Directions

We found the road today; someone finally gave us directions! Every salamander hunter we've met so far has been either unwilling to talk or just as lost as we are, and the only other person we've met was the captain of the Fernmarvel, who wasn't interested in roads. Roads and airships don't have much in common.

Today, though, we finally met a hunter who wasn't too busy sitting around and waiting to talk to us. This was probably because she was leaving the Boiler Room herself. We passed her coming from a small lava pool in a long stretch of canyon with hardly any of them at all. She was humanoid, dressed in leather from head to toe like most of the more sensitive-skinned salamander hunters. A leather mask and a typical pair of dark hunter's goggles (important when you spend all day staring into pools of lava) covered her face.

Plack and I had almost given up hope asking directions by then, but the sight of someone who wasn't completely engrossed in a pool of molten rock was unusual enough that we tried again.

She gave us directions (hooray!) in a clear alto voice, somewhat muffled by the mask, then went on to explain how she knew where the road was because she had come from the Cliff we were about to start climbing, several weeks ago, before spending the time in between at a remote and lonely lava pool farther along this fairly empty stretch of canyon, because not many hunters came all the way out here and that meant that the salamanders were a lot less cautious and could be caught more easily, which was why she had been so successful. (She obviously had, too; she was carrying four large cages full of the little creatures. Most of them were either chewing on what looked like lumps of coal or looking around, wide-eyed, at the strange wet world above the lava.) She continued that she was heading to Sconth, if she could find it, to sell the salamanders to the farms there that supply lanterns for the libraries, and also to visit her aunt, who ran a small cafe (the Algebraic Apple - perhaps I had heard of it? I hadn't) near the Metallurgical Library, and who needed a new salamander for her oven, since one of hers had somehow gotten its paws on some gunpowder and exploded, so this big one right here - with the blue spots - was going to replace it, because the little ones had time to grow before going off to light libraries, but her aunt needed a big one right away, because if she had to keep going with only the one she still had, it would soon be too tired to bake more than one scone at a time, and then where would all the experimental coppersmiths get their lunches every day? At one of those sad little turnip crisp places? That just wouldn't do.

The Greenhouse Cliff is not a place where you meet many people. The more outgoing travelers generally have to make up for weeks of silence in every conversation.

The hunter kept squinting at us, apparently having difficulty seeing us through her dark goggles. About halfway through the conversation, she took them off to reveal five gleaming compound eyes. I have no idea what the rest of her face looked like; she never took off her mask. After about half an hour, she had apparently talked enough, because she then asked us for directions to the other side. We gave them to her - the road ended near a large dead tree that was fairly easy to spot - and headed on.

Just as she said, the road to the other side began right next to a large, gnarled purple pligma. Apparently, this section is cool enough for them to grow. We reached the bottom of the jungle again this evening; with any luck, we should reach the other top of the Greenhouse Cliff in a few more days.

The Edge of Sconth

We're leaving Sconth today. I'd like to stay longer and see more of the city, but the art most people like here is a lot more geometric than anything I do. Only two people have bought drawings since we arrived. Besides, we've been here over a week, and if we're going to reach the Railway Regions, I'd rather be on the Train before it starts snowing.

There's no sign of the slope we climbed on the way to Sconth. It's moved on to some other part of the Mountainous Plains. At the moment, the Plateau of Sconth seems to bordered on all sides by the Greenhouse Cliff, one of the only completely vertical regions of Hamjamser. Ever since the Cliff arrived, Sconth has been surrounded by the thick cloud bank that always follows it. The Plateau looks like an island in a sea of mist. Owners of dirigible leaf carriages are flying around on the surface of the cloud, pretending they're in boats. The butterflies that run the hotel have been back and forth to the Cliff all day to gather the bright tropical flowers from below the edge and enjoy the rare warm weather in November. It hasn't been warm enough for them to fly outdoors for over a month.

In a few places, where the cold air meets the mist, small showers of rain have been forming a few feet above the cloud's surface. I've heard there were a few four-foot-high snowstorms last night.

Looking down over the edge of the Cliff, past the scrub and scraggly trees that protect the Plateau's farms from the constant wind of the Mountainous Plains, the glistening canopies of rainforest trees are just visible through the mist. It's a surprising sight in late Autumn. Bright beetles and hummingbirds fly up now and then from the seasonless clouds, hit November in Sconth, and hurry back down again. Farther down, a faint orange glow is just barely visible through the gray. The volcanic vents that keep the Cliff tropical are down there somewhere. We're bound to meet at least a few salamander hunters when we cross them. (Salamanders breed perfectly well in captivity, but the farms like to get wild ones from volcanoes now and then to prevent inbreeding.)

I had hoped to get to the Railway Regions directly from the Mountainous Plains - it would have meant considerably less climbing, for one thing - but I've always wanted to see the Greenhouse Cliff, so I don't mind that much. The climb should be interesting. We've brought several cube turnips, hung by the leaves from Plack's harness like blocky purple saddlebags. They'll be a nice change from my usual diet of potatoes, smoked sump squid (my apologies to Commander Squish, but it travels well and tastes good, no matter how badly I cook it), and whatever else happens to be growing nearby.

Plack, incidentally, is not happy about the appearance of the Cliff. He's just started growing his Winter coat; tropical weather is the last thing he wants to travel through right now. It's not as if we have much of a choice, though, unless an airship shows up before we leave.

The main road through Sconth now reaches the edge of the Cliff and takes a sharp turn over the edge, twisting along between the lush undergrowth that sprouts from every crack and patch of dirt. The road was carved centuries ago into a groove in the stone; the Cliff hangs overhead like a damp gray roof. With the trees growing like leafy pillars at the edge of the road, it feels almost like the cloister of a monastery.

It will probably take us a while to get to the bottom of the Cliff. It's hard to travel quickly when the entire road consists of switchbacks.

Farm Geometry

The farmers of Sconth are near the end of the annual harvest; there's hardly anything left in the fields now except the icicle tapers, which won't be ready to harvest until they've frozen solid. Everything else has been packed away into storerooms. Many of the insectoid farmers, having emptied their fields and closed down their farms for the Winter, will spend the next five months in hibernation. That's really the only choice for cold-blooded people in the mountains.

Today, the streets of Sconth were rumbling all day long with carts full of the city's famous cube turnips. Nearly everyone in Sconth eats cube turnips. They're nutritious, easy to grow, and fairly tasty, if you can chew them. Those who can't either mash them or grind them into flour.

In addition to this, cube turnips are probably the easiest vegetables in the world to store. Once the leaves are cut off, they can just be stacked up like blocks. Many farmers build houses out of them and gradually eat them over the Winter. They come out of their houses every day, climb up on the roof, and take a piece off the chimney for dinner. The fields no longer growing turnips sprout turnip huts instead. One particularly ambitious turnip architect to the West of town is working on a full-scale castle, complete with crenelated turnip turrets.

Cube turnips are best known, though, for what the bakers do with them. Not everyone has heard of turnip architects; not everyone has even heard of Sconth, city of mathematicians. But everyone has heard of its famous Square Root Pie.

Rodent Invasion

The bakery near the hotel had been having trouble with mice in the basement recently. They'd been chewing open crates, taking food, and generally making a mess of everything. The traps the restaurant owner set out had all disappeared. No one had even seen the mice.

Finally, frustrated to the limit of his patience, the owner decided to stay awake in the basement all night. If the mice came, maybe he'd be able to tell why they were so hard to get rid of; if they didn't, well, he'd know he could hire someone to sit in the basement every night as a last resort.

As it turned out, the mice did come... sort of. The owner was kind enough to show me the photograph he had taken before running back upstairs as fast as he possibly could.


He still hasn't managed to catch it yet. It might take a bit longer than he expected.

Descending

Spending the night at the top of the Needle Tower was surprisingly comfortable. The beacon salamander keeps the entire room quite warm - warmer than the hotel, in fact - and the aluminum floor wasn't as uncomfortable as I expected.

Sunrise was much earlier than usual.

Getting down was surprisingly easy as well. The elevators might reach less than halfway up the tower, but the ratchet baskets go almost to the top.

They're fairly simple little contraptions: a basket hung from a rope, much like the elevators, but with a weight on the other end. The pulley at the top has a ratchet mechanism attached to it. When the baskets are empty, the weights pull them up to the little platforms next to the pulleys; when someone gets in them (someone heavy enough, anyway), the ratchets let them down slowly and gently. It takes about thirty of these to get all the way to the ground.

Unlike the elevators, the ratchet baskets don't need anything but passengers to move them, so they can be built all the way up the tower. It would be impossible to bring waterwheel power up all three miles of it; salamander engines might work, but they're far too delicate to just leave three miles above the ground. The ratchet baskets hardly ever need repairs. Of the thirty or so I used on the way down, I only had to skip one. It was having its rope replaced. According to the repairman, who seemed glad to have someone to talk to, it had been six months since the last time he'd had to fix one of the baskets. They don't need much.

I wonder if some sort of hot-air balloon would work as an elevator? Maybe if it ran on a rail or something up the outside of the tower... It would probably take a while to get to the top, and the descent would have to be very carefully controlled, but it might work. I'll have to ask the repairman about that if I run into him again.

Until then, I have libraries to visit.

Climbing the Needle Tower

Well, I couldn't very well stay in Sconth and not climb the Needle Tower. When am I ever going to have another chance to climb three miles above the ground using only my feet?

The Needle Tower is one of the oldest buildings in Sconth. It's by far the tallest building anywhere in Hamjamser. The foundation is stone, twenty feet thick to support the immense weight on top of it; the tower gets gradually thinner from there. The top floors are barely ten feet from one wall to the other, made of aluminum bars and silk rope.

So far, the fastest person ever to climb the tower - a cliff squirrel gymnast by the name of Tatrika - took eight hours to get to the top and collapsed from exhaustion when she got there. Most people prefer to take the elevators. There are two of them, one on either side of a massive loop of rope hung from an even more massive pulley partway up the tower. A system of gears in one of the tower's basements connects a matching pulley at the other end of the loop to a waterwheel in the river Kastel (yes, the Samrath Kazi coins were named after the river - its main tributary runs through where the village used to be). A large clockwork mechanism, like the escapement of a clock, switches the direction of the elevators (after a pause for boarding) when one reaches the top and the other the bottom.

Unfortunately, the elevators don't go even halfway up the tower; any rope, even the foot-thick rope the elevators use, would snap under its own weight if it were any longer than that. You have to walk the rest of the way.

Fortunately, I'm used to walking, so it only took me ten hours and fifteen rest breaks to reach the top. I was barely able to breathe by the time I got there - partly from the exertion, partly because the air up there is so thin. The wind is freezing. It comes straight through the top room, which is really little more than an aluminum platform with a railing and a pointed roof. It's there mostly for the few anyway. You can see the curve of the horizon from there. The city was spread out beneath my feet like a very small postage stamp, perched on top of the tiny little bump that is the Plateau of Sconth. The clouds hid it from view occasionally. Off to the left, I could see the great metal hulk of the Cormilack Earthmover, gleaming like a tarnished silver toy in the sunset; to the right, the perfectly conical peak of Mount Moler was just visible, deep in the heart of the Railway Regions. There was a thin line of gold on the horizon that just might have been the Golden Desert.

It took me a few minutes to realize that I could see the entire Mountainous Plains. The edges were visible in every direction.

The core of the tower is a single straight rod of hypersteel three miles long - and that's just the part above the ground. It's driven deep into the bedrock beneath the city for stability. Even in the strongest winds, the tower doesn't even wobble. Hypersteel is not flexible. The only sign that the wind touches it at all is a low, metallic humming as the core vibrates in its stone sheath. It's almost too low to hear at all.

All anyone knows about the core is that it was dug up hundreds of years ago and stood on end in a hole dug through the stone (no one knows how anyone managed to lift the whole thing); the tower was then built around it. Like all hypersteel, it's a leftover from the Hill Builders' civilization, and therefore thousands of years old. No one knows how to make the stuff anymore.

The tip of the core is visible in the top room of the tower, protruding five feet above the floor. It's easily the oldest thing in Sconth. Its surface still has the same mirror-smooth shine it probably did when it was made. You can see your face in it.

It's hard to see all of the core's tip, though; draped in a reptilian curl over the top of it is an ancient salamander larger than most true dragons. Its mane of spines is large enough by now to rival the Sun Dragon's, and it fills the entire room with the light and heat of a bonfire. It's been there longer than anyone in the city can remember. No one is quite sure whether it was put there deliberately, possibly to warn airships and floating cities of the tower (yes, it's that tall), or whether it just found its way up there accidentally and decided to stay. It's the perfect place for a salamander that size. The core is the biggest lightning rod on the planet. Entire storms can strike nothing but the tower, if they're high enough, and almost all that electricity goes straight through the old salamander. A smaller one would be vaporized; this one simply drinks it all in. There probably isn't a better source of energy anywhere outside the salamanders' native volcanoes.

Whether or not its light was meant to be a beacon, it works. It's possible to see the light of the Needle Tower even when the rest of Sconth is well below the horizon.

I've been sitting up here so long, looking at the view and writing, that it's gotten dark. I got on the elevator before dawn; it was already sunset when I reached the top. Fortunately, the salamander provides more than enough light for writing. I'm sending this by a postbird who conveniently happens to be resting on top of the tower. I'll climb down again tomorrow.

The Owl

Yesterday, I visited the Sconth Museum of Historical Art and was lucky enough to see the Owl, an otherwise unremarkable statuette famous for being the most stolen artifact in the world. I did a quick sketch while I was there. (I'll try to post it later.)

Today, I went back to the museum. One of the local linguists is attempting to read the entire Epic of Rampastula out loud, using the version written in hieroglyphics on the inside of a three-thousand-year-old sewer pipe, and I didn't want to miss Act Three. The pipe amplifies his voice quite nicely. He had a fairly large audience by the end of Act Two.

When I got there, the Museum was crawling with soldier beetles. I asked one of them what was going on; he or she (it's impossible to tell unless you can see ultraviolet) explained that the Owl had been stolen last night. They were there to investigate.

They didn't really have much hope of finding it. Hardly anyone ever does. In a few months, it will show up in some other museum after being bought anonymously for some exorbitant price. Then it will be stolen again. The museums just never learn.

Sometimes, I wonder if it's all some sort of game among thieves. "Ha ha, the Owl's in the Vanister museum now. Sold for five hundred railway tickets and a Geint. Tag, you're it."

Incidentally, Act Three of the Epic was splendid. The linguist can translate dimly lit ancient Mirulian hieroglyphs into spoken English without skipping a beat.

The Essentials

Having spent all of yesterday and the day before in the Illegible Library, admiring the glorious clutter and the menagerie of letters scrawled on every surface in sight, I decided to do something different today. I went to see the Essentials.

Technically, the book's title is Essen Chile's Essential Book of Essential Essentials - it's embossed in foot-high purple letters on the cover - but this is a bit too long and ridiculous for most people's tastes, especially the ones who want the Essentials taken seriously. Most people hope the author was using a pseudonym; almost as many people hope that, given the choice, he or she would have chosen a better one.

According to the keepers of the Essentials, the book contains all the knowledge anyone in Hamjamser could ever need. No one's been able to prove otherwise. In fact, no one has actually lived long enough to read the entire book, so no one's been able to prove much of anything about it. Some people have pointed out that the book must have had multiple authors; no one could possibly have lived long enough to write it all.

There are only three copies of the Essentials in existence. (No one knows who had time to copy the whole thing, much less twice, but there they are.) Several people have tried to make more copies. None of them have ever finished the task. Sooner or later, one of their descendants always loses interest.

One of the three copies, of course, is in Sconth. It's kept in a thick-walled old stone building that used to be a fortress back in the days of the locust marauders. The Essentials keepers live there, spending their lives reading as much of the book as they possibly can and looking things up for anyone who asks. They are all Wayfinders. The book is large enough that its pages and paragraphs behave like geographical features and are never in the same place twice. Wayfinders are the only people who can find anything in the Essentials except by chance.

I didn't have anything I particularly needed to know, and I couldn't really afford to ask anyway - Wayfinders, and the information in the Essentials, are rare enough that they can charge more or less whatever they want - so I just watched. I was allowed to look at a few pages by the short, thickset burreler who was looking through the book when I came in. She was too short to read the book from the floor; instead, she just walked around on the pages in a pair of enormous fuzzy slippers.

She introduced herself, rather distractedly, as Snuffbox, which happened to be the title of the section she was reading. I never was sure how much attention she was paying to anything outside the book.

Apparently, the last person to come in had asked for advice on getting blue floo shrews out of a thugroffler's nose. Snuffbox (or whatever her name was) hadn't asked why. She thought she might have read something about that particular subject on page 736008, though, so she was now trying to find it. The pages are ten feet wide and not numbered in any order that makes sense. While I watched, she turned pages 42, 7758020, 96.24, 145AM, *, and TRUFFLE. Being Wayfinders, though, the Essentials experts can eventually find any page they've read before; page 736008 came up while I was asking about the building (which Snuffbox said was built by the 15th Baron of Sconth as a safe haven for his collection of cookbooks). Sure enough, there on the page were three paragraphs on the subject of removing blue floo shrews from the insides of noses. The section was in tiny letters, written sideways, in the middle of a larger paragraph on pocketwatch maintenance.

The best ways to remove blue floo shrews from a thugroffler's nose, according to the Essentials, are to lure them out with goat cheese or play Thiglian mop opera all day (though it's best to give the thugroffler earmuffs before trying the second method). That'll be good to know if I ever own a thugroffler.

There were a few Essentials keeper apprentices there as well; two spindle beetle nymphs and a little three-foot centipede spent the entire time crawling in and out between the pages Snuffbox wasn't reading. Each one carried a magnifying glass and a small salamander lantern. Just think - children all over the world stay up late reading between the covers, and these three get to do it for a living.

The Illegible Library

Today, I found the Illegible Library. It's no wonder I missed it yesterday. Apparently, when it was built, the only space the builders could find for the front entrance was an alley between the massive Fiction and Entomology Libraries. It's about five feet wide. The front door (fifteen feet high and just wide enough to get through if I turned sideways) opens onto a magnificent entrance hall, floored with a single row of mosaic tiles, with a colonnade of marble half-pillars against each wall. They're offset from each other, so there's room to sort of zigzag between them.

Walking this way, ducking under the occasional lantern, I eventually reached the front desk. It's wedged between the walls six feet above the floor so that people can walk under it. I asked the receptionist, a large, white-furred samoval, how they got it through the door; she replied in a distracted voice, without taking her nose out of the volume of triptych semaphore she was reading, that it had been built there. A ten-foot-long pair of fireplace tongs hung on the wall by her seat. I assumed they were for picking up dropped papers.

The heart of the library, once you get past the entrance, is a much wider space, though it's not immediately obvious. The high-ceilinged rooms are only sporadically lit and have been divided up into labyrinths of bookcases.

In them, and surrounding them, are the books.

Most of the libraries in Sconth - and everything else in Sconth, for that matter - are kept rigidly organized at all times. The Illegible Library isn't. Books and scrolls and tablets are stacked and piled and crammed onto shelves with no organization whatsoever. There's no way to organize them when nothing in them makes sense. Bookshelves stand and lean at odd angles to each other, forming high, narrow passageways lined with incomprehensible titles and lit dimly by the occasional lantern in the gloom overhead.

I think the building may have been a cathedral at one point. In the thin trails between stacks and piles of books, it's just possible to glimpse the paths of an old cathedral floor labyrinth, twisting invisibly beneath the newer wood-and-paper labyrinth piled on top of it. The passages open out occasionally into open, irregular rooms, piled high with books and the occasional piece of furniture. Sofas and armchairs are the most common, but I also saw several papasan chairs, a hammock, and the leather-padded cockpit of an antique airship.

Theoretically, the purpose of the Illegible Library (besides providing a habitat for linguists and a Place To Dump All This Gibberish) is to keep the incomprehensible writing in a place where people can find it. The hope is that it will all eventually make the proud journey to the Library of Obscure and Extinct Languages, an old and dusty building that holds about three times as many books as it actually has. Each translated book is shelved with several more books explaining how to read the original.

Books don't actually make the journey very often, though. Only one or two get translated every year. Most of the ones that make any sense at all have already been translated. The few brave linguists who still frequent the Library build their own little dens down in the stacks (formerly the crypts?) and hoard the books they're attempting to translate. If someone moves a book before they decipher its language, they'll never find it again.

(Many thanks to the Library denizens who came at least halfway out of their books to explain things to me. I admire your ability to talk and read at the same time.)

Compass Trees

I spent all day trying to find the Illegible Library, walking from one end of Sconth to the other, and had no success whatsoever. I'm exhausted. I don't feel up to writing much of anything tonight, especially not in the fifteen minutes left in this day, so here's something I wrote a few months ago instead. I thought it might be interesting. Most people who don't travel much aren't familiar with compass trees.

A piece of wood from a compass tree is always attracted to the tree, like iron to a magnet, and can be used to pull a compass needle in its direction. This is a great way to find a place; tree compasses work much better than magnetic ones, which only tell you which way is North. Really, what use is that? You can tell which way is North any time you can see the sun, and there's no telling what happens to be in that direction at any given time. Magnetic compasses are generally little more than harmless toys for mapmakers.

Tree compasses are much more useful. You can use them to find any place where there's a compass tree. You can only find one place per compass, though, and it only works as long as the tree is alive.

That isn't as simple as it sounds. Compass trees are extremely delicate. They have to have exactly the right temperature, the right nutrients, and the right amount of sun and water. They only like to live on top of hills. They have no defenses against insects. They can't compete with any plant bigger than a tuft of grass. They weren't always that way, but after centuries of being pampered by compass-makers, they've gotten spoiled. All but a very few compass trees look like bonsai trees; any conditions short of absolute perfection are as hard on them as a desert or a mountaintop would be to another tree. They grow extremely slowly. Tree compasses are extremely expensive, as a sliver of wood for a compass needle can take weeks or months to grow back. Only the most successful compass makers can afford to buy whole twigs.

Compass tree caretakers make a very good living, but only because they work so hard. They generally grow the trees in greenhouses, so that they have absolute control of the temperature, sunlight, and humidity. Mirrors direct extra sunlight onto the trees in the Winter; many caretakers import sea ice in the Summer. Most greenhouses are reinforced with steel bars to discourage thieves.

Compass trees also, for reasons known only to them, refuse to grow within twelve miles of each other. This further limits the places they can grow and makes reproduction extremely difficult. Every caretaker opens a few tiny holes in the greenhouse each Spring, not enough to let in any chills or aphids, in the hopes that a stray speck of pollen will manage to make it across the countless miles from another compass tree that happens to feel like blooming that year. In the incredibly rare instance that pollen is blown that far, and meets the receiving compass tree's standards, the tree will grow a seed. Just one. Compass tree seeds are about the size of poppy seeds and exactly the same color as their bark. Any caretaker lucky enough to get a flower on their tree will search with a magnifying glass for months afterward, hoping to find the little brown speck that will give them the slight chance of growing another tree. It's a good thing the seeds grow where the flowers do; otherwise, the caretakers would never find them. If a compass tree's seed isn't found in the week or two after it grows, it falls off onto the ground, where it dies. Compass tree seeds need three years immersed in constantly moist earth with an exact combination of nutrients before they'll even start to consider growing into a tree. Most caretakers simply sell the seeds for exorbitant prices, as they're too busy and too sensible to try to raise them themselves.

Despite all this, compass trees have not yet gone extinct. There are actually several hundred of them on Hamjamser, if not more, though no one has ever managed to count them. Nearly every town has one somewhere nearby. Caretakers in swamps and deserts go to great lengths to keep their trees alive.

A few of the richest travelers in Hamjamser have assembled compasses with many needles, each one pointing to a different tree in a different town. They're incredibly expensive and require updating whenever a tree dies, but they're almost as good as a Wayfinder guide when they work properly.

It has become a custom among travelers-by-compass to visit the tree their compass points to whenever they reach its home. It's brought them all the way there, after all; they might as well follow the needle a few extra miles and visit it. Most of them bring some sort of present for the tree or, more often, for its caretaker.

No matter what they're given, though, none of the caretakers ever let anyone else inside their greenhouses. You can never tell who might try to break off a priceless twig when you're not looking.

City of Chitin and Codes

Only three days of traveling, and we've already gotten somewhere! Plack and I arrived in Sconth, the magnificent city of linguists and mathematicians, early this afternoon. The city was buzzing. It still is tonight, actually; an unusually large number of its inhabitants are insects, so there are always wings rattling overhead. There are spindle beetles everywhere, all different colors (though mostly orange, of course), with every possible number of limbs. A Kilopede was resting a half-mile or so of its length on the roof of a library hive. The buildings are all domes and spires in odd, fluid shapes, like termite mounds in brick and stone.

We spent most of the day wandering around the city, trying to find a hotel and getting lost in back alleys instead. The alleys are... strange. Some of them are laid out in a relentless grid pattern; others twist and turn so much they almost tie themselves in knots. I have a sneaking suspicion that they would form fractal patterns if seen from the top. Professional polyglots wander through them in groups, talking in half a dozen languages at the same time. Mad cartographers lurk in corners and attempt to steal pens from passersby. The graffiti is all mathematical formulas.

The hotel we finally chose is several hundred years old. It used to be a library. Most of the rooms were converted from the old reading chambers; they used to be as tiny and spartan as a monk's cell, but now every spare inch of wall is covered with paintings and tapestries and ribbons and little things made of copper wire and brightly colored beads. The hotel is run by a family of giant butterflies, and they can't stand dull colors. Gray stone has to be painted or covered up or it drives them mad. They live in a maze of ropes and painted platforms hanging from the vaulted ceilings of the central reading room, which has more than enough room for them to fly wherever they want. They let the caterpillars paint murals on the walls. One of the caterpillars wanders around the hallways, using the walls and ceilings just as much as the floor, and follows any guests who look like they might have vegetables.

Tomorrow, I'm going to try to find the Illegible Library and look through all the incomprehensible writing there. The hotel was all we had time to find today; it was getting dark when we stumbled upon it. I'm writing this while listening to troubadours chirping outside.

There are no crickets in Sconth. They can't compete with the people.

Conveniently, there was a pen and a stack of paper in my room already; apparently, there's one in every room. I can hear Plack chewing on his paper next door. The butterfly who came around to light the lamps this evening said (well, wrote, as they can't pronounce English) that that's standard for hotels in Sconth - every room has to have beds and blankets, soap and water, and pen and paper. Just the essentials.