Dancing with Centipedes

I've gotten several letters from relatives (delayed a few months while the postbirds tried to find the Train) asking who Chiliska is. Since she's the only person I mentioned by name on my departure from Cormilack - aside from Lady Akistria Xeredile, of course - I suppose this is reasonable.

The New Year's Ball in Cormilack is always held on the first of April. (Don't ask me why it's called the New Year's Ball. I don't know.) The rainy season has been going for almost a month by then, and the people of Cormilack are starting to get sick of it. The Ball is a way to distract them from the endless rain and let them do more than sit around and drip all day.

I don't really mind that - I usually sit around and write or draw anyway, when I'm not traveling. While the rain made that harder than usual, it didn't keep me from exploring Cormilack and the Earthmover. I was perfectly happy. Also, I usually try to avoid dancing; I have two left feet, sometimes literally.

Lady Xeredile made it very clear, though, that the Ball was not optional for residents of the Palace. She didn't want the people she had to live with sitting around like lumps until May. Since I was staying in the Palace at the time, working on her portrait, that meant that I and my two left feet had to be there.

Everyone who didn't already have a partner (including foreigners like me who didn't know anyone in town) had partners chosen for them at random. All the men and all the women drew numbers and milled around on the floor for several minutes, trying to find whichever person of the opposite gender had the same one. (There were more women than men, so the few hermaphrodites and one mobile plant in attendance joined the men's group to even things out.) I wandered around with everyone else, holding the number 36 (which seems to follow me around) and looking for its twin. I was rather startled to find it in the claw of a giant centipede.




If you think I was nervous about dancing before then, just imagine how I felt when I found I wouldn't even be dancing with someone with the same number of feet. I couldn't think how we'd even dance at the same time - how does a centipede do a dance designed for bipeds, or vice versa? I was about to ruin her evening. I was sure of it.

She had about half of her legs off the ground when we met, rearing up to search the crowd with her head eight feet above the floor. When she found me, she dropped down politely so that our eyes were level. Centipedes can be any height they want. She was wearing one of the long, ruffled things that centipedes sometimes wear instead of dresses. Normally, arthropods don't wear anything at all - there's not really much point - but this was a special occasion. There were bows on her antennae.

One of the musicians told me later that she was a dressmaker for the Palace - had, in fact, made the purple dress with the screws on it that Lady Xeredile wore for her portrait - and that she lived (during the non-rainy season) in a hole under the Earthmover. I suppose that explains why she didn't have a partner already.

We introduced ourselves, and that was the extent of our communication for the rest of the evening. We couldn't understand each other. I don't know more than five words of any of the chitinous languages - even the few I can pronounce - and she seemed more amused than anything when I tried to say "pleased to meet you" in Sikelak (psarkl kssh k'klrga). She didn't seem to understand English either. The most we could manage was each other's names. Hers was Chiliska (at least, that's the closest I could come to it - it was really more like "Tch'lsskhhh," but I couldn't pronounce it correctly). She called me "N'shll."

Lady Xeredile's Palace is built on top of one of the Earthmover's giant drills, high above most of the town. The ballroom windows look out on a gently sloping hillside with ten-foot rivets sticking out of it. It's a good thing I'd already been staying in the Palace for a week at that point; the last thing I needed was to be distracted by the view.

The few dances I recognized were a waltz, a fast calacara (most of which I spent tripping over my own feet), and something that may have been a spangle hop. The rest were unfamiliar. I may have gotten a few of them almost right. It turns out that most dances have multilegged variations - which makes sense, when you think about it - or maybe Chiliska just made them up as she went along. She was certainly a much better dancer than I am. She glided around the ballroom, claws clicking softly on the floor, and I stumbled along with her as well as I could. I think we both enjoyed the Ball, though, and she made up for my two left feet by having about thirty right ones of her own. I don't think she even noticed when I stepped on her claws.

After the Ball was over, we had dinner. I think everyone in Cormilack had brought something. I had pasta, a bit of every dessert I could find, and a lot of things I couldn't identify. Quite a lot of them had been caught in the caves under the Earthmover; as far as I know, maybe no one else could identify them either. Chiliska ate about seven steaks. Centipedes need a lot of meat. After dinner, I walked her to the front door of the Palace (actually, she walked me, as I couldn't find it), we said what I assume was goodnight, and she left.

Somehow, we ended up being friends after that. We never learned any more of each other's languages; there's no way we could have pronounced them. She'd come and find me every time she visited the Palace, though, and we'd have lunch together and talk about what were probably completely different things. During my time in Cormilack, I probably talked more to Chiliska than to most of the people who lived in the Palace and actually understood me. I drew this picture as a farewell present when I left.

The problem with traveling is that, every now and then, you meet people you miss after you leave. I hope I find my way back to Cormilack someday.

From the Train

Once again, it's November - and nearly four months since I last wrote. I apologize again. I wish I could say that I've been too busy, but the truth is that I simply forgot. I fear that I shall never be the world's best correspondent. Being one of the few travelers in the family, I really ought to keep you all better updated on where I've been. I hope to do that for at least the next month. It's that time again.

I've been on the Train more or less since I first reached it in July. It's the easiest way to travel in the Railway Regions. Walking over the mountains is difficult, even when they're not broken up by cliffs, and llamas are more in demand (and therefore harder to find) in the Regions than in most of the rest of Hamjamser. Kilopedes, of course, only go where it's warm and sunny. They only visit the Railway Regions in the Summer (though they love climbing over all the mountains when they do). Airships are expensive, the chances of a floating city passing overhead are slim, and it seems unlikely that I will grow wings anytime soon.

Besides, I like riding the Train.

Practically everyone who has lived in - or even briefly visited - the Railway Regions has been on the Train at some point. It's what makes the Railway Regions the Railway Regions instead of just a bunch of mountains. The Train itself is thousands of years old, an ancient salamander steam engine built by the Hill Builders for their own mysterious reasons. It was dug up by a farmer shortly before the invention of the airship and the rehabitation of the floating cities.

For decades, engineers on the ground had been looking wistfully at those massive heaps of metal drifting across the sky, but most couldn't reach them, and nothing they found on the ground made sense. A couple of the Hill Builders' Guardian robots had been unearthed, but their pistons and reactors and crystal brains were far beyond anyone's comprehension. No one could bring them back to life. Most just ended up in museums. The Earthmover of Cormilack seemed simple enough - for a machine the size of a mountain - but none of its joints and gears and pistons seemed to actually DO anything. (To be fair, people have been stealing the pretty metal pieces from the Earthmover since before we'd even invented machines, and its inner workings still baffle everyone who tries to make sense of them.)

The Train was the first thing to change that. A group of engineers happened to be passing by when it was unearthed, and the farmer who found it was only too happy to sell them the useless and alarmingly large hunk of metal that had been buried under his field. Its purpose was fairly obvious - it had wheels, after all - and it didn't take the engineers long to figure out how the steam engine worked. They replaced the rusted parts, filled the boiler with water and the firebox with trained salamanders, realized what the old rails all over the mountains were for, and - within a few generations - had brought the Railway Regions into existence.

Nearly every part of the engine has been replaced at some point - not surprising in a machine several thousand years old. The hypersteel boiler tank and axles will last forever, of course, but the only other original part is a glass pressure gauge lens. The engineers swore it was in the Train when they first dug it up. Their descendants, the modern Clan of Engineers, still own and run the Train (among other things). Lady Mallory, the current head of the family, practically lives in the engine.

Since the Train began running, one of the fondest dreams of any engineer has been to build a second one. (Most other Hill Builder technology can be duplicated these days, if not actually understood, and the reactors in the floating cities made perpetual motion more or less obsolete before anyone had managed it.) It seems like it should be easy. A steam engine is not impossibly complex, after all - just a bunch of moving parts. Copy them all exactly, and a second steam engine should work just as well as the first.

Apparently, that's not how it works. No other Train engine has ever moved more than a few feet. Airships have been fitted with miniature salamander engines for their propellers, and engineers in Bannarbangle have built sluggish and unreliable "steam-cycles," but every attempt to make a steam engine that can pull more than its own weight has failed miserably. There is still only one Train. No one has ever built one, at least one that worked, completely from scratch. The Train is the only Train, and the Railway Regions are the only Regions with a Railway. That doesn't look likely to change anytime soon.

Frankly, I hope it doesn't. The engine of the Train is unlike anything else in Hamjamser, an oiled leviathan of bolts and pistons and dripping black metal. It rumbles along the rails all year long, above and below ground, swathed in steam like an iron dragon on wheels. No one can ever quite seem to count the cars it pulls behind it. There are always just enough; no car is ever empty, but the Train never quite runs out of room. None of the cars really match - they're all different ages, paneled in different types of wood, papered in brown and red and gold, divided into compartments and dining rooms and the kitchen where the spider-chef grins madly as he prepares five things at once. Boxcars join and leave the Train in a constantly changing line at the towns large enough to use them. The cars swarm with engine salamanders, glowing orange along the lamp-tubes inside, pitch-black as they recharge in sunlight on the roof. The people of the Regions use Train tickets instead of coins.

In all of Hamjamser, the Railway Regions are one of the only areas without a capital city. The Mountainous Plains are largely owned by the banking city of Bannarbangle; Tetravania (the region) is ruled by Tetravania (the city); the floating cities are all dwarfed by Miggle-Meezel; even the Kennyrubin archipelago is centered on the island of Carpel Hromin. In the Railway Regions, everything is centered on the Train. It connects the Regions together, makes them what they are, and is just as much of a place of its own as Milldacken or Vanister or Tazramack. The heart of the Railway Regions is no less the heart just because it runs for miles and is no wider than a pair of steel rails.

On the Road Again, Except Without the Road

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moving On

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

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

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

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

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

A Very Long Explanation for the Curious

Though the incessant rain and occasional hail have stopped (for the most part), the hills around Cormilack are still too sodden from rain and thawed snow to travel safely. Bits of road have a tendency to wander off downhill to explore. Even the Kilopedes are staying away; I haven't seen a single one since I left the one that brought me here.

I suppose you've probably been wondering where I've been these last few months.

After leaving the Kilopede, I stumbled through the hills in the dark for quite some time. Moonlit walks in the dark are much less pleasant when the moons are absent and the hills keep sticking rocks in front of your feet. I must try to get a good salamander someday. They're expensive, but the light would be worth it if wandering through mountains in the dark becomes a habit.

Anyway. Eventually, somewhat scratched, bruised, and muddy, I staggered into the outskirts of Cormilack, watching the stars swallowed up by the shadow of the mechanical mountain that looms over the town. I had no idea what it was then; I only knew that it was interesting, and that I had to draw it as soon as it was light outside.

Unfortunately, I had no idea then that I had arrived right at the beginning of the rainy season.

While most of Hamjamser spends the winter under varying amounts of snow, Cormilack spends it largely underwater; the only snow is on the mountaintops. The weather stays warmer here. The townspeople blame it on the giant machine, saying that it reflects the heat of the sun into the rest of the valley, that it stores heat all Summer and releases it in the Winter, that the mysterious, ice-encrusted mechanisms and antennae sticking up from its roof (peak?) disrupt the weather around Cormilack - there are as many explanations as there are people to make them. Some say that the Sun Dragon likes to wheel overhead and admire the digging machine. That may be true, but if so, I've never seen him. On each of the fifteen days - I've counted - that the sun shone during the winter, there was not a Dragon in sight.

Some say that the machine's engine is still going, and that its heat is what warms the valley.

The people of Cormilack call the machine the Earthmover, sensibly, as that is what it is. The highest hills in the town seem to have been plowed up by its immense blades and wheels - the tallest earthen hills, anyway. The Earthmover itself is the tallest hill in sight. Much of the town is built on it. According to local legends, the Earthmover was used thousands of years ago by the Hill Builders to build the Mountainous Plains. This is why the Earthmover and the Hill Builders are called what they are. Most people in Cormilack agree that the Earthmover was last used to make the perfect spiral of mountain ranges that surrounds the valley (I've only seen the inner mountains, but they say you can see the spiral, as perfect as a snail's shell, if you fly high enough). Upon reaching the center, several important parts broke, most the size of small foothills, at the same time that the Earthmover reached the soft, rich soil in the center of the valley and sank immovably into it. The Hill Builders, having finished sculpting the topography of this particular part of Hamjamser, decided that they had no further use for the thing anyway and left it here.

This is a typical Cormilack legend. The townspeople don't disapprove of romance and mysticism - not exactly - but they don't have much use for them either. When it comes to speculation, they're experts, but they'll take the most sensible explanation whenever they can find it.

However and whyever it's here, the Earthmover has obviously been in bad shape for a long time. Every piece of metal on it is worn and rusted. Even the digging blades at the front - which, according to local mechanics, are at least partially made of hypersteel - have their fair share of chips and scratches. One mechanical arm lies limply over a front wheel with tree-sized wires and pistons hanging from its mangled end. The drill it used to hold lies a mile or so away. Segments have fallen off the tire tread. Struts hang crookedly without their counterweights. One end of a massive snapped cable rises above the village, a crazed column of twisted metal as big around as a house and taller than most of the nearby mountains. The other end is frequently obscured by clouds. The whole mountain of ancient machinery is sunk deeper than the height of six houses into the soft soil of the valley, and grass grows in the gaps between peeling metal plates. The flatter parts are covered with trees and houses as well. It's a magnificent wreck.

As eager as I was to begin drawing the Earthmover, the weather made it completely impossible on the very first night I stayed here. Having found a reasonably good inn - it was sheltered, affordable, and warm, and that was enough for me - I was trying to nurse my fingers back to life with a bowl of soup when the rainy season hit Cormilack.

There's no other way to put it. At first, I thought something had exploded. The sound was a bit like the sound of a wet fish hitting a dock - a fish about the size of an average whale. The entire building shook.

No one inside it seemed particularly concerned. A group of people who had been celebrating a birthday party in most of the room, laughing and shouting and working their way steadily through a cake shaped like a large gear, all calmed down slightly. Still talking, they stood up, opened their umbrellas with a chorus of FLOOMPs (except the more amphibious of them, who didn't seem to care about umbrellas), and walked briskly out the door to disperse, still talking, into the ocean that was falling outside.

"Er - what exactly is happening?" I asked the innkeeper. She paused, heading towards the door with an armful of sandbags for the threshold.

"It's raining," she said simply.

I spent the next few months occasionally sketching the Earthmover, on the rare occasions when the rain stopped, but mostly just trying to keep everything dry. This is nearly impossible during a Cormilack winter. The villagers don't even try to keep their houses from flooding; whenever one floor fills with water, they just move all the furniture to the next one up. This explains why, in the middle of the valley, a house for a family of three can be six or seven stories high. It also explains the faint odor of must and pondweed that lingers around even the cleanest houses.

There is no way to describe how wet Cormilack is in the winter. Nowhere else comes close. The water on the ground is only the least of it. Even when it reaches the fifth floors of the houses, it still answers to gravity.

It's the water everywhere else that's the problem. The air is full of fog AND rain, at the same time, which I hadn't even known was possible. On especially wet days, it's hard to tell whether you're above or below the water. There isn't much difference. The fog creeps into the houses through every crack, filling the rooms inside with thick, opaque gray. Anything more than two feet away is invisible. Water trickles down the walls and drips from the ceiling. Rain comes in through every possible opening. Puddles collect in corners. Cups and bowls left in the open fill and overflow. Carpets squish when stepped on. Most people in Cormilack, in fact, don't even bother to have carpets, as the moss in their houses is thicker and doesn't rot. The air barely deserves the name. There's more water in it than air.

Nothing made of metal, paper, or wood is left out in the winter unless it's well covered in something waterproof - oil, wax, varnish, et cetera. Everything else is wrapped up until the spring. The houses are wooden, but far too big to waterproof, so the villagers just add more boards in strategic places when the old ones rot. It wasn't long before I gave up trying to draw. I kept my paper, pens, and pencils in a watertight oilskin package for most of the winter, the same way everyone else does, and got used to being constantly wet.

The floods receded over a few weeks in March, but - as I mentioned - the rest of the valley is still far from solid. The sun shines more often than not now, though, so I've been able to return to sketching the Earthmover. It will still probably be quite a while before I've got a finished drawing of it.

Unlike the migrant floods, the water that collects under the Earthmover stays there all year; the pools down there are the deepest in the whole valley, and the sun never reaches them. They stay dark and cold. Fishermen go down there occasionally, finding their way with candles, tame salamanders, or (in some cases) echolocation. They wade through rust silt to catch the blind crimson fish that swim through corroding wheels and pylons in the black water. Some say the fish have so much metal in them, you can catch them with a magnet.

I haven't eaten any.