The End of November

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wish me luck.

Nigel

Endless Tracks

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

This is balloon country.

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

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

WHERE?

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

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

After all, the tracks are always there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inkweed

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

Today, we were joined by a fourth passenger.

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

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

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

We introduced ourselves.

"Nigel Tangelo, two am."

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

"And, um... that?"

"Never wakes up."

"Ah."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Passenger Tree

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Kingdoms in the Snow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sclesserax (part two)

Our guide eventually took us up into the tallest spire in the Sclesserax, a twisting needle of clay and paper far higher than anything else on the building. There was only room inside it for a steep, narrow staircase, little more than a twisted ladder. The central column was corkscrew-shaped to make room for the steps. The builder was at the top (the current builder, anyway; the tower looks like it may have had several). He, or she, was a small dauber who added layers of clay seemingly at random. There were empty buckets all over the steps. They looked too large to be carried by a single wasp, with or without clay in them. I got the feeling that the tower was something of an obsession. It swayed in the wind. Other daubers wandered past occasionally and stuck little gargoyles on it.

On the way back down, we passed through a cloud of ichneumons. They were a colorful group of wasps, small and slender, with striped antennae that flicked the air constantly. No two were quite the same. They passed us in a whirl of shining colors, jet black and pearly white, gold and crimson, silver and tangerine and primrose yellow. One or two were violet.

Something had changed while we were up in the tower. The halls and corridors had been busy before, but now they were almost frantic. Wasps rushed past with pots and baskets and wriggling larvae. Daubers pulled thick curtains over the windows, casting the rooms into gray stripes of shadows. One cicada-eater blew past us with a gramophone in each claw. They were getting ready for something.

The only people standing still were little groups of musicians set up in corners and alcoves. Most of them did the odd wing-singing that's common in Carvendrone; wasps have a surprisingly wide range of buzzes. Others beat out rhythms on their own thoraxes or on large scarabs, chitinous drums that sat happily on the floor while the musicians pounded them.

I've never heard anything like the music they were playing. One would start a beat or a melody and gradually speed it up. This could go on for a long time; insect music can be unbelievably fast. There are people in Carvendrone who can actually sing Moldomer's "Flight of the Skitterfly." When one melody had reached the speed of a patter song, someone would start another one behind it at about half its speed. The two melodies would harmonize, fast and slow, speeding up gradually, getting faster and faster until the first one reached an impossible speed and exploded in a flurry of buzzes and trills. The second one would continue, still accelerating, and a third would start behind it. The result was a song that seemed to constantly speed up without actually getting anywhere. The frantic preparations going on were never faster than when they were near one of these choruses. I felt like running through the halls myself.

The guide rushed us through the last ten minutes or so. We practically flew through the corridors, passing wasps and bees and beetles pushing carts and carrying buckets and boxes and long streamers of red and orange cloth that whirled behind them like floating fire. Somehow, no one crashed into anyone else. It helped that hardly anyone was using the floor. We eventually reached the little entry hall where we had started. The hornet gave us what sounded like a brief, polite farewell, bowed neatly in midair, and rocketed off into the depths of the Sclesserax.

That seemed to be all, so we left. It was getting rather frightening in the corridors.

Outside, the streets of Carvendrone were much the same. The ground and air were full of rushing insects. Wasps flew by like diving falcons, roaches skidded across walls and roofs as if they were on ice, and rickshaw beetles became briefly airborne when descending stairs. It's an impressive sight, five hundred pounds of beetle passing overhead. Their passengers clung tightly to their seats. Even the millipedes were hurrying, as much as that's possible. Their legs went up and down like armies of sewing machines.

Flishel and I got back to the Train as quickly as we could and stayed safely in our compartment for the rest of the day. The sleeping passenger is still sleeping. Since boarding the Train, a month and a half ago, he or she hasn't woken up once. All the places we've been since then - Golgoolian, Skither, Jiligamant, Vanister, Scarloe, and now Carvendrone - have probably seemed like little more than dreams.

This morning, the reason for all the hurrying was clear. The temperature has dropped. The warm part of November is over, and Winter has arrived at last. The people of Carvendrone went to sleep last night; most of them didn't wake up this morning. They won't until next Spring. For the next few months, the small minority of warm-blooded Carvendroners have the city all to themselves.

It snowed at the station this morning as the Train was leaving. There were five people there to see it. The city has buried itself for the Winter.

A Very Long Explanation for the Curious

Though the incessant rain and occasional hail have stopped (for the most part), the hills around Cormilack are still too sodden from rain and thawed snow to travel safely. Bits of road have a tendency to wander off downhill to explore. Even the Kilopedes are staying away; I haven't seen a single one since I left the one that brought me here.

I suppose you've probably been wondering where I've been these last few months.

After leaving the Kilopede, I stumbled through the hills in the dark for quite some time. Moonlit walks in the dark are much less pleasant when the moons are absent and the hills keep sticking rocks in front of your feet. I must try to get a good salamander someday. They're expensive, but the light would be worth it if wandering through mountains in the dark becomes a habit.

Anyway. Eventually, somewhat scratched, bruised, and muddy, I staggered into the outskirts of Cormilack, watching the stars swallowed up by the shadow of the mechanical mountain that looms over the town. I had no idea what it was then; I only knew that it was interesting, and that I had to draw it as soon as it was light outside.

Unfortunately, I had no idea then that I had arrived right at the beginning of the rainy season.

While most of Hamjamser spends the winter under varying amounts of snow, Cormilack spends it largely underwater; the only snow is on the mountaintops. The weather stays warmer here. The townspeople blame it on the giant machine, saying that it reflects the heat of the sun into the rest of the valley, that it stores heat all Summer and releases it in the Winter, that the mysterious, ice-encrusted mechanisms and antennae sticking up from its roof (peak?) disrupt the weather around Cormilack - there are as many explanations as there are people to make them. Some say that the Sun Dragon likes to wheel overhead and admire the digging machine. That may be true, but if so, I've never seen him. On each of the fifteen days - I've counted - that the sun shone during the winter, there was not a Dragon in sight.

Some say that the machine's engine is still going, and that its heat is what warms the valley.

The people of Cormilack call the machine the Earthmover, sensibly, as that is what it is. The highest hills in the town seem to have been plowed up by its immense blades and wheels - the tallest earthen hills, anyway. The Earthmover itself is the tallest hill in sight. Much of the town is built on it. According to local legends, the Earthmover was used thousands of years ago by the Hill Builders to build the Mountainous Plains. This is why the Earthmover and the Hill Builders are called what they are. Most people in Cormilack agree that the Earthmover was last used to make the perfect spiral of mountain ranges that surrounds the valley (I've only seen the inner mountains, but they say you can see the spiral, as perfect as a snail's shell, if you fly high enough). Upon reaching the center, several important parts broke, most the size of small foothills, at the same time that the Earthmover reached the soft, rich soil in the center of the valley and sank immovably into it. The Hill Builders, having finished sculpting the topography of this particular part of Hamjamser, decided that they had no further use for the thing anyway and left it here.

This is a typical Cormilack legend. The townspeople don't disapprove of romance and mysticism - not exactly - but they don't have much use for them either. When it comes to speculation, they're experts, but they'll take the most sensible explanation whenever they can find it.

However and whyever it's here, the Earthmover has obviously been in bad shape for a long time. Every piece of metal on it is worn and rusted. Even the digging blades at the front - which, according to local mechanics, are at least partially made of hypersteel - have their fair share of chips and scratches. One mechanical arm lies limply over a front wheel with tree-sized wires and pistons hanging from its mangled end. The drill it used to hold lies a mile or so away. Segments have fallen off the tire tread. Struts hang crookedly without their counterweights. One end of a massive snapped cable rises above the village, a crazed column of twisted metal as big around as a house and taller than most of the nearby mountains. The other end is frequently obscured by clouds. The whole mountain of ancient machinery is sunk deeper than the height of six houses into the soft soil of the valley, and grass grows in the gaps between peeling metal plates. The flatter parts are covered with trees and houses as well. It's a magnificent wreck.

As eager as I was to begin drawing the Earthmover, the weather made it completely impossible on the very first night I stayed here. Having found a reasonably good inn - it was sheltered, affordable, and warm, and that was enough for me - I was trying to nurse my fingers back to life with a bowl of soup when the rainy season hit Cormilack.

There's no other way to put it. At first, I thought something had exploded. The sound was a bit like the sound of a wet fish hitting a dock - a fish about the size of an average whale. The entire building shook.

No one inside it seemed particularly concerned. A group of people who had been celebrating a birthday party in most of the room, laughing and shouting and working their way steadily through a cake shaped like a large gear, all calmed down slightly. Still talking, they stood up, opened their umbrellas with a chorus of FLOOMPs (except the more amphibious of them, who didn't seem to care about umbrellas), and walked briskly out the door to disperse, still talking, into the ocean that was falling outside.

"Er - what exactly is happening?" I asked the innkeeper. She paused, heading towards the door with an armful of sandbags for the threshold.

"It's raining," she said simply.

I spent the next few months occasionally sketching the Earthmover, on the rare occasions when the rain stopped, but mostly just trying to keep everything dry. This is nearly impossible during a Cormilack winter. The villagers don't even try to keep their houses from flooding; whenever one floor fills with water, they just move all the furniture to the next one up. This explains why, in the middle of the valley, a house for a family of three can be six or seven stories high. It also explains the faint odor of must and pondweed that lingers around even the cleanest houses.

There is no way to describe how wet Cormilack is in the winter. Nowhere else comes close. The water on the ground is only the least of it. Even when it reaches the fifth floors of the houses, it still answers to gravity.

It's the water everywhere else that's the problem. The air is full of fog AND rain, at the same time, which I hadn't even known was possible. On especially wet days, it's hard to tell whether you're above or below the water. There isn't much difference. The fog creeps into the houses through every crack, filling the rooms inside with thick, opaque gray. Anything more than two feet away is invisible. Water trickles down the walls and drips from the ceiling. Rain comes in through every possible opening. Puddles collect in corners. Cups and bowls left in the open fill and overflow. Carpets squish when stepped on. Most people in Cormilack, in fact, don't even bother to have carpets, as the moss in their houses is thicker and doesn't rot. The air barely deserves the name. There's more water in it than air.

Nothing made of metal, paper, or wood is left out in the winter unless it's well covered in something waterproof - oil, wax, varnish, et cetera. Everything else is wrapped up until the spring. The houses are wooden, but far too big to waterproof, so the villagers just add more boards in strategic places when the old ones rot. It wasn't long before I gave up trying to draw. I kept my paper, pens, and pencils in a watertight oilskin package for most of the winter, the same way everyone else does, and got used to being constantly wet.

The floods receded over a few weeks in March, but - as I mentioned - the rest of the valley is still far from solid. The sun shines more often than not now, though, so I've been able to return to sketching the Earthmover. It will still probably be quite a while before I've got a finished drawing of it.

Unlike the migrant floods, the water that collects under the Earthmover stays there all year; the pools down there are the deepest in the whole valley, and the sun never reaches them. They stay dark and cold. Fishermen go down there occasionally, finding their way with candles, tame salamanders, or (in some cases) echolocation. They wade through rust silt to catch the blind crimson fish that swim through corroding wheels and pylons in the black water. Some say the fish have so much metal in them, you can catch them with a magnet.

I haven't eaten any.