The Vertebral Causeway

A few days after leaving Garnet and Hanagrishel, we crested a dune and saw a line of enormous rectangles on the horizon, like a row of crooked molars. Mogen and I, having both been in the Golden Desert for only a few months each, were baffled as to what they were. Karlishek was able to illuminate us.

This part of the Golden Desert - or, rather, the part we could see on the horizon - used to be full of volcanic activity. As a result, it's long been more black and gray than gold. Creminda Zimmergoggle, one of the earliest people to explore the area and write anything down about it, reported "a veritable arboretum of pumice and obsidian. The trees are strange of shape, all formed of black glass, growing from mountains of petrified sponge." *

Since then, nearly all the volcanoes have gone extinct. Now there are earthquakes instead. All but a few of Zimmergoggle's glass trees have been shattered, and the land is covered with their pieces. Razor-edged shards of black glass stretch to the horizon. It's impossible to travel across them in anything less than chain mail. Even that is dangerous; the shards shift in the frequent earthquakes, sliding across each other like the blades of enormous scissors. The plants there are all very short.

The only way most travelers can cross the shattered plain is by the Vertebral Causeway, a trail of massive stone blocks placed there during the reign of the eleventh Farak of Sithera. That was what we'd seen on the horizon.

By the time we'd crossed the valley ahead of us (a small, charming one full of button lilies, whose shrine was a stone hyena with flowers between its teeth) and reached the top of the next dune, geography had shifted, and the Vertebral Causeway was no longer visible. I'm still not certain whether or not I imagined the screech of shifting glass shards in the distance. It all sounds fascinating, but to be quite honest, the shattered plain is one part of the Golden Desert I don't mind not having traveled through in person.

Its history, with which Karlishek continued to regale us as we traveled, is equally fascinating.

The Causeway was designed (like much of Sithera's most famous architecture) by the legendary Femeral San Samara, who - perhaps as a result of building in a region mostly comprised of shifting sand - favored massive, immovable stone blocks in all of their architecture. Their design for the Sithera Public Library required the invention of entirely new methods of construction. The blocks used for the foundation (which is, incidentally, also the first two stories of the building) were too large to be lifted by any known mechanism at the time. In an historic move, San Samara hired a team of dimensimancers, who - rather than physically lifting the stones into their intended locations - were able to simply persuade the geography of the construction site that they were already there. The technique (which came be known as Lumakuma, or Blockwalking) is used in many countries today; it rarely works on smaller stones, but it's become the favored method for moving large ones.

This was the technique used to build the Vertebral Causeway. The scale renders it impossible to determine a precise count of the blocks that make up the Causeway, but there are at least a hundred of them. Each one is the size of a small mansion. The shifting glass shards around their bases continue to scratch and chip at the stone, but travelers on top of the Causeway can cross at a safe distance from the chaos. The blocks shift in every earthquake; maintaining a perfectly even trail would be practically impossible. Instead, they are connected by rope ladders, so that travelers can climb from one block to the next.

We couldn't make out any of this detail from our distance, of course, nor the enormous Halsi characters carved into each block. According to legend, San Samara's original proposal for the Causeway claimed that when completed, the characters would spell out a poem in praise of the eleventh Farak's visionary approach to transportation planning. The eleventh Farak was thus understandably displeased when, upon completion, the blocks proved to instead spell out a proposal of marriage to San Samara's sweetheart. The sweetheart in question was hardly more pleased than the Farak; she reportedly said, "I told you to stop building monuments at me, the murals were bad enough, what in the world were you thinking" and broke up with the architect on the spot. San Samara, always the opportunist, took the design for the sixteen-story mansion they'd been planning to build for her and instead offered it to the Farak by way of apology. The Farak was apparently mollified enough to hire San Samara for several more projects, but monitored the construction much more closely from then on.

Geography being what it is, the blocks of the Causeway change position often, and the marriage proposal was only legible for a day or two (which was probably for the best). These days, the blocks most often spell gibberish. There are a handful of pilgrims who walk the Causeway routinely and record every character as they go, hoping that if they just pay attention, the blocks will someday line up to send them a message from geography itself. Geography has, thus far, sent them little more than the occasional rhyming nonsense couplet and (by a few dubiously reliable reports) one or two dirty limericks.

Opinion is, as usual, divided as to whether this means that the forces of nature have no interest in communication, or that they simply enjoy confusing people. Neither possibility offers much hope that they'll provide a clear answer any time soon. Still, it's reassuring to know that, if they do, someone will be there to read it.

---

*This was back when pumice was still believed to be the fossils of prehistoric sea sponges. The Volcano Dragon has, thankfully, since managed to correct this misconception.

Creeping Hieroglyphs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Postbird's Note

Mr. Tangelo has asked the Postbird service to extend his deepest apologies for his lack of correspondence this month. He is currently traveling through a region of the Golden Desert where the pipe crawlers have caught some sort of rare electrical disease, causing the normally tidy workings of their crystal brains to degenerate into self-replicating gibberish. Due to the nature of the area, this disease has spread to the town's writing as well. Anyone attempting to read there at the moment will find only a constantly shifting soup of random symbols. A team of expert linguist-philosophers has been dispatched from Karkafel, but it will likely take them several weeks to find their way to the town and get its words back in order; due to the impossibility of writing anything until then, Mr. Tangelo plans to pick up his pen and begin his annual month of correspondence in July, rather than in June. He apologizes for any inconvenience and wishes everyone the best.

Market Street, Day 5: the Lucky Bungler

Kekehruy Square is one of several small open spaces that are often connected to Market Street. Today, it was the site of a three-tower clockboard tournament.

Clockboard is generally considered the most elaborate board game in Hamjamser. Each board is unique, laid out to serve the personal strategy of its creator, or simply to make the game work the way they think it should.* People often say that a clockboard looks like a chessboard; this is true, in the same way that a city looks like a brick. Clockboard uses chessboard as a building material. There are multiple layers of black-and-white squares - checkered terraces, spiral walkways, bridges, rotundas, and the checkered towers by which the game is ranked.** The more adventurous clockboards look like mad model cities in harlequin dress. Each board contains some amount of clockwork as well. At the very least, there's a clock in the board somewhere; it usually has three or more hands, only one of which has anything to do with time. The functions of the others vary from board to board. Advanced boards also include clockwork that changes the game, shifting and rotating sections or dropping pieces down hidden chutes to bring them closer or farther from wherever they're trying to go. Half of playing clockboard is anticipating your opponent's moves; the other half is anticipating the moves of the board.

I've never quite been able to figure out three-tower clockboard. It's possible that I could if I took the time, but so far, my experience is limited to the single-tower variety.

This tournament was in its fourth day, so most of the players were seasoned experts. The beginners have been out of the running since Friday. I couldn't understand half of what was going on. The tournament seemed to be going well; nothing particularly exciting was happening, but the players and the audience were interested. Then Spud showed up.

No one has ever managed to find out Spud's last name - or, for that matter, anything else about him. His response to every question is usually something like, "yes, I'm Spud. Where are the doughnuts?" He shows up occasionally at tournaments (some say he's drawn to large concentrations of board games) and usually doubles the size of the audience once word gets around.

He had neglected to bring a clockboard of his own. This was a requirement for the tournament. It's customary, especially at a tournament, for a pair of clockboard players to play pairs of games - one on each player's board. It wouldn't be fair otherwise. A well-built clockboard gives its creator a significant advantage. If one player wins both of the first pair of games, he or she is the winner; if the first pair is a tie, the players move on to a second pair of games. This continues until one player or the other wins both games in a pair.

It often takes a while for this to happen; the Duchesses of Shimrick and Marbelsack once continued a single match of clockboard for almost ninety years. They met every day to play it over lunch. The match was said to have consisted of four thousand and thirty-six separate games (two thousand and eighteen on each board), and it only ended when the Duchess of Shimrick died of such extreme old age that everyone had lost count. The Duchess of Marbelsack is said to have been quite irritated at her timing, as she was winning the current round. It was just like Shimrick, she said, to die at such a contrary moment.

Fortunately for Spud, one of the other contestants had to drop out at the last minute to have a baby. As she left with a doctor and her husband (who looked by far the most nervous of the three), she gave Spud permission to borrow her board, with the clear understanding that she would kill him if anything happened to it. He nodded vaguely, thanked her, and waved as she left.

He proceeded to win every game he played. This is what always happens. Spud has been the world champion of clockboard - and several other games - for years, despite his apparent lack of any strategy whatsoever. I certainly couldn't find any when I watched him play. He moved his pieces seemingly at random; occasionally, he had to ask his opponent what one of them was.*** Several of his opponents appeared to be winning at first, taking full advantage of mistakes a novice player could have avoided, but his luck always changed by the end of the game. Player after expert player saw their detailed strategies overcome by what looked like randomness and sheer luck.

Board game enthusiasts have argued about Spud for years. A third of them think he's a genius who's impossibly good at hiding it; another third think he's an idiot who's impossibly lucky. The remaining third just think he's cheating. If he is, no one has ever managed to catch him at it. Experienced players who've matched wits with Spud - if wits have anything to do with it - are usually certain he's not cheating. What exactly he is doing, they don't know. They just wish they knew how to do it themselves.

Someone - no one remembers who - once called him the Lucky Bungler. The name has stuck. Clockboard players speak of Spud the Lucky Bungler in a tone of voice normally reserved for only the most insane emperors.

The tournament had narrowed down to the last eight players, seven of which were looking rather nervous, when Spud simply got up and wandered off for no apparent reason. Everyone waited for a while to see if he'd come back. In a game that can take years to complete, players quickly learn patience.

He never returned. After a few hours, during which most of the players mobbed the surrounding shops for food and news of Spud's disappearance, the tournament continued without him. The winner and runners-up continued to play well, though they all looked a bit shaken when accepting their checkered clockwork trophies at the end.

I heard later that Spud had shown up at a Go tournament that happened to be taking place simultaneously on the other side of the lake. He won, of course. The city's reigning Go champion, an ancient and brilliant woman named Trihakna Start, reportedly asked him to marry her on the spot. Accounts vary as to what he replied. On his last comment, however, everyone agrees. When asked about his miraculous success at the tournament, Spud simply blinked and replied, "tournament? I thought this was a yard sale."

And then he left.

* For many serious players of board games, the object is simply to play as well as possible; if a game goes well, it doesn't matter who actually wins. An elegant strategy is often all the more satisfying if your opponent surprises you with it.

** Three-tower clockboard is the most complex variety commonly played; double- and single-tower clockboard are more common. I've heard that the game goes up to seven towers, but I've never even seen a board with more than four. Beyond three, it gets so complicated that you might as well try to predict next year's weather as your opponent's next move.****

*** Clockboard has seventeen basic pieces per player, nearly three times as many as in chess. Each piece has its own unique abilities, and advanced players of the game often invent their own.

**** Unless, that is, you're a Weather Dragon. In that case, the weather is easy to predict, as you're the one making it.

Shapeshifters

Twokk, as it turns out, is mostly surrounded by farmland. I suppose most towns are. They had run out of things to paint - the need for artists tends to be limited in places this small - so I moved on this morning. The cook of the Moons and Magpie gave me half a dozen different kinds of food when I left, all of them made of locusts.* She says they'll last for months. I believe her.

The road out of town (an actual road, not one of the treacherous paths of the Scalps) winds through fields of cotton. The vegetable lambs are still young at this time of year. They sit curled on top of their stalks, cradled by leaves, pink skin still showing through their first layer of cotton wool. The fields are full of the sound of tiny bleating.

Most people are fairly sure that the vegetable lambs were created by shapeshifters. Not all hybrids of plants and animals were shifter-made, of course. Though no one can be entirely sure, tubermoles probably came into existence the normal way (whatever that happens to be), as did the enigmatic Greenlings and the trapper vines with their subterranean stomachs. Most of them are closer to one side or the other, though. Greenlings and trapper vines are mostly animal; they just happen to be capable of photosynthesis. Tubermoles are basically roots with digging claws.

The vegetable lamb, though, is an even division of plant and animal: a little sheep on a stalk. That rarely happens when shapeshifters aren't involved. No one is sure how many of the living things in Hamjamser were originally created by shapeshifters. The meatroots that feed the floating cities** certainly were; their creator's name was Sashrem. Tesra Sashrem, some call her - a craftswoman who worked in flesh and bone. There are statues to her on most of the floating cities, depicted as whatever species she happened to look like at the time each sculptor met her. She also created coal-nuts and the dirigible octopus. She supposedly said that sea-spackle, silt-crabs, and the surprisingly popular memory leeches were also created by shapeshifters, though she respected their privacy too much to mention their names.

She was unusual. It's rare to meet a shapeshifter and know it. Nearly all of them stay hidden, anonymous, using their extraordinary abilities to appear completely ordinary.

Most of Hamjamser's disguised people have a perfectly innocent reason to hide themselves, of course. Vancians consider faces to be private. Visitors to Samrath Kazi used to be required to wear a mask if they didn't meet the town's standards of beauty.*** Cloisterers hide their faces for religious reasons. Aggravarns (sometimes called the Worms that Walk) occasionally cause vomiting in people who are scared of worms; they usually feel just awful about this, so they wear coats over their collective bodies when they go outside, recognizable only by the faint squishing noise when they walk. Some troglodytes simply sunburn easily. Shapeshifters have a similar but different reason: they don't want the attention.

Like anyone with rare and exceptional abilities, shapeshifters tend to become instantly famous whenever and wherever they reveal themselves. Everyone is curious about them. Everyone wants to find out more about them, to understand how they work, often to ask them for help. Even ordinary conversations with shapeshifters can be awkward; no matter how good your intentions, it's almost impossible to forget that they've built themselves from scratch. The mind has a tendency to dwell on how they must have sculpted their bones, strung their muscles, tailored their skin, wired their nerves... If, that is, they even need nerves. People with near-perfect control of every cell of their bodies (or whatever they prefer to use instead of cells) have little need for anything as inefficient as a nervous system.

This is why many people are somewhat uncomfortable around shapeshifters. Of course, being basically sensible, most inhabitants of Hamjamser think nothing of it after a few days; they have no qualms about eating dinner with someone who uses a homemade stomach and could grow their own silverware from their fingernails. The shapeshifters answer the same questions that everyone asks them constantly over the years of their unending lives, smiling patiently, and all is well.

Still, there are always a few people who can't get used to shapeshifters, and even more who are just annoyingly curious. This is why most shapeshifters have stayed in disguise for the last few centuries. Their existence is fairly common knowledge; most people have heard of them, if only as a myth. Individual shapeshifters, though, prefer to stay anonymous. All we see is their handiwork.

Many village healers are actually shapeshifters. (The villagers are usually polite enough to avoid finding out.) Being able to manipulate individual cells - their own and, with far more difficulty, those of others - shapeshifters have healing abilities far beyond anyone else's. Most of what we know about biology was discovered by shapeshifters; they've seen it, or sensed it, firsthand. They build their own cells, defend themselves against diseases, puzzle out the complex mechanics of reproduction (and often design more convenient systems of their own). Medicine would be very different without their vast and microscopic experience.

Their creations have changed the world just as much. Life on the floating cities would be impossible without the meatroot; even if there was room for pastures in the vast machinery of the cities, the weight of a whole city's livestock would make them too heavy to float. Without memory leeches, who provide brains in exchange for blood, the mental abilities of abacus thinkers and omniglots would be equally impossible.

Then, of course, there are their descendants. About one person in sixteen has some sort of obvious quirk inherited from a shapeshifting ancestor, however distant. Some call it the Shapeshifter's Curse. Many of its apparently random manifestations certainly seem like curses - there are tails that never stop growing, hearts that play hide-and-seek with doctors, and a bizarrely common variation that causes the random growth of extra teeth.**** It's harmless most of the time, though. Many people even consider it a gift. It also shows itself in unexpected wings, in perfect immune systems, in shifting kaleidoscope skin, in bodies that heal without scars when anyone else would die - sometimes even in immortality. Many inheritors of the Shapeshifter's Curse never age past a certain point. I've met people who have been thirty (physically, at least) for hundreds of years.*****

My own variation of the Curse has been useful, however slow and uncontrolled - a constant, gradual change that always seems to know what I'm going to need, wherever I find myself. In the Winter, I grow fur; in the swamp, I once grew gills. It's possible that the legends about the wandering of the Cursed are true, and I might have settled down in one place if I had a body that could settle down in one shape. I don't know. Without shapeshifters, though, I'm sure I'd be quite a different person.

Without shapeshifters, you probably wouldn't be reading this letter.

* Swarms of locusts come through Twokk occasionally, though it might be more correct to say that the town comes through them. The insatiable insects normally eat everything in sight. They're probably surprised when Twokk eats them instead.

** Another combination of plant and animal, by the way. The meatroots are enormous, turnips the size of mountains with roots of solid steak.

*** This is not the case now, of course, as the town no longer exists.

**** I have several myself. There are rumors of people who have even grown teeth on their eyeballs, but I suspect that this is hyperbole.

***** Whether they see it as a blessing or a curse after all that time depends heavily on the person.

Bestiary of Nowhere

Like practically every town of any size in Sedge, Crucible is built by the River Truckle. As the town is also the source of the molten River Flare, it contains one of the strangest river-meets in the world. Water and iron do not mix well. For the length of the town, the Truckle flows underground.

Before Crucible was built, the molten metal of the Flare simply flowed into the Truckle, solidifying as soon as it hit the water. More metal then flowed across the solid part and solidified farther out. Over the course of centuries, a thick shelf of iron gradually formed across the Truckle, spreading horizontally but never coming more than a few inches below the surface. The farthest edge is just over halfway to the far bank. Boats on the river are careful to skirt around it, or they risk having their hulls sliced in half at the waterline.

Most of the iron doesn't reach the Shelf these days, of course; the Flare has always flown sluggishly, and the smiths now siphon off nearly all of it before it reaches the Truckle. People have settled on the Shelf. They've built houses on the foot-thick sheet of iron and drilled holes to pull up water and fish. Crucible may be the only place in Hamjamser where people can live on top of a river and still have to dig wells.

I spent most of the day wandering through the streets of the Shelf. The heat on Crucible's central hill is a bit much to endure for more than a day at a time. The Shelf is much quieter than the hill. The edges are full of docks, some wooden, some iron. Like the docks in any town, they're backed by a forest of cranes for the loading and unloading of ships. The cranes are all anchored in the riverbed, of course. The Shelf wouldn't hold that much weight. There are rust-colored fish in the water, possibly relatives of the ones that live beneath the Earthmover in Cormilack. They eat the rust that flakes from the bottom of the Shelf. If they didn't, half the length of the Truckle would be red by now.

Now that it's no longer being replenished from above, the Shelf will probably rust away to nothing someday and drop its load of docks and buildings into the river. No one seems particularly concerned about it.

The buildings of the Shelf are covered with carved plants and animals. There seemed to be at least one on every wall. I had noticed a few of them up on the hill, but the thickness of the cloud and the dim firelight make them all look like soot-clad gargoyles. (If there were any real gargoyles, they were remarkably well-camouflaged.) The ones here were clean; in the slanting morning light, some of them were even lit by the sun. It should have been easy to identify them. I didn't recognize a single one. There were serpent-birds with eleven wings, skeleton fish with lanterns hung in their empty ribcages, tortoises with the legs of crabs beneath their spiny shells, creatures with all manner of multiple heads and mismatched limbs. Several seemed to be strange combinations of animal and plant. Even among those, there were none I recognized - not a single ordinary trapper vine or vegetable lamb in sight. These were fanged lilies and web-footed potatoes and cats with flowering whiskers.

As I was puzzling over this, I was stopped by a smith near the docks; he could tell, apparently, that I was an artist. He asked me what colors I had. As it happened, I still had some blue paint from the Gray Coast, where the villagers gave me a whole bucket of cockleworms before I left. Blue is apparently quite a novelty here. It's hard to find any color but red. Farmers bring the inedible stalks of corn and carrots into town along with their crops; leaves and stems don't pick up so much color from the rusty soil. People buy them for the green, keeping them in buckets of water as if they were flowers. All the flowers here are red.

When I told the smith I had blue, he was delighted. He asked me to paint his sign for him. Aside from portraiture, this is one of the jobs I get most often; I've painted one sign or another in half the towns I've visited. Many of them weren't even in languages I could read. I accepted, of course, and prepared to use up most of my remaining blue.

The smith's name was Dinbar Hammergavel. It was printed on his sign in peeling red paint, and he was polite enough to introduce himself as well. He was a thickset reptile with scales like river pebbles. His arms and chest were covered with shiny spots of metal, spatters that had cooled and fused to his body. He seemed to have a second coat of black and silver scales over his natural red ones. Apparently, his scales are thick enough to keep the hot metal from burning him, as it would anyone less armored.

He didn't seem to think much of the smiths by the Flare. Anyone, he said, could work metal that kept itself hot and let you shape it like wax. It took a true smith, one who worked with hammer and bellows, to heat it just enough and no further.

I was lucky enough to get to see what he meant. He came to work outside as I painted, saying that he liked to stand in the sun before it rose above Crucible's perpetual smoke. I had no idea what he was making. It started as a block of iron. He pounded it flat, then indented the surface with a complex pattern of holes and grooves, working with a progression of steadily smaller hammers and chisels. The ones at the end were hardly bigger than upholstery nails. In the end, the thing looked as if it had been made in a machine. You could have used the sides as straightedges.

It was, he said, a metaphorical flange for the Answer Machine in Miggle-Meezel. The machine has a tendency to catch the flanges with its paradox pistons and break them. He makes replacements when they're needed and has his apprentice bring them to Truckle Stop. Miggle-Meezel stops over Truckle Stop occasionally to pick up pipe crawlers from Tesra Malerian; his apprentice waits for the airship to come down from the floating city and brings the flanges up with it. Tesser Hammergavel rarely delivers themself these days. He is, he said, getting too old to make the trip, and his apprentice still finds it exciting.

I asked if it wasn't dangerous for the apprentice to travel alone. I've had relatively little trouble myself, but there's no telling when a traveler might run into bandits or cathomars or a nastier-than-usual troll. The smith laughed for a good half-minute at that. Apparently, his apprentice takes in wounded alligators that wash up on the Shelf; several, once healed, have decided to remain with her. They follow her everywhere. What few bandits there are on the river road have learned very quickly not to trouble her.

"Besides, she's got a lad there," he said, grinning. "Apprentice to a gear-cutter in the floating city. Reason enough to give her a little time to herself. Anyone's guess whether he'll convince her to stay in Miggle-Meezel or she'll convince him to come here. The other apprentices have been laying bets on the two of them for years. Personally, my money's on Serilla. A girl who can beat an alligator back to health isn't one to give up easily. I just hope she waits to bring him back until he's finished his apprenticeship. We could use another gear-cutter in Crucible."

Later, I asked about the creatures on the buildings. Apparently, the people of Crucible (most of them, anyway) disapprove of representations of plants and animals. This is not a particularly rare opinion. The mesmerizing geometric artwork of Thrass Kaffa and Hestamar is a result of this belief, as is the elaborate calligraphy of the Talixa Valley.* Quite a lot of people disapprove of copying the work of other artists, and many believe that the creator of the world - whoever they consider that to be - should be given special respect in this matter. Depictions of plants, animals, rocks, clouds, and anything else not made by people are strictly forbidden. Needless to say, I won't be painting any portraits in this town, unless they're of buildings.

As a result, the only creatures available to Crucible's artists are the ones they make up. No dragons, no chimaeras, no doorknob gremlins; the only creatures you'll find in Crucible are imaginary. Sculptors and painters are judged here by their ability to depict unreality. They restrict their work to beasts that don't exist - preferably ones that couldn't possibly exist, just to be safe. You never know what explorers are going to find.**

This is why the buildings teem with unidentifiable creatures. Happily, Tesser Hammergavel was able to identify quite a lot of them for me. The serpent-bird is a Frenible Tepiary; the tortoise-crab, a Chelimincer; the skeleton fish, a Garnet-Tailed Lissel. The oak-tree squid that shows up several times in the rafters of the Flue is a Hastadendraflack, commonly attributed to the Lady Pyrafax. The snail-shelled bulldogs are Pemerines, the birds with butter-knife feathers are Tallimonians, the feathered wasps with peacock-tail stingers are Claridots, and the snake with a head on both ends is an Ouroboruo.*** Even Crucible's flag is its own invention. The town's emblem is the Carrifrock, a plant that grows upside-down with its fruit buried and its perpetually flaming roots in the air. It's fitting for the town. Their harvest comes from the ground, produced by flame, and there's more water in the air than in the river.

The most popular artists here are the ones that make up the best impossible things. I wasn't surprised to hear that many of them had come from elsewhere; there's no shortage of inventors of the impossible in Hamjamser, both the drawn and the written, and it's rare to find places that appreciate them so completely. I knew most of the ones Tesser Hammergavel named. Ramer Oswelt - writer, illustrator, and beast-maker extraordinaire - was quite well-loved here. According to the smith, the town holds several hundred of his creations, copied many times in wood and iron and stone. The Chelimincer and Frenible Tepiary are among them. Oswelt's original sketches are in the town's fireproof museum, as are several paintings by Elva Ursunorn and the legendary (some say the mad) Mynorbious Chesho. Rae Drawdle and Carlis Rowell, writers of surprisingly sensible nonsense poetry, also spent several years each in Crucible. There are several of their impossible beasts on the buildings around the Hammergavel smithy. Many of them, according to the smith, have the poems from which they came carved into the walls beneath them. I'll have to go look for them when I have time.



* Talixan calligraphers are masters of not-quite-representational art. They will not paint a horse. They may paint a glyph that captures the essence of a horse, all its speed and grace and elegant strength, but it would have none of the features of a horse. Where are its hooves? they would ask you. Where is its eye, its tail, its snorting nose? Do you see them in these brushstrokes? No? Then how could this be a horse? It has no part of a horse within it. Many stubborn people have debated with the calligraphers of Talixa over this, and to the best of my knowledge, none of them have ever found an answer to that question.

** The discovery of the aerobatic frogs on the floating islands of Salyovemit, nearly a century after their invention by the decidedly earthbound Herbert G. Welleger, goes to prove that either the impossible is a lot more possible than it originally sounds, or science fiction authors know a lot more than they let on. I don't know which is more likely.

*** I thought this one was skirting dangerously close to reality, but apparently the fact that it has two heads and no tail to bite with them was enough to let the artist get away with it.

The Untranslatable City

Most of my time in Tetravania (the country) I spent in Tetravania (the city). It's a strange place - stranger than the rest of Tetravania, if possible. The city seems to concentrate all the confusion generated by the entire country. The streets are full of musicians singing nonsense songs. Professional riddle-makers gamble with passersby, continuing the age-old riddle game in a slightly more profitable variation. The riddle-makers almost always win, of course - the ones that don't quickly go out of business - and fill the pockets in their hats with brass carolmarks and silver dringles. (The dringle is Tetravania's moebius coin, famous throughout the world for having only one side.) Perfectly respectable buildings occasionally decide to spend a day or two upside-down. The ones that don't lean out over the streets, close enough at the top to step from one house to the next; it's a popular saying that in Tetravania, sweethearts on opposite sides of the street can kiss each other without leaving their houses. Many people travel by rooftop alone, finding the slanted peaks and gables easier to navigate than the labyrinthine streets below.

The city of Tetravania is built on the side of a mountain. There's a ship grounded on the Southern slope. No one knows how it got there - or, equally likely, they do and just weren't telling me. It's hard to get information in Tetravania. If people don't think the truth is interesting enough, they make up something better.

It's easy to tell how old the ship is, though. It's got the light, bamboo-framed sails of a carnelian silk riverboat - or would, if the sails weren't long gone. Carnelian silk was only used in sails for three and a half years, the exact length of the crenelated weevil's incubation period; after those three and a half years, all the eggs that had been spun into the silk hatched, and the weevils ate the sails in a matter of weeks. River trade did not do well that year. The people with upholstery or clothing made of carnelian silk weren't too happy either. People in Tetravania still wear carnelian silk, but only in sashes; the weevils are quite pretty, with iridescent exoskeletons so knobbly that they seem to be encrusted with pearls. They're worn like living jewelry. Of course, everyone who wears them makes sure the rest of their clothing is completely inedible.

The peak of the mountain, perpetually hidden by high-altitude clouds, is commonly thought to be the highest point in Hamjamser - though no one's bothered to actually measure. (Mount Moler is not the highest mountain, just the most beautiful.) Like everything in Tetravania, though, that could be just a myth that's more interesting than fact.

I speak fairly good Theskerel, but the Tetravanian version of the language is like nothing I've ever heard. They speak entirely in metaphors and figures of speech. Words seem to have no literal meanings at all. I had a conversation with a large, fluffy samoval one day about the relationship between barnacles and plaid. The conversation ended when he handed me a large enameled fish, beaming as if I'd made his day, and left. I still have no idea what he thought I said.

The restaurants and cafes claim to serve only one thing each. I went to the Cafe Mastraflan one morning and was handed a menu containing exactly one word: "Raspberry." The cafe had the usual assortment of food and drinks.* Not a raspberry in the building. I tried to signal that I wanted a glyph muffin and coffee for breakfast, but no one cares what you point at in Tetravania. The waiter said, "yes, yes, raspberry," and left. Presumably, the Tetravanians have some sort of code to indicate what they want to order - or maybe they just don't care. I can never tell. My breakfast, when it came, was a miniature loaf of artichoke bread and a glass of green lemonade with whipped cream. There was not a raspberry in sight. It wasn't what I ordered - or, at least, what I thought I ordered - but it was surprisingly good.

I had some trouble getting to the cafe the next day, as there was a flock of stone sheep on the steps. the sheep are one of the many mysteries in Tetravania. They're only barely sheep - polished stone balls with little pillar legs and the carved suggestions of faces. If they were larger, people would probably call them elephants; smaller, and they'd be capybaras. They are sheep-sized, though, and therefore sheep. They move at night - or, at least, are in different places every morning. No one has ever actually seen them move. The most common theory is that they graze on the city's paving stones and move to new ones every day.

I don't know. It would make as much sense as anything else in the city.



* The cafes in Tetravania serve more or less the same sorts of things as cafes anywhere - coffee, pastries, experimental pies and pasta - though the selection and color of any given thing is likely to change from day to day. My theory is that the cafe owners have some sort of secret code that they use to communicate with each other. Every morning, Magdar Galordi of the Cafe Mastraflan walks over to the Cafe Venogoral** to look at the pastries. If there are scones on sale, it means that one of Tetravania's many impromptu street-barricading groups is at work again. Strawberry scones mean the Order of the Detour; walnuts mean the Society of Walking Flowerpots - unless, that is, the muffins have blueberries, in which case the scones refer not to barricaders, but to pastry locusts or snatch-ravens or yesterday's weather.

This is probably entirely in my imagination, but it's the sort of thing one starts thinking after a few weeks in Tetravania.

**Mastraflan means "by the Ocean." The cafe, like the rest of the city of Tetravania, is halfway up a mountain. Venogoral means "counterclockwise." I have no idea why.

Tetravania

After leaving the Railway Regions, I spent several months last year lost in Tetravania. It's easy to get lost there. It took me almost a month to find someone who would even tell me I was in Tetravania; everyone else only gave me cryptic answers when I asked.

This, of course, was itself a fairly good indication of where I was. No one is as dedicated to confusion as the Tetravanians.

Tetravania is the capital city of Tetravania, one of the four Kingdoms and Duchies that make up the country of Tetravania.* The city shares the name with fifteen other towns and villages in Tetravania. It is centered around the palace, or Tetravania, in which live the ruling family, the Tetravanians. The current Baroness is Tetravania Tetravanian IV. The Tetravanians apparently have no trouble keeping all this straight, though they enjoy confusing tourists.**

The streets of Tetravania (the city) are all narrow, twisted corridors that seem to lead only back to themselves. They break into staircases at random intervals. The cart mules like to take them at high speeds, clattering and whooping all the way down. The mules are very loud in Tetravania. They claim to be purebred - nothing but mules for the last fifty generations - but I suspect there's some llama in there. I've never met a mule who enjoyed hills so much.

The street signs are weathered to the point of illegibility, and no one seems interested in fixing them. There are hundreds of streets, but only about fifteen street names in the city; if you want to find anything, you have to learn the difference between Scatterbell Street, Scatterbell Road, Scatterbell half-alley, and so on. Half the people don't bother with addresses anyway; instead, they'll tell you a building is "between its neighbors," or "the quintessence of stability," or "behind a door and beneath a chimney." The buildings themselves make hardly any more sense. The hotels in the city seem to have an unspoken agreement that each hotel will be named after the distinguishing feature of a different one. The Blue Hotel is bright orange. The Tangerine Hotel is a deep sea-green, covered with painted fish and landweed that drips from the window-boxes. The Maritime Hotel is built of volcanic brick, the Coal Scuttle Inn is patterned like stained glass, the Rainbow House is entirely gray, and so on.

This is actually fairly normal for Tetravania (the country). Practically everything in the country is decorated somehow. The Tetravanians are in love with patterns. It's rare to see anyone with unpainted skin. The mammals dye their fur in stripes, the avians dye their feathers, and the reptiles paint their scales in intricate geometric patterns. Some of them write poems on their backs in graceful Shasta calligraphy. Insects dye the veined panels of their wings like living stained glass. A mammal who bought a drawing from me one day had zigzag stripes all through his fur, black on white, with one brilliant purple one that ran from his left eye to the tip of his tail. The outside of the Tetravania (the palace) is covered*** with the Song of the Running Sunrise, a poem that seems like nonsense but is fabled to predict the future. This could easily be true; no one has yet found a single line of the poem that can't be applied to every major historical event in the thousand years since it was written. The poem is the ultimate ambiguous prophecy. It could mean anything. It may predict the future, but if so, I don't see what good it does anyone.

The Tetravanians claim to have invented the square. The Tetravanian national pastime is Croak, a card game in which you must conceal your cards from yourself. The national anthem consists of thirty-six verses extolling the virtues of the nonexistent Buckle Toad and is traditionally sung backward. The Tetravanians seem to believe that no one, especially a foriegner, should get through a whole day without being confused at least once. They certainly succeeded with me.



*The other three are Castlevania, Wethravania, and a fourth one that no one seems able to identify.

**The word "Tetravania" currently has four whole pages of meanings in the Sconth Extended English Dictionary. My favorite is "a small hooked device, typically made of whalebone, used to remove the seeds from watermelons."

***Except for one space, just above the front door, that holds a copy of the Recursive Sonnet. That thing shows up somewhere in every city.

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.

Leviathump and Thing

It rained today, all day, and the streets of Vanister became little more than rivers of mud. The children of the town had a marvelous time playing in them. Their parents were not quite so happy.

I spent the day in the Museum again. There has still been no sign of Professor Flanderdrack since he disappeared into the building two days ago; as slim as the chances of finding anything in the Vanister Museum are, I was still hoping I might run into him. I didn't.

What I did find was a small room, probably a former washroom or the bottom of a stairwell, with only one thing in it. On a crate in the middle of the room sat a complex little clockwork thing, a bit like a cross between a typewriter and a crab. Its label said simply, "Thing." That was all. The room was otherwise empty except for a little bowl for the dust-mice, which was filling up with the rain that dripped down the narrow window.

(As huge a building as it is, it would be impossible for the curators to keep the Museum clean. They can't even find all the rooms in it. Instead, it's swept and dusted by omnivorous dust-mice (some of the only wild rodents in Hamjamser that people actually encourage to live in their houses). They come out every night to sweep up dust with their tails - which are so fluffy that they look bigger than the mice themselves - and eat it. They live on nothing else; dust and water are all they need. The downspouts on the Museum's many roofs are linked to small basins in each room to provide water for them.)

The room had the usual little brass nameplate, which proclaimed it the "Leviathump," so it wasn't undiscovered. The curator who discovered it simply hadn't done much with it. I still don't know whether the Thing was called that because no one knew what it was, or because no one had bothered to find out, or because that was actually its name. I probably never will know.

I assume it was my footsteps on the floor that woke it up. When I looked later, mine were the only footprints in the dust on the floor - the dust-mice apparently avoided the room, which made the forlorn little water-basin seem rather sad - so no one else had entered it in quite a while. For whatever reason, when I got within three feet of the Thing, it started moving. There was a click, then a tight little chorus of clinking gears, and it raised itself on eight metal legs (made, I think, of dismantled scissors) and began to dig its way through the crate.

I can't think of another word for it. It simply dug into the wooden slats, using three or four little brass shovel attachments, and scooped out slivers of wood. They clattered on the floorboards on either side. Within a few seconds, it had dug straight through the top of the crate and climbed inside.

Cautiously, in case the Thing climbed back out, I leaned over and looked through the hole in the crate. A few slivers of rain-soaked light leaked through the spaces in the side. I could see small flashes of polished metal pieces moving in the darkness. The sound of wood being scooped away like ice cream filled the little box, then suddenly stopped; the glints of light folded themselves downward and vanished.

I waited for a good two minutes before I moved the crate.

Below it, there was a neat, round hole in the floorboards. For some reason known probably only to Mister Creemer, the space beneath them was filled with layers of embroidered carpet. These had been cut neatly away as well. Below them was empty space. The darkness was filled with the muffled clicking of a multitude of surreptitious clockwork.

I backed away from the hole then, wondering where exactly there was an unlit room full of moving machinery in the Vanister Museum, and went to the window to see if there was another one below it. I was surprised to find that the room was now on the ground floor. It had been on the third when I found it. When I went back to the hole, there was nothing below it but dirt. The room had moved.

I'm still not sure what the Thing was. Perhaps it was some sort of sentry, posted to warn the other Things when someone found the room above theirs. That seems rather pointless, though, as I would never have found the dark room if the Thing hadn't burrowed into it. Perhaps something in it had jammed, and it took just the vibration of my feet on the floor to loosen it and let it make its way home. Perhaps it just wanted to be alone, and I interrupted it, or frightened it, or woke it up. I doubt I'll ever know.

I put the crate back before I left. The label saying "Thing" now appears to refer to a hole in the floor. If future visitors to the Leviathump find that confusing, they won't be the first.

Quests, Clutter, and Freshly Picked Umbrellas

I spent most of today wandering through the Vanister Museum. Most of the passengers on the Train did the same thing, flooding through the entrance hall under the coldly bespectacled eye of Miss Corverly, who runs the Museum with a claw of steel and a mind like a dictionary. (She's rumored to have a dungeon full of badly behaved visitors underneath the Museum, but no one's ever found it.) There must have been nearly a hundred people in the Museum today. Beyond the entrance hall, I saw exactly three of them. It's a large place.

One of the other visitors today was Professor Flanderdrack, who claims to have incontrovertible evidence that the fabled Omnipresent Telescope is hidden in the Vanister Museum. As far as most people know, it was lost forever when Parrafan Loofra, the great aeronautical otter, crashed his airship in Gira Gira. Professor Flanderdrack disagrees. There is a clear and unbroken trail, he says, for those who know how to follow it, and it leads directly to Henrijohn Ignitius Creemer. (Everything Mister Creemer owned, of course, is now in the Vanister Museum. There is an entire room devoted to the contents of his bathroom. His nose-hair-clipper collection, I am told, was quite impressive.) Professor Flanderdrack intends to find the Telescope before the Train leaves Vanister. He seems quite confident. I don't know how he's planning to find one thing (not even a very large thing, according to legend) in the towering archival chaos of the Museum; he hinted at plans and methods, navigational strategies and clues in historical records, but refused to go into detail. I gave up eventually and simply wished him luck.

Most of the rooms I found today were in the Gormless Wing,* judging by the lavender bricks and the fact that most of the rooms' names began with Q. The first few were full of statues of geese. They grew in size as I went - the first room had silver ganders the size of midges and barnacle geese carved out of barnacles, while the last one had room for only a single statue, a reptilian-looking thing carved from a giant palm-tree crystal. The card next to it said that it had been found in a ruin in the Golden Desert, and that the creature it portrayed was widely believed to be extinct. That probably comes as a relief to the Desert-dwellers.

I wandered through rooms full of upholstered armchairs and speckled glassware, galleries of steam- and hamster-powered pipe organs, halls of paintings by legends like Tina Tharschryman and complete unknowns like Thoggerell T. HeFeffenaff, whoever he was. There were collections of thimbles, ear trumpets, mechanical antlers, dried gourds, oracular typewriters (all frauds, of course), fishbowls, tentacle socks, silverware, left-handed scissors, ceremonial spatulae, enameled fish, doorknobs previously inhabited by gremlins, teacups, coffeepots, stringed instruments from miniature feefelos to a six-handed garobassum. A broom closet was sealed behind glass, with a sign explaining that it contained Mister Creemer's collection of antique air. Two Museum visitors were debating the meaning of a copy of the Recursive Sonnet (which shows up all over Hamjamser, carved and written on everything from temple walls to handkerchiefs, and seems to have no purpose except to make people debate its meaning. This one was on a chunk of bluestone from a granary in the Blue Desert). One room was full of clocks shaped like the moon, which someone had recently wound. The ticking of mismatched clockwork was nearly deafening. (Tick tockle tick plink tackatacka PING, tick tockle tick plink tackatacka PING...) They were not all running at the same speed. I think some of them may have been using the Phelodean Interval instead of the standard second.

I've been to the Vanister Museum almost twenty times now. With the exception of the entrance hall, I don't think I've ever found the same room twice.

When I got back to the station, I found Flishel selling his umbrellas. He had set up a little stall on the platform (where he got it, I have no idea - maybe it was in his suitcase) and had umbrella leaves in all sizes standing in neat rows. He'd stuck a few unfolded ones on the top of the stall, where they stood like enormous flowers.

He's been painting the leaves for the last few days. The paint smells faintly of hazelnuts. The green has gradually disappeared under lovely abstract patterns, swirls and speckles and hexagons, like easter eggs or soap-bubble rainbows or Karkafelian tilework. I wasn't sure why - as the leaves were still on the plant, I couldn't imagine it was healthy for them. Watching customers eagerly open and close the fresh umbrellas, I understood. He's been planning to sell them all along.

Normally, umbrella leaves aren't unusually strong - they're stiffer than other leaves, certainly, but nowhere near as strong as the waxed cloth used for most umbrellas. They tear easily. Once they die and dry out, they stop being completely waterproof, and they eventually rot and fall apart. They are leaves, after all.

The paint must do something to the leaves to strengthen them - and preserve them as well, I assume. Several of the customers weren't any gentler with them than with normal umbrellas. They folded and unfolded them roughly, dropped a few on the ground, and tapped at the taut surfaces with claws that would have gone straight through an ordinary umbrella leaf. The umbrellas were not harmed in the slightest.

For a minute or two, I simply stood and stared at the bright little stall. The umbrella stems were tipped with the little wooden things that Flishel has been carving since August: shoes, seashells, fruit and little animals of all kinds - even a small model of the Train engine. Flishel put each customer's favorite handle on their favorite umbrella before selling it to them.

Eventually, of course, I had to buy one. I needed a new umbrella anyway; I lost my old one earlier this year, in Tazramack, when a large green thing (possibly a dragon with unusual taste in treasure) came down out of the rain and flew away with it. I hadn't found another one I liked since then. There were several I liked in Flishel's stall - I'd already been admiring them, without knowing what they were, for weeks - and I eventually chose one painted a rich blue (cockleworm dye, I think) with orange sunbursts. The handle is a little mountain sheep with enormous curving horns.

There's nothing left of the umbrella plants now but the stubby trunks - which, as usual, are hollow inside and resemble umbrella stands. Without their leaves, they seem to have finally gone dormant for the Winter. Flishel packed them all into his suitcase this evening. This is rather a relief, really; the umbrella plants had grown so large recently that there was hardly any room in the compartment.

From what I can tell, Flishel sold almost half his umbrellas today. They were a huge success with both Train passengers and Vanister townspeople. As pretty as metal-and-cloth umbrellas are, they're still mechanical things; some people prefer their umbrellas grown.

As I write this letter, which I will give in about two minutes to one of the Train's flock of postbirds, Professor Flanderdrack has still not returned. I hope he's all right.



* Other wings include the Northless, Salient, Spectacular, External, Superterranean, Ghastly, and Flightless. The rooms in them were named by the curators, but the wings were named by Mister Creemer himself.

Rats

I was sitting in the Train station in Jiligamant today, having visited the clockwork market that shows up in the town's main square every so often. Jiligamant is inhabited nearly entirely by mice and rats, who make some of the best clockwork in existence. No one else is better at tiny details.

Of course, having been a center of rodent culture for generations, it's not just the small mice and rats that live in Jiligamant. There are rodents of all kinds - squirrels, capybaras, chinchillas, three-legged gerboas, and probably a lot more that I don't know about. Even the town's humanoid inhabitants look rather rodent-like. There are winged mice the size of bumblebees and a clan of rats the size of hippopotami, who live in what used to be the town's sewers. Jiligamant has six or seven layers of sewers altogether; being a town of rodents, the pipes always have rats living in them, even when they're in use. The rats in the working sewers gradually dry out and brick up parts of them to make houses. This inevitably causes the whole sewer system to back up and stop working, at which point the town builds another one underneath it. Only a sixth of Jiligamant is above ground. The giant rats, who are as close to nobility as you'll find in Jiligamant, have the whole top level - the original sewers - more or less to themselves.

Anyway. I was sitting in the Train station, eating my lunch (some sort of grain thing from a food stall in the market) and waiting for the Train to finish exchanging a boxcar of seeds for a boxcar of clockwork pipe crawlers. A crate of pipe crawlers had, apparently, not been switched off or properly sealed; they were making things rather interesting for the loading crews when a tall gray rat in a blue frock coat came and sat down next to me.

"Morning," he said. It was four in the afternoon. "You ever been to Pickerell's Peak?"

I hadn't, and said so.

"Well, don't." He was quite emphatic. "Nothing there but fir trees and loonies. I was sitting at the Train station there, that little one that looks like an umbrella and never has anyone in it, just sitting there and minding my own business when a lizard in a tuxedo comes along the tracks and says to me, 'have you seen a house around here?' Now, if you'd been to Pickerell you'd know there's not a house within six miles of the station, not even a lean-to, so I gave him the look I give ceiling salesmen and said that if there'd been a house then I'd missed it. So he said fine, he'd wait, and I'll be flanneled if he didn't sit down there and wait! For a house!

"So I sat there with him and ate my lunch, and asked him if he wanted any, but he said he was allergic to cheese, said it made him grow fur, so I said what's wrong with a bit of fur then, and he said that he had nothing against fur but only in the Wintertime. In the Wintertime, he said, he ate cheese until he was so fluffy you could hardly see him.

"Well, I couldn't think of anything to say after that, so I just sat there and ate my lunch. Me waiting for my Train and him waiting for his house. And I'd just said to myself, well, he'll be waiting here a lot longer than I will, when there's a clattering noise off along the tracks, and around the corner comes a house. A house. Perfectly ordinary, the kind you see in Tazramack or anywhere, four stories high and one room wide. It was blue with dormer windows. Had those little fiddly bricks on the chimney. And it was walking, I tell you, just walking along on four great planking feet made all of boards. I could see the nails sticking out of the knees. And it walked right along the tracks, making a racket like you wouldn't believe, and settled down right in front of the station like a big dog, so that its little front porch was level with the platform. And you know what that lizard said? He said, 'my house appears to have arrived at me. Good day to you.' And his house stood there, calm as a horse, while he walked up to the front door and went right in. And then it stood up again on its feet - it had knobs on its toes like on a banister - and it clattered off along the tracks until I couldn't see it anymore. And what I say is, anyone who lives in a house that bounces like that can't have many dishes left by now. I mean, honestly, is it too much to ask for a man to sit and eat his lunch in peace? Why does every loony in the Railway Regions have to come and sit next to me?"

I nodded sympathetically. He gave me a suspicious look at that, stood up, and hurried away without another word.

I could have asked him the same question. Somehow, though, I doubt he'd have taken it well.

Seven More Random Facts

Having been tagged with this meme by Leia, tagged with this meme by Megan Doyle (soon to be Hansen) , and not tagged with this meme by Ginaagain, I will happily do it again. There are a lot more than fourteen random facts about me, and writing down another seven will provide one more post for the month. I'm still eight days behind.

Besides, today is the thirteenth, which is seven times two minus one, and two plus one is three, and three times seven is twenty-one, so it all works out. How can I overlook an opportunity like that?

1. I have never heard a song with a sitar in it that I didn't love immediately. No exceptions. If it has a sitar, it's going to be good.

2. A complete stranger once gave me a clockwork pipe crawler, for no reason I could see. He didn't speak any language I knew. He just handed me the little machine in a Train station, said something very solemn and full of consonants, put on his spectacles, and marched off into the night.
It was a very nice pipe crawler. Unfortunately, I don't actually own any plumbing, so I gave it to a troglodyte the next time I passed through Baconeg.

3. I keep exactly one of every kind of coin I ever get. Gold Loundas, extinct Kastels, Toli beads in various colors, purple Lint... There are far too many to carry around all the time, so I keep them in the Bank of Bannarbangle.

4. I don't seem to be able to post anything before ten PM. I can post pictures earlier in the day, but no long pieces of writing. I don't know why.
Come to think of it, you probably knew that already. Oops.

5. Every time I travel anywhere, I always end up at a slug farm at some point (which is odd, as they aren't really all that common). As a result, I can now identify 36 different kinds of slug by taste.

6. I always whistle in any room that has stone or tile walls. Nothing makes whistling sound as good as a smooth wall does. I scare people in bathrooms a lot.

7. Almost a fifth of the places I've been have shown no sign of existing before or after my visit.

Having said all of that, I am going to break the rules now and not tag the seven people I'm supposed to tag, because I'm lazy. I am going to tag whoever reads this. Yes, you, at least if you feel like doing this and happen to have seven random facts about yourself and time to write them down and a blog to post them on. Go right ahead. Or not. Either way.

Seven Random Facts

Since it's an odd, random thing, I've decided to reply to Moominlight's open invitation to the Seven Random Facts meme. I'm sure everyone knows by now that I am a traveling artist, have been (briefly) inside the Palace of Madmen, have a habit of getting into tight spots with unusual menus, and use parentheses and semicolons more than is healthy, so here are seven other random facts:

1. I have never eaten chocolate I didn't like. (Perfectly good chocolate that happens to have things I don't like in it, such as licqeurs and peanut butter, doesn't count. It's not the chocolate's fault.)

2. I inherited the Shapeshifter's Curse from some extremely distant ancestor, but I enjoy it most of the time.

3. Many people make chains out of paper clips. Since many people do that, I make chains out of used staples.

4. I pick up a rock everywhere I go (everywhere that has rocks, anyway. Not swamps). A pretty rock. I can't resist. Unfortunately, I can't carry them all with me, so I have to leave the least pretty ones behind every so often. This is very sad and will probably drive geologists mad in a few thousand years.

5. I have actually received an actual real compliment from one of my two favorite artists* (the one who's still alive).

6. I am currently reading 23 comic series (comic books, graphic novels, webcomics, whatever you want to call them).

7. I draw a map of every place I stay, even if it's only for one night. I know, drawing maps is a sign of insanity and futile as well, but I like doing it.

Like Moominlight, I'm not tagging anyone with this; all the bloggers I know well enough have already done it. I also simply leave this open to anyone who would like to try.


*(Or, at least, the two artists who come to mind first when someone asks me who my favorite artist is. That's as close as I can get. I have dozens of favorite artists; asking me to narrow them down by actually thinking about it would be useless. It's almost as bad as trying to pick a favorite author. Almost, but not quite.)