Pieces of Mollogou

The Truckle road ended today.

It wasn't completely unexpected. I'd been following it since I left the Great Shwamp, and it had been getting smaller since I left Crucible. I have a feeling that Sedge doesn't have many more towns that size. I said goodbye to Mr. Radish and his typewriter this morning, after sharing breakfast with him and Rumbulligan and reading the typewriter's latest poem. A few hours later, when the road had shrunk to half of yesterday's width, Rumbulligan turned off into what looked like a village made of origami lily pads in a water meadow near the road. He apologized for not being able to invite me. Weight is apparently a great concern in a floating village; they can't allow anyone in who's a great deal larger than they are, for fear of sinking. Rumbulligan is, he said, one of the largest people in the entire village. He is possibly a little over three feet tall. I assured him that I wasn't offended, and he splashed off over a bridge made of half-submerged leaves, looking relieved.

I wonder if his book of earthquake words has anything to do with this. Shaking earth, sinking villages - it's all just a matter of stability. I hope he succeeds in whatever he's doing.

In any case, I was traveling alone once again. The road continued to shrink all day, getting lumpier and narrower and more full of puddles. At around noon, I came to a branch in the river and had to take another detour. The road quickly became little more than a footpath on the bank. I could only tell where it was because the grass was shorter. The branch meandered for a while, looping its way through a jumble of low hills, though even ones that small were surprising after the flatness of Sedge and the Shwamp. I'd been following the branch for maybe five miles when it disintegrated. In the space of a few hundred feet, the water split away into handful after handful of little streams, each of which broke up into even smaller streams trickling down from the hills. Seen from the air, the whole thing probably would have looked like a tree. I've never seen a river branch that way. I counted thirty-six separate streams before I gave up.

Farewell, then, to the River Truckle.

The longer I walked, the stranger the landscape became. The sky here is full of odd, fractured clouds, each one moving in a different direction with no regard for the wind. They collide occasionally. The hills are full of little stone shrines; I must have passed one or two every ten minutes. There are stone animals inside them. Most are ordinary, birds and badgers and giant isopods, but a few rival the gargoyles of Crucible for strangeness. The shrines - and the hills, and the trees, and everything else - have a tendency to move around while I'm not looking. (Geography does that everywhere, of course, but not usually every time I blink.) It finally became truly ridiculous when I realized that I had been walking around the same hill for half an hour. There had been no turns, no forks in the road, but I had passed the same shrine four times. The statue inside was an otter-like thing with scales and a necklace of snail shells. Someone had left half a fish on the little shelf in front of it. I would be surprised if there are four different shrines with statues exactly like that. Just to be sure, I climbed up on top of the hill and looked around. It was quite clear from up there: at some point, the road I'd been following had turned into a closed loop. There was no sign that it had ever gone anywhere - including back to the river. Wherever I had ended up, retracing my steps was out of the question. There were no steps to retrace.

Farewell, then, to Sedge.

I gave up on the road and set off across the hills. As long as I came up on top of one and looked around occasionally, I seemed to actually be getting somewhere. Perhaps it's only the valleys that lead you in circles. I stopped for lunch in front of one of the valley shrines. It had a round, heavy roof that made it look a bit like a mushroom. A man with a vague resemblance to a raccoon was sitting in front of it. I thought at first he was making some sort of offering; you can see them in most of the shrines, little gifts that vary depending on the tastes of the spirit inside. People leave them to thank the good spirits and placate the bad. Some like flowers, others sausages or pretty stones. One particularly reliable one apparently brings rain every time anyone gives it a boiled egg. I couldn't see the statue in this shrine with the raccoon in front of it, and I couldn't see what he was putting in it either. It seemed to be taking rather a long time.

We ended up talking for perhaps half an hour while I ate and he continued to work. He was quite intent on whatever he was doing. I don't think he looked at me even once. I am, apparently, in a country called Mollogou. It's frequently near Sedge and the Great Shwamp, as it's slightly drier and hillier than either of them, but lower and wetter than anywhere else.

According to the raccoon (his name was Num, he said, and left it at that), every hill and valley has a shrine for its guardian spirit. You can tell how friendly a place is by the statue in its shrine. The smiling ones can be trusted; the ones with huge, staring eyes are disconcerting, but safe. The best places have mother animals with children in their shrines. The ones with masks or too many teeth should be avoided. No one seems sure whether the statues change to match the spirits, or whether the stone-carvers can somehow tell what the spirits look like, but no one seems to doubt their accuracy. I assume people carve the statues - though I can't actually be sure; I haven't seen many people here. Perhaps they're self-portraits.

Apparently, no other country could have nearly so many shrines. The spirits' domains never overlap; I don't know whether they're territorial or if it would simply be impossible for two spirits to guard the same place, like two people sharing the same body. Either way, there's still a shrine on every hilltop and another in each valley. Territorial creatures wouldn't put up with an arrangement like that anywhere else.

Mollogou isn't a particularly large country. It's just more fragmented than most. Places tend to be much smaller here. In the Mountainous Plains or the Railway Regions, places at least stay connected; the layout of each city changes from day to day, but it remains a city, with the same buildings and the same skirt of farmland spread around it. People know where they live.

There are no cities in Mollogou. They don't stay together. About the best anyone can hope for is that their house won't have misplaced any of its rooms when they wake up in the morning.

The same goes for everything else in the country. There are no mountains, but many hills; no rivers, but many streams; no forests, but an abundance of copses. Mollogou has just as much of everything as any other country. It's just divided into much smaller pieces. The shrines are content with a single hill or valley because it's impossible to hold on to anything larger.

I was getting ready to leave when Num finished what he had been doing and stood up. On the shelf in front of the shrine was a collection of tiny white eggshells, cut neatly in half across the middle and laid out in a spiral pattern like the seeds in a sunflower. They were arranged with such geometric precision that you could have cut yourself on the angles. The statue receiving them was a somewhat manic-looking owl clutching a ruler and compass (the geometric variety, not the navigational). It's a benign spirit, Num said, but a somewhat obsessive one. It cares more about the precision of its offerings than the substance. When I left, he was beginning a second spiral in what looked like grains of rice. He was using a ruler the size of a toothpick.

I think I'm going to like Mollogou.

This is the last day of June, and therefore the last of my daily letters for this year. Perhaps it's just as well. Even postbirds have trouble finding people in Mollogou. I will do my best to write during the rest of the year, but you should know by now how rarely I succeed in that. Somehow, there's always something to distract me.

Farewell, then, to you. I'll be back next June.

Nigel

A New Type of Writer

I left Crucible yesterday, having run out of every color of paint except red and black. I haven't met people so starved for color since I left the Gray Coast. I hope I find a place to buy more soon. I spent this afternoon walking along the banks of the Truckle, trying to stay in the shade, watching frogs and lungfish jump into the water as I passed them. I'm always surprised at how high lungfish can jump. It's not what one expects from creatures with no legs.

The first traveler I met on the road was an amphibious man carrying an enormous book. It was written in a hieroglyphic language I didn't recognize; he said it was Tectograma, the Language of Earthquakes. He was sweating rather violently in the heat. Huge drops of greenish liquid formed on his face and arms and rolled down into his shirt, which would have been stained quite badly if it hadn't already been green. He left a damp trail in the dust of the road. I asked him several times if he would like me to watch his book while he took a dip in the river; I was afraid he was going to melt away to nothing as we walked. He said no the first few times, clinging tightly to the book with long-fingered hands. (He was wearing gloves, presumably to keep the book dry.) Eventually, he relented, handing the book to me and leaping into the water. He was noticeably larger when he came out again. Maybe he really had been gradually shriveling away. I don't think full-time air-breathers completely understand how important water is to amphibians. As we continued walking, his stops for water got more and more frequent; by sunset, I ended up carrying the book on the road while he swam along beside me. That seemed a more sensible arrangement. If he hadn't had the book to keep dry, I doubt he would have come out of the water at all.

He said his name was Rumbulligan. That was more or less all he said all day. Before he let me carry the book, he was in no state for conversation; after he let me carry it, he was mostly underwater. We traveled in a companionable silence.

There were few other travelers on the road today. Perhaps it was the heat.* We passed a few people on foot, a group of crow-feathered avians panting in their black plumage, a two-headed musician practicing counterpoint with himself as he walked, and a coggerel fruit vendor who was quite happy to sell us as much as we wanted. (It was plump, juicy coggerel fruit, glistening in buckets of cold water. Drops of condensation had formed on it in the humid air. No one can be expected to resist this sort of thing in June.)

The sun was getting low, dripping light as thick as honey sideways through the trees, when we met the final traveler of the day. We had stopped just before a bend in the road, resting in a small clearing under the trees. I had had more than enough heat for one day and was ready to stop for the night. I don't know what Rumbulligan thought. I'm not sure he was awake. His eyes were open, but I'm fairly certain he doesn't have eyelids, so that didn't mean much. The other traveler came around the corner while we sat there. He was human - the first one I've seen in nearly a month now. I like to see other humans occasionally. I haven't looked like one in so long that I sometimes forget what they do look like. He seemed fairly ordinary: perhaps a foot shorter than me, with brown skin, purple eyes, and zebra-striped hair. Nothing particularly unusual. He stopped at the clearing and we exchanged the usual courtesies - good afternoon, mind if I stop here, not at all, I have interesting food, perhaps we can trade, and so on.**

There was a clicking noise farther down the road. As the man began setting down his luggage, a typewriter came around the corner, walking along on spidery metal legs.

The man's name is Alister Radish. He's a traveling accountant and transcriptionist. The typewriter is named Selio, after the legendary poet T. T. Selio. It appears to have once been an ordinary typewriter, but it's been altered quite a lot since then. The legs are only the most obvious additions. On top of it are two mechanical eyes, those little black glass lenses that people dig up with other Hill Builder technology that no one understands. While Mr. Radish was unpacking his dinner, the machine folded itself into a sitting position, extended two slender metal arms, and began cleaning its roller with a small dustcloth.

I was not surprised when Mr. Radish told me that the typewriter runs on a crystal brain, like a clockwork pipe crawler. He says he gave it the brain so it could refill its own ink and check his spelling. It does a lot more than that by now.

It writes poetry.

Pipe crawlers are intelligent in a simple way, like trained animals, but they've never shown any gift for language. They work by imitating the plumbers and mechanics who own them. The mechanical Guardians of the floating cities have written poetry - they've done practically everything at some point in their dedicated, millennia-long lives - but their crystal brains are far more advanced than those of humans, much less pipe crawlers. I've never heard of one of the small brains doing anything like this before.

Of course, I've never heard of anyone linking one to a typewriter. Perhaps it simply picked up language like the ordinary ones pick up mechanics; perhaps any of them could communicate if given the words. If you teach a creature nothing but good plumbing, it's likely to give you nothing but good plumbing in return.

Mr. Radish has sheets and sheets of the typewriter's poetry in the basket of neatly filed papers he carries on his back. He pulled out a few to show us.

At the first was only darkness
And the world was only letters
As those letters came together
In the wrong ways or the right
Then the eyes were given to it
And filled the dark with light
But still in words and letters
It hears pictures in the night

I don't know if it's particularly good poetry or not. It's certainly the best I've heard from a machine. The typewriter seems to have a vague grasp of rhyme and rhythm, though I don't know how it picked those up with no ears. Perhaps syllables are syllables whether they're heard or not. The typewriter seems more concerned, though, with the number of letters in each line. The syllables may vary, but the lines always match. It sits there every night, clicking away to itself, and in the morning, there's a new poem. Some are short:

Ink on paper
Black, white
Two becoming
All there is

Some are long, and some are continuations of other poems. One of the longest - it took the typewriter two months - seems to be a sort of epic about a grain of light traveling through glass tunnels. Neither Rumbulligan nor I could make any sense of it. The poems are put on paper complete and never rewritten; the typewriter makes only one copy of each. If there's any editing, it occurs entirely within the crystal brain.

The typewriter has never written anything but poetry. There are rare occasions when it seems to be trying to communicate something practical, but even those are in poetry:

In the joints
Of right foot
Is a grinding
Is a catching
Needs the oil
Make it loose
And a sliding
Of two pieces
Out of jammed
Set them free

If it weren't for the poetry, it wouldn't seem any more intelligent than any other small crystal brain. It follows Mr. Radish around like a large mechanical dog or mule-crab. It had to be taught to walk; it damaged itself several times at first by walking off ledges or into trees. Even the poetry isn't always understandable. Some seem to be simply playing with words:

Pocket Watch
Pocket Watch
Patch Socket
Pocket Watch
Shack Rocket
Packet Shock
Snatch Hatch
Catch Pocket
Pocket Watch

Others are complete nonsense, at least as far as anyone who's read them can tell.

Parrot the Milky Way
On an enviable swing
The toad on the moon
Shall give it a ring
Try all of it oncely
And hear it all sing
The seconds are over
And minutes the King

The three of us slept on the ground, not bothering to put up a tent or umbrella. After the last few days, no one cares if we get rained on; it would cool us off. As I write, I can hear the typewriter clicking away, its keys going up and down by themselves like the keys of a player piano. (I wonder if anyone's ever hooked a crystal brain up to one of those.) It's a surprisingly relaxing sound, somewhat like rain on a roof.

The postbird has been waiting very patiently for me; I'll stop writing now so that it can take this letter and leave. I don't expect to be awake for long after that.



* My most recent round of molting left me covered with fine golden-brown scales, spotted with dark blue like a gecko, and quite hairless. It's a good combination for the Summer. I don't know how full-time mammals endure it.

** Most countries have courtesies of this sort, but in Sedge, they have an almost ceremonial rhythm to them. Everyone knows the same set of greetings and responses. I've heard older travelers speed through the entire introductory conversation in five seconds, reciting the familiar sentences too quickly for me to make out the individual words.

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.

Crucible

The Great Shwamp has a town for everything. Cloth comes from Chelissera, feathers from Meligma, pottery from Woodpot. There is no metal to speak of in the Great Shwamp, so it gets its metalwork from Crucible. There is quite a lot of it there. Lady Peraximander was right when she called it a city of fire and iron. A river of molten iron runs through the center of town. This is what has made the town the area's center of metalworking: it has a seemingly endless supply of iron and no need of fire to melt it.

We could see the town long before we actually came to it. The cloud of smoke and steam it produces is visible for miles, like the plume of a volcano (which, technically, I suppose it is). We didn't see the town itself until we came out of the trees and into the farmland that surrounds it. It was the first time I'd seen a hill in Sedge. Crucible is a great black heap of a town, a mound of black buildings on a black hill, lit like an oven from within. No sun shines through the cloud that hangs over it. The buildings are visible only as firelit silhouettes.

At the outskirts of the town, where the fields gave way to buildings, they also gave way to metal. There was a sheet of it a few inches thick covering the ground. The edge was smooth and rumpled, like wax, as if the metal had flowed molten over the ground and solidified there.

As I later found out, this is exactly what happened. Most of the hill beneath the town is made of iron, built up over centuries by the molten river that springs from its peak; in the soft, stoneless ground of Sedge, that's the only reason there's a hill at all. If the metal didn't spread out so far around the town, the whole thing would probably sink into the ground. It looks like the melted stub of a giant candle. Plants grow in the spaces between flows of iron, where dirt has collected or been exposed by splits in the metal. What streets there are have been melted out of the side of the hill or welded onto it. The melted ones are perfectly flat and mirror-smooth, polished by centuries of feet; the added ones are clattering catwalks of metal gratings. Most of the buildings on the hill are also made of metal, as it's more common that stone and less flammable than wood. With the clanking of the metalworking shops in the background, it's like being in one of the floating cities.

There is so much iron in the water and soil here that even the hair and skin of the people has a rusty reddish tint. It's rare to see any other color that isn't obviously the work of dye. They advise visitors to drink from cisterns of collected rainwater, rather than from the local wells. Like the spores in Sporetower, such a high concentration of metal can be harmful to anyone not raised with it.

The molten river is called the Flare. It follows a meandering path through the streets of the town, making its slow way from the peak to the base of the hill, and fills the streets with the heat of a thousand fires. There are few bridges over it; most people prefer to keep their distance. Strange spires and encrustations have formed all along the banks, like half-melted candles or icicles in black metal. Salamanders perch on them like miniature mountain dragons. Rare in most parts of the world, salamanders breed like rats in Crucible. It's one of the few places above ground that's hot enough for them. It's common to see the small reptiles climbing out of the river, glowing with its heat, shaking the drops of molten iron off of their backs as they look around for edible insects or mice. Most of them don't stay out long. I don't think they'd leave the river at all if they weren't so curious. Salamanders can survive perfectly well on a diet of sunlight and charcoal, but their natural habitat is the inside of a volcano. The ones that live near the surface only leave to find food. They hunt with light and flame, roasting or dazzling their prey before they eat it. The dragons say that there are larger ones down in the depths of the earth, lurking in the sea of fire that lies under the ground, that sea that leaks through in volcanoes and molten places like Crucible. I have no idea what those eat. Perhaps there are fish of fire down there for them. For all we know, there could be creatures of all kinds, a whole bestiary of flame living below the ground as we live above it, and the salamanders are simply the only ones that travel between the two. If the dragons know, they aren't telling anyone.

My own salamander spent most of the day out on top of the lantern it lives in, looking around with wide eyes at the town full of flames and the abundance of its relatives. I let it go and say hello to several of them. It was well-trained in Cormilack, though, and always came back when I called it.

Anyone who goes outdoors anywhere near the metalworking district or the river wears thick leather coats and wide-brimmed hats. Sparks and drops of molten iron spatter and drop there like rain, and not everyone is fireproof enough to just shrug them off. Fortunately, there are stores where you can rent the outfits. Like me, most visitors would rather not buy an entire set of fireproof clothing that they won't use anywhere else, but no one wants to come to Crucible and not see the River Flare.

The surface of the river used to steam and solidify when it rained.* Parts still do so, forming a dark crust on top like the ice on water; most of the river is covered, though, with a sort of metal awning that keeps it dry and therefore liquid. It's a beautiful structure, a roof held up by slender columns and rafters of metal, like a cross between a Caroque cathedral and an oven. The townspeople call it the Flue. It was built long ago by the legendary Lady Pyrafax, whom the legends say was part salamander (some say part dragon) and could sculpt molten metal with her bare hands, like clay. The Flue certainly looks like it was made that way; a skilled metalsmith could make work that graceful with a hammer, but it would take decades. Besides, the Flue has the look of something sculpted, not beaten. It's all fluid curves and graceful twists, no two parts quite the same, and there's not a seam in sight. Some say you can find the Lady Pyrafax's fingerprints in the metal. Fire-bats roost with salamanders in the upper reaches, swooping down to catch night insects before they fly into the bright river and incinerate themselves.

Most of Crucible's best metalworkers live near the river. It's the most convenient source of metal in the town. Many of them have balconies built over the banks, so they can lower containers made of stone** over the railings and pull up metal by the bucketful. Several of the smiths have pipes installed in their smithies that lead directly to the river. They have iron on tap with the turn of a handle. This only works in smithies by the river, though, as the iron will cool and solidify if it travels more than about six feet. That's a blocked pipe no plumber can fix.

I found out all of this without the company of Mahalia Peraximander. I had been traveling with her for the past few days - or, rather, I had been traveling with my scissors, which had been traveling with her. She didn't seem particularly interested in my company except as the owner of the scissors. She did talk to me occasionally - mostly describing her plans for her Fish, which continued to be completely incomprehensible to me, or complaining of the eccentricities of the family to which she was returning. "For they are a clan of the Stubborn and Unlistening," she said, "who would not see Sense if it was written on their very Eyelids." This is, apparently, the reason she spends so much time away from Crucible, despite her fierce devotion to the town. To hear her talk, no other place in the world is worth seeing, and no other family so impossible to tolerate.

When we reached the outskirts of Crucible, she stopped and turned to me. It had taken days, but her fur was short all over, if somewhat ragged. There were rust-red highlights in the black roots. It seems rather odd to complain about the heat and then return to a place like Crucible, but perhaps it's easier to endure when it's part of home.

"You have proved yourself Useful," she said, handing my scissors back. "You have my Thanks and Gratitude, and that of my Fish. May you be warmed by the Fire and never Burned. Now go away." With that, she turned and strode away through the streets.

I doubt I will see her again. If I ever find myself back here again, though, I intend to ask about her and her Fish. I am curious to hear if her plans for him succeed.



* Thanks to its constant shroud of soot and steam, Crucible is one of the only places in the world where the clouds clear when it rains. Sporetower is another.

** These are the crucibles with which the town shares its name. No one seems to be sure which is named after the other; both are containers that hold molten metal, so it could have gone either way.

Fish of the Sun

I left the gregarials yesterday after a breakfast of fish and green cheese. (It comes from the green cow. Her name is Pickle.) In exchange for the hospitality, I left them a jar of dark green oil paint. As I mentioned, one of the gregarials is an albino, white-scaled with bright pink eyes; he has difficulty hunting, as he practically glows in the dark.* I can easily pick up more green at the next town I come to, and he could use some camouflage that won't wash off in the water.

The following day was relatively quiet; the gregarials carried me across the river on half of a boat that they have, wished me well, and sent me on my way. It took longer to get back to the main river than it had to get away from it, so I ended up spending a night in the open after all. Oh well. I'm used to it. I would have slept quite well if it hadn't been for the owls hooting in Morse code over my head.

Today, like every day in the last week, it seemed as if the sun had come down to bathe in the river. Steam rose from the water. The light reflecting from the packed dirt of the road was blinding. I kept to the trees as much as possible, their shade nearly black in comparison to the sunlight. Even there, the air seemed something to be drunk rather than breathed. I reached the river road slightly before noon, hardly a hundred feet from where I left it two days ago. The Tetravanians would be proud. It seems like a lot of work to cross that much distance, but I'm glad I did; I got to meet the gregarials, after all. I looked back at the branch that had caused the detour, that torrent of fast water that had been too strong for me to sail across, and was shocked to see someone wading in it.

Normally, I would say she was a large, fluffy samoval, but I don't think I've ever met one who was less than eight feet tall and didn't make a sheepdog look bald in comparison, so there's really no need. This one was no exception. She was plowing through the water, waves breaking against her waist, stomping as if she was trying to kill something with her feet. She was in the deepest part of the river when I first noticed her. As she started to reach the shallower parts, her head got higher... and higher...

If she wasn't at least nine feet tall, I must have shrunk a lot in the last few weeks.

She was wearing a wide-brimmed hat the size of a wagon wheel. It was almost wide enough to shade her shoulders. On one shoulder, she was carrying a four-foot jar full of what looked like orange juice. Every so often, a flash of red scales and fins was visible inside. Her fur was black at the roots, but she had dyed it a pale yellow, possibly to make it less hot in the sun. If so, it didn't seem to be working particularly well. She was panting in the heat. As I watched, she let out a roar of frustration, threw her hat into the bushes, put down the jar - I was afraid she would throw that too, but she put it down with exquisite care - and flung herself headlong into the river. The wave nearly capsized a little canoe passing by.

"A Thousand Thousand Curses on this abominable fur!" she roared, erupting out of the water again. The man in the canoe nearly tipped over out of fright this time. "Even in the cool of the shade, it Roasts me like a very Oven, and gives me no peace by Night or by Day! I swear this moment, in the hearing of all who hear me, I shall endure it no more! I shall cut it off! To the last Strand shall I sever this coat of Evil, and cast it into the Mud to be trampled by Cattle and Pigs! You!" She pointed with a massive fist at the terrified canoe-paddler. "Have you Scissors? Give them to me!"

The man babbled something about not having any scissors, sorry, goodbye, and paddled off at a speed I didn't know was possible in a canoe. I could see sunlight underneath the keel.

The samoval turned and caught sight of me. "You!" she said, sloshing over to the bank. "You are one who has Scissors. I can tell. You have the Look. Give them to me." She held out one enormous hand. I took a look at the claws on it and decided not to argue.

My scissors looked like nail scissors in her hand, but she managed to get the tip of a finger through each handle. Her fur stuck out in spikes as it dried in the hot air. She cut each one off as if it had personally insulted her. She started walking again as she worked, picking up her hat and jar again on the way by. The jar must have weighed more than I do; she lifted it easily, with one hand.

I had little choice but to follow her. I only have the one pair of scissors. Fortunately, she was going in the same direction I had been traveling anyway. She stomped along without another word, pounding dust out of the road, hacking away at her fur with every step. She somehow managed to hold the jar in one arm while trimming with the other. Cutting evenly seemed to be of no importance; after an hour, her arms had a sort of mangled hedge look to them. The scraps of dyed fur that remained made a sort of diced lightning pattern over the dark roots. The scaled thing continued to flicker in and out of sight in the glass jar. After another hour or so, the samoval seemed less completely enraged, so I asked her about it.

"This is my Fish," she declared. "He is a handsome Fish and quick of Fin. I am raising him in the Fruit of the Sun, so that he shall be a Giant among all Fishes and possess the power of Flame. The Waters shall steam where he Swims."

After that, she was quite willing to talk, though the conversation was rather one-sided. Her name, she said, is Mahalia Peraximander the Third. (The Fish is from the Unseen Deeps and does not yet have a name.) She is apparently part of the royal family of a place called Crucible, "a Great City of Fire and Iron." Having found her Fish, she is returning there. She's fifth in line for the Throne, "but unlikely ever to claim it," she said. "For we are a family of great Strength and Stubbornness, and it shall be many Years till the Death of my Uncle, if indeed Death ever dares to disturb him at all."

I wonder if everyone in Crucible talks this way. I suppose I'll find out. It's going to take a long time to cut all that fur.



* His name is something like Plrzzxgak. I can't pronounce it any better than I can spell it.

Gregarials

I had to take a detour yesterday around a branch of the river. There was no bridge over it. There had been one once, judging by the broken pilings on either side, but it looked like the last flood had decided to keep it. The current was a bit faster than I was comfortable with, or I would have crossed on my suitcase.

The path was shady, overhung with trees and marsh creepers; I didn't mind leaving the hot, dusty road for a while. Frogs jumped off the bank as I passed. Kingfishers and spotted snatchers yelled at each other in the trees. The river branch was quiet, as flat and shallow as the main trunk, but the forest around it more than made up for that.

There were far fewer houses on the branch. I walked until almost sunset, when the light slanted sideways through the trees and lined them with gold, and saw not a single sign of anyone living nearby. I was starting to resign myself to sleeping in a tree when I came across the house. It was old, a low, lopsided building that looked like it was about to slide into the river. The porch sagged so much that one side was submerged. The water around it was full of weeds and floating logs; it looked as if the house had begun to dissolve already. Sedges and cattails covered the banks and leaned up against the crooked boards, except for a muddy, trampled-looking area by the water. There was a cow grazing in the back. It was green.

As I walked up to the door, several of the logs lifted their heads from the water and looked at me.

I covered the last few steps to the door somewhat faster, then wondered after I knocked if perhaps I shouldn't have. The face that answered the door was startingly similar to the ones that I could hear crawling out of the water behind me. They were completely unhurried. Crocodiles are always unhurried right up until that last moment when they lunge. The one at the door, taller on two legs than I was, grinned the grin that only crocodiles and snapjaw sharks can achieve. I was certain that I was about to become dinner.

Then the crocodile burst out laughing at the expression on my face, and I noticed - looking away from those teeth for the first time - that she was wearing an apron and a pair of oven mitts embroidered to look like sheep faces. The crocodiles behind me started laughing too. It was an odd, creaking sound unlike anything I'd heard before; it took me a moment to realize that it was laughter. After a few seconds, I started laughing too, if somewhat nervously. The two-legged crocodile beckoned me inside with one oven mitt.

"Khom in, khom in!" she said. "We won't eatchoo, we promish."

They were not exactly crocodiles, as it turned out, but a closely related species called gregarials. Crocodiles tend to be solitary creatures; gregarials are not. They're pack animals, and far more intelligent than the average crocodile. This was one of several packs living on the River Truckle.

Like most people, they varied quite a bit in shape. Most of them were built more or less like ordinary crocodiles. Several were part amphibian, their back legs missing, their heads adorned with leathery manes of gills. One was an albino; another was striped, like a tiger in green instead of orange, and had six legs. One looked almost human, except for the scales that covered his skin. His wife (the one with the oven mitts) was the other humanoid of the pack. She looked more crocodilian, but was by far the more talkative of the two. Her name was Cheleezixmargra; his was Shekelnark. I was introduced to the others, but their names are far beyond the capabilities of any alphabet I know.

I was never quite able to count how many of them there were.

None of them wore anything besides cooking aprons, which they took off once the food was served. Reptiles rarely feel the need to cover themselves up the way mammals do. There were a few dresses hung on one wall, next to a spectacular striped suit; I assumed that they were for special occasions. The dresses were a variation on the tube gowns popular among reptiles and weasels. Styles are different for people whose mouths are longer than their arms. The gregarial's voices varied as well. A few could have passed for humans with a surplus of teeth, at least in the dark; others had deep, creaking voices, and several spoke only a chewing sort of language that I didn't recognize. They seemed to understand each other well enough.

They invited me in for dinner, with repeated reassurances that I was not to be the main course. That was a stew featuring freshwater eel and a deer that one of them had caught crossing the river. (The roof was largely held up with antlers.) I added a piece of my shell cake and a marginally more recognizable crustacean thing from Woodpot. The gregarials pronounced them crunchy, but edible. I was asked to tell them about my travels - they've rarely been farther downstream than Truckle Stop - but the conversation during dinner was mainly about the day's work. They fish for a living, apparently, and sell things they find at the bottom of the river. The floods leave the things they don't like down there, and even in the dry seasons, people are always dropping jewelry and spectacles and so on out of boats. There's also a lost city somewhere beneath Sedge. None of the gregarials have ever found it - and not for lack of looking - but they keep finding statues and pots and ancient oil lamps half-buried in the mud. There's an archaeologist who, not being aquatic himself, comes up the river every now and then to see what they've found. According to him, it's all from something called the Alpaca Empire, which no one but archaeologists has ever heard of. They say he exclaims over each shard and fragment like a little boy on his birthday. They're quite fond of him.

After dinner, all the gregarials gathered around the fire and listened to Cheleezixmargra read a chapter of Year of the Manatee, Lena Tithe's epic seafaring novel. They were completely absorbed in the story, staring raptly at the reader, though I got the impression that they were most interested in the parts with the sharks. Several of them dropped off to sleep before the end of the chapter.

They invited me to stay the night, and I saw no reason not to accept. I spent the night at the edge of a heap of huge, hoarsely snuffling crocodiles, trying to keep from leaning on claws or the more serrated backs, with fish-scented fangs snoring gently in my ear. A cacophony of frogs shouted from the darkness.

Surprisingly, I actually slept. Once you've reassured yourself that they're not going to eat you, there are few places safer than a heap of crocodiles.

The Floodplains of Sedge

I've decided to follow the River Truckle upstream. This close to the Great Shwamp, it's not far from being a swamp itself. It's comfortable in its bed and doesn't hesitate to stretch out into the surrounding woods. The road on the bank is wide and well-traveled - more so than the boardwalk - so there are fewer washed-out sections. Most of the ones that there are have been filled in with logs or little wooden bridges. The mice here - there are mice everywhere - keep their teeth short by chewing on the railings. They're more artistic about it than some; it's rare to see a bridge without fine traceries of carved scrollwork all over it. You have to look closely to see the tooth marks.

According to the Truckle Stoppers I spoke to,* this country is called Sedge. No one seems sure whether that's short for "Shwamp's edge" or a reference to the plants that grow everywhere. The country is a menagerie of seedpods. There's box sedge, pineapple sedge, pyramid sedge, bottle sedge, giraffe sedge, cabinet sedge, and the elusive invisible sedge. Hollow seedpods are used as much as pottery. Musicians who can't afford instruments just find a ripe rattlesack or whistling sedge, put a coat of varnish on it, and play that instead. Many of the seeds have spines all over, so they attach themselves to your clothing when you brush the plants. There are villages where they wear seeds on their clothes, stuck on in intricate patterns like beads or embroidery. Other plants have different ways of spreading. I was nearly hit twice today by rocket sedge, which can shoot its enormous seed spikes all the way across the river. They have a tendency to spontaneously explode during dry seasons. I'm glad this isn't one.

No one can agree on whether or not Sedge is part of the Great Shwamp. The border, like the land, is less than solid. After traveling through the Shwamp, where land is scarce where it exists at all, it's surprising to see so many houses. I come across three or four every mile. Most of them seem to be farmers or fishers, with nets hanging in the water or fields baking beneath the sun. One house had nets strung across the river, above the water, to catch skipperjacks. The fields are low and full of water; the water is shallow and full of dirt. People toss small stones into it as offerings to the river spirit. They believe that rivers ought to have pebbles to rub smooth, and the Truckle, flowing through a marsh, is deprived of them.

The river fills everything here. Ponds, inlets, and tributaries break up the ground into a thousand islands, which shift and change shape with the flow of the water. The land is so flat that you can see their outlines clearly, speckled across the landscape until they disappear behind trees. At night, the river rises into the air as fog; during the Spring, it climbs out of its banks (only a few inches above water at their highest) and floods the land for miles. The small forests and copses that speckle the fields are striped with the mud left by previous floods. The farmers can read the years on them. Every flood has a name.

"Here's the line from the Shell-Raiser. Highest water in my lifetime. I was only five, but I can still remember my mother taking us all up to the top of the old signal tower. First time I ever imagined what the Ocean might be like."

"There's the Great Perforation, when all the termite eels came up from Sporetower. You can still see the holes in the wood..."

Some trees have the detritus of floods caught in their branches. Children don't bother to build treehouses by the Truckle; they just find a tree with a wagon or a wardrobe in it and hang up a rope ladder. The farmers are thoroughly unconcerned about floods. Most of them are at least partly amphibious. They grow rice and mackerel grass, plants that don't mind spending weeks underwater; they build their houses low and sloping, with streamlined roofs that go all the way to the ground, so currents will go over them instead of carrying them away. Half the furniture is made of metal or ironwood so that it won't float away. The rest is tied to the houses. During floods, the farmers spend the day fishing and scavenging, then find their way home by looking for their furniture bobbing on top of the water. Nearly everyone has a bed or a wardrobe that can be turned into a serviceable houseboat for a week or two. It's not unusual to have the world underwater for five or six weeks out of every year. That's just the way things are.

Fortunately for travelers like me, there are rarely floods at this time of year. The land is as close to dry as it gets. The sun pounds dust from the road. Cicadas drone in the daytime, somewhere in the trees, hidden from view but audible for miles. Locusts make short, rattling flights in the grass. At night, katydids and frogs take over, moving from the lazy insect fugue of the daytime to the invisible polyphony of night.

I've never been fond of heat, but it's days like these that remind me of what I love about Summer.



* Most of the people I spoke to in Truckle Stop wanted portraits. There's a pipe crawler in the town that draws them, but it uses a geometric, highly stylized technique. Not everyone wants to come out looking like the carvings on a thousand-year-old tomb.