Leaving SuyMaTmakk

Farewell to SuyMaTmakk. Today I left behind the whirlpool lake, the wicker buildings, the endless living cacophony of life on Market Street. As the wagon rattled along the road by the River KleMit, the bird's-nest skyline and its crown of waterfall mist faded into the distance.

I've enjoyed my time in SuyMaTmakk, but it's time to move on before I get too attached.

I said goodbye to the TiLeKraNas before I left this morning. As thanks for their hospitality, I gave them a set of origami birds in bright paper, the kind that can be folded up and put into an envelope or a pocket. I learned how to make them in Mollogou. To my surprise, the family gave me a beautiful salamander lantern, a fluid shape like a turnip of blended metal and glass. HmoTan said it was an experiment that went slightly wrong. It makes a perfect home for a salamander. Apparently, the children have been playing with my salamander while I've been out,* and they'd noticed that its lantern was getting a bit small. My salamander has grown a lot since I got it. In fact, it's starting to get a bit fat. Maybe I should feed it less coal for a while.

The TiLeKraNas are going to spend a few more days in the city before heading back up the Hley. Instead, I got a ride with a merchant on his way out of town. His name is FlunDitChukk. Whether it's his first name or last name, I have no idea; he's said maybe six words since I met him, and that many only if you count grunts. His cart is pulled by something called a dunderblub, which looks something like a hairy mushroom with four stumpy legs. If it has a head under all the fur, I haven't been able to find it. I can only tell which end is the front when it's walking; even that's only a guess. I'm not entirely sure that it's even an animal. Its name is Tupp.

FlunDitChukk is taking a shipment of jazz birds to CheChmit. They look a bit like roadrunners, but they have clever faces and black-and-white magpie stripes. When they spread their wings, the feathers look like piano keys. They sit in wicker cages in the back of the wagon and warble syncopated improvisations to each other. Occasionally, one of them gets its talons on a trumpet. (FlunDitChukk has a shipment of those too. I'm not sure whether this is a coincidence or not.) I have no idea how they can play a trumpet without lips; whenever I look around, the music stops. All I ever see are a bunch of birds sitting around and whistling innocently.

This could be an interesting trip.

* I was surprised at this, but not particularly worried. My salamander was well trained even before I got it - Cormilack salamanders are some of the most reliable in the world - and children on the dry plains of the Scalps learn fire safety at about the same time they learn to walk. I wasn't worried that they'd hurt each other. I'd watched TiLi and HnerKipPeLo catch fireflies and phosphor moths on the way to SuyMaTmakk, and I don't think they harmed a single charcoal scale of their wings.

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.

Swarm

I haven't had time to write or draw much today, I'm afraid. A swarm of locusts arrived in SuyMaTmakk this morning. This happens periodically - perhaps once every month or two, in the Summer. It always becomes a contest: the locusts eat the city, and the city eats the locusts.

As in Twokk, locusts are something of a staple food here, along with fish, potatoes, wig-root, and a few species of grains. Cooking on the Scalps tends to be full of crunchy bits and the nutty taste of insect meat. Every swarm that comes within a mile of SuyMaTmakk stops for a snack; apparently, all these wicker buildings are too appetizing to resist. (In addition to being the most available building material on the Scalps, grass also seems to make excellent bait.) Once the locusts arrive, descending insatiably on the city, the people of the city descend on them. Wielding scythes, hammers, hatchets, badminton rackets, or whatever else they can lay their hands on - often just their own claws and teeth - they swat and smash the locusts from the air and walls of the city. The best climbers sweep them from the rooftops. I caught a glimpse of Emiline and Katal at one point, cleaving their way through the swarm. Katal swung her trangaban in whistling, deadly arcs; Emiline took a sword she'd gotten somewhere and became a glittering blur too fast for the eye to follow. I can see why they've been so successful at hunting. Everyone tried to stay out of their way.

Other people, the ones less willing to kill things in such large numbers, gather the dead insects as they pile up on the ground. This was what I did all day. I dislike killing things for any reason, and though their numbers and appetite can make them a plague, locusts are still beautiful animals. Fortunately, they're tasty as well. It was easier if I reminded myself that I was gathering food.

It took all day. Everything else in the city stops when a swarm arrives; the locusts have to be caught as fast as they land, or they'll eat the buildings. In the past, when the city hasn't reacted fast enough, whole blocks have simply vanished down a thousand tiny throats. Everyone comes out to catch locusts, taking only occasional breaks when the heat and the noise become overwhelming. The air is filled with spiny legs and hungry jaws and the incessant rattle of insect wings. It's impossible to hear anything else; even Hmakk is inaudible over the noise. The people of the Scalps have developed a sort of sign language to use during swarms. Unfortunately, I don't know it, so I just went where people pointed.

Up in the air, the avians of the city - those capable of flight - cut swathes through the clouds of locusts, using claws or beaks or antique weapons left over from more warlike centuries. A black-feathered man named Katahweet was particularly skilled; he used a saber passed down from his grandmother, and the sky rained bisected insects wherever he flew. Everyone tried to stay out from under him. A few of the other avians have discovered a particular note, inaudible to most vertebrates, that knocks locusts unconscious when sung. They only use it when they're too high to hear from the ground, so that they don't knock out the city's chitinous citizens as well.

Only the herbivores took any breaks for meals. Most of them don't eat insects. When the rest of us got hungry, we just ate the locusts as we caught them.

It was sundown before the swarm was gone. The fastest and nimblest locusts ate their fill and flew on, clattering away in a much smaller swarm than when they arrived. Their fallen comrades remained behind, piled on the street, filling barrels and baskets and a great many stomachs. The buildings around us were in surprisingly good condition; they were a bit chewed around the edges, but nothing a few days' patching won't fix. Most of the locusts hadn't had time to eat much. The people of SuyMaTmakk have had a long time to get good at this.

About half the people went home, exhausted, to rest until tomorrow. The rest of us spent the next few hours gathering the remaining locusts and carting them off to the city's storehouses. These are enormous subterranean buildings built solely to hold locusts; they're called Hlatakanit (from hlataka, the Hmakk word for locust), and they're as large as the city's granaries. Over the next month or two, the heaps of locusts gathered today will be dried, stored, and gradually reintroduced as breakfast, lunch, and supper.

I've eaten a lot of locust dishes in my time on the Scalps, but tonight's supper was the best yet. I don't know whether the reason was freshness or satisfaction. Food always tastes better when you catch it yourself.

Market Street, Day 4: the Singing Huntresses

These two looked like an interesting pair. I could hear them laughing from across the street (one of them, anyway). I introduced myself, and they agreed to let me draw them if I bought them another round of drinks.

Their names are Emiline and Katal. Emiline was drinking green tea with mint; Katal had something that steamed and turned the table black when it spilled out of her mug. They were in good spirits and talked while I drew. Emiline says she grew up in Ganraminga, a coastal city in Minann, just far enough from Mollogou to stay intact. It's a city of mist and elegant manners. Katal told me a long, detailed story about how she was raised by wolves on the Scalps, and how she left when she realized she was bigger and stronger than any of them. About twenty minutes later, she told me another story about how she was raised by shark-riding bandits on the Mandible Coast. An hour after that, it was sky-monkeys in the floating jungles.

The two of them make their living by traveling across the plains, hunting and singing ballads. There wasn't much hunting to be done in town, but I did get to hear them sing in the inn this evening. They say people are often surprised to find that both of them are equally skilled at hunting and singing. Katal has a lovely alto voice, sweet and clear between her fangs, and as delicate as Emiline looks, she's apparently rather deadly with her bow. It's almost as tall as she is.

There's a lot of space on the Scalps. Of all the creatures that cross them - thunderbeast, rainwalkers, candlegiraffes, wild horses, lightning hyenas - very few ever come within sight of a town. Katal and Emiline say they find some creature no one's ever heard of on almost every trip they take. This month, it was a strange elephantoid beast with multiple tusks; they grow in rows out of its mouth, curling up and over its head in ranks, like a second ribcage. There's a whole herd of them on the plains. The two huntresses caught "the best one" and brought it back to the Museum of Natural Philosophy in SuyMaTmakk, where it will probably spend the next month being cleaned by carrion beetles and then stuffed. It took the huntresses two weeks to drag it back on a wagon. This is what they were celebrating when I met them.

At this time of year, though, they mostly hunt thunderbeast and speckled antelope. Katal seemed to be wearing most of an antelope already; she wore one of the speckled skins as a dress and several particularly interesting bones around her neck. One of the songs the two of them sang this evening comes from the Scalps, and they performed it the traditional way, with drums made of antelope skulls. The clack of bone went perfectly with the clattering Hmakk words.

The songs came from all over Hamjamser. There were sea shanties, hop-fugues from Kennyrubin, lightning-fast breakdowns from the Railway Regions, arzenroyds with chords that made the silverware vibrate. I recognized love songs (frequently estimated to be half of the music ever written) in at least five different languages. They sang a few hymns, a cappella; the harmonies were breathtaking. They even sang the Saga of Neinrak, one of those bleak Northern song-tales of ice and revenge. It takes half an hour and leaves every character dead. They had the entire room spellbound by the third verse; by the eighth, we were joining in for the choruses (there are five different ones, each repeated throughout the saga). By the sixteenth verse, most of us were too choked up by the story to trust our voices anymore. It took several patter-songs and ironic ballads before anyone could smile again.

While they sang, I touched up the paint on Emiline's quiver. It had gotten scratched while she was wrestling a cathomar in the foothills of the Railway Regions. Though she's modest about it, Emiline has trained rather extensively in the kinds of martial arts that let you toss around creatures five times your size. She's the only person I've met who's chosen the contest of strength - usually the least popular of a cathomar's traditional three choices - and one of the only ones I've even heard of who's actually won it. The cathomar must have been quite surprised.

Some of my favorite songs were the ones from Mollogou, crooked melodies with strange, metallic chords. Katal's instrument is called a trangaban; it's an enormous stringed thing, like a five-foot banjo made of steel. It looks like she occasionally uses it as a club (presumably when her actual iron hunting club isn't handy). For the Mollogou songs, she played the trangaban with a pair of tin spoons, producing a sound somewhere between a steel drum and a dulcimer. Emiline plays the soolian, a relative of the clarinet. It has a flared opening carved to look like a dragon's head. The two of them showed exactly how good they were with their instruments when they performed a traditional haknit from SuyMaTmakk; soolian and trangaban skittered up and down the scale, forming complex, glittering harmonies with Katal's powerful voice. The angry words of the haknit would have been slightly more convincing if they hadn't been grinning so widely the whole time.

Market Street, Day 3: the Animals

There are probably more animals for sale on Market Street than there are people to buy them. Their snorts and clucks and shrieks occasionally drown out even the songs of the vendors. Horses, mules, oxen, emus, and a variety of cart-lizards pull wagons between the crowded stalls. Klepts lurk silently in the shadows. Fish circle in barrels and tightly woven baskets. Messenger monkeys scuttle over the rooftops, screeching to each other in raucous code. Below them, people stop to listen to the songs of the Kelleries, birds as drab as kiwis and as musical as nightingales. Their voices have outgrown their wings. Some of them sing counterpoint with the calliope cicadas.

The spotted hens this one boy seemed so fond of are only one of the hundreds of kinds of poultry in the market. There are ducks and geese, chickens and kaklbirds, paihens and pahareets, bred for meat or eggs or feathers. One breed of tiny bantams produces eggs the size of grapes, with all the iridescent colors of an opal in the shells. There are jewelers who use them in jewelry; they spend hours hollowing out the eggs, filling the shells with something more durable, and coating them in substances that make the colors last. The recipes for these are jealously guarded by each jeweler. Only their apprentices learn the secret.

The russet crabs are raised to turn food scraps into useful meat, like pigs. They get to be about the same size. The ones at the market are usually sold small - palm-size at most - but they never seem to stop growing. A man once kept one for twelve years to see how big it would get. At the end of the twelve years, it ripped its way out of his basement and cut a thundering path of destruction through the city before plunging into the depths of Lake Twiliat. The hole it left revealed that the man had quadrupled the size of his basement to make room for it. It was taller than his house. As far as anyone knows, it's still somewhere in the depths of the lake, growing bigger every year.

Since then, everyone makes sure to eat russet crabs before they get much larger than a pig. Almost every family has one if they can afford it. You can see them all along the canals, scurrying around in wicker pens under the water. There's never more than one crab to a pen; they have an unfortunate habit of eating each other. I can't say I blame them. I've tasted them once or twice myself, and they're delicious.

There are pets in the market too, of course. This girl seemed to have fallen in love with one of the house-spiders, as so often happens with small, fuzzy animals. It had pink feet. Her brother didn't seem quite so sure about them.

House-spiders are a fairly common sight in SuyMaTmakk. They're descended from the wild tarantulas of the plains, in much the same way that lap-dogs are descended from wolves. The poison was bred out of them a long time ago. They can still bite, but it's only painful, not deadly, and they've long since lost the aggression of wild spiders. You're more likely to be bitten by a hamster. They're kept for the same reason as cats; they're soft, they're affectionate, and they catch mice. Many people prefer house-spiders to cats. They're more easily housebroken, and they get rid of ants as well.

There are dozens of kinds of fish in the market - this is a lake city, after all - but these are some of the strangest. In the wild, jar-fish live in the abandoned tunnels of muskrats and water-snakes. Only the most vertical holes will do. They sit in the holes all day, dangling their long fins down through the entrances, and only come out when they can sense that nothing's moving nearby. No one's sure what sense they use. It could be hearing, or a form of echolocation, or the strange electric awareness used by sharks.

Jar-fish are always kept in tall jars like this, hence the name. If they're kept in larger containers, they develop acute agoraphobia and stop eating. The TiLeKraNas knew a scientist once who kept one in a beaker and used it as a seismograph. He said it was the only reason his workshop survived the eruption of Mount SanCheLi; the tremors were still too gentle for him to feel when the fish panicked and tried to hide in its own mouth.

This is one of my favorite parts of Market Street, second only to the scavenger docks and the booksellers' alley. The animals of the market come from all over the plains. There are birds from the forests, beasts from the open spaces, strange and wondrous fish dredged up from the lake. Parts of the city have become whole ecosystems of their own, narrow wicker forests between the lake and the plains. Many of the creatures here were bred in SuyMaTmakk and exist nowhere but in the city.

Every day, it gets harder to leave the market without bringing some of them with me.

Market Street, Day 2: the Waitress

Gisella Peliak is a waitress at the Krolem Hmuytebit, a restaurant on Market Street. Its name means "the Affable Troglodyte." In SuyMaTmakk, it's called a yanyanitlekka, which means something like, "sunrise, sunset, all night long." It never closes. In other parts of the world, it would be called a diner.

There was some sort of festival today - just a minor one, I think. Crowds of people lined up along the docks and threw weeds into the lake, which sucked them down into itself (except where people had brought bladderwort or floatweed. I'm not sure whether or not this counts as cheating). The festival is called the Eating of the Weeds, or something of the sort; it has something to do with farming. A few people tried to explain it to me, but I couldn't hear them very well. I'm fairly sure at least half of them were drunk.

The crowds got to be too much for me after a while, so I ducked down a few alleyways to find a more peaceful spot. Alleys in SuyMaTmakk are even more like crooked birds' nests than the rest of the city. No one bothers to weave neatly on the back of a building. I eventually came out on the quieter end of Market Street. There was hardly anyone there; they were all at the festival. A tall person in a striped cloak - male or female, I couldn't tell - was poring over a bookseller's stall, running a slow finger along the spine of each book, as if reading an unfamiliar language one letter at a time. It looked as if this had been going on for a while. The bookseller was snoring. Other than the two of them, and a couple of construction workers napping on a half-woven building, there was no one on the street.

I stopped for lunch at the nearest restaurant, which turned out to be the Affable Troglodyte. It was nearly deserted as well. There were a few people reading at solitary tables, a couple who appeared to be quietly celebrating an anniversary, and an insect mother and child playing some sort of pencil-and-paper game between crumb-scattered plates. That was all.

I stayed there for most of the afternoon, sitting in a back corner and sketching the other customers. Not many came in. The ones who did usually stayed a while, sitting still, which made them easy to sketch.

Ms. Peliak noticed what I was doing when she brought me lunch. (I forget what it was. Something made of locusts.) Her nails were painted bright pink; so were the tips of her tusks.

"Hmm," she said. "Not bad. Have you been here after dark?"

I hadn't.

"You might want to come back then," she said, and moved on to refill someone's coffee without another word.

The sun was hot and the crowds were noisy, so I decided to simply stay there. It wasn't as if I was taking up needed space; not even half the tables were full.

At about midnight, someone turned the lamps down, and the diner became a dim cave. The customers were stranger after that.

It started with the usual mix of troglodytes and nocturnals - people with pale skin and large eyes, snakes and ferrets, the kinds of miners who never leave the house without a pickaxe. Many of them wore dark glasses and wide-brimmed hats. A bat-woman came in wearing a waistcoat fastened with magnets. There were so many rings in her ears that she jingled when she turned her head. A group of werewolves came in soon after midnight, on two legs or four or something in between. They were laughing and talking among themselves as they ordered meat and green tea. The topic of conversation always seemed to be the moons.

A steady procession of fishy people went in and out all night, dripping with lacy fins and clear lake water. Most of them were wearing weeds, the same little stalks and flowers that had been thrown from the docks that afternoon, tucked into their pockets or gills. They ordered soup and ate it with great slurping gusto.

The person in the striped cloak came in carrying a single book. It was small, but obviously carefully selected. The person sat down at a table and unwrapped the cloth from its head to reveal more cloth. This layer was in a dark gray houndstooth pattern. There was a horizontal tear near the bottom of what I'm assuming was the person's head, into which it tucked tiny slices of potato for almost three hours.

At a table in the back, a man with four ears sat and muttered to himself while he made painstaking repairs to what looked like a disembodied hand. I assumed he was either a shapeshifter or an expert on clockwork. He crunched peanuts from a bowl as he worked. After an hour or two, he unfolded a third arm from his coat and attached the hand to its wrist. He grinned in satisfaction as he flexed the fingers. I'm still not sure whether it was real or clockwork, but whichever it was, he seemed to have gotten it to work.

Vague upright shadows flitted across the floor to lurk under tables, as if even the dim lamp light was too much for them. They gave their orders in flickering sign language. What they got was either ink or the blackest coffee I've ever seen.

Two men sat down on opposite sides of a small table. "It is time," said one of them.

The other man nodded. "Have you the Tome?"

The first man pulled an enormous book out of his coat - I have no idea how it fit - and thumped it onto the table. It was bound in green leather, singed at the corners. The two of them stared at it for a while.

Eventually, the other one reached into his own coat and pulled out one of the little booklets of crossword puzzles that you can buy at the market, three for a Packle.

"Ah. The Tome," said the first man.

"What dreadful checkered mysteries it contains." The other nodded solemnly.

"This night shall see their unraveling."

"Indeed. Let us begin."

They spent the rest of the night doing crossword puzzles with the solemnity of a burial. They were still there when I left.

Ms. Peliak served everyone with equal cheer, pink nails shining in the dim lanterns. Apparently, she's used to them all by now, or professional enough not to show it if she isn't. She asked several of them about their families.

"I visited my parents at their home last night. Then I woke up."

"My sister has been dead for ten years now. She said to thank you for the flowers you sent last week."

"My aunt is downstairs, my uncle is upstairs, my grandfather is on the roof. When it rains, he is the first to know."

"Fam'ly? Whazzat?"

"My children number in the hundreds. They knit me socks to make me proud. Whatever shall I do with so many socks? I have only three feet."

A drifting, diaphanous thing came up through the floor at three o'clock, wreathed in smoke. I'm fairly sure it came through the cracks between the tiles. It sat slightly above a table and drank the smoke from a bowl of incense as if it was a fine wine.

That was when I left. I was too exhausted to tell if the thing was real or a sleep-deprived hallucination. In fact, I wonder the same thing about most of the people I saw last night. Ms. Peliak is the only one I'm sure was real. She was there all night, solid among shadows and phantoms, serving eggs and pouring coffee. I don't know when she sleeps.

This, as you may have guessed, is the reason my letter was late yesterday; I was up all night at the diner. I think it was worth it - for this picture, if nothing else.

I haven't included any of my other sketches. I'm not sure I believe them.

Market Street, Day 1: the Scavenger

After a day spent exploring the market district of SuyMaTmakk, I'm afraid I'm too tired to write much tonight. I did come back with some pictures, though; perhaps they'll make up for it. Here's the first.

This is Harzifan Scrath, scavenger and merchant. He spends most of his days climbing over the islands of flotsam in the center of the lake. On Tuesdays, he brings back what he's found over the week and sells it at the market. His stall is set up by the docks. It's full of old clothes, boxes, and assorted bits of furniture; he found a whole butter churn last week, perfectly intact. A heap of tableware in materials that float (wooden spoons, bone-handled forks) sits next to an array of mismatched jewelry.* There are books so waterlogged that they're shaped like fans, their pages splayed and wrinkled and all but illegible. There's a china doll that looks like the survivor of a shipwreck. Perhaps she is. She has one shoe, patent leather with a brass buckle, and lake-weed in her hair.

A row of bottles stands in an uneven line in front of the stall. They're full of the small, smooth gouges left by the vitreous snail, which makes its shell out of glass. Any glass object left in the lake will be full of the same little pockmarks within days. The snails normally eat sand, processing it into glass in some strange pocket of their digestive system, but they've developed a taste for pure glass since people first settled by the lake. The TiLeKraNas have a colony of them at their house; they bring the occasional shell to the market whenever a snail dies of old age. There were none this time, but the shells are apparently quite lovely. Surprisingly, they're also quite practical. Most of the predators in the lake eat snails - if they like snails - by crunching them up, shell and all. Hail-storks and a few kinds of seagulls can crack even the toughest ones by flying them to great heights and dropping them on the docks.** Nothing bothers to do this with the vitreous snails, though; cracking their shells gives you nothing but a lump of meat full of glass shards.

An ornate wooden mantel clock sits on a back corner of the stall, ticking quietly. Harzifan says he's had it for five years now. It's made of some kind of hardwood - rare and valuable on the plains, where most wood comes in the form of small sticks - but no one has bought it. Harzifan says this might be because of the water stains, which have turned the clock charcoal-black in splotches, or possibly because it's run backward ever since he fished it out of the lake. I'm impressed that it runs at all.

Harzifan himself simply sits there all afternoon, grinning that same piratical grin at everyone who passes by. Every Tuesday, he says, he's more grateful than the week before to have the chance to relax. (His voice is deep and rough, like gravel on a lakebed, or the razor grin of a shark.) He's getting too old to be climbing over heaps of flotsam all day, he says. When someone buys the backward clock, or when it finally stops ticking, that's the day he'll retire.

I took a look at the clock as I was leaving, after I'd thanked Harzifan for letting me sketch him.*** The gears inside, where they were visible, gleamed with polish and good repair; the clock's price was higher than everything else in the stall put together, including the stall itself and possibly Harzifan's hat. Somehow, I don't think he's in a hurry.



* It's impossible to find a matched pair of earrings at a single scavenger's stall. It takes visits to at least a dozen to have the slightest hope of a match. There are people who spend hours going from stall to stall, playing the scavenger market like some sort of giant memory game, cataloguing hundreds of salvaged earrings in their heads in the hopes of finding a match. According to Harzifan, it's surprising how often they succeed.

** This, of course, is what hail-storks are named for. A whole flock of them can produce a short but devastatingly well-aimed shower of snails. This is why dock workers around Lake Twiliat wear such thick hats all the time, even during the hottest weather. They can't just drop what they're doing and run, the way everyone else does when the storks appear overhead; they have to have a different method of avoiding concussions.

*** I bought one of his books, as it seems rude to sketch someone's business and not buy something from it. It's called Hni Teli Paka, which could be translated as either "Greetings, O amusing one" or "Hey you, ugly." Some of its pages still look legible. This could be interesting.

SuyMaTmakk

According to the TiLeKraNas, SuyMaTmakk is the only real city on the Scalps. There are a few large towns that like to call themselves cities when they think they can get away with it, and a couple of ghost cities where no one lives except night-haunts and the intensely solitary, but SuyMaTmakk is by far the largest concentration of living people. It's built around the only lake.

When I first saw SuyMaTmakk, I thought it was on fire. The setting sun caught the cloud of mist that hangs constantly over the city, raised by its hundred waterfalls, and lit it all up in orange. The buildings, made of sticks and straw and sod bricks, cast scarecrow shadows against the sunset.

Every river on the Scalps eventually empties into Lake Twiliat. There are only four of them, so this is not quite as impressive as it sounds, but that's still a lot of water for the Scalps. The Hley comes from the East. The other three rivers are the KleMit (West), the HatPaLikk (South), and the Flyeek (Northwest, except during full moons, when it moves around to parallel the HatPaLikk from the South).

The entire lake spins slowly, as if someone's opened a drain at the bottom. According to those who live in the lake, that's fairly accurate. There's a giant hole in the floor of the lake. It's called the Hwuyk - literally, the Drain. Most lake-dwellers stay away from it; the current is too strong to resist past a certain point. Many people have gone into the hole, curious or simply unaware of it until it's too late. Only a handful have ever come out again. They've returned over land, all of them, stumbling across the Scalps on dusty feet or carried in barrels of water by traveling merchants. Their stories have made little sense. They've raved of moons, of coal-fish, of strange and secret oceans. As they recover their senses, they lose their memories of their journeys. No one has ever gotten any sense out of them. The world beneath the Drain remains a mystery.

Some call Twiliat the Lake with No Plug.

It's actually surprisingly difficult to reach the lake by water. Its constant spinning has carved a huge bowl in the ground over the centuries, and the banks are much higher than the water. In many places, they actually overhang it slightly. Fish lurk in the shadowy places underneath, waiting for prey that doesn't have a hook in it. Water only leaves the lake through the Drain; everything above ground flows into it, not out. The four rivers reach the lake as waterfalls. Only the stupidly adventurous sail over those. There are a few systems of locks around the banks, series of stepped pools that lift boats with clever arrangements of valves and gates, but few boats use them. Instead, most of the city's shipping trade takes place in a ring of canals around the raised edges of the lake.* Much of the city is built around and over these canals, or clinging to the steep banks below them. Many buildings slouch on piers over the slowly swirling water.

The dry part of SuyMaTmakk forms a ring around the lake; the submerged part of the city forms a somewhat smaller ring inside it. Their populations are about equal. The city is evenly divided between the people of the air, the people of the water, and the amphibians who travel between the two.

The only people who sail on the lake itself are fishers and scavengers. Whole islands of debris build up in the center of the lake.** The current draws them together, but it's not strong enough to pull them down into the Drain, so they simply float on the surface, spinning gently. Everything that falls into the lake and floats eventually ends up there. The islands are made up of broken furniture, lost toys, dead fish, papers blurred to illegibility, leaves and sticks and wood shavings and a hundred kinds of dust. Some of them are old enough to have sprouted grass and small bushes. There are people who make their living by rowing or swimming back and forth, scavenging in the shifting heaps of trash and lost things. They bring back what they find and sell it in the city's markets. Their booths are full of stained books, locked boxes with no keys, dolls with waterweed in their hair, wooden clocks with their gears full of silt. The scavenger's booths are the first places people go if they lose something. Chances are it will turn up in one of them eventually.

The city itself is a chaotic jumble of buildings. Wood is just as scarce here as elsewhere on the Scalps, so the buildings are made of wicker, of crooked sticks lashed into bundles, of piled sod bricks topped with grass, of bones taken from the elephant graveyards outside the city.*** I don't think there's a straight line in all of SuyMaTmakk. The city tangles around the edges of Lake Twiliat like the nest of an enormous bird.

I haven't actually seen all that much of it yet. The sun set shortly after my first glimpse of that crazed silhouette against the sky, and it was dark when we began to reach the outstretched fingers of the city's river docks. The lamps on them are lit by bottled fireflies and exquisitely trained salamanders. In a city made of sticks and straw, actual fires are extremely scarce. The streets are mostly dark after sunset.

The inn the TiLeKraNas usually stay at is on the Hley, so we didn't actually set foot on the streets tonight; we simply tied the raft up at the dock, next to a shack built on a huge floating dome, and went inside. I looked back as the door was closing and saw the dome lift its head out of the water. It was an enormous turtle.

The inn is called the Hmofrem Pekelli (the Eloquent Pig). It's a cozy, slouching building made of sod bricks. From outside, it looks like a grassy hill with windows. The walls are threaded with embroideries of living roots, some of which reach pale flowers out to the lanterns or the dusty windows. The most bored or drunk patrons of the bar pour various drinks on them; some turn the next day's flowers interesting colors, as if the plants themselves are drunk. A few regulars have become experts and can combine drinks to give the flowers multicolored stripes or splotches. The other patrons generally agree that they don't have enough to do.

All of this is still only what I've heard from the TiLeKraNas; they come to SuyMaTmakk often enough to be familiar with the most interesting parts of the city. It was late when we arrived, though, and the children went straight to bed (after some protesting), soon followed by the adults. I've only stayed up late enough to write this letter and hand it to the patiently waiting postbird. My own exploring will have to wait until tomorrow.

* Twiliat literally means "Ear." It is, after all, a hole beneath the Scalps. English-speakers call the city's main waterway the Ear Canal.

** This might explain why rafts on the Hley look the way they do.

*** Most of the bone-houses' inhabitants are immigrants from Trammelghast, where a house is not considered homey until it's haunted by at least one shrieking specter. They see the dead as something like eccentric pets. Their neighborhoods tend to remain politely out of earshot of the rest of the city.