could snack on horseback while fighting each other.

There has been no war in the Golden Desert since the Locust Marauders died out, but it's still easy to find tough, salted pakals baked for long trips. In the dry Desert air, they last nearly forever.

I have always had a kind of magpie attraction to small, beautifully made things.** Pakals are no exception. It is nearly as much fun to collect the little patterned loaves as it is to eat them. I love nearly all food, but there is something special about these compact little gems of the baker's craft.

If they weren't so tasty, it would almost seem a shame to eat them.



* Some of these giant pastries have gone on to become permanent homes. I met a woman in Hemrikath who lived inside one of the empty crusts. It had been emptied of its filling long ago, and larger holes had been cut for windows and a wooden door. I asked her if she ever got the urge to gnaw on the walls. She said no; the old bread had gone stale years ago and was roughly the consistency of granite. The smell of its contents still lingered, though, however faint, and she occasionally woke up from blissful dreams of figs and cinnamon.

** As a traveler with no permanent home, I have to be wary of this tendency, lest I end up as ridiculously overburdened as Elva Ursunorn's fabled Packrat. Though the world is full of beautiful things, I have trained myself to keep only the miniature and the edible ones. People often ask why I have so many random small objects hanging around my neck.

Cactus Flutes

Today, the road took me through stands of flute-cacti. I had never heard of these plants before this trip to the Golden Desert; in the past few months, though, I've seen them in at least three or four places. They are tall plants, but otherwise unremarkable - at least when they're alive. When a flute-cactus dies, though, it leaves a dry stalk full of holes, which blows soothing notes in the wind. Birds like to nest in them, as do the more musically inclined varieties of lizard.

I first saw flute-cacti in the desert around Teshirak. The villagers there tend the cacti and encourage the ones with the sweetest notes. Some cut the dry stalks and arrange them around their houses, so that the village is filled with music whenever the wind blows.

The village of Korfa also has flute-cacti growing nearby. There, skilled instrument-makers cut them and attach complex systems of wooden stops and levers, turning the dry stalks into lightweight, eight-foot-long flutes that are quite popular among dragons and other large creatures.

The smaller nose-cacti, which also grow near Korfa, play a high, nasal note like a whining child. These the villagers hunt down and uproot without mercy.

This grove seemed to be wild. There were several stalks lying on the ground, cracked and silent except for the occasional faint half-note, but I didn't see any of the stumps that flute harvesters leave behind. The wind was blowing, as it always does in the Golden Desert. The cacti surrounded me with a constant, airy cloud of chords; miraculously, they were almost all in the same key. I found myself whistling as I walked. It was hard to resist. I went through a few melodies that harmonized with the cacti, finally settling on a sea shanty by Rango Tress. At the end of the first verse, I paused to drink some water.

The cacti whistled the tune back at me.

My first thought was that the heat was starting to affect my brain. I'd been lucky enough to avoid that so far, but there's always a first time. I felt fine, though, aside from the fact that my mouth was dry from whistling.

I whistled the melody again. This time, the reply came from a cactus a few feet farther down the road.

As strange as this was, I wasn't particularly alarmed; musical plants are rarely dangerous.* I took another sip of water and kept walking, whistling as I went. The music followed me. It always came from a cactus nearby; I never heard it from a distance. After a few minutes of simply mimicking my whistling, the cacti started to do variations and harmonies.

I'm fairly sure the source of the music was a zephyr. They're some of the more curious wind spirits - perhaps the only ones that take any interest in people - and they often have surprising artistic tendencies. Many of them like to draw in fine dust and sand. I've heard that some have even developed ways of making sculptures, though I couldn't tell you how.

After I finished the sea shanty, I moved on to a few of Majenti Huddle's clockwork ballads, then to an operetta by Sherm Trupelo. The zephyr - if that's what it was - seemed to be hungry for new melodies. Out here in the Desert, there probably aren't a lot to choose from. It picked up tunes almost as fast as I could whistle them, filling in two- or even three-part harmonies as it went. Sometimes it whistled the melody and I harmonized. I'm not much of an improvisational musician, but I've sung in enough choruses, here and there, that I can make up a fairly decent harmony when I need one. We whistled jazz, folk music, concertos from the Caroque period, slow torch songs and rapid arzenroyds, even a few rock songs by the Poltergeists. The zephyr had some trouble with the idea of percussion until it found a way to knock two cacti against each other.

I must have whistled fifty songs over the course of the afternoon. My lips were getting dry by the time I reached the end of the flute-cacti. The Desert stretched out before me, seeming strangely empty with no sound but the hiss of sand blowing off the dunes. Behind me, I heard the first few notes of an old Desert song of farewell. I whistled the next few notes. The zephyr and I harmonized one last time, exchanging a musical goodbye, and I set off - with some reluctance - into the less musical section of road ahead.

As I left, I felt a tiny breath of air on my face - hardly enough to notice, except that it was blowing in the opposite direction from the wind. It was like the ghost of a goodbye kiss.

Long after the shimmering horizon had swallowed them from view, I could still hear the cacti singing behind me.



* A notable exception is the siren nasturtium. Fortunately, those only grow in semi-tropical areas, and most of them have been tamed for medicinal purposes, as their music provides a powerful anesthetic.

Sky-Hunch

I'm starting to think it's just something about this stretch of road. Today was my third encounter with someone who couldn't speak to me - at least not in any way I could understand.

Just like yesterday, I had been walking for most of the morning when I saw a dark shape in the distance, just off the road. I couldn't tell what it was at first. A blanket? A dead tree? The outline shimmered in the heat haze and refused to resolve itself into any shape I recognized. I had to get much closer before I realized what it was.

It was one of the flying hyenas.

Even the ordinary, ground-dwelling hyena is an oddly proportioned creature: thick-bodied and front-heavy, all neck and shoulders and ears. Its back slopes up from short back legs to a high, domed head, with a scruffy mane of fur along the spine. Its neck is almost as thick as its waist. The little tuft of tail almost seems like an afterthought.

Flying hyenas are stranger still; all of their proportions have been exaggerated even further for flight.This one had bat-like wings easily twice as wide as the span of my arms, and its toes were unusually long and flexible, somewhere between paws and talons. Its chest was massive. It takes truly amazing flight muscles to lift a creature the size of a hyena. The Desert name for the flying hyena - sarkotha - means something like "sky-hunch," and now I can see why. Most of the animal seemed to be shoulders and a long, muscular neck heavy enough to balance its small hindquarters in flight. Like a bat, there was webbing between its tail and its hind legs.

I don't know whether it was male or female. Unlike most mammals, there is no obvious way to tell male and female flying hyenas apart except that the females are larger, and I'd never been close enough to one to make a comparison. This one was large enough to be frightening, even lying sprawled on the sand.

The hyena's fur was gray-brown with a pattern of black spots. The bare skin on its wings was much the same. The wings were tough, translucent membranes, like those of a bat, leathery and wrinkled at the joints. Enough light shone through from the sand that I could see red and blue blood vessels beneath the surface.

There was a loop of rope tied around the hyena's left wing.

I'm not sure how the rope had gotten there in the first place. Maybe someone had left it somewhere, and the hyena had gotten tangled in it; maybe someone had actually tried to catch the creature. If so, they must have been insane. I could see its fangs from where I was standing. The area around the rope was red and swollen, chafed by the fibers and the hyena's teeth. It looked as if the hyena had been worrying at the rope, trying to get it off, and had only succeeded in pulling it tighter. The membrane was so constricted by now that the wing probably couldn't have opened completely - which explained why the hyena had been traveling on foot. From what I've heard, they never walk when they can fly.

Judging from the tracks in the sand, it had walked for a long time, and dragged itself for a long time after that, before collapsing from exhaustion or dehydration. It wasn't moving. I was fairly sure that its eyes were shut, though the dark rings around them made it hard to tell. Until I noticed the faint rise and fall of its shoulders, I wasn't sure if it was even alive.

It was clearly alive, though. That was all I needed to know. Aside from the fact that I hate to see anyone suffer, I've read enough fairy tales to know the proper course of action in situations like this. That rope had to come off somehow. I set my bags down a safe distance away and rummaged through them until I found my bread knife. It was a less-than-ideal tool, but I needed something with teeth to cut through rope that thick, and I don't carry a saw around with me. The bread knife would have to do.

(The picture above, by the way, I drew later, from memory. This was a situation that called for either helping or running away, not standing around sketching.)

The hyena didn't move when I approached. It seemed to be unconscious. It made a noise when I touched it, somewhere between a snarl and a snore, but it didn't open its eyes. Gingerly, trying to shake the beast as little as possible, I crouched by its wing and started sawing at the rope.

It was a long and difficult process. The sun beat down mercilessly. It had been bearable when I'd only been walking; sawing at a rope was much more strenuous, and therefore hotter. The rope seemed to part at a rate of one strand per hour. As slick as it was with my sweat and the hyena's saliva, it was hard to even hold onto it. I was terrified that I was going too slowly and would never finish, that I was going too quickly and would wake up the hyena, that it would wake up anyway and bite my arm off. Somehow, I managed to keep going.

I had almost finished when I became aware of a low rumbling sound from somewhere nearby. I looked down to find a pair of dark eyes, ringed in black, glaring at me above a wrinkled muzzle. The hyena was growling.

I had no idea how long it had been awake, but that was obviously a sign that I was out of time. Fortunately, one last yank of the knife was enough. The last strand of rope parted, and I scrambled away as fast as I could without stabbing myself or turning my back on the hyena. I got to what seemed like a respectful distance and then went a bit further.

The hyena didn't get up immediately; it sat there, baring its teeth at me in a snaggly bear-trap snarl that would have put a crocodile to shame, until I was far enough away to satisfy it. Only then did it stagger to its paws. It moved gingerly at first, favoring its injured wing; something must have felt different, though, because it turned away from me to look. The tendons flexing in that great neck were as thick as my wrist. Cautiously, it unfolded its wing, and the frayed rope slithered off and fell to the ground.

The hyena gave its wing a tentative flap. Then, with a thoroughly inhuman cackle that raised all the hair on my spine (never mind that I don't have any right now), it beat both wings in the most ferocious takeoff I've ever seen and flung itself into the air. The river was fairly nearby, just over a few small hills. Apparently, they'd been too much for it to manage before; with its wing unencumbered, though, it swooped right over them. I could hear the splash when it dove into the water.

I climbed over the hills and sat just behind the crest of the last one, watching the hyena. It drank at first, lowering its head into the sluggish current and chomping down water in great, famished gulps. Having dealt with its thirst, it just stood there for a while and let the water wash over its wing. It took several minutes for the swelling to start going down. After that, the hyena romped and splashed around in the water in what looked like sheer joy, kicking and scooping up big waves with its wings. It shook itself like a dog when it finally climbed out.

It froze when it saw me. I'm not sure what it was thinking. On a human, its expression would have looked like a perplexed frown, as if there was some puzzle it was trying to work out. We stood there and looked at each other for what seemed like forever. Finally, the hyena dipped its head in what might have been a nod, then turned and loped away up another hill. It lifted into the air with another ghastly cackle and flapped off into the sky. I watched it until it was out of sight.

I didn't do any more walking today. Instead, I went to lie in the river myself for a while, until I was less overheated and my hands had stopped shaking. It had been wonderful to see the hyena back in the air, free to return to the element it was born to rule. I was glad I'd been able to help it.

But I hope I never have to do anything like that again.

The Monologue Hermit

The man was sitting in a ruin by the side of the road. I mistook him for a rock at first. He was dressed in a huge, threadbare overcoat almost the same color as the sand. Only his head stuck out of the top. His hair was only a shade darker than the coat, bleached pale at the ends by the Desert sun; his beard had obviously not been shaved in years, but it had been carefully braided instead. There were small pebbles looped into it here and there.

He looked as if he had been there forever. The sand had formed a drift against his back.

He muttered constantly, a string of half-audible syllables that stopped only for the occasional gulp of breath. I couldn't make out any actual words. They sounded like the lyrics of a song - they had a rhythm, and hints of a lost, wandering melody - but if so, it was a song that had been misheard, misrepeated, held in a faulty memory and reduced to so much nonsense.

He was also occupying the only shade I'd seen all day. It was the remains of a tall, round building that looked as if it might have been a watch tower in the past. There was little left now but a jagged ring of stone. The man was sitting beneath the miraculously intact arch of its doorway. Behind him, spiral stairs coiled up to nowhere.

I was reluctant to interrupt him, but I'd been walking all morning, and there was nowhere else to sit if I wanted to rest in the shade. I sat down nearby as quietly as I could. He gave me a vague nod and muttered something that might have been "hello" between the other words. He looked half-starved under his tattered coat, so I gave him some of my remaining bread and a couple of red-skinned radish-potato things from Rikanta. He took them and wolfed them down, still muttering with his mouth full. His hands were covered with an intricate web of blue tattoos. Between the wrinkles and the dust, it was impossible to make out the design. Whatever it was, it was as incomprehensible as the constant mutter of his half-audible monologue.

I tried to resist. I really did. Eventually, though, curiosity overcame me, and I asked him what he was saying. He turned to me with a haunted stare.

"It is the incantation." mumble mumble mumble "It keeps the spiders down. I must not stop." mumble mumble mumble

"What do you do when you sleep?" I asked, fascinated.

"Sleep?" His stare was uncomprehending. "I do not sleep."

I didn't ask him any more questions.

When I finished my own lunch and got up to leave, he held up one hand in a wordless gesture: wait. mumble mumble mumble. Unlike the others, the tattoo on his palm was clear - a chambered nautilus shell, inked in exquisite detail and positioned so that his fingers became its tentacles. A blue ink eye stared at me from the base of his middle finger. With the other hand, he reached down to dig in the sand at the base of the ruined wall. He pulled out a pebble and handed it to me.

It was a perfectly ordinary pebble - small, rough, yellow-brown, and no shape in particular. I would have thought it completely unremarkable if I'd found it myself. In that hand, it took on a strange aura of mystery.

"Take it." mumble mumble mumble "Keep it safe until it is ready. You will know the time." mumble mumble "It will be grateful." mumble mumble mumble

I thanked him. I wasn't sure what else to do. He nodded once, gravely, and turned away, ignoring me again.

Tucking the pebble into one of my sturdier pockets, I turned and walked on. It was a long time before I was sure I could no longer hear the man muttering.

It is always hard to tell the perceptive from the mad. The world is full of all manner of people who see what the rest of us don't. Some of them are visionaries, seeing what is true, or what is hidden, or what could be. Others simply see what is not. For all I know, the pebble could be just as important as the man seemed to think it was; for all I know, it could be as ordinary as it seems, important only within his own mind.

I have no way to tell, so I'll keep it for now. I wouldn't want to disappoint him - or, for that matter, to disappoint the pebble.

Lunch Break

I left Rikanta this morning. It was time. After stopping to say goodbye to Mr. Haggadan, who gave me a vague, absentminded reply from the depths of a machine I couldn't begin to identify, I packed up my things and returned to the road.

It was a quiet morning. The average size of the towns along the road has been decreasing over the past month or so, and the traffic on the road has done the same. I saw only two other travelers before noon. They were a pair of rat-like mammalians - twin brothers, if I had to guess - with narrow, pointed muzzles and the striped robes of Gillivan monks. They gave me a polite nod each, then went back to a vehement debate about something. Both spoke at the same time, far too fast for me to understand.

For the next few hours, I walked in silence. A lone flying hyena flew overhead at one point, but unlike the ones from previous days, it made no sound. Other than that, it was just me, the road, and the sun.

I had seen no shade since leaving Rikanta, other than the pale shadows cast by weeds and the occasional small rock, so it was a relief when I finally saw the silhouette of a tree on the simmering horizon. It was one of the giant acacias that you find occasionally in the Desert. They grow from tiny seeds that can blow for miles on the wind. The few seeds that land near some source of water, and aren't immediately eaten by a jackrabbit or Desert rat, grow into tall, elegant trees with wide canopies. This tree was in the center of a depression in the sand, ringed with boulders that suggested a bowl-shaped layer of rock near the surface - perfect for collecting rainwater underground. The tree's roots probably went all the way down to anchor themselves in the stone. Through gaps between the roots, I could see the glint of water in the dark under the tree and hear the peeping of small frogs.

It seemed like a good place to stop.

I set my bags down near the trunk and sat there for a while, just listening to the sounds of the wind in the leaves overhead, the frogs singing in their hidden pool, and the occasional cry of a bird in the distance. It was quite peaceful. It took me a while to notice another sound added to the mix - a low, steady drone, somewhere between a fly's buzz and the deeper rattle of a locust.

At first, I thought the dark shape above the horizon was yet another flying hyena. I realized my mistake fairly quickly; the sound, and the decidedly non-mammalian shape, made it clear that it was an insect of some sort. It looked fairly small at first. It got closer much more slowly than I was expecting, though. In a few minutes, it looked twice as large as before, and I could tell that it was still quite far away. The sound of its wings was deafening by the time it actually arrived. It landed under the tree with one last rattle of its wings and the thump-click of six segmented feet.

The fly was the size of a tiger, leathery black all over with vivid bronze streaks across its pointed abdomen. There were fringes of bronze-colored fur around the plates of its exoskeleton, more fringes around its clawed and padded feet, and a thick tuft like a mustache in the middle of its face. I could see my own face reflected a thousand times in its compound eyes. The six pairs of claws on its feet were quite impressive, longer than my fingers and quite sharp.

If the dagger-like mouthparts and lean, tiger-striped body hadn't made it obvious, the claws did: this was one of the predatory species of flies, and it was large enough to hunt antelopes. I got ready to run if necessary. I'm not sure if it would have done any good.

The fly stared at me for a moment, as if surprised to find me there, then made a quick series of buzzes - bvRRzfbvt - from somewhere below its chest. When that provoked no response, it tried what looked like a sort of four-clawed sign language. I shrugged to show that I didn't understand. It mimicked the gesture, shrugging the complex joints at the base of its wings, then seemed to give up on communication and settled down on the other side of the tree trunk to rest.

When the fly showed no indication of wanting to eat me, I decided it was time to eat lunch. I'd bought a few root vegetables in Rikanta. They grow them interchangeably there; instead of separating the different species, they just toss carrots and potatoes and turnips and any other interesting seeds they have into the same field and harvest whatever comes up. I had a couple of potatoes, in various colors and sizes, and a pair of purple-orange things that seemed to be a hybrid of carrots and sugar beets.

It's considered polite in nearly every part of the world to share food with strangers, but the fly showed no interest in the vegetables, nor in the loaf of bread I pulled out next. I also had most of a jug of beef stew in my bag. When I poured some of this out into my largest mug and set it on a nearby rock, the fly noticed. It reached into a large mail pouch hanging from its neck - I'd been distracted by the claws and eyes and stripes and hadn't noticed the pouch - and pulled out a metal lunch box. There was a pattern of little rabbits stamped into the lid. Those huge claws opened it with great care to reveal a selection of fruit and small cheeses wrapped in paper. The fly plucked a few out and offered them to me.

That's how I found myself eating lunch with a giant fly. We sat there in the shade, sharing food in a companionable silence broken only by the frogs under the tree. The cheese and fruit were delicious - the perfect blend of sweet and strong, with the faintest overtones of metal polish from the lunch box. The fly gripped its own food with a bewildering array of jointed mouthparts and sucked up the stew with a long, crooked proboscis.

Most of the Golden Desert's inhabitants don't travel at noon, at least not on foot. It's just too hot. When I finished eating, I sat for a while and read one of my ambiguous novels. (The story in it at the moment is Toad's Labyrinth, one of my favorites by Oswina Dennenjay.) The fly put its lunch box away and pulled a miniature concertina out of its bag. The rapid, buzzing music it played for the next few hours reminded me of the sound of its own wings. I didn't recognize any of the melodies.

Finally, when the sun was approaching the horizon and the shade of the tree had moved to fall on the rocks to the east, I shouldered my bags and got ready to move on. The fly tucked the concertina back into its own bag and did the same. It gave me a brief, friendly nod before lifting the great veined windows of its wings and taking off in a buzzing blast of sand.

The fly had arrived from the empty Desert to the left of the road. It left in the opposite direction, rattling off across the dunes at a right angle to my own route. I have no idea where it was going. I waved as it left, and I'm fairly sure that I saw it raise one claw in reply. I could hear the buzz of its wings for a long time after it was out of sight.

The Radio

On another brief wander this evening, I was passing underneath an open window when I heard the unmistakeable crackly sound of a radio. I'd almost forgotten what they sound like; it's been a few years since I last heard one.

The last time was on my last visit to the Railway Regions, when I would gather occasionally with a small group of passengers on the Train to listen to Mr. Intaglio's salamander-powered receiver, a tiny machine held together with twine and snail glue. We would stay up until the quiet hours of the morning listening to tinny, static-filled broadcasts from exotic places we'd never heard of.

The Inadvisable Music Hour is broadcast from a mountain toll bridge in Skeen, where the bridge-keepers would let musicians cross for free if they played a sufficiently outlandish instrument.

The Nightsound Show is a nocturnal cornucopia of music and philosophy from the distant underground town of Carburrow, where they discuss stories and foreign politics and the supernatural late into the night.

Brendan Harzelflat, age two hundred and three, tells stories of his long and eventful life and sends them out over the Aether from his solitary lighthouse, speaking in a voice as soft and unhurried as waves on a beach.

One opera program we never did find out the name of, since none of us recognized the language.

It was a good few weeks. That little radio receiver was one of many reasons I was sad to leave the Railway Regions. Until today, I'd almost forgotten the sound of static, of scratchy voices riding on invisible waves over impossible distances, of the mysterious and melodic Aether-whistles that interrupt them every so often.

It was startling to hear that sound here, in this tiny town in the middle of the Desert. I looked around to see where the sound was coming from and chanced to be looking up just when a wild-haired man stuck his head out of a second-story window.

"It's working!" he called to the street in general. I was one of the only people actually in sight, so he turned to look at me. "I'm finally getting a clear signal! Well, almost clear. Come up, come up and listen!"

I rarely refuse invitations to interesting things, so I went up to listen.

The building looked like a shop of some kind. It was closed at the moment (possibly because the owner was busy tinkering upstairs), but the door was unlocked. Since I'd been invited, I opened it and went in.

The lower room was full of clockwork and other machinery. The sun slanting in the window struck glints from pocket watches, clocks in various sizes, a gramophone or two, even some of the more complex types of farming equipment, all in various stages of dismantlement. Gears and cranks and other specialized bits of metal lay with an array of tools all over a pair of long tables that stretched the length of the room. The smells of metal and machine oil filled the air. Something clanked rhythmically in a dark corner in the back. It was fairly clear that this was the town mechanic's shop.

A half-dozen salamanders dozed on a table beneath the front window, with their scales turned dull black to soak up every drop of the remaining evening sunlight. Small, slitted eyes opened briefly and then ignored me.

I could hear a crackly, muffled voice coming from the back. Past a curtain, I found a narrow spiral staircase leading up. It looked like it had come from somewhere else. The ornate wrought-iron railings, twisted round with designs of winged weasels and snakes, were wildly different from the simple stone walls around them, and the staircase didn't quite seem to fit the stairwell. The middles of the steps were worn down, the edges scattered with mysterious bits of machinery.

If the downstairs room had been cluttered, the upstairs room made it seem practically empty by comparison. It was all machinery, floor to ceiling, stacked in precarious heaps and hanging from the rafters. Jars of nuts and bolts stood on any surface flat enough to hold them. Loops of chains and wire hung from hooks. Several of the heaps had small, open areas in the middle, showing that there were work tables somewhere beneath all the clutter.

The machines here - when I could pick individual ones out from the chaos - were much more fanciful than the practical, workaday devices downstairs. Here was a fan, a ring of thin blades punched with geometric patterns of holes, designed to be spun by the air rising from a candle flame; there, a music box built to play multiple brass musical cylinders at once; farther in, an ungainly machine for cracking eggs. Judging by the litter of pulverized eggshell around it, it had not yet succeeded in doing so gently.

In the center of the room was the man who had called me in, whom I assumed to be the mechanic himself. He was a short man with a face like a bespectacled sheep and a wild mane of woolly hair. He wore a shirt stained with machine oil and a vest that seemed to be made entirely of pockets.

"Oh good, you found the stairs." He spoke Halsi, almost too quickly for me to follow. "Some people can't. Do you speak other languages? I finally got a signal on this thing and I'm talking to someone, or trying to, but I can't understand a word."

I replied that I spoke several languages. Unfortunately, my spoken Halsi is not particularly good yet; my reply probably sounded something like, "yes, it speaks many language, what need?" This did not appear to fill the man with confidence in my abilities. He was about to say something else when the radio interrupted.

"Finally, someone else," said a crisp, crackly voice from the speaker. "I don't suppose you speak English?"

It was surprisingly pleasant to hear someone speaking my native language again - even if the voice was crackly and coming out of a machine. It's fairly common to hear English, along with every other language, in the larger cities of the Golden Desert. Since leaving Karkafel, however, I've heard very little of it.

The voice on the other end turned out to belong to a Miss Anthetica Mandrigore, who was speaking from a cottage in the High Fields. She's currently trying to assemble a group of radio operators to create a sort of radio communication team - a "network," she called it - between several of the more remote parts of the High Fields. In that country of cliffs, landslides, broken bridges, narrow switchback paths, and weather so unpredictable that even postbirds find it difficult to deliver mail on time, a system like this could be quite useful.

The mechanic introduced himself - when he remembered - as Bofrid Haggadan. With me as a translator, the two of them spent the next few hours discussing radio technology. I got the impression that neither of them often got a chance to discuss the subject with someone who was equally interested. Miss Mandrigore also had rather a sharp tongue, though, so perhaps it was just as well that the two of them couldn't communicate directly just yet. Not everyone patient enough to operate radios has the same amount of patience with people.

I am far from an expert in any of the mechanical disciplines, so the conversation quickly grew to be over my head. Fortunately, many of the technical terms are the same or similar in both languages; most of the words I didn't understand, Mr. Haggadan did.

No one is really quite sure how radio works. People first found the old transmitters in the floating cities; the theory is that the Hill Builders used them to talk to each other. Some of those old transmitters still work, even after thousands of years, and people like Mr. Haggadan and Miss Mandrigore have started making their own.

Electricity has generally been dismissed as an unstable and impatient form of energy, especially compared to salamander power and the ancient Hill Builder reactors that still power the floating cities. No one would consider using electricity for anything practical. Still, the Hill Builders seem to have been fond of the stuff.

Of course, since no one actually knows how radio transmitters and receivers work, the best anyone can do is put wires and magnets and electrically-trained salamanders together and hope that it all works. Those few who try succeed almost half the time. Even when radio does work, it's never reliable. The signals have a tendency to fracture as they spread, becoming crackly and distorted. They can only be picked up in random patches of space. Move two feet to the left, and everything dissolves into static. Many radio operators find themselves yelling across the room to their microphones, holding their antennas out of the window for a better signal.

Fortunately, nothing like that was necessary today. The two radio operators continued to converse, their voices passing each other on tenuous streams of radio waves stretching halfway across the world, until a storm crossing the High Fields finally drowned out Miss Mandrigore's crisp voice in a sea of static. The two of them made plans to contact each other again in a few days. Miss Mandrigore has a niece who speaks Halsi, so they will be able to continue to trade notes after I leave Rikanta. Coming from two such distant locations, it sounded like they had a lot to learn from each other. I suspect that the niece will find herself with a full-time job shortly.

After switching off his radio, Mr. Haggadan thanked me profusely for my help. He said he would have invited me to stay for dinner, except that - like many passionate craftsmen - he had never taken the time to learn to cook, and all his meals consisted of bread and garlic with the occasional cabbage. Besides, it was quite obvious that he wanted to return to work on his radio. I thanked him for the offer and said goodnight. When I left, he was in the middle of dismantling some piece of electrical wiring, muttering enthusiastically to himself and shuffling through the sheaf of notes he'd taken during the conversation. Perhaps this will be the beginning of a more reliable or widespread form of radio.

For now, though, it remains a pastime for the patient and the hopeful, for dreamers and eccentrics, for engineers who are willing to tinker endlessly with half-understood technology for the chance of hearing a stranger's voice from half a world away.

Then again, anyone who answers them is almost certainly a similar sort of dreamer. Perhaps they're not such strangers after all.

Rikanta

Having only arrived in Rikanta two nights ago, I wasn't ready to leave just yet, so I spent today wandering around the town. It's a beautiful place. The old stone gives it a solid, peaceful feel that is hard to find outside of old ruins. It's a town that has settled comfortably into its place. I walked through the streets, following the shade, watching carts roll by and children play elaborately drawn jumping games in the dust, admiring the way the creeping hieroglyphs twined their way around the architecture - though I was careful not to lean too long against any inscripted walls. I didn't want them rubbing off.

Rikanta is a small town. Walk three blocks east, and you reach the river; it's too shallow here for boat travel, but there is the occasional tumbledown dock where people sit to fish during the long, drowsy afternoons. Walk three blocks west, and you come out into farmland, shady orchards and drought-wheat fields where trained shrews scour the crops for particularly succulent insects.

Perhaps "blocks" is the wrong word, though. The town's layout has nothing so regular as that. Inside this narrow patch of land is a maze of twisty little streets that seems far too complex to fit within such a small space. I wandered all day, and I'm fairly sure I was never on the same street twice. Fortunately, there's a tall clock tower in the center of the town, so I could never get entirely lost.

The clock tower is made of the same pilfered castle stones as the rest of the town. It has no clock. When I asked the group of elderly men playing board games in the town square,* they said that the town will get a clock someday. Eventually. When they find one they like. One of the men - who seemed to be winning his game of Hens and Comets, if his opponent's expression was any indication - said that his great-grandfather used to say the same thing.

People in the Golden Desert are rarely in a hurry about anything.



* There is always a group of elderly men playing board games in the town square. This is a universal constant. If it's not the town square, then it's the general store, or perhaps one of the more neatly-kept parks. No matter how far you travel, they are always there. The only things that change are the language and the board games.

If I ever settle down in one place, I hope to be one of them someday.

Creeping Hieroglyphs

After I wrote last night's letter and handed it off to the postbird, the innkeeper led me upstairs to a narrow stone room roughly the size of a coat closet, which I am sharing with an elderly tortoise.

At least, I'm fairly sure it's a tortoise. It hasn't actually come out of its shell yet. I'm certain there's something in there, though, if only because of the snoring.

Exhausted as I was, I collapsed into the heap of mismatched cushions that serves as a bed and fell asleep almost instantly. I dreamed that I had become a creature of living flame. Every time I tried to write a letter, the paper would burn up in my hands, and the words I'd written would speak themselves in the crackling of the flames.

I woke to find that I had left the curtains open last night and was now lying in direct sunlight. This explained the dream. Even early-morning sunlight is hot in the Desert. The room was far too hot to stay in at that point, so I left the tortoise shell to its nap and went out to look at the village. I'd only seen it in the dark last night.

Rikanta is a small town, perhaps two or three dozen houses, centered around an old sandstone castle. These are fairly common in this region. Like most of them, this one was built when the Locust Marauders were at their peak and had started making forays into the Golden Desert. You can still see the tooth marks in the stone. The Marauders are long gone, though, and the castle has been empty for nearly as long. It hasn't had an enemy to keep out in decades. The town's Chooser* lives in a house now, and the castle's few intact rooms are home only to sand-colored day bats and the occasional night wanderer. Swallows and potter wasps build neat clay nests under the crumbling battlements. The outer walls shrink just a little every year as people take the old, elegantly cut stone blocks to build new houses. They're not about to let good stone just sit around.

Most of Rikanta's buildings have a thick, chunky look as a result; they are small houses built with castle-sized blocks of stone. Many of the walls are thicker than the width of the doorways. As well as looking funny, this is actually a good design, keeping the houses cool during the day and warm during the night. There is very little that insulates as well as two feet of solid stone.

The architecture, however, wasn't the first thing I noticed in Rikanta. The town is overgrown with creeping hieroglyphs, a form of two-dimensional life adapted to live on dry stone. They look like letters, neatly painted in faded brown dye, a growth of random symbols that never quite resolve themselves into a readable alphabet. Their seeds are windborne and look like commas. The glyphs alarmed me at first - had the word-plague spread here from Arkit? Fortunately, a few townspeople assured me that the glyphs had been around for decades and had never shown any sign of interfering with the town's actual writing - though the appearance of the occasional Halsi character in the otherwise random symbols suggests that the two might be interbreeding.

Neat, geometric, and completely incomprehensible (though many linguists have tried), the glyphs apparently started at ground level and simply worked their way up. The popular theory in Rikanta is that they started on an old vase or pot buried in someone's basement. Craftsmen in several of the old Desert civilizations used creeping hieroglyphs as decoration, encouraging them to grow on pottery and carvings. No one is sure whether these craftsmen liked the nearly-legible patterns or if they were just too lazy to add their own decorations.

Wherever they came from, the glyphs have spread by now to nearly every (previously) unmarked surface in sight. They seem to fill the role that ivy or tambourine wisteria might in a wetter place. Lines of elegant symbols twist their way up stone blocks and wooden posts, along walls and across rooftops, curling around corners and tracing the most minute imperfections in any surface. On occasion, they will even spread to the skin of a person who sits too long in one place.

Mammals usually don't care; the glyphs are hidden beneath their fur, and being two-dimensional, cause no actual physical change. Some say that they even keep fleas and bedbugs away. The town's furless inhabitants are somewhat more likely to object. Many of the reptilian townspeople have rather dramatic scale patterns of their own, and they don't want to add a layer of meaningless symbols on top of them.

Fortunately, the glyphs can be killed by sufficiently heated debate. Inscripted people often go to the town hall, a stone building completely devoid of glyphs, and attend meetings of the elders' council for a dose of remedial bickering.



* Chooser is a position somewhere between mayor and magistrate; most towns of any size at all have a council of elders and a Chooser. The relationship between them is a complex one, and I don't fully understand it yet, but I suspect that the Chooser's job is to step in when the council finally becomes too exhausted to argue anymore.

A Different Kind of Stone

I've spent most of the last two days walking. I've seen few people traveling and even fewer staying still. There's been the occasional hut, abandoned and overgrown, home to nothing but desert foxes and chimney swallows; one or two dried-out wells with sand spilling over their brims; a brightly colored tent with the symbol for DO NOT DISTURB painted many times over its entire surface - but nothing more permanent.

This is normal for the Golden Desert. It's rare to ever find two places less than three days' walk from each other.

Yesterday evening, just before sundown, the road wound its way into a cluster of rocky outcroppings. I hardly noticed them at first. The sky was cloudless, but the sun was managing a spectacular sunset anyway, painting the empty sky a hundred shades of gold and crimson. I walked in among the pillars of stone and suddenly felt as if I was in a forest. This has not happened in several months; I would have enjoyed it, except that the stones blocked my view of the sunset. I turned around and settled down near the base of one of the pillars near the edge, shrugging off my bags of books and clothing and art supplies, and took out a couple of pakals for dinner. (I love pakals. I'll write more about them in another letter.) I'd been walking since before dawn, and it was a relief to sit down and rest for a while. I would have sat in the shade, but I couldn't have watched the sunset that way.

It was a pleasant place to rest. There was a cool (relatively speaking) breeze off the river. A pack of winged hyenas was doing wild aerobatics overhead; I'm not sure if they were the same pack I'd been seeing all day or a different one. The sun had set where I was by then, lighting only the craggy tops of the stone pillars behind me, but the hyenas were high enough that their spotted fur shone like gold. Their laughter echoed between the stones.

When both the sunset and my dinner were gone, I got up and moved on. The best time to travel in the Desert is when the sun is just below the horizon; that way, it provides light without extreme amounts of heat.

The air was cool between the pillars of rock. Their surfaces were oddly layered, as if they'd been poured into place - quite different from the usual Desert rock formations. Their shapes didn't look as if they'd been eroded by wind and sand. Most of the smaller ones had holes in the top, which made me suspect some sort of volcanic activity; fountain volcanoes, perhaps, or some sort of geysers, dried up long ago. Several were encrusted with the tough brown lichen that grows in shady places here. I admired their rough, irregular shapes, wondering how they'd been formed, until they were reduced to silhouettes against the darkening sky.

As it turned out, I didn't have to wait long to find out. Right at the end of twilight, when the sky had gone a deep ultramarine and a few of the brightest fish-stars had come into view, a light appeared at the top of one of the nearby pillars. I couldn't tell what it was at first. Backing away, I climbed up on one of the stubbier pillars to get a better view - and watched as a frond of turquoise light rose from the stone.

It was dim at first, but more and more flecks of light appeared as it unfurled, blue and green with the occasional speck of rich violet. It was like a glowing peacock's feather. A second one unfolded from another pillar, purple and deep red, followed by a third in white and pink. I stood in amazement and watched. They shimmered with thousands of points of light, like the flecks of pigment in a pointillist painting. They were breathtaking.

They were also considerably larger than I was. As I watched, a large moth flew into one of the fronds, which snapped shut around it and made a motion that looked disturbingly like swallowing. I got off of the pillar I was standing on quite quickly after that.

The moths obviously found the shimmering light even more entrancing than I did. The night air was full of the sound of fluttering wings, cut off by the soft snaps of the fronds as they plucked one moth after another out of the air. I caught sight of the occasional bat as well, silhouetted against the lights. The gathering of moths must have been a feast for them as well. They had to fly carefully, though; more than once, I saw the fronds snatch at passing bats, though I never saw them catch one. Bats are good at dodging.

I had no idea what the fronds were. I'd heard of things like these - creatures somewhere between plant and animal, such as anemones and sea-ferns, that root themselves to stones and grow hard tubes to pull themselves into - but I'd never seen anything like them on land. For that matter, I'd never heard that they grew anywhere near this large.

I suspect I could have stood and watched this strange carnivorous rainbow all night if I hadn't dozed off eventually. When I woke up, the creatures were gone again; they'd pulled themselves back into their stones well before sunrise. That explained the holes at the tops of the smaller pillars. I looked into a few of them, but I couldn't see anything but darkness inside. The tubes must go deep into the sand.

This evening, exhausted after another whole day of walking, I finally reached a village. I limited myself to only the essential questions:

"Where is the inn?"

"How much for a room?"

"What were those feathery things in the Desert?"

According to the innkeeper, who seemed rather amused at the question, they're called samratheel - which roughly translates as "biting flowers."

The name seems to fit them.

The Desert Road

Now that the word-plague is cured and the town is no longer under linguistic quarantine, I packed up my things and left Arkit this morning. I made sure to leave before dawn. Travel in the Golden Desert is much more pleasant if you can reach someplace shady by noon.

Arkit is on one of the few permanent roads in the Desert. Elsewhere, there would be little point in roads; an unpaved one would just be sand on sand, and anything more solid would be buried by the sand instead. It would be like building a road on the ocean.*

However, being near the river, there are enough grasses and weeds here (Desert weeds are tough and brown and dead-looking) that the absence of them qualifies as a path. Or, if you're feeling generous, a road.

I'm traveling the Golden Desert on foot, as usual. I've acquired a wide-brimmed hat and some of the loose, blindingly white clothing worn by Desert nomads. These protect me from most of the sun. That only leaves the heat radiating up from the sand, the hot, gritty breeze that smells of dryness and baked stone, and the times - even worse - when the breeze doesn't blow. The air congeals then into something thick and unbreathable, like syrup poured over a pancake sizzling on the endless frying pan that is the Golden Desert.

It has taken me some time to become accustomed to the heat.

Fortunately, my body and the Shapeshifter's Curse I inherited have been as resourceful as ever. My toes have become quite long and thin, spreading my weight across the sand while exposing a minimum of skin to it. My skin, in turn, has developed a coat of scales even whiter than my clothing, with a collection of heat-shedding frills where my hair would be in colder weather. Several people have noted my resemblance to various Desert lizards. This seems like a good sign. The lizards, after all, have had quite a lot of time to adapt to this place; if I can become half as comfortable as them in little more than a year, I count myself quite lucky.

I have become surprisingly comfortable here, in fact. The heat has ceased to bother me much. I enjoy the silence of the long spaces between towns. The settlements of the Golden Desert tend to be bustling, exuberant places, communities of people who will gather around any source of water to build their houses and plant their crops and celebrate the miracle of life existing in the middle of such desolation. I love staying in Desert towns. After a week, though - sometimes two or three - I start to long for the desolation again, for a place where there are no voices to drown out my thoughts. I like people, but in moderation.

I have had many companions on my travels, but silence and solitude are by far the oldest and fondest of them.

They have been good company today. I spent the morning and parts of the afternoon traveling solo, wading through the rippling heat haze over the hard-packed road. My feet fell easily into the familiar rhythm of walking. I passed few travelers. One or two people passed me, traveling in the opposite direction on foot or on faded wooden wagons full of sand-tubers. One woman rode by on a flightless bird, somewhere between ostrich and roadrunner; there were message tubes strapped to both its legs, like a carrier pigeon. Each one must have held a scroll longer than my arm. The woman gave me a crisp salute with one white-gloved hand and shouted a greeting as she passed by. I didn't recognize the language.

Other than that, I spent the day alone. The silence stretched on long enough that started to notice the details of the Desert around me. Even here, there's always something moving. Occasional clouds wandered up over the horizon and burned up in the mid-afternoon sun. The darker shapes of vultures and winged hyenas passed overhead, dismissing me as too mobile for food. The hyenas called to each other with crow-like bursts of cackling that echoed for miles across the sand. Small, unseen creatures rustled in the weeds. Fine sprays of sand sifted from the tops of the nearby dunes. The wind blew dry notes across the brim of my hat.

I walked.

I have no particular destination in mind, and therefore little reason to care when I arrive. It wouldn't much matter if I did. The Golden Desert is a place of vast and changeable distances, impossible to predict; as the saying goes, you'll get there when you get there. People rarely hurry here.

Besides, it's just too hot.



*This has, of course, been attempted in many parts of the world, with varying degrees of success. Notable examples include the Serpent's Backbone, a floating bridge made of giant vertebrae that links a few dozen of the islands of Kennyrubin; Trifrost, an ice causeway kept frozen by imported glacier snails in the tropical waters of Barbaleel; and Skimmer's Path, a road built by the Great Acrobat, who somehow convinced a fifty-mile stretch of ocean to increase its surface tension to the consistency of ankylosaur leather. To this day, no one is sure how he did it.

Word-Plague

It has been an interesting couple of months in the town of Arkit.

The first sign of the word-plague was when the clockwork pipe crawlers began to literally tie the town's plumbing in knots. This happens occasionally, even with healthy pipe crawlers; it is usually a sign that they are bored, or that some set of instructions was not clear enough. As fine as their metal and crystal workings are, clockwork pipe crawlers are essentially simple creatures. They are capable of following simple instructions and very little else. This is why they so often end up assigned to plumbing repair.

The pipe crawlers' trainers inspected their notes, but they found nothing that could have led to this sort of behavior. What was more, further instructions to the pipe crawlers changed nothing.

This was cause for alarm. No one wants a repeat of the construction of Bratakar, where the bricklaying pipe crawlers stopped responding to instructions and built neat foundations across half the town before someone realized that a misinterpreted command had led them all to turn off their eyes. Arkit's pipe crawler trainers immediately went to work, testing the little machines for every error they've been known to encounter. Still, nothing worked.

This, incidentally, was when the town's schoolteacher began to notice an unusually high number of spelling errors in her pupils' writing. No one took much notice of this at the time.

Over the next few weeks, the pipe crawlers' behavior grew steadily more erratic. Some continued to fix pipes, though many of them fixed them in wild and fantastic shapes more suited to a sculpture museum than to plumbing. Others wandered farther from their assigned tasks, obsessively polishing a single length of pipe, or cutting faucets into careful slices with their metal-cutting tools. (This was when the trainers removed all the heavy-duty tools from the crawlers.) Yet other pipe crawlers wandered off into the town's underground, only to show up later rearranging tableware or carving endless hatch marks into stone walls.

The spelling errors continued to proliferate as well. Several of the town's accountants began to quietly wonder if they were going mad.

Then came the fateful day when every piece of writing in the town spontaneously translated itself into an old and obscure dialect of Halsi. That was when it became clear to everyone that this was not a mere mechanical problem, but some kind of linguistic plague. Spoken words remained unaffected, to the great relief of everyone in the town; the written ones were another story - literally, in some cases. My collection of ambiguous novels briefly opened their pages full of gibberish, then went blank, possibly out of self-defense. I was afraid that they had simply lost their voices and would remain blank forever.

The Halsi lasted only another day or two before Arkit's writing made its final descent into raving alphabet soup. It was not just novels anymore. Every letter had become ambiguous.

It was a great relief when the linguist-philosophers arrived.

The town's fastest flier, a bat-winged girl named Hatraskee, had packed a supply of food and water and taken off across the Desert to fetch them the day the words went bad. The linguist-philosophers traveled quickly and arrived before the town, deprived of written language, could descend into complete chaos. Fortunately, Arkit has never been an exceptionally literate place. If this had happened in a library city like Karkafel, the effects could have taken years for them to fix.

They came armed with glyphs and scrolls, thesauri and syllabaries, imperious tomes of grammar and punctuation - all the tools and weapons of an elite linguist-philosopher. They had dictionaries in a dozen languages. They had powerful epigrams and couplets, engraved in steel and fortified with many layers of rhymes. The largest of them carried stone tablets with carefully worded runes carved an inch deep. Nothing was going to change those words.

I really have no idea what all of this equipment was for. It was quite impressive, though, and whatever they did with it, it worked. Within three days, they had sorted the town's letters back into their separate alphabets; within six, they had corralled them back into languages. A further two weeks of constant writing and chanting finally forced the words back to their proper places. It was quite something to watch, too - the elaborately equipped linguist-philosophers often stood in the middle of the town square, chanting at the tops of their lungs while they did graceful and dramatic calligraphy, weaving a net of words to catch the town's wayward language. Quite a lot of the townspeople found that they had pressing business in the square on those days. Some of them stayed all afternoon.

If they ever get tired of language repair, I think the linguist-philosophers could have quite the career in theater. Whether the performance was really necessary, or whether they simply had a flair for the dramatic, I don't know - but the success of their work was undeniable. It was a great relief when the words of the town's ledgers and record books (and my own ambiguous novels) finally settled back into their familiar order. If there was a comma out of place here and there, no one complained.

Accompanying the linguist-philosophers was an expert on Hill Builder technology (as much as such a thing exists). Her job was to fix the pipe crawlers. Whatever language it is - if any - that flows through the crystal brain of a pipe crawler, it is quite different from the ones used by speaking creatures. The mechanic's task was to determine if the pipe crawlers' madness and the word-plague were the same thing, and if so, if the linguist-philosophers had cured the source of the problem or only a symptom.

I heard much less about this process. The details of machinery are as opaque to me as those of linguistic epidemiology, and the mechanic's work was much quieter than that of the linguist-philosophers. Most of it took place indoors and underground. I got the impression that she found all the noise somewhat irritating. Whatever the details, though, within another week, the pipe crawlers were back to making straightforward, functional repairs with no trace of the madness they had shown a month earlier.

Several of their more creative work, however, was sent to the museum in Hemrikath. Art is art, after all. Being made by machines or the mad does nothing to change that.