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.

The Sclesserax (part one)

I think the Sclesserax may be larger on the inside than on the outside. Flishel and I visited it today, and the rooms inside it have no end.

It was completely by chance that we ended up there at the same time. I walked through the first door I found - an ornate archway near the bottom of one of the pillars, covered in little clay snails with paper wings. The flying snail turns up a lot in Carvendrone architecture. I think it's their equivalent of the stone griffins in Rampastula or the cyclopean hammerheads in Cammerlan.

Anyway. The inside of the pillar was one enormous spiral staircase, sunlight shining through all the windows and lighting up the red and yellow chrysanthemums growing from the windowsills. They grow straight out of the architecture. Their roots emerge here and there from the clay walls. Late-blooming sunflowers and Winterthistle join them farther up the staircase, and mushrooms sprout beneath the steps.

At the top of the staircase was an entrance hall shaped like a beehive. Wasps flew in and out through the windows - I wondered how many of them even noticed the stairs - and there was Flishel, standing in the middle of the room and looking around with the same openmouthed awe that I'm sure was on my face. We greeted each other incomprehensibly and continued looking around. The room was lined with paper, intricately twisted origami shapes in gray and white that twisted down the walls and twined around each other on the floor. It was like a folded waterfall. Little crabs and shrimp in mottled clay peered through gaps in the streamers.

We were there all of two minutes before a hornet came to take us away.

I'm not really sure, any more than I am about anything in the Sclesserax, but I think she may be some sort of tour guide (or possibly someone entrusted with keeping random gaping intruders out of trouble). She buzzed up to us, landing catlike on the floor - her head was about level with my waist - and motioned with one claw for us to follow her. We did.

The hornet, whose name I probably heard but didn't recognize, took us on a convoluted route that must have passed through over a hundred rooms in the Sclesserax. We went through miles of twisting passageways, lit by sun or amphibious anglerfish or nothing at all. Wasps don't mind a bit of darkness, and it would be foolish to keep flames in a building that's half paper. We passed the kitchens, where wasps and various other insects were chopping and moulding a hundred different kinds of food I couldn't identify. I think a lot of it had once been fruit. There were cakes in pink and purple, flowers of sliced meat, sugar sculptures of wasps and cacti and giant squid, a towering construction made of layers of meat and green jelly. Whole roast cicadas left the kitchens in carts on their way to the nurseries. Larvae eat a lot.

Our route took us out onto balconies several times. Builder hornets were repairing the roof of the dome above one of them. Wasp-paper is famous for its resistance to sogginess, but pieces of the Sclesserax still get mushy and fall off every now and then. Most of the architecture is in large, sweeping curves and flowing arches, shapes that don't break easily. All the ornamentation is small. Flat floors are uncommon; they're just places to land. Rickety little staircases have been added here and there, for those who can't fly, but they're an afterthought. Most of the Sclesserax's residents don't need them.

We wandered through a library built by bees, with books and scrolls and unfamiliar paper things in folds and coils, all stored neatly in hexagonal wax bookshelves. Very little of the writing was familiar. I recognized the neat alphabet of Carvendrone, three-pointed letters based on the handprints of black beetles, but I can't even pronounce the sounds they represent. Most of the spoken languages were unfamiliar as well. The rest of Carvendrone is a mix of every chitinous species in the Railway Regions, but most of the Sclesserax is inhabited by wasps, the royalty and lesser nobility of the city, and they don't speak English. The language of Carvendrone (which shares the city's name) is an old one, dating back to prehistoric tribes of black beetles in the caverns of Mount Moler. I don't know how much of the constant buzzing and clicking is meaning and how much is motion. Maybe they're the same thing. In a language made largely of buzzing wings, flight can be poetry.

I recognized the occasional conversation in the almost-universally-pronounceable Sikelak, though I'm far from fluent in the language. The fact that almost anyone can speak it means that no one can do so easily.

Our guide kept up a constant cheerful commentary, in clicks and buzzes, on the rooms we went through. (At least, I assume that's what she was talking about. For all I know, she could have been reciting poetry or complaining about the weather.) Her segmented hands never stopped moving. We stopped by the throne room for several minutes, admiring the sculpted swarms on the door, but we never saw the inside. The Queens don't open their doors to just anyone.

Wasps have a reputation for being fiercely territorial. The Queens of Carvendrone are rare exceptions. Over a century ago, the Queens realized that they could create a hive, between the six of them, far larger than a single Queen could even dream of. A wasp can only lay so many eggs a day, after all.

More Queens have joined them since then. Every species of civilized wasp in Hamjamser lives in the Sclesserax - I don't even know how many. There are even a few colonies of bees and a reclusive hive of termites in the basement.

They have their own names for themselves, in the scissoring language of the nobility, spoken with wings and serrated mandibles. It's far more subtle and complex than anything else spoken in Carvendrone. I've heard that some of it is communicated by smell.

Vertebrates can't pronounce it. They call the wasp tribes by other names.

The hornets - such as our guide - are strong and catlike, with tough exoskeletons the dusty red-and-charcoal of bricks. The builders among them work in paper, which they make in their stomachs from chewed wood. The nobility have butter-yellow faces. All of them are sisters, daughters of the Hornet Queen who looms enormous in the depths of the throne room, but only the yellow-faced ones could take her place, trade their predatory grace for a size greater than most whales and the rule of all their sisters, become mothers to a thousand daughters of their own. Most of them don't live that long. Queens take their time dying.

The daubers are long and impossibly thin, blue-black with purple wings. They are constantly in motion. They twitch slightly even when standing still, their wings flickering in place. They prefer clay to paper. Unlike the hornets, they have no Queen Mother; they have small families of their own, like most of Hamjamser, and elect a small council of Queens. The males have made a few attempts to join the council, but they're always outnumbered by the dozens of Queens in their own and other species. Something usually distracts them anyway.

The cicada-eaters are massive and tiger-striped, far larger than anything in the city except the rickshaw beetles. They are mottled rust-brown around the thorax, black on the abdomen, with rippling yellow stripes like war paint. The roar from their enormous bronze wings is deafening. They fly as unstoppably as meteors. The towers of the Sclesserax are theirs, all of them, even the ones built by other wasps; the cicada-eaters perch protectively on the pinnacles, wings and legs delicately folded like dragons or winged cats. No one knows why. They raise their grubs in the lower rooms of the Sclesserax. The huge, boneless children of the cicada-eaters spend the first year of their lives wedged comfortably into clay and stone crevices, devouring half the cicadas raised in Carvendrone.

I'll write more tomorrow. We spent all day in the Sclesserax, walking constantly, and I'm currently falling asleep over my pen.

A Hive in Terraces

I walked around Carvendrone today, seeing some things for myself that the mantis shopkeeper had described to me yesterday. The city is a maze of oddly shaped wood and brick. The houses are all domes, or rippling towers, or strange little tapering things like timbered pinecones. Most of them have extra doors on the roof for visitors from the air. Everything is on terraces; nearly half the buildings in the city are underground, dug out of the fronts of terraces with other buildings on top of them. Every road is the roof of all the houses on the next terrace down. The people climb stairs or ladders or simply fly from one layer of city to the next. The air is full of clicks and buzzes and the rattle of transparent wings. Spindle beetles walk the streets next to mantises, bipedal grasshoppers, black beetles, and a thousand other species I can't even name. Wasps and giant butterflies drone or drift through the air overhead. Millipedes pick their way along the streets, their colonnades of legs moving in elegant waves, gathering the city's trash and eating it. Scarabs and roaches pop in and out of tunnels - there are miles of them inside the mountain - through little arches in terrace walls. Caterpillars ripple sideways along the walls to avoid being stepped on. (The people of Carvendrone always watch the ground in front of them, but newcomers aren't always so careful.)

The mantis shopkeeper - his name, he said, was Grchx-spakkkl, but I could call him Fred - had paid me half a dozen Train tickets for repainting his shop's sign. (It was written in three languages. I couldn't understand two-thirds of it, but the calligraphy was lovely.) I spent one ticket and a few tuppenny gears - leftovers from my stay in Cormilack last year - on lunch, a speckled brown curl that turned out to be a sausage grub, with a sort of honey pastry for dessert. The spindle beetle I bought them from seemed to like the gears. I don't think Cormilack coins reach Carvendrone very often.

Rickshaw beetles hurried past every few minutes, trundling along at a surprising speed for insects the size of a walrus. Their black shells gleamed in the sun. Most of them were waxed and polished, even shinier than usual; others were painted in abstract designs, swirls and geometric patterns, or had writing in the tidy alphabet that appears everywhere in the city. A few had seats strapped to their backs, but most pulled the little carriages named after them. The ones without passengers gave me inquisitive looks as they passed. (How a beetle can look inquisitive, I don't know, but they did.) I didn't take a ride on any of them. I wasn't going anywhere in particular, just wandering. I spiraled my way gradually up through the city.

At the peak of the city, and the mountain it's built on, is the Sclesserax. It casts intricate shadows on the terraces below it. Builder hornets are constantly adding onto the hive-palace,* the home of the Queens of Carvendrone and the Vespid nobility, an impossibly huge construction of wasp-paper and sun-baked clay that has long since outgrown the peak on which it was built. It bulges out over the rest of the city like a patchwork thundercloud pinned to the ground. Layers of thick wasp-paper, striped in gray and brown and white like layers of sedimentary rock, are mixed with lumps and patches of clay in every shade of brown. There are sections of wax honeycomb here and there, startlingly geometric in rigid hexagons amid the curves and whorls of wasp architecture. The wasps far outnumber the few small colonies of bees. The spires and domes that make up the Sclesserax grow constantly, built up in rippling layers by the claws and mandibles of its ever-present cloud of workers. The River Glom doubles in width below Carvendrone; the banks recede daily as the clay is flown up and added to the Sclesserax. Pillars and stalactites of chewed architecture stretch down from its edges. Stones and pieces of old machinery are embedded in the walls here and there for decoration. Windows that are also doors speckle every wall with holes, seemingly at random. They're filled with the in and out of wasps and bees. A few non-insects live in the Sclesserax too - there were one or two avians overhead, and I think I saw a day bat at one point.

Seen from a distance, the building is slightly similar to a hornets' nest or the little mud-cases made by daubers and potter wasps, in the way that a plumpkin is similar to a pea. I plan to explore the inside tomorrow.

Oh, yes - apparently, the spindle beetles have not given up on Captain Tamarac. No less than fifteen of them stopped me on the street today to ask where he was. They didn't ask anyone else that I saw. Just me. When I asked them who Captain Tamarac was, they just gave me blank looks, as if I was speaking nonsense.

I'm starting to get rather curious about the Captain's whereabouts myself. If this goes on much longer, I may have to join the spindle beetles in asking random strangers about him.


* "Sclesserax" is a vertebrate mispronunciation of the Carvendrone word for "hive." To wasps, the word means a bit more than "that little buzzing lump over there" - the meaning is closer to "stronghold" or "citadel."

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.