Charcoal Chrysalis

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

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

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

After dark, they lit them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hollowane

This October, I happened to be in Golgoolian on Hollowane Night. I'm glad I was. The city throws itself into the holiday with more enthusiasm than anywhere else I've ever been.

Hollowane is the night of illusions, when everyone tries to look as strange as possible in the hopes of getting candy. Half the people in the city dress up and go out onto the streets; the other half dress up and stay home to feed the random strangers at their door. There are chocolates and candied fruit and muffins wherever you look, lollipops and peppermints and sugar beetles, berries and bonbons, fruit jewels and candymoss and the little spiral pastries called Shwamp shnails. The bakeries, fruit stalls, and sweet shops of Golgoolian are nearly emptied for Hollowane.

I wasn't out to get candy (I took what people in the crowd gave me, but that's all I want to carry), and I didn't have anywhere to give it out from, so I mostly just walked around the city. I wandered through Golgoolian all night. There were people and things everywhere, walking and eating and singing at the slightest provocation.

Practically everyone in Golgoolian is in costume on Hollowane. They mismatch their clothes, paint their skin and scales and fur, and hang curtains from their antlers. Groups of courtiers trade masks of their own faces and become each other for the night. Acrobats walk on their hands and put sock puppets on their feet. A few of the people in the crowd actually had two heads; others were two people sharing a costume. A spiny reptile had stuck fruit and vegetables on every spike - onions, turnips, squash, and a small cherry on the tip of his nose. A large samoval had rubbed something into his fur that made him glow pale blue all over. One... something... seemed to have covered itself with most of a hillside. It shed dirt in clumps as it walked. Grass covered its back and shoulders, pebbles dotted it like scales, and a small tree was growing out of its head. Someone else was wearing an outfit of creased leather that, in the dark, looked exactly like the wooden skin of a Drae. There were blue eyes behind the dark knotholes.

Golgoolian has more costume makers than anywhere else in the Railway Regions. They spend all year getting ready for that one night. The makers of wigs and artificial tails (a common sight in any city or medium-sized town) serve a steady stream of the bald and unentailed all year, but they still do more business in October than in all the other months together.

All over the city, the toads were dancing in the sinkhole gardens. It was like...

Well...

I can't explain it. If you've never seen a toad dancing, no amount of description can possibly tell you what it's like.

The moons were full. The moons are always full on Hollowane. It's a tradition. A group from the Lupine Astronomers' Guild had decided to come to Golgoolian for the celebrations, and the streets were full of grinning, hairy shapes. Some looked like ordinary people of canine ancestry; others looked like wolves, or large dogs, or massive hulks of teeth and bristles half-glimpsed in the darkness. The crowds of big furry stargazers added something to the celebration, a sort of intense canine happiness that seems to follow them wherever they go. Everything's more fun with werewolves.

They would stop every now and then, as if on cue, to howl hauntingly at the moons. Several of them had started doing four-part harmony and jazz improvisations by the end of the night.

Hollowane is the one night when shapeshifters all over Hamjamser (full shapeshifters, not their half-malleable descendants, like the werewolves or myself) get to show what they're really capable of doing. They can walk the streets undisguised, in all their frilled, multicolored, glittering glory, each one completely different from the others and many different from one moment to the next. If anyone recognizes them, they can always say that it was just a costume.

The people of Golgoolian also believe that on Hollowane, the things that live under the city come out to join the celebration. No one is sure exactly what the things under the city are, but almost everyone is sure that they're there. All that space has to have something in it. There are tales of mole-people, of albino alligators, of earthworms bigger than the Train and mud that writes poetry. You can find all of those on the streets during Hollowane. They're part of the city's mythology. It's anyone's guess how many of them are people in costumes.

As if that weren't enough, every ghost in Hamjamser gets stronger on Hollowane night. They refuse to be overshadowed by real people. No one is sure why. Some ghosts have even been known to leave their usual routines for the night, doing something new instead of the one thing they've been echoing for years or centuries. Three years ago, the ghostly actors in Tazramack stopped halfway through "Without the Dragon," the show they've been repeating since their deaths, and instead launched into an impromptu performance of "The Importance of Being Hairy," a comedy by the brilliant Worsel Acid. According to the audience (the theater allows a larger one than usual on Hollowane, due to the temporary amplification of the ghosts), they put on a splendid show. Scofferell Flint and Giacomo Cargellini even managed to acquire a plate of ghostly muffins for one scene. It's never happened again.

There are a lot of ghosts in a city as large as Golgoolian. In the dark, it's hard to tell them apart from real people.

For quite a lot of people, including me, that's the most exciting thing about Hollowane: the people out on the streets could be anyone or anything. There are a lot of strange and wonderful things in Hamjamser that stay hidden all year. Some of them are frightening; others, like shapeshifters, are just a little too interesting for their own good. Hollowane is a chance for them all to come out of hiding. By the next day, the shapeshifters have returned to their disguises; the troglodytes have gone back underground; the werewolves have returned to their observatory on Mount Moler. The ghosts fade. The clandestine androids cover themselves once again with artificial skin and rubber muscles. The world goes back to normal, or at least a very convincing imitation of it.

For many people, Hollowane is a chance to dress up as something else. For others, it's a chance to be entirely themselves, if only for a single night.

The Sclesserax (part two)

Our guide eventually took us up into the tallest spire in the Sclesserax, a twisting needle of clay and paper far higher than anything else on the building. There was only room inside it for a steep, narrow staircase, little more than a twisted ladder. The central column was corkscrew-shaped to make room for the steps. The builder was at the top (the current builder, anyway; the tower looks like it may have had several). He, or she, was a small dauber who added layers of clay seemingly at random. There were empty buckets all over the steps. They looked too large to be carried by a single wasp, with or without clay in them. I got the feeling that the tower was something of an obsession. It swayed in the wind. Other daubers wandered past occasionally and stuck little gargoyles on it.

On the way back down, we passed through a cloud of ichneumons. They were a colorful group of wasps, small and slender, with striped antennae that flicked the air constantly. No two were quite the same. They passed us in a whirl of shining colors, jet black and pearly white, gold and crimson, silver and tangerine and primrose yellow. One or two were violet.

Something had changed while we were up in the tower. The halls and corridors had been busy before, but now they were almost frantic. Wasps rushed past with pots and baskets and wriggling larvae. Daubers pulled thick curtains over the windows, casting the rooms into gray stripes of shadows. One cicada-eater blew past us with a gramophone in each claw. They were getting ready for something.

The only people standing still were little groups of musicians set up in corners and alcoves. Most of them did the odd wing-singing that's common in Carvendrone; wasps have a surprisingly wide range of buzzes. Others beat out rhythms on their own thoraxes or on large scarabs, chitinous drums that sat happily on the floor while the musicians pounded them.

I've never heard anything like the music they were playing. One would start a beat or a melody and gradually speed it up. This could go on for a long time; insect music can be unbelievably fast. There are people in Carvendrone who can actually sing Moldomer's "Flight of the Skitterfly." When one melody had reached the speed of a patter song, someone would start another one behind it at about half its speed. The two melodies would harmonize, fast and slow, speeding up gradually, getting faster and faster until the first one reached an impossible speed and exploded in a flurry of buzzes and trills. The second one would continue, still accelerating, and a third would start behind it. The result was a song that seemed to constantly speed up without actually getting anywhere. The frantic preparations going on were never faster than when they were near one of these choruses. I felt like running through the halls myself.

The guide rushed us through the last ten minutes or so. We practically flew through the corridors, passing wasps and bees and beetles pushing carts and carrying buckets and boxes and long streamers of red and orange cloth that whirled behind them like floating fire. Somehow, no one crashed into anyone else. It helped that hardly anyone was using the floor. We eventually reached the little entry hall where we had started. The hornet gave us what sounded like a brief, polite farewell, bowed neatly in midair, and rocketed off into the depths of the Sclesserax.

That seemed to be all, so we left. It was getting rather frightening in the corridors.

Outside, the streets of Carvendrone were much the same. The ground and air were full of rushing insects. Wasps flew by like diving falcons, roaches skidded across walls and roofs as if they were on ice, and rickshaw beetles became briefly airborne when descending stairs. It's an impressive sight, five hundred pounds of beetle passing overhead. Their passengers clung tightly to their seats. Even the millipedes were hurrying, as much as that's possible. Their legs went up and down like armies of sewing machines.

Flishel and I got back to the Train as quickly as we could and stayed safely in our compartment for the rest of the day. The sleeping passenger is still sleeping. Since boarding the Train, a month and a half ago, he or she hasn't woken up once. All the places we've been since then - Golgoolian, Skither, Jiligamant, Vanister, Scarloe, and now Carvendrone - have probably seemed like little more than dreams.

This morning, the reason for all the hurrying was clear. The temperature has dropped. The warm part of November is over, and Winter has arrived at last. The people of Carvendrone went to sleep last night; most of them didn't wake up this morning. They won't until next Spring. For the next few months, the small minority of warm-blooded Carvendroners have the city all to themselves.

It snowed at the station this morning as the Train was leaving. There were five people there to see it. The city has buried itself for the Winter.

Carvendrone

Every region of Hamjamser has a city inhabited mostly by insects. In the Mountainous Plains, it's Sconth; in the Kennyrubin archipelago, it's Crustacle Island; in the Railway Regions, it's Carvendrone.

Normally, the town would be practically deserted at this time of year. The inhabitants would be deep in hibernation beneath the ground and in the warm heart of the hive-palace above the city. Most insects can't survive the cold. In another month, that's the way the city will be: a ghost town, guarded against looters all Winter long by its few warm-blooded inhabitants. This warm November has extended the harvest season a little longer. The insects are still awake; the plants are still blooming.

The gardens - the city is full of gardens - are full of the townspeople's small, feral relatives. Migrating butterflies pause for food on their way to somewhere warmer. Beetles speckle the ground and leaves in myriad trundling shapes. Skippers dart from flower to flower, nimble little brown things, neither moth nor butterfly but something else altogether. The air is filled with bees.

The civilized insects are just as busy as the wild ones. Giant butterflies harvest the nectar from late-blooming cartwheel hibiscus and column-bine. The flowers are small this late in November, the largest only six feet wide. The butterflies collect the nectar in bottles and jars to be stored until next Spring. In other parts of the city, they tend sugarcane, beets, fruit, and candymoss - other sources of sweet food that take more work, but yield more than the flowers' few cupfuls of sugar each. To vertebrates, butterfly farms seem to produce nothing but dessert.

Higher in the city are the carnivores' farms. Cows and pigs share pastures with landlocusts and sausage-grubs. Tame cicadas emerge from the ground earlier in the year, leaving mounds of dirt like three-foot molehills. Generations of them spend years underground eating roots. The shed skins of the larvae, hollow and mud-crusted, hunched over their massive digging claws, are stuck on the roofs of houses for luck. The adults graze in the pastures, as docile as sheep. They're too heavy to reach the trees like their smaller relatives. The buzzing, echoing songs of cicadas, large and small, tenor and bass, harmonize with each other all through the Summer. I wish I'd been here to hear them.

I haven't actually seen much of the city yet, but I went to an art supply store to buy colored pencils and ended up in a conversation with the mantis shopkeeper, who seems to enjoy describing his city to strangers. His descriptions were long and eloquent. He spoke perfect and unaccented English; a vertebrate, marrying into the family of insects generations ago, had left him and several cousins with lungs and voices. His wife interrupted occasionally in an efficient, clicking language spoken with claws and mandibles. (Civilized mantises have given up the habits of their tiny ancestors, of course; the wives no longer eat their husbands.)

I've never been to Carvendrone before. The Train is going to be here for a few days, at least, for which I'm extremely grateful. I love insect cities.

Town of Fossils

I spent most of a week this Summer in Tazramack, a cold town high in the mountains, where things keep for a long time. Everything there has a strange, fossilized quality, as if the town exists inside an old photograph. I couldn't escape the feeling that if I had visited a hundred years ago, I wouldn't have been able to tell the difference.

Nothing ever dies in Tazramack. Not permanently. If it does, it is promptly stuffed and put in the nearest museum. A third of the people are taxidermists, and half the buildings are museums. They are dark and dusty and vaguely creepy. The narrow halls and dimly lit rooms are stuffed with stuffed animals - deer, horses, trantelopes, thugrofflers, cats and canines of all sizes, tortoises, seals and dolphins, even fish. There's an entire museum devoted to the art of preserving dead frogs. Another is basically a three-story filing cabinet full of drawers of dried insects. A third specializes in teeth, from micro-shrew bicuspids to a havernack's tusk that required the construction of a second tower, as it is taller than the museum itself. For some reason I could never understand, every museum in the town - no matter what else is in it - has a stuffed alligator hanging from the ceiling somewhere. Just one. It might be in an entrance hall, a dusty back room, or even hanging nose-down in a broom closet, but it will be there somewhere. No one seems to know where the alligators came from originally. People in Tazramack don't ask questions about the past; they just preserve it.

When the town was built, it seems to have been dug out as much as it was built up. The streets are narrow trenches cut into the stone of the mountain. The first floor of every building is hollowed out, rooms carved in the blocks left between streets, and the wooden upper floors were built on top of them later. Some buildings even have stone furniture sprouting like mushrooms out of the floor. Fossils coat every piece of stone in the town. Only the most delicate have ended up in museums; there isn't room for the rest. Half of the mountain seems to be made of fossilized creatures. The streets are paved with stone clams instead of cobblestones. Every wall is lined with trilobites, ammonites, reticulated sea-nullipedes, and hundreds of other things I'd never even seen before. There are shells smaller than grains of sand and sea-serpents so long that they stretch through the foundations of five or six buildings. Scaly coils form arches above alleyways. The central square of the town was hollowed out around the three biggest fossils: a prehistoric shark, a giant squid, and an enormous eurypterid, circling each other on pedestals of stone above the ground. It's impossible to tell whether they're preparing to fight or taking part in some ancient aquatic dance. On market days, the townspeople set up stalls in the spaces between the eurypterid's legs. Pigeons perch on tentacles the size of trees and make their nests between the teeth of the giant shark. People count their sharks' teeth (the main form of currency in Tazramack) and haggle over the price of sump squid in the shadow of creatures that could have eaten them without bothering to chew. No one seems to think anything of it.

I'm still not sure whether I'm glad or not to have shed my skin in Tazramack. It came off in late July this year, when the Train had stopped in the town to pick up a few boxes of coal. (They use it to train the salamanders, the way dog trainers use biscuits.) As I've said before, I enjoy most of the effects of my particular example of the Shapeshifter's Curse; the changes I go through all year mostly seem to be adaptations to make me more comfortable. When the weather changes, I usually have to endure only a few weeks of discomfort before I change to match. If I spent long enough in the water, I'd probably grow gills. (I haven't had much interest in trying that yet.)

I've had fur in the Summer a few times. I don't know how full-time mammals can stand it.

Even when my fur falls out, the way it does almost every Spring, I try to spend the Summer in cold places. the Mountainous Plains practically roast themselves at this time of year. The same heat that keeps Cormilack thawed and soggy all Winter boils it like a squid steamer in July (another reason so few mammals live in Cormilack.) Normally, I shed in the Spring the way most mammals do, except that I don't grow a Summer coat to replace the Winter one. I just stay bald until Autumn. This year, for some reason, it was different - I lost not just the fur, but the top few layers of skin with it, so it all came off in one piece. (I'm used to shedding my skin, but not when there's fur on it.) Underneath was a layer of scales in a rather nice shade of orange. I think my salamander approved.

I was lucky to be in Tazramack at the time, I suppose; skins shed by reptiles are common enough, but there may not be another place on Hamjamser where people would be interested in a skin shed by a mammal. I had half a dozen taxidermists offering to buy it by the next day. I eventually sold it to the Tazramack Museum of Taxidermy (one of over thirty museums of taxidermy in Tazramack - it gets to use the town's name because it's the biggest), which had exactly eighteen of the thirty-six furs shed by shapeshifter's descendants in the Railway Regions. The other eighteen are in a museum in Tetravania. The Tazramack Museum was delighted to have mine and take the lead.

In short, there is now a stuffed Nigel Tangelo at the Tazramack Museum of Taxidermy. They have it dressed up very nicely. They wanted to buy some of my clothes as well, for perfect accuracy, but I refused.

It's a strange town.

Stone over Paper

Sure enough, the Train reached Scarloe this afternoon. I'm starting to wonder if Professor Flanderdrack is a Wayfinder. He's uncannily good at finding things.

I have no idea what he's doing here. He continues to explain the occasional theory; this morning, having finished whatever calculations he began last night, he explained the use of three-tower clockboard as a way of predicting the future.

(The complexity of the game, and the fact that no two boards are alike, apparently creates a mathematically unique situation that distorts time. This can be manipulated by expert players of the game, who can interpret their opponent's moves, the outcome of dice rolls, and the order of randomly shuffled cards to correctly predict the future. Experts can even use their own moves to pose questions. Unfortunately, any expert player of three-tower clockboard is, by definition, interested in only one thing: three-tower clockboard. Anyone skilled enough to use oracular strategy will inevitably ask the game a question about the game itself. The resulting paradox distorts time and can have almost any result; it often did two hundred years ago, during the height of clockboard's popularity. The almost daily transformation of overly curious clockboard players - and their opponents - into newts, trees, and small hills was what caused the game to go quickly and severely out of fashion for the next century, and also led to the loss of more or less all the players who really knew what they were doing. The art of oracular clockboard-playing has been lost for nearly two hundred years. This is probably for the best.)

Professor Flanderdrack remains completely silent, though, about what he's doing at the moment. He disappeared into the page mines of Scarloe today without a word of explanation.

No one really knows where the page mines came from.

To be specific, no one knows where the geological layer came from that led to the creation of the mines. (The mines are there because people dug them.) Several hundred feet below the surface of the Dustbowl, a dome-shaped mountain that rainclouds inexplicably avoid like a gardener avoids kudzu, is the Scriptorial Layer, a sedimentary layer made entirely of tightly pressed paper. The Layer was discovered almost a hundred years ago, when one of the many futile attempts to dig a well in the Dustbowl turned up something even better.

Practically every language on Hamjamser appears on the paper dug out of the mines. English, Sikelak, Carvendrone, Common Vreen, ancient Tetravanian, Aggali runes and Rampastulan hieroglyphs, all the variations on Shasta script... To date, the miners have only found eight pages that didn't have writing on them. They've held on to most of these. They're rarer than diamonds, after all; Scarloe is probably the only place on Hamjamser where you can make your fortune by finding a blank piece of paper.

The written pages, though, are what keep the village going. There's not much else on the Dustbowl - no water, no plants, and no animals, except what people have brought with them. All the water in the village comes from a pump that stretches up the side of the mountain from the nearest river. Before the pump and the page mines were built, no one remembers how anyone was able to live in Scarloe at all.

It's strange to visit the village in late Autumn. The weather is normal for November in the Railway Regions - the pump stops at night to avoid freezing - but Scarloe looks like a small piece of the Golden Desert (or would if everything wasn't gray). A place that looks like this ought to be baking under the sun. Instead, the weather is cool and breezy. There's even fog now and then.

In every way but one, the Dustbowl is a perfectly ordinary mountain. It's just that rain never falls on it.

Over the curve of the mountain, the mountains of the Railway Regions stretch away in every direction, looking perfectly normal: green from hemlock and fir and bottle-brush pine, with the occasional stubborn patch of orange. On top of the mountain is nothing but a blank expanse of gray stone. No normal drought ever dried a place out this much. Scarloe's drought has lasted for centuries.

There's not really much to do in Scarloe except mining. There are a few small farms, startling patches of green that wouldn't last a day without the pump; even with the pump, though, there's only enough water for six or seven of them. Most of Scarloe's food comes from outside. Plants spring up around leaks in the pipeline when birds or people drop their seeds in the right place. A strip of greenery and rust stains follows the pipe all the way to the peak, a tilted temperate oasis two feet wide.

The lack of water is generally thought to be why the pages are so well preserved. The mines are as dry as a bank vault. Rot, mildew, and bookworms are completely unheard of in Scarloe; they'd die of thirst before getting within a mile of the mines. Even so, after spending who knows how many centuries under a mountain, the pages are in amazingly good shape. The miners hardly ever find one that's too damaged to read. Most are slightly ripped, or stained, or missing a corner, but it's rare to find a page missing even a quarter of its words. Whatever left them there was surprisingly careful about it.

The miners spend every day digging pages out of the ground, then sell them to the village bookbinders, who stack them neatly and completely at random and sew them into books. The largest building in the village, besides the bindery, is the store that sells books from underground.

Unfortunately, none of the books make any sense. Most of the linguists and literary experts in the Railway Regions have tried to decipher the meaning of one page, even one sentence, but none of them have come up with any likely explanations for the writing. It's nonsense - neatly written, grammatically perfect nonsense, but nonsense all the same. The theories on the origin of the pages are as numerous as they are unlikely. I'm sure Professor Flanderdrack has one. A surprisingly widespread theory is that the pages were left by one or more giant bookworms, despite the complete lack of any tunnel shapes in the layers. Unfortunately, no one has ever actually seen a giant bookworm; the only indication of their existence is the fact that people believe they exist.

Of course, the fact that the mined books are incomprehensible doesn't stop people from trying. A group of authors and linguists called the Refinery has spent the last few decades buying as many mined books as possible. They insist that the books will all make sense if they can just get enough of them together.

If that's true, they've got a long way to go. No one's reached the edge of the Scriptorial Layer yet.

Books Within Books

The weather was exceptionally beautiful today. It's been an unusually warm November in the Regions - almost like October all over again, though it's hard to believe we could be that lucky. October is always too short. People have written songs about it.

Even the Vanister Museum, probably my favorite building in Hamjamser that isn't a library, couldn't compete with the mountain around it. I didn't feel like walking around inside all day. Instead, I walked around Vanister and the surrounding forest all morning, sketched a few things here and there, bought a tin of lemon cookies at the Rinkler Bakery, and brought them - and a book - to the old standing stones uphill from the town. I like to sit and read under the one shaped like a platypus.

I think I've mentioned before that all the books I own are ambiguous novels. When you travel all the time, you can't carry a lot of books around with you, and libraries won't always be in the same place by the time you've finished a book and want to take it back. Ambiguous novels are the only good way to read new books on the road.

Recently, I've discovered yet another favorite author in Iliev Machinel, whose books have been showing up in one of my novels with rather alarming regularity. I just hope they continue to do so. I love them. Between Iliev Machinel and Inian Gleam - the book's current favorite authors, apparently - I feel like I've spent half of the last few months in strange places beneath the streets of Golgoolian.

Ambiguous novels, from what I've heard, are generally made by mixing up pages from seven or more different books inside one cover. This makes the book so confused about its own contents that it gives up and starts copying other books instead. It generally goes after books similar to the ones used to make it, though nearly every ambiguous novel gets bored and tries something else occasionally.

Reading ambiguous novels takes some practice. Once someone has seen the last page of a story, that's it; the book will have a different one the next time it's opened. I've had to track down over a dozen books at various libraries, having glimpsed the last page too early and missed the ending.

One of mine always contains fantasy, of nearly any kind. That's the one that's been obsessed with Gleam and Machinel lately. It's also the book that got me started on Ramer Oswelt, Tratch R. Pettery, Lena Tithe, Milici Trappilack, H. T. Garnix, and even Oswina Dennenjay. Another mixes fantasy and science fiction, and seems to have a particular fondness for Inry Varnel, Curl R. Hatcreak, and the unlikely technologies of Herbert G. Welleger. The third - put together, apparently, from a wider variety of books - alternates fantasy with murder mysteries (mostly by Trachia Ghastie), obscure works of biology and cryptozoology, and the occasional rather silly romance.

The fourth contains only graphic novels, which it seems to choose completely at random, but occasionally fills itself with what look like ancient Rampastulan hieroglyphs. I don't know where it gets them. They must be written somewhere - ambiguous novels don't invent their own words - but I've loaned the book to several Rampastulan archaeologists, and none of them had ever seen these particular hieroglyphs before. They were delighted to have them. All I can think is that the book has found some old ruin near Rampastula, probably buried deep underground or lost in the heaps and layers of architecture that make up the city, and is copying the occasional interesting wall. Maybe hieroglyphs and graphic novels don't look all that different if you're a book.

Completely unrelated to anything else, Mr. and Mrs. Dreefel - the fortune-teller and her husband - celebrated their son's negative second birthday today. Mrs. Dreefel says he'll be born in exactly two years. They had a party in the Train's dining room, with their friends and a few random strangers that are apparently going to be their friends someday, and divided a cake with two candle-shaped holes in it.

I love living on the Train.