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.

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.

Cats and Riddles

While in the Railway Regions last year, I had my first encounter with a cathomar. Don't worry - I'm still quite alive and in possession of all my limbs. In fact, as near-death experiences go, it was surprisingly entertaining.

Cathomars are some of the only dangerous animals still common in the Railway Regions. (There is the occasional carnivorous sheep, but they're relatively rare, and most are perfectly safe if they're trained correctly.) Wolves avoid anything that looks civilized, as intelligent creatures like humans are too unpredictable for comfort. The same goes for bears and dreadgoats. Most of the other large carnivores - the intelligent ones, like saberclaws and serrated raptors - have become somewhat civilized themselves; most of them live in towns these days. Once in a while, even the most dedicated predators like to get their meat by paying the butcher for it. The solitary ones, who still prefer to stay out in the forests and hunt, see travelers as sources of conversation rather than food. I've met several raptors who have trampled out of the forest, all muscles and fangs and ripping talons, only to lick the blood off of their claws and politely challenge me to a game of chess. (They're usually quite good at it.)

Even dragons have become relatively peaceful.* Their pillaging days are long gone. They've found that it's easier - if slightly less fun - to pay farmers to raise prey for them.** Half the cows and sheep in the Railway Regions belong to dragons. They acquire their gold (or other expensive collections) from estates of well-managed farms, or put it in banks and buy more gold with the interest. Business, it seems, is more profitable than piracy. Their only feuds are private ones with other dragons.

Cathomars are different. They have no compunctions about eating anything or anyone. Any animal that is not a Cathomar is food.*** The ones that talk are simply more fun.

This one was a tom - sleek, enormous, and fairly old, judging by the size of his fangs. They were nearly as long as my arms. The Train had been taking its time in coming, and I had decided - perhaps foolishly - to try the footpaths that pass for roads in the Railway Regions instead. Now I know why people generally avoid them. The cathomar glided silently out of the woods as I was walking and sat his sand-colored sleekness down neatly in front of me. He looked about twice my height, sitting down, and was slightly wider than the path I was on.

A fly buzzed near his shoulder. Without looking at it, without twitching a single unnecessary muscle, he flicked his tail up and swatted it into the trees.

"Good morning," he purred. "You're not as well-fed as I'd like, but you look educated. What will it be?"

Cathomars are quite polite when they catch intelligent prey. Creatures that can talk are much more entertaining than ones that can't. Instead of killing them immediately, the cathomars will challenge them to a contest of the prey's choice: speed, strength, or riddle. (Technically, this challenge applies even to non-speaking prey; anything that runs away has obviously chosen the contest of speed, and anything a cathomar catches has obviously lost.) If you lose, the cathomar will eat you. If you win, it will leave you alone, forever. Cathomars have excellent memories for faces and always keep their word. If you beat one, you will never need to worry about that cathomar again - only all the other ones.

Most people avoid the first two contests, as the cathomars always win. Only a giant or an exceptionally muscular samoval has much hope at winning a contest of strength, and if you could win a race, the cathomar probably wouldn't have caught up and challenged you in the first place. Nearly everyone chooses the riddles.

Fortunately, I spent several weeks on my first trip to the Railway Regions researching obscure riddles - and coming up with a few of my own - just in case I ever ran into a cathomar. (That was one thing that Plack probably needn't have worried about.) I followed tradition and chose the contest of riddles. In fact, cathomars are no better than anyone else at riddles (thank goodness); they just enjoy them. They could live entirely on non-speaking animals and never go hungry. Intelligent prey is just more fun. Creatures that don't talk are good to eat, but creatures that do talk are good to eat and possibly entertaining as well.

Numerous people have called cathomars psychopaths. This is not entirely correct. They're not insane; they're merely wild. The fact that they can talk doesn't change that. Consciences are only normal for civilized creatures, and cathomars - for all their cleverness and elegant manners - are anything but civilized.

I would love to tell you the riddles we asked each other, but I'd rather not spread them (and their answers) any further than I can help. The cathomar used a variation on the old egg riddle, easily guessed, but that's all I'll give away. You never know when you might need a riddle no one's heard before. Suffice it to say that I won the contest. When the Cathomar finally gave up, lashing his tail and rumbling, I told him the answer to my last riddle. He stopped and stared at me for a moment; then he threw back his head and roared. I thought he was angry at first, but eventually realized he was laughing.

"Very good, meatling," he eventually said, still sneezing with subsiding laughter. "Very good indeed. You have won the game and your life. Go run off and do whatever it is you herbivores do." I happen to be an omnivore, but I thought it unwise to correct him.

"And come back to visit me!" he roared as I walked away, trying very hard not to run. "We'll see if I beat you next time!"

Perhaps I will. It's always a delight to see a game played well. If the stakes are low enough, it doesn't matter whether it's played well by you or your opponent. Losing to a worthy adversary can be as satisfying as winning. It's rare to find anyone who understands that. That was not the case in this game, of course, as I had a rather personal interest in winning, but that couldn't be helped.

Perhaps next time.



* They are not tame. If you call them tame, quite a lot of them are still likely to eat you. "Relatively peaceful" doesn't mean you can insult a dragon and expect to live.

** They pay with Train tickets, of course, not actual coins. Few dragons will willingly part with anything metal.

*** Except llamas.

The Graveyard Shift

On one of my last nights in the Railway Regions, I met the night watchman at the Train station in Metaxela. He walked all night, up and down the platform, around the empty ticket booths, stopping occasionally to stare off down the line of the empty tracks. His eyes were the pale green of frost on new leaves. They seemed to be looking at something beyond what I could see.

I was waiting for the Train, as I often do on warm nights in the Railway Regions. Most Train platforms are comfortable places. Passengers can sit and doze while they wait for the Train, which might arrive in minutes or in weeks. There was no one else on the platform in Metaxela that night. The watchman walked up and down, back and forth, and kept stopping to look - as far as I could see - at nothing in particular. After a while, I asked him what he was looking for.

He told me.

"I have seen the lights in the shadows, yellow and red and copper-green, the ones that are eyes and the ones that are fireflies and the ones that are both at once.

"I have seen the fire-dancers that make their way along the tracks, delighting in the freedom of a dance floor that does not end and will not burn beneath their feet.

"I have seen the clouds that will not cross the moons. They change their courses, going against the wind, to keep from brushing against the white faces.

"I have heard the echoes that come before the sounds.

"I have heard the trees whispering to each other at night. Most think it is only the wind, but even on the stillest nights, I have heard them whispering. Their words are soft and unhurried. I do not understand their language.

"I have seen mist-wolves chasing the rats of smoke that spring from the Train's smokestack.

"I have seen bats and owls and night-wyrms, and the winged night flyers that have no names but the ones they give themselves.

"I have seen the shadows of mammoths walking silently through the trees. The moonlight illuminates only their outlines, and not a twig snaps beneath their great dark feet.

"I have heard the song the Train sings to itself, a song of fire and iron and speed, and of the freedom in the single path it follows.

"I have heard the ramblings of beggars and madmen who think themselves alone or do not care who hears. Some speak in nonsense, some speak in riddles, and some speak of their own strange philosophies. One speaks only in rhyme. A few speak prophecies that no one but they and I will ever hear.

"I have watched the rise and fall of a dozen snowfly empires, built in a month and destroyed at the first thaw. I have seen their crusades against the Train. They believe it to be a great Dragon, the terror of their existence, a beast with enough heat to melt them and all their crystal palaces. Their spears and arrows melt before they ever touch the iron.

"I have seen moths with the names of stars written on their wings.

"I have seen flowers growing from steel.

"I have seen the troglodytes who live in the city's sewers. They come out at night to look at the stars. They put coins and rings and old medallions on the tracks, all the small metal things lost down the drains of the city, to be flattened by the Train they have never seen in daylight. They wear the pounded metal on their clothes and around their necks. Sometimes, when I walk past a drain in the street, I hear the jingling of their jewelry far below the ground.

"I have heard icicles in the Spring as their hearts break and they weep themselves away to nothing.

"I have seen people who wear masks to hide the faces that are masks over their true faces. Their eyes are black or gold or as multicolored as an opal.

"I have seen the man who walks with feet of brass and the woman who hides giant snakes beneath her overcoat.

"I have learned to read the patterns in frost and smoke and the stones scattered by careless shoes. They tell me the events of the future, or perhaps the past, but not to whom they happen. In this station, someone will find a suitcase with a lock but no keyhole. A child will be born in the ticket booth on a freezing day in December. A cocoon will hang from the doorknob of the station, untouched and unharmed by any of the thousand hands that turn the knob, until it hatches into a butterfly the color of sunrise over the ocean, on a morning when there is no one to see it but a small child waiting for her parents to meet her on the platform. A woman will find her name written in beautiful calligraphy in the snow. A man will look in the station's lost and found and find what he did not realize he had lost. Two lovers will meet each other when both look up to listen to the song of the same bird, and they will travel to distant lands where the sun never sets and the trees are made of black glass, and their children will be poets and gardeners, and they will live to be a hundred and eight and die on the same morning as they watch the sun rise over mountains of rose-colored stone. Or perhaps all these things have already happened. The frost and the smoke and the pebbles give me every detail but the names.

"I am the night watchman, and I watch. This is what I have seen. This is what I have heard."

The morning watchwoman arrived then, half an hour before the sun. The night watchman put on his coat, nodded to her, and walked away without another word. I caught the train at sunrise and haven't seen him since.

People seem to be willing to talk to me about anything at all. I don't know why. Maybe it's because I'm willing to listen to anything at all.

You never know what you might hear.

Spring in the Railway Regions

Once again, I apologize for the prolonged silence. If someone exists who is a less consistent correspondent than myself, I have yet to meet them. However, while several months of the delay (December, January, and February, namely) were entirely my own fault, most of March and April were not.

Spring has come to the Railway Regions (the lower parts, anyway. It won't reach Milldacken for another two months). The snow has melted, bringing the worlds of the snowflies to an end in a blaze of molten water. Rain is a daily occurrence. Mist-wolves pad through the towns and forests on silent cloud paws, passing like fog-furred ghosts over the rooftops. After spending the Winter as sleeping layers of frost, they seem happy to be moving again. It's considered good luck if one of their intangible paws lands on you.

In short, it's no longer Winter; the snow is gone, and it's possible to travel on foot again. I can't stay on the Train any longer. I rarely stay in one place for even a month. The longer I stay, the harder it is to leave. I left the Train three weeks ago, bidding farewell to Norrel Hepsidine, Flishel, and the sleeping passenger (and receiving one reply in English, one in some other language, and one snore). Flishel gave me a little wooden... thing, presumably as a goodbye present. It looks a bit like a snail, or possibly a very round trantelope. A string goes through holes in the spiral bits so that it can be worn around the neck. Over my years of traveling, I've gathered quite a collection of little charms and trinkets hanging there.

There has still been no sign of Professor Flanderdrack.

My fur has gotten steadily shaggier all Winter; I haven't worn a coat since before Christmas. It's white this time, with black markings around my eyes and the tip of my tail. I'll be sad to see it go. (Actually, when the weather gets ten degrees warmer, I'll probably be quite happy.) With any luck, it will come off in one piece like it did last year, and someone will make a coat out of it.

I left the Train in Findlebar, a small town built around a small and highly specialized library. It is, apparently, Hamjamser's largest collection of books on the Gastropod Conspiracy.* The townspeople make a point of bowing to any snail they see (just in case). As a traveler who lives largely on slug meat and smoked sump squid, I was rather uncomfortable there and only stayed overnight.

From Findlebar, I set out by road; there are a few in the Railway Regions, though they tend to be small and precarious. They only exist where there are no Train stations. Several sections were washed out entirely, forcing me into detours that involved more climbing than walking, and the road was so narrow that I had to climb over fruit carts coming the other way. (I have no idea how they got past the washed-out sections.) At least there were no troll booths.

I don't know the name of the part of the Regions I've been in for the last three weeks, though it's quite clearly separate from the rest. I'm not sure it has a name. It's only a cluster of villages, four or five at the most, but it might as well be a separate country. Postbirds don't go there, as the villagers speak a language completely unknown to the rest of the world. Anyone they could write to is within a few hours' walking distance. Fortunately, each village has a few people who speak English as well.

I'm finally writing from the village of Rampal's Pleek, the first place I've seen a postbird in weeks. I think it may be in Tetravania.** The villagers won't tell me. When I ask, they say Rampal's Pleek is "in the four-cornered land," or "below that which is above," or "it's right here. Can't you see it?"

This, of course, is why I'm almost certain I'm in Tetravania. No one else in Hamjamser talks like that.



*I refuse to comment or respond to comments about the Gastropod Conspiracy. It only leads to trouble. If you want trouble, get in touch with Commander Squish.

**I don't know which Tetravania yet, or how many. I'll let you know when I find out.

The End of November

Once again, November is over, about two weeks after it began. November and October always seem like the shortest months of the year. They're over far too soon.

The postbirds started leaving today. I'm not the only passenger on the Train who tries to write every day in November; the birds have been swamped with letters all month. They've taken off every day in ungainly postmarked flocks. Today is the last day, though, and most of the passengers will go back to being merely intermittent correspondents, like me. (Hopefully, most of them will do better than that.) The Train will get by with only a half-dozen postbirds for the rest of the year. The rest are off to warmer places for the Winter. They're all Wayfinders, so it won't take them long to get there.

I've found my warm place already; I'll be staying on the Train for the rest of the Winter. Most travelers in the Railway Regions do the same. Trenchcoat Guy showed up this morning, waiting by himself at the tiny Blue Wilderness station (named for the bluets that grow all over the roof and the ground around it). The Train stopped for him and he got on, grinning as widely as always. He has acquired a truly enormous umbrella at some point in the last month. It's pumpkin-orange with a pattern of plaid mushrooms. It's wider than the station, which is little more than a roof on a stick.

I don't know how he got there; there's nothing but trees for miles. Maybe he hitched a ride on a balloon. Maybe he really is a septuplet and this is one of his identical brothers. Maybe he just walked. He's certainly not telling anyone.

It's quiet out here in the wilderness. There are no cities, no noise like the rumble of Milldacken's thousand wheels or the buzzing of Carvendrone, none of the bustling crowds that have been such a common sight for the last two months. Just the calls of birds and the constant rhythm of the Train. Even Flishel has mostly stopped talking; he's been working on something in a small book, using several kinds of ink and the occasional dab of umbrella paint. He hasn't shown it to anyone yet. Maybe he won't. The sleeping passenger continues to sleep, breathing softly in the corner of the compartment. The days are long and peaceful.

Someone has been sitting on the roof and playing the handbagpipes for the last three days. Whoever it is picks a different tune each day - lilting, tentative melodies that move in loops and never quite seem to repeat themselves.

The whole Train gets quieter as the weather gets colder. The cold-blooded passengers get sleepy, even the ones who aren't hibernating. The warm-blooded ones are content to sit in their compartments and read, or dream, or just watch the mountains go by. No one ever knows where the Train is going; we all just get on and hope it's somewhere interesting. It certainly has been this year.

I'll try to write more next year than I have before. I love the November challenge, as exhausting as it is, but it shouldn't be the only time you ever hear from me. I can't promise anything; my mind is not the most organized place. I will try, though.

Wish me luck.

Nigel

Endless Tracks

We're out in the uninhabited parts of the Railway Regions. The mountains stretch away in every direction like a rumpled quilt made of trees. There are misty gray patches of skeleton trees, green speckles of fir and hemlock and pine, and smooth expanses of gray and brown stone. Birds fly overhead - crows, vultures, and the occasional Winter falcon. Their calls carry for miles across the empty mountains.

This is balloon country.

They're everywhere. There's always something in the sky - rarely more than one at a time, but always something. Hot-air balloons float by like brightly patterned soap bubbles. Floating cupolas hang like little cupcakes of architecture beneath their own balloons, larger than the ones with baskets, long tubes like cucumbers or stacks of balloons like abacus trees. Pedal-balloons putter by now and then. The people beneath them are visible if they get close enough, turning the rudders and propellers with bicycles rebuilt for flight. Airships of every size loom overhead, massive hulks of inflated cloth or leather or paper with tiny gondolas underneath, casting shadows like clouds on the mountains. Some spin their propellers lazily; others just drift with the wind. They're only crossing these mountains on their way to somewhere else.

The Train traveled all day without passing a single city, town, or village - not so much as a trackside cabin. Nothing but trees. The only sign that people had ever been here was, in fact, a sign, stuck on a post near the tracks. The paint was cracked and faded, but the writing was still legible. There was only one word:

WHERE?

It looked like it had been sitting there for years, asking its impossible question to the silent trees. I wish I had an answer for it.

Actually, that wasn't the only sign of civilization. Passengers on the Train just stop noticing the other one after a while.

After all, the tracks are always there.

The first tracks were laid by the Hill Builders. For centuries, no one was sure what they were; the long, straight pieces of metal just turned up now and then for no apparent reason. Farmers would find them beneath their fields or exposed by landslides. For some reason, the tracks were made of ordinary steel, which is why they didn't last as well as most of the Hill Builders' creations. Most of them had been buried and rusting for a long time.

After the Train was unearthed, of course, it was only a matter of time before someone noticed the shape of its wheels and realized what the tracks were. Most of the tracks were bent and rusted beyond repair by then, and there's no telling how many have never been found at all. Nearly all of the intact ones had been dug up and taken away. They obviously weren't doing any good where they were, after all. The scattered tracks show up in the strangest places. One of them is the roof-beam of a barn near Milldacken. Two others are in a circus that travels through the Railway Regions; they've been turned into stilts for a giant. A pair of tracks runs the entire length of a hallway in the Vanister Museum. They've been used as foundation pilings in Golgoolian, fence posts in the High Fields, and pillars and railings in several of the floating cities, where metal is lighter than air. According to one of my fellow passengers, one piece of track has made it all the way to the Golden Desert; a crinkle-bagel vendor in Thrass Kaffa uses it as a frying pan. Little pastries sizzle in the Desert sun, lined up in a row on top of the old steel.

As a result of all of this, when the Train was finally repaired and began running again, there was more or less no track for it. A few sections had survived, but it could have crossed all of them together in about two minutes. The Engineers had to lay their own tracks for several years.

Of course, once it became obvious that the Train was the best thing to ever happen to travel in the Railway Regions, every town and city wanted the tracks to come to it. The railroad doubled in length within the first few years.

It's fairly simple for a town to connect to the railroad. The people just add a small circle of track to their station - usually with one side hidden, so that it's not held in place by people looking at it - and within a few days, the track going through the station is just another part of the railroad. Instead of going in a circle, it continues out of the town in both directions. There is only one track in the Railway Regions. Any set of rails laid on the ground will become part of it sooner or later.

Strangely, it's continued to grow over the years. Each town only adds one or two hundred feet of track - not enough to even reach the edge of town, in most cases - but the rails still stretch across the mountains for miles.

No one puts tracks in the middle of the wilderness. They're there anyway. The railroad may have been started by hand in towns and cities, but most of it has grown all by itself.

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.

Linewurm

The Train came around a curve this afternoon to find what looked like a lizard-shaped heap of scrap metal shuffling along the tracks. It was almost as large as the engine. When it saw the Train, it got off the tracks in a hurry, shedding machinery and pots and rusted sheet metal as it went. The noise was horrendous. It sat by the tracks as the Train went by, lashing its tail and hissing at us. The combination of clanking and hissing sounded like a steam engine about to explode. Its teeth were quite impressive. There were storm-drain gratings fitted over its eyes.

I only recognized the junk-heap creature from photographs and descriptions in books; I'd never seen one above ground. The Train had surprised a linewurm.

Small dragons and their relatives, such as salamanders, are usually content with anything metal. That's one of the many reasons to keep salamanders in lanterns; they've got a piece of shiny metal that's bigger than they are. Craftsmen's salamanders are generally happy with their ovens or forges. The ones in the great metal hulk of the Train - or, better yet, the floating cities - must feel like kings.

Large dragons usually have more refined tastes. They prefer gold. This is by no means true of all dragons, or even most, and the less obsessed ones can get rather unpleasant if you imply that it is. Quite a lot of dragons these days collect gears, or teapots, or umbrellas, or any number of the other pretty things that people make. I know of half a dozen off the top of my head who collect only books. (Frankly, I don't know why everyone doesn't do that, but you know how I feel about books.) Some don't collect anything - though most dragons consider those ones eccentric, or possibly just lazy. Still, all the most traditional dragons collect mainly gold and the occasional gemstone.

The linewurms - distant relatives of dragons, like giant white newts - have almost nothing in common with their winged cousins except their size and their love of metal. They certainly don't share their brains. Even the most uncivilized and temperamental dragon can outthink most smaller creatures; when you live for centuries and have a brain larger than an entire cow, you can hardly help it. Linewurms are considerably less intelligent. They spend all their time hoarding things. They prefer metal, but they'll settle for rocks. They're not picky. When they find something nice and hard, they glue it to themselves with the mucus they secrete, making their own armor plating to cover their soft bodies. They make claws out of old knives and pickaxes stuck to their toes. When two linewurms meet, provided they don't find each other attractive (and most of them don't), they fight. The fact that their claws and scales are secondhand and handmade makes them no less eager to use them. They fight, and the winner takes whatever useful bits and pieces are left on the floor when the loser runs away. The focus is generally on knocking armor off rather than actually hurting each other.

In other words, linewurms collect stuff to fight and fight to collect stuff. People have suggested that they could just leave each other alone, but the linewurms don't seem interested. Perhaps there's nothing better to do down in the caves.

The mucus that holds linewurm armor together eventually covers it with a thick white layer, like glue, giving the metal (and other assorted junk) a pearly shine and softening its edges. It reduces the clank of metal on stone to a quiet rustle. Old linewurms look like the ghosts of junkyards. The mucus also coats the insides of the caves where they live, turning rough stone passages into the smooth tunnels that linewurms prefer.

This, incidentally, is where linewurms got their name: they are wurms* that line stone with slime and line themselves with stone. It seems like rather a pointless cycle, but linewurms seem to like pointless cycles.

A rare few wurms have been known to make sculptures out of mucus, building them up layer by layer with the patience of a cave drip forming a stalagmite. Most don't have the patience.

The hardened mucus is said to be like tree rubber, only better, and there's gotten to be quite a trade in stolen linewurm upholstery. People go down into their caves and peel the coating off of the walls. It's a job for only the exceptionally brave or foolish. Linewurms grow to be several hundred feet long, keep themselves well armed, and suspect everyone they meet of being a thief. (To be fair, they're almost always right.) They're the main reason that abandoned underground villages stay abandoned. Linewurms like abandoned villages. People always leave such nice stuff behind. Fortunately, there's no shortage of abandoned underground villages in Hamjamser, so linewurms rarely need to bother with the inhabited ones.

Of course, not all linewurms live in the wild; quite a lot of them live in Mount Moler, primarily as garbage collectors. Once again, they're not picky. Lineworms have been known to live above ground, but only with completely opaque armor (they sunburn easily) and truly enormous sunglasses. It's extremely rare to see one out in daylight. I still have no idea what the one we saw today was doing. According to the passengers at the back of the Train, it got back on the tracks after we passed, clanking away behind us and lashing its tail angrily. It stopped first to pick up some of the pieces it had dropped.

Later in the day, when the Train stopped at the village of Hoggen, I found a horseshoe and the crank handle from some piece of machinery - a gramophone or pepper grinder, perhaps - caught on the front of the engine. Shreds of rubbery mucus still clung to them. The crank handle looked quite old, an elegant piece of Caroque brasswork. I brought them in and put them in my suitcase. I think I'll hold on to them for a while. It's not every day you get your hands on a piece of a linewurm's coat-hoard. Who knows - maybe I'll get a chance to return them someday.



* "Wurm" being the term for the amphibious variety of dragon. Not to be confused with "worm" (a limbless invertebrate), "werm" (any other limbless animal, such as furry snakes and nullipedes), "wirm" (a long, segmented robot), or "warm" (the same as hot, but slightly less so). "Wyrm" refers only to scaled dragons (though in some parts of Hamjamser, it's considered rude and therefore highly dangerous to use the word to their face). Why we can't just use completely different words for all of these, I have no idea.

The Smokestack

Sure enough, there's a smokestack in the center of Ayagolla. It's a hollow monolith of ancient red brick on the highest point of the mesa. A rusty ladder is bolted to its side. Anyone can climb up and look into the opening on the top, so that's exactly what I did.

The outside of the smokestack is about as tall as a two-story house; it's small compared to most of the ones on Hamjamser. Inside, however, the hole goes down too far to see. It's at least as deep as the bottom of the mesa.

Being large, ancient, inexplicable, and remarkably well-preserved, the smokestacks are generally thought to be yet another mysterious leftover from the Hill Builders. They seem to be made of perfectly ordinary, if rather large, red bricks; several of the stacks are known to be at least a thousand years old, though, and they don't look more than a few hundred. Nobody has ever built as permanently as the Hill Builders. They're named for it, after all.

The smokestacks turn up all over Hamjamser, usually in high places. There are at least fourteen in the Railway Regions. Explorers have found them rising unsinking from the Great Shwamp, drifted in sand in the Golden Desert, and crowning the peaks of half a dozen islands in Kennyrubin. They're all made of identical red bricks, no matter where they are. As far as anyone can tell, the smokestacks are bottomless. Explorers who go down them run out of rope before they reach anything. Attempts to excavate the stacks, to follow them from the outside, have turned up nothing but endless perfect rows of bricks. The shafts are too narrow for flight; the bases are wider than the tops, but they stay the same width below the ground. Katara Katravandisask, the notorious daredevil photographer, probably would have gone down one long ago if her wings could fit.

A few people - geckos and insects, mostly - have managed to climb down the inside walls of smokestacks. They've brought back strange tales of tunnels and rooms at the center of the world. Some say the smokestacks go straight through the planet, and that each one has an identical counterpart on the opposite side. (This theory is only held by supporters of the round-world theory, of course - the flat, shapeless, mosaic, and moebius world theorists think it's complete nonsense.)

No smoke ever comes out of the stacks - they're named only for their shapes - but they're always a few degrees warmer than the surrounding air. The inside of Ayagolla's is full of bats and cliff-swallow nests. Aeroscorpions hook themselves to cracks in the bricks during the Winter. A few of the cold-blooded villagers join them, preferring to hibernate in the warmth of the smokestack instead of their own chilly basements. They hang little tents inside the bottomless hole. From the top, I could see several of them hanging like canvas fruit over the empty blackness. Each tent has at least five or six ropes holding it to the top of the smokestack, as does each person inside it. Apparently, the drop doesn't bother them.

The Ayagollans agreed to let Miss Hepsedine plant a small inkweed sprout at the base of the stack. It's the perfect spot - the bricks are surprisingly smooth after hundreds or thousands of years of weather, and the ground all around them is as black as charcoal.

On a completely different topic, I heard from another passenger on the Train that there was an accident at the Bank of Bannarbangle last month. A dragon's hoard fell through the floor and ended up hopelessly mixed with the vault of gold below it. It took weeks to sort them out. The dragon is thought to have come out of the mess about thirty pounds richer than before; when a dragon says that yes, it is sure that this particular brick belongs to it, you don't argue. The whole thing reminded me instantly of Professor Flanderdrack. I wonder where he is right now.

Ayagolla

Ayagolla is a small fishing village on top of a small mesa. It's farther away from the water than any other land within two miles. The valley around Ayagolla is deep, edged by cliffs on every side, as if a section of the Railway Regions just sank three hundred feet straight down. Most of the valley floor is a lake.

The villagers have carved dozens of steep, precarious staircases into the wrinkled cliff sides of the mesa; at the bottom, where the cliffs rise straight out of the water, are the docks and the little boats that the Ayagollans use for ordinary fishing. They row occasionally to the little shacks and cabins on the valley's other islands, or to the outer staircases that lead to the rest of the Railway Regions.

The Train, on the other hand, can only get to Ayagolla by bridge.

The Bridge of Golla is built on two rods of hypersteel. They were laid across the valley a long time ago - far too long for anyone to remember, possibly by the Hill Builders themselves - and their ends were driven deep into the face of the rock. No one really knows exactly how long they are. One end of the bridge is attached to the mesa, the other to the top of the valley's outer cliffs. For hundreds of years, the two rods - each over two miles long and roughly the thickness of a pencil - simply had wooden boards laid across them. People could walk to Ayagolla, three hundred feet above the water. The boards had a tendency to rot in the damp air, though, and people kept getting blown off the bridge by the high-altitude wind, so most preferred to take a boat. No one objected when the Train began running and the bridge was turned into a a railroad bridge. Instead of wood, the two hypersteel rods were connected by bars of iron, and tracks were laid on top of them.

It's rather unnerving to cross the bridge. It's less than a foot thick. Nothing supports it except the two pencil-thin rods of hypersteel; from the middle of the bridge, with the cliffs far away, it looks like just a thin strip of metal hanging in the air. Underneath the steady beat of the Train, you can hear the bridge humming, the deep ringing sound made by the metal that does not bend. A piece of hypersteel doesn't just vibrate in one part. If the middle is vibrating, so are both ends and everything in between. The Ayagollans can hear the Train coming long before they can see it.

Ayagolla was originally built by fishermen, who cast their lines over the cliffs to catch the glider-eels that swim through the air over the lake. It's part of their migration route. The river that flows through the lake has carved a deep canyon into the cliffs on either side; the eels weave their way from one opening to the other, avoiding the waterfalls that spill over the edges. They float high above the surface. They swim with the same languid rippling motion used by aquatic eels; their fins are as large as wings and covered in shimmering rainbow patterns. Each eel has four long whiskers, far longer than its body, which it keeps trailing in the water at all times. If an eel's whiskers leave the water, it falls. No one has figured out why. Aeroicthyologists have spent their entire lives trying to discover the secret to glider-eel flight.

The villagers don't really care how glider-eels fly. They just catch them. When the first schools of eels start drifting through the valley, all other fishing stops. The villagers get out their poles, thick bamboo rods strung with rope and baited with apples (a favorite of the eels, for some reason). You need a strong pole to catch a glider-eel. Young eels are no larger than a garter snake, but the adults can reach the size of a tiger shark. The eels are completely weightless until their whiskers have left the water; after that, though, it sometimes takes two fishermen to reel in a large one. They anchor themselves in the fishing-holes scattered over the top of the mesa. Over the years, depressions in the stone fill with small grains of sand, which are blown around in circles by the wind and expand the holes a fraction of an inch every year. Some of the oldest and largest ones have had houses built on top of them and become root cellars. Each eel-fisher picks a hole and stays in it until their eel has reached the top of the mesa; mature glider-eels are large and strong, perfectly capable of pulling a loose fisherman over the edge.

The Ayagollans rarely catch more than ten eels each year. They salt or pickle the spongey meat to eat until the next migration. They sell the whiskers, which are quite popular among experimental aviators. The sky-sails used on some airships, which appear to be constantly filled with a wind blowing from below - like parachutes that never fall - are actually ordinary ship's sails with glider-eel whiskers woven into them. The owners of sky-sail ships keep large supplies of water on board so that the sails don't dry out.

The Train is going to stay at Ayagolla overnight and move on tomorrow afternoon. I hear there's a smokestack in the middle of the town, which I plan to go see tomorrow morning. I've never seen a smokestack up close before.

Inkweed

Since the abrupt disappearance of Professor Flanderdrack, our compartment has been only three-quarters full. A few people have taken a look at it, but being less inclined to stay up late than Flishel and I, none of them have stayed. One of the four seats has stayed empty. The sleeping passenger sort of spreads into it occasionally.

Today, we were joined by a fourth passenger.

The Train had stopped at Arkentram, a small town that seemed huge compared to the little villages we've been passing lately. The station was centered around a tall thing like a scrap-metal tree. The station-master explained that it was to attract sunlight. In Arkentram, he said, the sun shines even when it's raining. It certainly did while we were there.

The Train stayed for a few hours, so I went to buy some more ink in the market. I don't know when we'll find another town large enough to have ink vendors. I found the stall just as a heap of coats and scarves, presumably with someone inside them, was leaving with a gallon jug of ink. I bought one of my own and came back to the Train. The heap of coats arrived at our compartment only a minute or two after I did.

"Norrel Hepsidine," it said. "Midnight."

We introduced ourselves.

"Nigel Tangelo, two am."

"Flishel, midnight." (The only English word I've ever heard him use.)

"And, um... that?"

"Never wakes up."

"Ah."

That was all. Without another word, the heap put down its suitcase (her suitcase - Norrel is a girl's name) and settled in. She spent the next half-hour taking off layer after layer of coats and shawls and sweaters. Underneath, she turned out to be amphibian, with a salamander-like face and pale green skin. A fringe of vestigial gills hung down over her ears. Her face was covered with what I assumed were tattoos or paint: black spirals and leaves, like the shadow of a vine.

Her coats took up nearly every coat-hook in the compartment. Fortunately, the Train gets a lot of cold-blooded passengers, so each compartment has about forty hooks for just this reason. The air slowly filled with the smell of cinnamon. We found out why later, when she took a stick out one of the pockets - raw cinnamon, the alpine variety, still in stiff little rolls. She chewed on it absentmindedly all day.

Our compartment stays warmer than most, as a result of having three mammals in it. It would almost be stuffy without the blasts of cold air whenever the Train stops. In the end, all Miss Hepsedine kept on was a knee-length embroidered skirt, like the ones worn in the Golden Desert. (Keeping the chest covered is a purely mammalian habit; no one else has anything to cover up. Male and female amphibians look exactly the same to most people.) Her entire body was covered with the black vines. I was about to ask whether they were tattooed or painted when a leaf fell off of her arm. It dissolved into a puff of smoke before it reached the floor. That seemed to more or less answer my question.

I had only glanced at the falling leaf for a second, but that seemed to be all it took; Miss Hepsedine noticed me looking and grinned. "It's inkweed," she said eagerly. "Do you like it?"

Thus began the rest of the afternoon. Before the subject of inkweed came up, Miss Hepsedine had said all of seven words; after that, she turned out to be capable of talking steadily for hours.

Inkweed is a plant composed entirely of the color black. It's a dermatoglyph, like mobile hieroglyphics or rainbow splodge, a form of two-dimensional life that exists only as patterns on a surface. It can't exist by itself. It has color, but no thickness. A tree with an inkweed vine on it doesn't have stems and leaves stuck to its trunk; it has vine-shaped patches of wood that happen to be black. All inkweed needs is a smooth surface and a source of black, such as ink, tar, ash, or the dark mud on the bottoms of swamps. It has been known to survive on a diet of shadows, but it prefers more substantial kinds of darkness.

Miss Hepsedine, as it turns out, is something of an expert on inkweed. She makes her living off of it. Her suitcase is completely full of books, pens, and jugs of ink (I think she was wearing all the clothes she had), and all but a few of the books are copies of her guide to raising inkweed. She includes seedlings from her own plants when she sells them. The seeds look exactly like commas. They fall off of the plants when they're ripe and stick to the first surface they touch. The seed in each book is carefully planted on a sheet of black paper, which turns white as the seedling sucks the pigment out of it. Each seedling has to be added just before its book is sold; if it stays in it too long, it spreads and starts eating the words.

If it weren't for my disastrous luck with plants - every single one I've raised has died, except the ones that turned out to be weeds - I might be tempted to get an inkweed myself.

Miss Hepsedine fed the inkweed while she talked. Her hands were covered with the feathery black lines of roots. I wasn't sure why they were there, instead of on her feet, until she got out a jug of ink and started pouring it into her palm. I expected it to drip off onto the floor. Instead, it disappeared into her hand like a magician's trick, absorbed by the inkweed without spilling a drop.

She spent the evening writing; she's currently working on a book about dermatoglyph biology. When not discussing inkweed, she hardly talks at all, which is perfect - I don't either, and Flishel talks a lot but doesn't seem to care if anyone's listening. It all works out nicely. If we ended up with someone who talked all the time in a language I knew, I could never concentrate on anything.

Passenger Tree

The cold is still new and sharp in the air, only a few days old. No one is used to it yet. Most of the Train's passengers spent the day snug and warm in their compartments, sleeping or reading, talking to friends and relatives and random strangers. The Train had been quiet all day. It was getting dark when we pulled into the station at Filligan, a little wooden shack next to the tracks, and there was no one awake in the car except the Conductor and I. The platform in Filligan is a small field on the outskirts of town. The snow had melted there, and the ground was dark and muddy.

The Train always stops for at least a minute or two at every station, even the completely empty ones, in case someone wants to get off. No one had gotten on or off the Train all day. There was no one waiting outside the door. The Conductor was about to give the all-clear to the engine when I noticed something standing farther off on the platform (I was coming back from a quiet dinner in the dining car - just me, a plate of pasta, and Herveli Pipe's Lifted Engines) and pointed it out.

There was a silhouette in the dark, a slightly lighter brown than the darkness around it. At first it looked like a woman, then like a tree trunk, and then I realized it was moving. Not a tree trunk, then. It came slowly closer while we watched.

When it reached the light from the open door, we could see slowly moving limbs and the shine of light on wood. It was a Drae.

Drae are one of the few species of intelligent plants in Hamjamser. Their origin is a mystery. They are trees, leafy and wooden, but they're shaped (sort of) like humans. I've only seen two or three of them before, and never this close. It was surprising to see one at all this time of year. Most Drae are motionless through the winter, lost in sleep or whatever it is that trees do until Spring. This one was quite awake. She wanted to ride the Train.

Her torso was a trunk; her trunk was a torso. Drae look like trees and like women at the same time, and it's impossible to separate the two.* Her arms were branches. Her fingers were twigs. Her body split at the waist into two legs, like a double-trunked tree in reverse. There were knots at her knees.

Her head was little more than a knob of wood on top of her trunk. Being plants, Drae have no mouths or noses; they don't eat and they don't breathe. Her ears were wrinkled knotholes in the sides of her head. Her eyes were similar, two dark holes in the wood of her face. They were completely black inside. A tangle of vines hung like hair from the top of her head, framing what there was of her face. They rustled softly as they moved over her shoulders. She'd lost her leaves, like the other trees. Two skeleton-tree branches sprouted from her shoulders. She kept them folded behind her back, like wings, and the twigs rattled as she walked.

Drae don't walk on top of the ground. They're plants, after all; they prefer to stay in it. She waded across the field instead, plowing up little waves of dirt in front of her ankles. Soil is about as solid to Drae as water is to other creatures.

"Good evening, Ma'am," said the Conductor, with his unshakable catlike elegance. "Would you like to come aboard?"

Drae don't talk. They understand spoken words, and speak to each other with a slow language of moving branches, but they have no mouths to speak with. She nodded her head, slowly, and reached out with both hands. The conductor took the Train ticket she held silently in her wooden fingers. He waited for her to climb the steps, but she just stood there, arms lifted to us. Her feet were completely still below the ground. The meaning was fairly obvious: she wanted us to lift her into the Train.

It took both of us. Drae are trees, creatures of solid wood, and it takes more than one slender Conductor to lift one. Her arms were as stiff and heavy as branches. Drae don't exactly have muscles; they move using water pressure, like venus flytraps. They're incredibly strong. When a Drae moves her arm, it's not a motion involving separate pieces, like the bones and muscles of an animal. The arm is a single piece of wood. One moment, it's one shape; the next, it's a different one. To any outside force, a drae is as rigid as a tree trunk, even when she's moving. They can crack stone with their fingers.

She held our hands with exquisite care. Her own were as hard as carvings and as cold as the air outside. She pulled down heavily as she lifted one foot out of the ground.

It wasn't a foot. Below the ankle, her leg branched into a tangle of thick roots, like the trunk of any other tree. Clods of earth fell from them as they emerged. The roots kept coming, the thick primary ones branching into smaller ones the thickness of a finger, then into tendrils no thicker than string, and finally into huge masses of fine root hairs. There were as many roots sprouting from her ankle as there were twigs on one of her wing-branches. Normal trees have as many roots below the ground as they have branches above it; apparently, Drae are the same way. It's no wonder they don't walk on top of the ground. They have no feet.

She put the tangle on the lowest step of the doorway, the roots twisting and grasping for purchase like an octopus on land, but she kept most of her weight on our hands as she pulled her other set of roots out of the ground. The ground sagged as she left it. There was a fairly large hole below the door when she finally had all her roots spread on the steps. She climbed them, still leaning mostly on us, and walked slowly to the nearest seat. Her roots left a trail of dirt on the floor.

She sat perfectly still as the Conductor called to the engine and the Train started again. Her wing-branches framed her in rattling twigs as we moved on. At the very next stop, the station in Sellendendra, she stood up and we helped her back off the train. Her roots made the ground ripple as if she was stepping into water. She walked away into the night without a backward glance.

We watched her go. When she disappeared in the dark, the Conductor called to the engine, thanked me politely for my help, and said goodnight. I went back to my compartment. Flishel was asleep already, as (of course) was the other passenger. No one else on the Train had noticed the Drae at all.

I still have no idea where the Drae was going, or why she decided to get there by Train. I'm just glad I had a late dinner and happened to be walking by at the right time. If I hadn't, neither the Conductor nor I would have met her, and she would have had a long way to walk.



* Technically, Drae have no gender, but they've made it known (somehow) that they prefer to be called "she." They do look more female than male, even if it's just because of the hair.

Kingdoms in the Snow

It snowed for most of the day, surrounding the Train in silent curtains of white flakes. A layer of white built up outside the compartment window. I could see the tiny crystals in it against the dark wood of the frame. The engine dripped, hot and iron-black in the middle of all the white, and snowflakes vanished on it in tiny puffs of steam.

We stopped at a few small villages - Tremel, Arn, Tackahoe, and two or three more whose names I've forgotten. Everyone in them was tucked away in their houses, sleeping or sitting quietly, looking out at the snow. It's the first snow of the year. By January, no one will even notice it anymore; the flakes on the ground and in the air will become as unremarkable as leaves in Summer. Today, though, the world stops to watch them. Everything is quiet. The sleeping passenger in our compartment wasn't the only one. Only one passenger got off the Train all day, wrapped in so many scarves that nothing was visible but a pair of gleaming yellow eyes. The bundled figure was walking away down the streets of Tremel, a lone silhouette in the empty whiteness, when the Train pulled out of the station. The smell of frost came in through the open door and lingered for half an hour.

A few miles past Tackahoe, there were snowflies in the snow. They looked a bit like tiny white moths. I couldn't see their faces or their tiny hands; I'd need a microscope even if they ever stayed still. They were barely visible even when they flew right up to the Train's windows, braving the raging heat that leaked through the panes of glass. I doubt they got anywhere near the engine. The salamanders on the roof, letting out curious little puffs of steam, must have seemed like enormous fire-breathing dragons.

No one is sure where snowflies come from. They are never seen before the first snowfall. Some people believe they are born then, that one water drop in a million freezes into a snowfly instead of a snowflake and takes on a tiny life of its own.

Snowflies live fast. A day lasts about a year for them. They live through nights that are whole Winters, when ice blooms and the world flourishes, and bleak daytime Summers when the sun drains the cold from the world. An exceptionally long-lived snowfly might see the passing of an entire week. They collect snowflakes, digging them out of the layers on the ground or catching in them midair. Some of them look for quite a while. No one knows why, but only certain snowflakes will do. They build castles with them. This is probably the first tribe of snowflies to appear this year; they will begin a new era, here at the dawn of time, and be remembered in myth and legend by their descendants.

Their castles are marvels of miniature architecture. Snowflies lock snowflakes together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, building them into walls and minarets and tall spires like icicles made of lace. The very thickest walls are thinner than my little finger, and they can withstand the strongest Winter gale. For their size, the snowflies' ice buildings are stronger than stone. The rooms are smaller than the ones in a doll's house.

The castles are more or less the same every year. Either the snowflies build them by instinct, or the basics of snowflake masonry are rediscovered each Winter.

By February, each castle will have become a palace, a monumental construction of a trillion tiny crystals. The snowflies will build an empire. Settlements will grow around the palace, little clusters of ice huts sprouting like mushrooms. A few snowflake empires have grown to cover whole hillsides. The farmers will harvest the frost every morning. Hunts will fly out after gargantuan field mice and the occasional terrifying shrew, waging ferocious battles in the tunnels beneath an inch of snow.

It's almost impossible to observe snowflies, as they're not much larger than snowflakes and move so fast they're practically invisible. Nearly everything we know about them is thanks to Brindle Soffmoggin, a scientist who once spent three weeks in the snow with a camera and a magnifying glass, studying the snowflies. They were curious about him at first (a mute, molten giant, lying motionless on the ground for years at a time), but started treating him like part of the landscape after a few hours. They harvested frost off of the mountain of his coat. Most people these days know Soffmoggin by his nickname, Snowfly Brindley.

In Spring, the world of the snowflies will come to an end. The days will grow longer and harsher. The castles will drip and collapse. The frost will become scarce and die out, the snow will stop falling, and empires that have stood for months will crumble and fall into anarchy. Every snowfly in the Railway Regions will be gone before May.

Next November, when the first snow falls, a new tribe of snowflies will appear and start history all over again.

The world, it is generally agreed, has been around a long time. It will probably be around for quite a while longer. Looking at the snowflies every year, though, I can't help but wonder how many there have been before it.

Golgoolian

One of the first places the Train stopped in October was Golgoolian, the huge and grimy city on the edge of the Great Shwamp. Nothing ever seems to stay clean there. The mist that comes off of the Shwamp oozes through the city, thick and brown, and leaves a coating of mud behind it. Smoke from chimneys goes up, curls back down again, and stains the buildings black. The whole city seems to attract dirt. The locals blame the wind.

Like Rampastula, Golgoolian is built on top of layers of itself. Each building in the city has two or three more underneath it. The mud has oozed in to fill the old rooms underground. Archaeologists have excavated some of them, digging as fast as they can while the ground sweats and sags in around them. The deepest ones they've found were little more than stone huts. Arrowheads fill the mud like fossilized fish.

Apart from the occasional archaeologist or basement spelunker, Golgoolian's underground is a blank to the people on the surface. No one goes down there. If they do, they don't talk about it. Three-quarters of the city is underground, and no one really knows what's in it. Every fantasy author in the Railway Regions has at least mentioned Golgoolian's underground; some of them seem to use it in every book they write.

Most of Golgoolian is stable now - the only buildings that still sink are the new ones at the edges and an unlucky few in the middle. No one knows why, but there are some buildings that won't stop sinking no matter how much architecture piles up underneath them. The Corkscrew Tower has at least fifty floors, probably more than that. Five of them are above ground. In the centuries since its foundations were laid, the building has never stopped or slowed its steady descent into the earth. The Earl of Mangrel and his family (one of many noble families in Golgoolian) abandon each floor when it starts to fill up with water and mushrooms, which happens about once every five years, and build another one on top to replace it. The tower tilts slightly every year. No floor is quite parallel with the one beneath it, hence the tower's name. It twists its way down into the ground like a segmented corkscrew of stone. It's anyone's guess how deep it goes.

The Corkscrew Tower is just one of many buildings that never solidified. Golgoolian is full of sinkhole gardens, little patches of ground which seem perfectly solid but eat anything built on top of them. Some are only fifteen feet wide. Buildings next to them have stood steady and even for decades; put a rock two feet from the foundations, though, and it will be swallowed up in a few years. Nothing stays in the sinkhole gardens but small plants. Even trees are too heavy. The gardens are little half-wild patches of solid bog in the middle of the city. They're filled with flowers; marsh-lilies raise their speckled blossoms above bluets and violets, crinkleweeds and moss of every kind. Crumpet creeper sprouts at the edges of the gardens, climbing the neighboring buildings and spreading its crusty orange flowers across walls and rooftops. Pitcher plants and whip-vines nibble at the legions of small flying things that spread from the Shwamp in the Summer. Venus flytraps lurk in the shade. Toads join them, one and only one in each garden. They don't multiply to fill the larger gardens; they just grow. The largest toad in Golgoolian is rumored to be the size of a cow.

Every sinkhole garden in the city once had something built on it. Most of them had several. In Golgoolian, if you give up after your first three houses sink, you're considered lacking in patience. It takes a long time to prove the existence of a sinkhole.

Even so, if it were any other building, the Mangrels would have given up on the Corkscrew Tower decades ago. Each floor only lasts about twenty years before it submerges and goes rotten. The tower has to be constantly rebuilt. It has cost the family a small fortune. They keep it, though, because it has made them a large fortune.

Purple pligma mushrooms will grow anywhere where there's more water than sunlight. They pop up in basements, caves, swamps, and places where it's just been cloudy for a week. Candy-stripe pligmas - a great delicacy in the Railway Regions - are pickier. As far as I know, they've only been found in four places in all of Hamjamser. The Corkscrew Tower is their favorite.

No one is actually allowed into the Corkscrew Tower except for the Mangrels, their servants, and a small army of pligma farmers. All I've seen are photographs of the inside. The mushrooms cover the floor of every underground room in forests of little red-and-white caps. It's like a garden of peppermints or tiny striped umbrellas. Half the candy-stripe mushrooms in Hamjamser come from the Corkscrew Tower, picked and packaged in its damp basements. The Mangrel family lives in the five floors above the ground. They've lived comfortably for generations by selling one small crate of mushrooms per week. All the basements of the tower used to be the elegant upper floors, so the dripping underground rooms are lined with floral wallpaper and carved molding. The water dripping down the walls gradually eats away at paint and varnish, eroding wood and revealing the bricks underneath, but it's obvious that the gray, dripping, fungus-coated rooms were once quite lovely. Large pieces of them still are. After all, there's no sense in letting a nice room go entirely to waste. When a floor sinks underground, its windows are removed and used in the construction of the next top floor. The holes are replaced with watertight seals. Any molding and paneling that can be pried off of the walls is used upstairs. The top floor is always a patchwork of new material and pieces of architecture from six floors down; a few murals and painted ceilings have been moved over a dozen times. The art of detachable architecture is thought to have begun with the Earls of Mangrel.

Below ground, the pligma farmers tend and pick the mushrooms from metal walkways bolted into the stone walls of the tower. Most of the old floors are still there; they're where the pligmas grow. After all these years under the soggy ground, though, the wood is about as solid as old cheese. Anyone who stepped on it would go straight to the bottom of the tower (wherever that is). Water seeps in constantly through the walls. There are holes punched in every floor for the tangles of ancient, corroded pipes that keep the rooms from filling up. Mushrooms grow from the rusty valves. Mud, water, and stranger things are pumped up from the bowels of the tower and dumped into the Shwamp. Children sit by the end of the pipe and try to catch the things that come out of it. No one bothers getting pets from outside the city. The more enthusiastic children have rows of jars and fishbowls in their bedrooms, full of strange creatures from below the ground, aquatic centipedes and spider-frogs and axolotls and amphibious eels and a hundred other things no one's bothered to name. This is the Great Shwamp, after all. Aquatic strangeness is just part of life.

Valestrina

The Train had to stop for almost an hour today, in the middle of nowhere, because there was a valestrina on the tracks.

Valestrini are widely considered to be one of the seven most beautiful birds in Hamjamser. (No one seems to be able to agree on which is the most beautiful of all, but the top seven are always the same.) They look a bit like a cross between a peacock and an ostrich. Some believe that's exactly what they are. It's rare to see a valestrina anywhere colder than Clam-Porkle, much less in the Railway Regions during Winter, so half the passengers in the Train tried to get out and have a look at it. After five minutes, the Train was blocked as much by its own passengers as by the valestrina. Several people climbed onto the roof. (One of them was me - I like to be up high, out of the crowd. It's surprisingly easy to get onto roofs with a little practice.)

Every type of feather in existence can be found somewhere on a valestrina. They have rather more feathers than can really fit on a single bird, actually, and they lose them constantly. Predators can track the birds by the trail of feathers they leave behind them. (Not many predators bother with valestrini, though, as they kick like mules and are mostly fluff.) The colors vary from bird to bird - black and white, violet, a peacock's blue and green, or just about anything else. This one was mostly coppery orange. It had a peacock's crown on its head, a scarlet crest all the way down its long and elegant neck, and pink wattles so long they looked like a catfish's whiskers. Round-edged feathers like copper pennies covered its neck and breast. Its flight feathers - such as they were - were tipped with sapphire blue. (Valestrini are quite incapable of flight, though not all of them realize it.) Thick golden feathers covered the top half of its legs; past that, its feet were a vivid pink, and as scaly as a velociraptor's. Its tail was a magnificent sheaf of feathers, like a bouquet of the feathers from the tails of a dozen birds. There were woodpecker stripes in black and copper, the speckled rectangles of a mockingbird (blue and gold instead of gray and white), quetzal plumes almost eight feet long, the fluffy curls of an ostrich, and about fifty peacock eyespots in every shade of gold and copper and jeweled blue. It spread it while we were watching - just once - and there was a sigh of awe from everyone on and around the Train. It was like watching every flower in Melligan bloom at once. Nothing in the world has a tail like a valestrina's.

After a while, it became clear that the bird was not planning to move anytime soon, so a few salamander keepers went out to shoo it off the tracks. The valestrina watched them suspiciously. When they got within ten feet of it, it began to leap up and down and scream as if it was being murdered. Valestrini may have beautiful feathers, but their voices are somewhat less melodious than a crow's. Brilliant feathers flew everywhere. The salamander keepers backed off, alarmed; the valestrina let out a few more ghastly squawks, fluffed its feathers indignantly, and settled back down again.

The same thing happened whenever anyone got near it. The best place on the mountain, apparently, was right in the middle of the tracks, and no one else was allowed there. Eventually, people started settling in, as the valestrina showed no interest in moving two feet over and getting out of the Train's way. Picnic blankets sprouted around the Train. I took about twenty sketches and photographs of the valestrina. I may try to draw or paint it someday, but I doubt I could ever really do it justice.

Mostly, everyone just sat and watched the bird. It made little hiccuping noises. It bobbed its head like a chicken and scratched at its feathers, which fell out. It was still the most beautiful thing on the mountain.

After an hour of this, the valestrina seemed to decide that it had been stared at enough for one day, or that it was bored, or that it actually preferred that patch of ground over there, or something. I don't know. For whatever reason, it got up and poked its lovely way into the woods. Everyone watched it go.

There was a moment of perfect silence.

Then half the people on the ground ran to pick up one of the dropped feathers, and the other half started talking all at once, and the Train workers started shouting to each other, and the engine roared as it warmed up again, and there was all the usual noise and chaos that happens every time the Train leaves a place. It was like waking up from a dream. In fifteen minutes, everyone was back on board, and we were rolling along as if nothing unusual had happened. The rest of the day was perfectly ordinary. Still, whenever anyone mentioned the valestrina, all conversations would stop, and we would stare blindly at nothing in particular, remembering sunlight on feathers the color of copper and sapphire and gold.

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.