The Vertebral Causeway

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

The Blue Hyacinth Tea House

Although every valley with any size (and a few without) had at least one shrine, it was nearly a week since leaving the centipede's valley before we found another with signs of more corporeal habitation.

We were surprised to cross a dune and find a small building in the valley below us, but our surprise was lessened somewhat when we realized that it had clearly been abandoned for some time. The building's front wall was made of stone, but the roof and other walls were made of wood and had collapsed years ago. Trees had sprouted in the foundations. None of us were familiar with the species, but the largest ones must have been at least a decade old.

Still, it was a shady place to rest, so we pulled the wagons over and got out to explore. Mogen pulled a folding contraption - something like a cross between a wheelbarrow and a bathtub - out of the undercarriage of Chak's wagon, and he eeled his way into it so that she could wheel him over for a closer look.

Up close, the tiles on the one remaining wall turned out to be decorated with a pattern of blue hyacinth flowers. Two rusted hooks above the sagging doorway had once held a sign, but we could see no trace of it anywhere around the building. There was no risk of falling through the floor - the trees made it obvious that the building didn't have a cellar - so we stepped through the doorway into what had once been the interior.

Inside, standing on grass that showed occasional glimpses of a tiled floor beneath, was a statue.

It was the red-brown of terra cotta, speckled all over with lichen and moss. Its face was sculpted to resemble a round-cheeked dog - an akita or spitz of some kind, perhaps - with polished black eyes and a friendly smile. The rest of its body was much more minimal in detail, as if it had been intended to be covered by clothing. The collar of what I assumed had once been a uniform of some sort still hung around its neck. The rest of the garment had rotted away, and the collar, which looked to have once been a cheerful red, had faded to a pale and ragged pink. The statue's hands held a stack of paper menus, which were yellowed with age but surprisingly intact, considering that the rest of the statue had clearly been out in the elements for some time.

On its forehead was etched a single character. Chak later said that it meant "hospitality."

As soon as Karlishek stepped through the sagging doorway, the statue opened its mouth and spoke.

"Kirim," it said, which means "welcome" in Jingli. While we variously jumped, gasped, and (in Mogen's case) pulled out a crossbow, it repeated the greeting in several other languages. Chak was the first of us to recover his poise; he thanked the statue in Amrat, the one language all of us shared. The statue switched languages smoothly and continued in Amrat.

"Welcome to the Blue Hyacinth Tea House," said the statue - which, I assumed, was in fact some sort of golem. Though it was clearly made of hard-baked ceramic, its face moved as flexibly as if it were flesh and blood. Its voice was soft and androgynous. "Please allow me to apologize for the state of my uniform. Would you like a table for five?"

We held a brief, hushed discussion while the golem waited patiently. Mogen's single vote for caution was outweighed by four votes for curiosity, and we said yes.

A few small vines had grown partway up the golem's legs. The stems snapped when it moved its feet; it had clearly been standing in the same spot for some time. It led us to what had once been an elegant set of wrought-iron chairs and a table. Unfortunately, the seats had long since rotted through, the legs had rusted, and a large portion of the furniture was now rust stains on the overgrown floor. Unlike its uniform, the golem didn't seem to see this as a problem; it gathered the remains of a few more chairs, which shed flakes of rust and in one case an entire leg, and propped them up against the metal outer rim of the table. It carefully balanced five menus on the few scraps of wood that remained of the surface. Given the state of the furniture, we all elected to remain standing (or, in Chak's case, reclining).

"Please let me know when you have made your selection." The golem stepped back a polite distance and surveyed the other tables, which were - if possible - in even worse shape. Finding no other patrons to attend to, it simply stood and waited while we attempted to peruse the menus.

Further questions revealed that the golem had no name; that the proprietor of the tea house was currently on vacation; and that the golem could not presume to say when they would return.

In a set of shelves by the door, several additional menus,  plus an assortment of cracked china, were stacked on the one shelf still intact enough to provide some shelter from the rain. That explained how any of them were still intact.

If protected from the elements, good-quality paper can last for centuries. This, unfortunately, was middling quality at best, and it had been stored for some time in a building without a roof. When I attempted to gingerly pry the brittle, yellowed menu open, it cracked in half at the spine. I felt a somewhat irrational pang of guilt. Rather than try to open another, I simply handed my menu to Chak - the only one of us who could actually read the faded columns of Jingli script inside - and he translated it for us.

The selection seemed to be fairly standard tea house fare: an assortment of cakes, pastries, and biscuits, plus a selection of teas, only a few of which we'd heard of. Most of the teas had reptilian names of some sort: Black Crocodile, Sunlizard, Dragon's Gold.

We were curious as to how the golem planned to produce any of the items on the menu, given the building's apparent lack of a kitchen.When I attempted to order a caramel rice cake and a cup of the Sapphire Dragon tea, which was the variety I was most curious about, the golem's response came as a surprise to no one.

"I am sorry to report that we are missing an essential ingredient for this dish. In fact, we are missing every ingredient for this dish. Could I interest you in something else?"

Still curious, I asked about several other dishes on the menu. The golem informed me that they were also unavailable, as was the Sapphire Dragon tea and, for that matter, every other variety of tea. I probably would have run through the entire menu if Karlishek hadn't interrupted me.

"What exactly is available?" he asked. I had to admit that this was a more efficient approach.

The golem considered the question for a moment. It looked over at the stream running past the front door. "Water." It turned its head to survey a few nearby shrubs and trees. "And a selection of fresh fruit."

That was good enough for us. For the sake of hygiene, I requested that the golem at least boil the water first. Chak rolled his eyes. "Boiled water? For goodness' sake. Mogen, would you please fetch the tea case from my wagon?"

Mogen gave the golem a suspicious look, but hurried back to the wagons and returned a minute later with a watertight chest bound in leather. Inside was a small treasure trove of tea in assorted jars and wooden boxes. The labels were in a bewildering variety of languages. I recognized Amrat, Halsi, Hmakk, English, and even a few in Sikelak. The names were an even wider variety: Jade Serpent, Baconeg Breakfast, Gira Gira Captain's Black, Midnight Purple, Red Rose Lightning, Undertaker's Comfort, Wicked Wilma's Knuckleduster Chamomile.

Chak selected two jars and handed them to the golem with the solemnity of someone presenting a gift to royalty. "Please accept these as a small donation to your tea house."

The golem inclined its head with equal gravity. "The Blue Hyacinth Tea House appreciates your donation. I am pleased to inform you," it added to the table at large, reading the labels on the jars, "that Green Manatee and Baron Smackerly's Blackcurrant are now available."

Both of these are widely known teas, available cheaply in most countries. Chak later informed us that, given the circumstances, he had chosen them mainly for their ability to retain their flavor over long periods of time, and the fact that they were both stored in watertight jars. (And, of course, the fact that they paired well with the flavors of the brassberries and wild mint that he'd noticed the golem looking at, "because I'm not a complete barbarian.")

The golem declined our offers to donate food supplies other than tea to the tea house, citing archaic health codes that none of us had heard of. It was a pleasant meal all the same. The golem even managed to find enough cups and plates for all of us. Most of them were chipped, but they were all intact enough to hold our tea of choice. The china was decorated with a pattern of blue hyacinths.

The prices were quite reasonable - for all we knew, because they were from the previous century - and we paid the bill using little more than small change. The golem took the coins and dropped them with a splash into the rusted-open drawer of what had once been an ornate brass cash register. We also left a tip, of course. The golem attempted to slip the coins into a nonexistent pocket, looked puzzled for a moment, and then placed them on top of its head instead.

As we were leaving, I asked how often the tea house had customers.

"Business has been slow lately," the golem replied. "You are our first customers in twenty-three years, five months, and eight days. If you enjoyed your meal here, please recommend us to your friends," it added hopefully. "Desserts are half-price on Tuesdays if you wear an amusing hat."

We thanked the golem and said that we would certainly recommend the tea house to someone, whenever we reached a more populated area.

By the time we left the valley, the golem had washed the dishes, gathered the menus, and resumed its post by the empty doorway, waiting patiently for the tea house's next customers. I hope the tea is still good when they arrive.

Crickets and Gargoyles

Unlike the vine-covered ruins of Jandraming or the jumbled heap of ancient architecture that is Rampastula, abandoned buildings in the Golden Desert don't tend to get overgrown by anything. The Desert is short on plants and long on space, and many of its commonly available building materials are resistant to rot, even in the rare places where there's enough moisture to make rot possible. Buildings no longer in use tend to simply remain as they are.

This results in experiences like the one the caravan had a week after our encounter with the Painted Ones.

Chak had proven to be, as well as a generous host, excellent company; the two of us had spent most of that time happily exchanging songs and amusing anecdotes while sheltering inside his wagon, I from the heat, he from the dryness of the Desert air. I'd continued to decorate the translucent cover of his wagon with a design of water and fish that I hoped would help to soften the glare of the sun. Though I suspect the confined quarters would have become monotonous given enough time, it was a pleasant way to spend a period of recovery.

The seclusion was broken one day when Mogen opened the flap of the wagon to inform us that there was something worth seeing outside.

We had come across one of the Golden Desert's many abandoned villages. This one was in even better condition than most; the most abundant local building material seemed to have been a type of pink granite, which had withstood decades in the elements even better than other villages' wood or sandstone.

Several travelers with experience in exploring abandoned buildings (a riskier prospect than it might seem) requested that the caravan stop for the afternoon to allow them the opportunity to search the village, in case anything of use or interest had been left behind.

Tirakhai required little convincing to grant their request. The basement of the largest building was flooded with water clean enough to restock the caravan's reservoirs, and several of the smaller houses were home to a rare breed of domestic cave crickets, hunchbacked and freckled creatures the size of guinea fowl. Though feral, they were entirely unafraid of us, hopping between the shade of the wagons and generally getting underfoot in a fashion that most of the caravan's members found charming (except for the gafl, who were afraid of them despite being several hundred times their size). In short, there was plenty in the village worth stopping to examine.

It was about noon at that point, so most people retreated to either the shade of their wagons or the less monotonously familiar shade of the village's houses (those that had been checked by the explorers and proclaimed free of scorpions, rotten floorboards, cellar howlers, and other common hazards).

Chak and I didn't feel the need to brave the noonday sun to satisfy our curiosity, so we waited, listening to the bustle of chores, exploration, and tea preparation outside the wagon, until the shadows had grown longer. Mogen pulled the wagon into the shade of the largest building; Chak donned a scarf soaked in water to protect his face (ineffective for prolonged exposure, but good enough for a brief peek outside); and we opened up the flap of the wagon for a look.

Every house in the village had at least two or three gargoyles on its roof. They were all relatively ordinary examples of the art: hybrids of various animals that ranged between frightening and comical. Some looked benevolent, others charmingly mischievous; some held positions or objects meant to symbolize luck or prosperity, while others - ostentatiously showing off oversized shoes, pots, or spectacles - were clearly meant to advertise their residents' trades. A few, I suspect, were caricatures of the families that once lived beneath them. All of them were fairly sedate and quite clearly the work of the same three or four artists.

Then there was the main building.

No one in the caravan was certain what, exactly, its purpose had been. Various people suggested a granary, a town meeting hall, or a temple of some sort. It's entirely possible that it was meant to serve all of these functions at once. Whatever it might have been, the village's sculptors clearly saw it as the opportunity to create their masterpiece. The building was a riotous confection of bays, arches, gables, cupolas, and small minarets, all built from the same pink granite, and every possible niche and corner was inhabited by a gargoyle.

The East side of the building, which we could see from where the caravan had stopped, had gargoyles in the traditional positions: sly, beneficent, mournful, and pugnacious. Their forms were inventive enough, and the workmanship was superb - clearly several years beyond the work on the houses - but none of them were especially remarkable for gargoyles.

They continued on the South side, though the grimaces became less intimidating there and more like sneezes and stomachaches. A few of the more closely-placed groups gave the impression of quartets or trios of cheerfully hideous singers. It's probably just as well that no one could hear their voices.

The West side, farthest from the caravan, had the gargoyles sleeping, smoking, cleaning their spectacles, and so on. I got the distinct impression of a group of actors killing time backstage between appearances. Still, they remained in typical gargoyle locations, perched on lintels and peaks and at the edges of balconies.

The North side was complete chaos. The gargoyles there had left their posts and climbed all over the walls. They poked their faces into the windows (which must have been a rather startling sight from the inside) and gnawed at the edges of the roofs. Five or six had gathered inside the top of an arch for what appeared to be an upside-down game of cards. According to a few high-climbing explorers, others in less visible areas of the building were doing things less acceptable in polite society (though accounts were vague on what exactly those things were). If this was true, the gargoyles in question didn't seem to be visible from the ground. Perhaps the sculptors suspected that whatever village leaders commissioned the building wouldn't have approved.

Though our view from the wagon was limited, we spent a fascinated hour or two slowly circling the building and looking at as many gargoyles as we could. I even paused to sketch several of the most inventive. We stopped only when Chak said that his face was feeling singed and my head began to swim again from the heat.

I left the wagon that night and spent the rest of the evening comparing notes with the other observers of gargoyles - a category that included nearly everyone in the caravan by then - over a dinner of cricket's-egg omelettes.

The crickets appeared to lay two or three small but nutritious eggs each day, like domestic hens. Tirakhai and several of the more agriculturally inclined travelers insisted on capturing a few in the hopes of breeding and selling them elsewhere as livestock. Using a combination of carrots, greens, and dried fruit, they had no trouble coaxing several dozen crickets into hastily constructed cages, where the insects sat placidly munching on the food and twittering to each other.

Apparently, the crickets used to be a much more common food source in the Golden Desert; Mirenza says that they're mentioned in several historical records, and the omelettes that night were, in fact, an ancient recipe that she'd never had the chance to test with proper cricket's eggs before. As the omelettes were excellent, with a nutty greenish flavor more subtle than chicken's eggs, I suspect that the crickets might be making a comeback in the next few years.

When we awoke in the morning, the gargoyles had moved.

No one who had kept watch overnight had actually seen them in motion, and no one saw them change position while the sun was up. However, everyone who had paid them any attention agreed: roughly one gargoyle in four was in a different position than it had been the previous day. Some had turned ninety degrees; some had shifted from one perch to another.

Most alarmingly, there were now more of them on the east wall of the main building, the side that faced our campsite, and many that had been on the main building the previous day were now perched on the houses surrounding the caravan. None of them were looking directly at us, but all of them were positioned so that they could have done so, if they wished, without turning their heads.

There was some debate - in tones considerably more subdued than the previous night's conversation - as to whether or not the actual shape of any of the gargoyles had changed. An object switching locations is hardly unusual; it happens every day in Hamjamser, though it rarely occurs with anything smaller than a building. For a carved statue to turn its head or move a limb would have implied that something much more unusual was going on. When one of the debates began to grow rather heated, on the subject of whether or not a particular seahorse-headed gargoyle had had its wings up or down the previous day, I offered to fetch my sketchbook and settle the matter. I remembered sketching the gargoyle in question, as it was one of the few in the village with the features of an aquatic animal.

I opened my sketchbook to find that every gargoyle I'd drawn was now shown, not only in its new location, but staring directly out of the page at me.

That was when we decided to leave.

While the others packed up the caravan, I removed the three pages of gargoyles from my sketchbook (I normally have a visceral aversion to tearing pages from any book, for any reason, but felt no hesitation in this case). Accompanied by one of the urban explorers - a woman named Imichek, with whom I had only a passing acquaintance, but whose dry sense of humor I'd come to appreciate during dinner conversations - I ventured into the main building and left the pages in a dry, sheltered area of the floor. One page had several sketches for the design of Chak's wagon on the other side, which I considered only a minor loss, now that the design itself was already sketched out on the fabric. Though the character for Patience in the center of the design was something that I suspected the gargoyles already had in abundance, I hoped, privately, that perhaps they'd appreciate the sentiment. I imagined I could feel the quiet gaze of stone eyes on us as we left the building.

Our departure from the village was far more subdued than usual. Hardly anyone spoke at all until the last minaret of the village had vanished behind the dunes. Even then, the topic of the gargoyles was conspicuously absent from conversation for the next several days.

What's frustrating (and fascinating) about the whole affair is, of course, the ambiguity of it. When one encounters an unexplained phenomenon in a place that has been long abandoned, for no obvious reason, by all intelligent life, it's usually wisest to make a swift exit, as we did. Still, although I wouldn't have stayed to find out, it's quite possible that the gargoyle's intentions - if they had any at all - were entirely benign.

Perhaps they were simply hoping for another taste of cricket's-egg omelettes.

Saframish

The last place I visited in the Golden Desert was Saframish, a town built around a giant fish temple. The caravan stopped there to exchange passengers with other caravans and refill its supplies of water.

To be more precise, it's one of the Temples of Gilliva, Lady of the Waters, a deity much appreciated in the Golden Desert. The Temple of Gilliva in Saframish is built in the fossil skull of a giant fish. Its jaws rise up from the ground like twin steeples, dwarfing the houses and shops that have sprouted like barnacles around it. The mouth is open; from inside the main sanctuary of the temple, you can look up past the crooked stone teeth into open sky. This is a common feature of all Gillivan buildings. The followers of the Lady of the Waters don't keep rain out of her temples.

Below the open mouth is a long, oval pool, in which swims a single great catfish as large as a bull. Its whiskers have grown long enough to brush its tail as it swims, like the gray mustaches of an old, old man. The townspeople call the fish the Lasra, which means "tongue." They say it speaks for the Lady of the Waters in times of trouble. This century has been good to Saframish, though, and no one I spoke to could recall the fish speaking in their lifetimes.

According to the people of Saframish, there are catacombs beneath the skull, excavated in the spaces between the ribs and vertebrae. I would have liked to go see them, but they don't let just anyone down into the heart of the fish. Some of the passages are flooded, inhabited with shrimp and blind cave fish. The Gillivans consider them sacred, like all fish. (As I've mentioned before, this religion has never really caught on in coastal areas.)

The founders of the town cut the mountain away from the skull a century or two ago. At that time, a giant fish in the Desert was seen as sufficient evidence of a miracle - or at least a place with interesting geology - so they carved the inside into a temple to the Lady. It's the reason that Saframish has grown from a tiny village to the bustling town it is now.

It does bustle, too. Pilgrims journey to the Great Fish from all over the Golden Desert; there are always people grateful for the water with which their homes have been blessed, just as there are always people in desperate need of more. Most of them, being pragmatic as well as devout, bring things from their home towns to trade while they're here. Nearly every kind of nut and fruit in the Desert can be found in the markets of Saframish - even if only in the amounts that can fit in a single backpack. The cries of vendors and crafters and a whole menagerie of Desert animals fill the streets. One herder I saw had a group of lookout giraffes, wearing lightweight viewing platforms like wicker collars around their necks. Another was selling blind hounds, like a hybrid of dog and earthworm. She said they could sniff out water in the Desert.

There was little chance for them to prove their skill in Saframish; water was everywhere. In all my time in the Golden Desert, I have never seen a town with so many fountains. Several of them were full of lily pads, and I'm sure I caught the golden gaze of a bullfrog in one of them. Floater-merchants paraded their way through the streets, pulling billowing globes of water through the air behind them with oil-coated hands. No one but the floater-merchants is sure how they can make such vast quantities of water hang in the air, as weightless as soap bubbles; they have kept the secret carefully guarded for centuries.

This abundance of water was actually why I ended up leaving the caravan. But more on that later.

A Digression on Language

The most commonly accepted theory, at present, is that languages develop with a certain type of mouth in mind.

This is obviously the case with languages such as English, with its many subtle uses of the lips and teeth; or Hmakk, which has an M in its very name. Languages such as these are difficult to speak with a beak or insectile mouthparts. Presumably, they developed in parts of the world where most people had lips, just as Kakaran originated in mountain clifftops inhabited solely by avians.

Over time, however, the various races of the world have wandered and mingled together. It is rare now to find even the smallest of villages inhabited exclusively by mammals, or avians, or reptiles. Even if they begin with different languages, those who share a common home usually come to share a common tongue. In many places, the speaking of English without lips, or Kakaran without a beak, has become only another kind of accent. Most avians cannot pronounce the lip-borne consonants so familiar to me - P, B, F, M, V - and I doubt I will ever manage the clacks and harsh demi-vowels of avian languages such as Hreet. However, despite our imperfect pronunciations, we rarely have difficulty understanding one another.

Those of the exoskeletal persuasion are somewhat more deeply separated. Many of them do not even breathe through their mouths. They have developed instead languages of chitinous clicks and hisses, or elaborate sign languages for multiple limbs. Many of these are more difficult for a person with only two soft-skinned arms to mimic. Still, we usually manage. Universal languages such as Sikelak help to fill in the most difficult gaps.

In addition, love is - and has always been - a great bridger of gaps. The marriages between vertebrates and invertebrates have created many surprising combinations. I have met many insects and arachnids who possessed, somewhere behind their scissoring mouthparts, the anatomy necessary to speak English clearer than my own. In the other direction are people such as the Hsshra tribe of the High Fields: silent, long-legged humans who breathe through elegant spiracles between their ribs.

Still, the villagers we met beyond the valley must have the most unusual language I've ever encountered.

We left the valley the night after the encounter with the saber-dingoes. We had no desire to sleep there; it would have surprised none of us if the pack had returned to attack us in our sleep. There was little we could do to keep them from tracking our scents, but we hoped that the cliffs would provide enough of an obstacle to dissuade them from following us. The climb was rather unnerving in the dark, but - largely thanks to Garnet's and Karlishek's night vision - we managed to fumble our way to the top with no more than a couple of scraped knees and elbows.

We were about to make camp at the top of the cliff when Garnet spotted a light on the horizon.

As exhausted as we were, the possibility of civilization - and of sleeping indoors, out of the chilly night wind, for the first time in weeks - was enough to get us walking again. No one said it, but I think we were all glad to put a little more distance between us and the saber-dingoes' valley as well.

As is so often the case in the Golden Desert, the light proved to be much farther away than it appeared. It must have been nearly midnight by the time we reached it. As we walked closer, we found that it was not a single light, but many - the glow of a small village full of dimly lit windows. The houses were low half-spheres of stone and clay. Only about half of them were lit, though, and we heard none of the chatter and bustle of an active village. We assumed the inhabitants were asleep for the night.

We walked into the middle of the village to find ourselves in the middle of market day - or, more correctly, market night.

The villagers were about Garnet's height, shorter than the rest of us. They were more or less humanoid. Their bodies were covered in downy white fur, except for their hands, feet, and faces; the overall effect faintly resembled mice or baboons, though their eyes were as wide as those of owls. They wore only simple skirts of pale brown cloth. If they were male and female, I never noticed any way to tell the difference.

Their most noticeable features by far, however, were the patterns on their faces. Streaks and blotches of bright colors shifted constantly across their skin, pinks and golds and emerald greens, like an endless fireworks display on every cheek and forehead. The colors glowed in the dark. There are many animals, such as angler-fish and torch-mice, that have luminescent patches on their bodies; most of them, however, can achieve only one or two colors each, like the repeated plucking of a single note. Each villager's face was a full symphony of light.

It was a silent one, though. In the entire marketplace, the only sounds were soft padding of feet in sand, the rattling of wagons, and the clinks and thumps of containers being moved. Not one of the people spoke. In the dark, with the rippling glow of all those silent faces, the effect was as eery as it was beautiful.

We had been staring for what I hope was only a few seconds when one of the villagers approached us. The body language was the same on both sides - smiling, non-threatening friendliness - but when we tried greetings in several languages, the uncomprehending smile on the villager's face didn't change. A few flashes of pink and blue passed over the smile and then went still.

It took us some time to realize that that had been the villager's greeting, or perhaps a question. The shifting colors were their language.

Eventually, we managed to convey by gesture that we had been walking in the Desert for a long time and were very tired. The villagers - we had drawn something of a crowd by then - gave us a sympathetic chorus of blue and lavender. The one who had first greeted us followed that with a flickering orange light in a green semicircle, like the cooking fires inside the dome-shaped houses, and led us to one of the larger ones. The ceiling was not quite high enough for us to stand up. Inside, we were greeted by another adult - the first one's spouse? - and a trio of tiny children as fluffy as owlets. Light flashed across their small faces as well, but they seemed to have difficulty doing more than two colors at once. Perhaps they were only just learning to speak. The whole family welcomed us in with many hugs and blue-pink greetings, and we soon found ourselves sitting on dusty cushions around a stone table, sharing slices of unfamiliar but tasty green vegetables. I looked in my bag and found a couple of slightly dusty candies from Thrass Kaffa; Mirenza rummaged through her pockets and found a motley assortment of nuts and dried fruit. All of these were enthusiastically received, especially by the children.

The name of the village, we were told, was an orange flash peppered with green spots. Our hosts' names were Expanding Blue Concentric Circles and Wavy Red Streaks On Yellow. They didn't introduce their children by name; perhaps, in a society where a person's name is an entire visual performance, children are given time to design their own. We introduced ourselves as well, but they had no more way to repeat our names than we had to repeat theirs.

The conversation around the table was quite lively. In fact, there were two conversations going on simultaneously, but since one was silent and the other was invisible, they didn't seem to interfere with each other.

Though nocturnal, the villagers must have been at least somewhat familiar with other sleep schedules - or perhaps they just accepted that we were tired, no matter the time of day. In any case, Blue Circles went out after dinner (for them, I suppose it was something like lunch) and returned with four extra blankets to spread across the sandy floor. We thanked our hosts profusely, hoping that our smiles and surreptitious yawns would convey the meaning our words couldn't. I dropped off to sleep quite quickly. All night, though, I had the strange feeling that the colored afterimages on my eyelids were trying to speak to me.

Wings of Stone

There are many ways of navigating in the Golden Desert. By far the most reliable are the singing sand rats, who can hear the unique song of each town and city and follow it to its source.* Human Wayfinders, blessed with the rare gift of a sense of direction, are also quite popular here. Those unable to afford a Wayfinder travel by kilopede. The great arthropods are just as home in the Golden Desert as in the Mountainous Plains, though they have to drink a lot, and many order snowshoes - several hundred pairs each - so that they can more easily traverse the shifting sand. Other people prefer tree compasses, which forever point to the living sources of their wooden needles. For a prepared Desert traveler, there are almost as many ways of finding places as there are places to find.

We had none of them. For lack of a better method, we fell back on the oldest means of navigation: pick a direction and hope that it leads somewhere. Fortunately, we still had several days of food and water, and we were finding enough on the way to keep our supplies replenished. Death by deprivation was not an immediate worry. All we had to do was keep walking and try to keep ourselves amused.

We spent the first few days singing and telling stories. Karlishek turned out to have a pleasant tenor voice and a large repertoire of folk tales and songs, which made the hot days go by much faster than they might have. (We traveled in the mornings and evenings, resting when it grew too dark to see or too hot to move, but the air was uncomfortably hot by an hour after sunrise and only grew worse from there.) Mirenza's collection of ancient legends and songs, in the bent keys of traditional Desert music, was also fascinating. As the widest-ranging traveler of the group, my eclectic mix of songs and stories made an interesting contrast; the tale of Gan the Foolish Fence-Builder, from the lush and carelessly governed land of Mollogou, required as much explanation from me as the tales of the ancient and highly ritualized Miravi Empire did from Mirenza.

Garnet continued to speak little, murmuring something about her singing voice being out of shape, but she listened closely to everything.

The Miravi Empire was on our minds quite often during those days. Hardly an hour went by when we didn't pass some remnant of it. Broken pillars quivered on the horizon. Piles of stone blocks lay half-swamped by dunes, still retaining just enough right angles to tell that they had once been the foundations of houses. Markers for long-vanished oases gave names to dry depressions in the sand and invited travelers to drink their fill. At night, we slept in old, half-buried ruins, surrounded by ancient stone and illegible hieroglyphs. Statues looked down on us: the stone-faced gods of a thousand years ago. No one but archaeologists remembers their names.

Every single statue had wings, or stumps where wings had once been.

In the ancient Miravi Empire, according to Mirenza, the ability to fly was considered divine. The wingless were normal; the flying were gods, rulers, cloistered and extremely rare. The highest-born spent their entire lives in towers and hammocks, never once setting foot on the ground. The palaces of the Empire were fantasies of towers and balconies and open courtyards, with more doors opening to the air than to the ground. Many rooms were accessible by flight alone. Others had narrow stairs or ladders added as an afterthought, a vulgar necessity for the rulers' poor, earthbound servants.

Those with wings but not flight were considered cursed and cast out into the desert. Even now, the nomadic tribes that wander between cities have an unusually high occurrence of vestigial wings.

As odd as this method of choosing rulers seems to us now, they seem to have run the Empire quite well for a time. It was one of the most prosperous countries in Hamjamser for several centuries. Most of the cultures in the Golden Desert have Miravian roots; the ancient Miravian language is the basis for modern Amrat, the tongue I have been learning from Karlishek and Mirenza. Modern Desert cities are built with the same majestic, highly ornamented architectural flair that the Empire perfected. The ancient Miravian cities were centers of art and trade and science, each city keeping a friendly and respectful relationship with the aquifrax that provided its water. These generous, enigmatic Desert spirits have probably never been as well understood, before or since, as they were by the ancient Miravians.

Unfortunately, as so often happens, this understanding eventually became complacency. All of this prosperity ended when the Miravians finally did something to annoy the aquifraxi. Accounts vary as to exactly what it was. Some historians believe it was due to political or religious differences; aquifraxi consider themselves subjects of the Rain Dragon (and he humors them politely enough, though he's never shown any sign of actually wanting to rule anything but tides and storm clouds). Others theorize that the dispute was over pollution, or excessive irrigation, or an infestation of imported foreign frogs. Whatever the reason, one day, every aquifrax in the Empire simply picked up and left. They took the water with them.

They hadn't gone far, as it turned out; they'd merely relocated to the uninhabited areas of the Empire. Within a few months, what had been empty desert was lush and blooming, and what had been fertile farmland was too dry to grow anything but dust and heatstroke. The people of the Empire packed up their things and left everything they'd built. In some cases, they only had to walk for a few hours to reach fertile ground. Many could still see their old homes as they built their new ones. The division between farmland and wasteland is a sharp one in the Golden Desert, though; people have to follow the water, wherever it happens to be. Without an aquifrax, the old cities of the Empire might as well have been on the moons.

Many of the wealthiest citizens stayed behind anyway, hoping desperately that things would go back to the way they had been, until their grand houses filled up with sand.

Most of the winged nobility were among them. The new settlements had been thrown together quickly, to give the farmers and craftspeople somewhere to sleep while they figured out how to feed an entire displaced Empire. There was nowhere for sky-dwellers to perch.

The Miravi Empire never really recovered. It took a long time to rebuild even a fraction of what had been lost, and in the bustle, most of the Empire's less practical traditions - such as the winged rulers - were left behind and forgotten. The rough settlements grew into stable towns and eventually became the Golden Desert's modern cities, such as Karkafel and Thrass Kaffa. The people developed new, somewhat more cautious relationships with the aquifraxi. Life returned to normal. Like most places in Hamjamser, though, the cities remained separate this time. They continued to trade goods and citizens and ideas with each other, but somehow, they never quite reunited into a single country again. It's not that surprising, I suppose. In every part of Hamjamser, empires have always been the exception, not the rule.

These days, the ability to fly is considered as ordinary in the Golden Desert as it is anywhere else. The winged hold everyday jobs and mingle with the flightless without hesitation. Many even consider the winged nobility to have been a foolish idea. In these modern times, most places in Hamjamser consider it unhealthy for rulers to be always looking down on their subjects. It gives them strange ideas.

Still, I have often seen the people of the Golden Desert gazing silently at the clouds, or at the wings of their neighbors. Perhaps a part of them still remembers a time when wings could bring them closer to Heaven, and not merely to the empty sky.



* They can even find things as small as individual oases, though they say those songs are little more than brief jingles.

Canyon Town, part three

In total, I believe we spent a day or two in the canyons. Perhaps three. Surrounded by so many centuries, it was easy to lose track of a few days.

We had grown accustomed to the sunlight coming only from above, filtering down through the narrow tops of the canyons to glisten on leaks from the raised aqueduct and cast shadows from the plants sprouting along its walls. When we finally turned a corner and found sunlight spilling through a doorway, it took us a moment to realize what it was.

We had reached an exit. Instead of another empty house, the arch before us was full of sunlit desert.

We approached the narrow opening slowly, half-disbelieving, like sleepers waking from a dream. We found ourselves strangely reluctant to leave - and not just because of the contrast between the cool canyon streets and the dry, sun-blasted dunes outside. The town had been home to many people once. Perhaps it was only my imagination, but I thought I felt a hint of sadness from the abandoned walls around us. The town couldn't have gotten guests often, and now we were preparing to leave.

Does a town grow lonely when no one lives in it? I don't know. If we had had a longer supply of food, though, I wonder if this one would have let us go so soon.

At the top of the arch was another statue, its features worn away by weather long ago. It might have been a bird of some sort. The words carved below the statue had lasted better, sheltered by its feet or talons, and Mirenza was able to read them.

"Is old poem of goodbye," she said, tracing the faded characters with one claw. "May wind stay at your back, water rise where you step, and such. Every place in Desert has same poem, little different."

It made sense for such a poem to be carved at the door to the desert, but it still felt eerily as if the town was saying goodbye to us.

When we walked out into the sun, Garnet fell behind for a moment. The small woman had barely said a dozen words since we'd become separated from the caravan. It took me a moment to notice she was gone. I looked back, worrying that we had lost her as well, and saw her whispering something to the stones of the archway. Perhaps she had felt that same sense of loneliness I had, and was giving the town a few comforting words. I don't know. I couldn't hear her, even if I had been rude enough to listen.

Far above her head, a stray breeze plucked a single peach-colored flower from one of the aqueduct plants. It drifted slowly down to land in Garnet's hand. She gave the sandstone wall a kiss and turned to catch up with us.

None of us spoke for several hours. I was quite content to be left alone with my thoughts, and extended the same courtesy to the others. We didn't say a word until the sun set and we set up a rudimentary camp for the night. A rocky outcropping provided shelter, as well as some prehistoric graffiti for Mirenza to read, and Karlishek identified a nearby stand of fat cacti as edible. They were a little like cucumbers that had grown already pickled. I made myself useful by building a fire, a task with which I have some experience, though working with the handful of miserly twigs we were able to find took all of my skill and a good deal of luck. Garnet took out a knife that looked about large enough to peel carrots - potatoes might have been a stretch - and vanished into the darkness, returning a while later to surprise the rest of us with a stringy desert hare and some kind of edible lizard. We ate, for the most part, in silence.

The flower could, of course, have only been chance. 

Perhaps. 

In my dreams, I heard the whistling of wind through narrow windows and doors, the trickling of water, and the sound of laughter so faint it was only a dream of a memory. The stillness had a measure of sadness to it - but there was hope there, too. More than anything, there was patience. A town is meant for people. A town carved in stone can afford to wait until the day when they finally come back.

Canyon Town, part two

Mirenza's machine was little more than a small lens in a brass frame. Small buttons and levers protruded from it here and there, like a combination of a pocketwatch and a jeweler's compound eyepiece.

My Amrat and her English have improved since I first met her, so - with some help from Karlishek - she was able to explain a little more fully exactly what the device does.

As far as I could understand it, the lens shows the past. Sometimes. Other times it doesn't. The precise working of it is immensely complicated; the one Mirenza had was the simplified portable version, and even then, her explanations of the functions of all its knobs and switches quickly rose to heights of technicality beyond even Karlishek's ability to understand. Mirenza eventually gave up and just demonstrated for us.

The first subject she tried was a heap of green glass beads lying in an empty doorway. Garnet, Karlishek, and I had to crowd closely around the lens, as it was really only designed to fit a single eye. At first, the lens simply showed the heap, as if we were looking through ordinary - if somewhat dark and distorted - glass. Mirenza gave expert flicks to a couple of switches. The lens darkened, then cleared again to show a different image, grainy and flickering, like the pictures in an antique slide projector. When viewed through the lens, the beads were now on a string. A few more flicks of switches, and the view pulled back to show a dark-haired girl - perhaps fourteen or fifteen, with the stubs of an adolescent pair of antlers on her forehead - wearing the beads around her neck. She laughed, soundlessly, and vanished through the doorway where we had found the beads. In the lens, the opening had a wooden door in it, carved with symbols. "Health and protection," Mirenza identified them in a distracted mutter.

The girl closed the door, and the image blurred into darkness. Mirenza's claws flew over the switches. The darkness gave way to a burst of scratches, which cleared to reveal a priest. (Mirenza identified him by his robes and by the Amulet of Humility* around his neck.) Above the amulet, he was wearing the same necklace. His face bore little resemblance to the girl's, but he did have a magnificent set of antlers.

We watched for what seemed like hours as Mirenza flicked through image after image, following a dizzying array of people. Some had a family resemblance to the girl; many did not. All of them wore the beads around their necks. The lens was watching the beads, in their previous form as a necklace, and their wearers simply happened to be in the picture as well. One brief glimpse showed a glassworker actually making the necklace and giving it to her husband, whose eyes were an identical shade of brilliant green. Other images - much blurrier than the rest - showed only blowing sand, or an outcropping of greenish rock, which we assumed to be the sources of the beads' material and pigment. Apparently, anything further back than that no longer resembled the beads closely enough for the lens to observe it.

Most of the people showed up many times. One heartbreaking scene showed the first girl, a few years older, grieving for the death of her young husband. We had seen the two of them courting in many of the previous images. The next one showed the two of them, decades older, eating a quiet dinner with a small boy so similar that he had to have been their grandson. They were listening, clearly fascinated, while he described something to them with many soup-flinging gesticulations of his spoon.

This was when I started to be doubtful of the accuracy of what the lens was showing us. Mirenza switched it off a moment later, returning it to an ordinary glass lens, and explained.

The lens doesn't see the past; it sees all of the pasts. The pictures in it show both what was and what could have been. Mirenza had pointed it at the remains of the necklace, and we had seen where the necklace had been - and where it might have been, had things been different.

It is an archaeologist's dream. It is an archaeologist's nightmare.

Fittingly, Mirenza's group of archaeomechanogeolinguists calls these devices "arkmasith," which translates roughly to "historians' dreams." They've been working on them ever since Hashmax Bensathrack, their biometallovitrialchemist,** found that he could see strange things through a batch of glass he'd accidentally mixed with the powdered shells of oracular crabs. The creation of more lenses has progressed slowly, as oracular crabs are quite difficult to catch. They always seem to know where you're going to look for them.

The team has managed to improve the accuracy of the lenses somewhat, using the elaborate mechanical workings around them, plus an exhausting amount of testing with objects whose pasts are well-documented enough for comparison. The small one Mirenza had was an early model, with few adjustments for accuracy, considered by most of the team to be past its usefulness. She had kept it anyway. "We are look for beginnings," she explained, with a smile at the edges of her beak. "We never should forget beginnings of our own work. Also, is shiny thing."

We wandered through the canyons for the rest of the day, taking turns looking through the lens at whatever remains of the vanished community caught our eyes. We looked back to when that streak of rust was (probably) the wheel rim of a cart pulled by goats and miniature saurians, when this rock was (possibly) at the bottom of a swift-moving canyon river full of fish and freshwater nautilus, when that doorway was (perhaps) carved by a stubborn one-armed sculptor who clenched his chisel in his teeth, when this fossil was (dubiously) a small trilobite who spent its days tracing geometrical proofs into the silt of an ocean floor, when the hollow cave-houses were (most likely) inhabited by families who lived and died and danced and prayed beneath statues that had not yet lost their sandstone faces to centuries of wind and rain and neglect.

Not one view gave us any hint as to why they had left.



* The Amulet of Humility is commonly worn by the priests of Uncertainty, who teach that true knowledge comes only through sufficiently complete observation. "Sufficiently complete" observation, in the strictest division of the faith, is possible only by omnipotent beings. The most exceptionally adventurous and introspective of mortals might, by the end of their lifetimes, come to know all there is to know about themselves. To know everything about another person is usually considered impossible. To know everything about a place, or a society, or a species - much less the rest of the world - is utterly beyond hope. True knowledge is therefore restricted to the central deity or possibly deities of the Uncertain (His/Her/Its/Their followers don't presume to know anything at all about Him/Her/It/Them, including whether or not He/She/It/They actually exist). Mortals must learn to accept that the sum of their knowledge will forever be a microscopic grain of flawed and partial observations in the vast and incomprehensible universe. Followers of Uncertainty consider it a sin to be certain and a virtue to admit to being wrong. This perhaps explains why there have always been so few of them.


** All of the terms I'm using are broad approximations made up based on Mirenza's attempts to explain the scientists' work to me, and are probably laughably inaccurate. Language barrier aside, they simply do not seem to divide the sciences into the same categories with which I'm familiar.

Canyon Town, part one

We wandered in the canyons for several days.

There is, as yet, no reliable strategy for navigating a maze. Their constant shifting defeats any attempt to be methodical. Most people foolish enough to step into one simply wander around until they reach an exit - or, depending on the maze, perhaps something else of interest.

Wayfinders, being blessed with superhuman navigational abilities, can step into a maze and immediately find a perfectly straight path leading to their destination. As none of us were lucky enough to have this rare ability, we were confined to ordinary methods.

Nearly all of my supplies were, of course, in the wagons that had moved on without us. This could have been a serious problem. Fortunately, I have been a traveler long enough to have developed certain paranoid habits. I had with me a bag containing supplies (food, water, pens and paper; just the essentials) for several days. I try to keep this with me at all times, regardless of inconvenience, for just such situations as these. The supplies inside were meant for one, but could easily be stretched to three for a week or so.

Food, then, was not an urgent problem, as long as we rationed our supplies. Neither was water. The river that had carved the canyons was clearly long gone, but water still flowed through them in a sandstone aqueduct above the street.* Steps led up to it periodically. One of the first things we did was to climb the nearest staircase and fill our canteens.

After that… We wandered.

The city was carved right into the walls of the canyons, themselves carved by thousands of years of water erosion. The graceful, flowing lines of the striped stone dipped in here and there to reveal a window, a staircase, an arched doorway. Mirenza and I kept stopping to sketch particularly interesting pieces of stonework or take rubbings of the carvings on the walls. Mirenza was in her element - surrounded by stone and history and the elegant script of the canyon-dwellers' language. She pointed out glyphs, architectural styles, and geological strata with equal enthusiasm.

Most of the layers of stone were smooth - as smooth as sandstone ever gets, that is - but occasionally, we would find one with fossils embedded in it. The canyon-dwellers had added carvings to a few of these layers, so that the fossil ammonites and eurypterids had tiny stone riders or chariots hitched to them. One particularly large trilobite had an entire city built across its back, with hair-thin rope bridges crossing the gaps between segments.

Whoever the inhabitants had been, they seemed to have left in a hurry. The sand-drifted streets were littered with fallen jewelry, broken pots, wagon wheels rusted into arches of metallic lace.

This was when Mirenza brought out the machine she'd been carrying under her robe.

But I shall write more about that tomorrow.



* Anyone who has lived in a city will know that one never drinks anything that's been below street level.

On the Advisability of Obeying Signs

I suppose you must be wondering where I've been for the past few weeks.

I apologize for the prolonged silence. It's far from the first time, and I'm sure it won't be the last - but once again, I have been beyond the reach of postbirds.

The caravan had been traveling for a week or two when we first saw the stones. They were small enough at first - just the occasional spire and pillar of wind-sculpted sandstone, striped in layers of brown and gold, protruding from the sand. Desert gargoyles crouched on top of some of them. The stone-skinned beasts sat perfectly still, blending in so well that none of us noticed them at first. It wasn't until one of the vultures trailing the caravan stopped to rest on top of a rock, and the rock shot out a long, frog-like tongue and snapped it up with a squawk and a puff of black feathers, that we even realized the gargoyles were there.

We never saw any gargoyles that were even close to large enough to eat people. All the same, we watched the rocks much more carefully after that.

The farther we went, the larger the stones were. After a day or two of travel, they had become wider than the spaces between them, and we found ourselves wandering through a system of canyons. Like the spires, they were banded in layers of yellow and golden brown, with the occasional vein of deep black running through. Some stream or river - long gone now - must have taken centuries to carve the canyons, digging grain by grain through the layers of sandstone.

Among the group of scientists traveling with the caravan, the favored theory is that the canyons must have been home to an unusually active aquifrax, or some other type of water spirit. Perhaps more than one. The regular flow of water could never have produced anything as complex as this labyrinth of canyons.

I'm still not sure of the exact nature of the scientists' work. Are they geologists? Archaeologists? Historians? Experts in unusual vision? Some combination of all of these? I can only guess.

Mirenza, the avian in the group, has tried once or twice to explain their work to me, but we don't share quite enough words yet to convey something that complex. Geolarchaeolinguistic terminology is still beyond my ability to comprehend in English, much less in Amrat.

Still, I'm learning. Between Mirenza and Karlishek, I know enough Amrat by now to be, if not fluent, at least coherent.

Karlishek, as it happens, shares my love of comparative mythology. We've spent many hours discussing the myths and folk tales of various lands. We've talked about the daisy-chained strings of stories that form the Book of a Thousand Mirrors, which I've only read in translation; the Epic of Orbadon, which Karlishek has only read in translation; the tall tales of the Railway Regions, which seem to make a habit of pushing the boundaries of credibility, so that no matter how far-fetched they are, you can never be entirely certain that they're not true; the strange, unresolved half-stories of Mollogou, which seem to consider endings optional and questions best left unanswered…

Being an insect, Karlishek's face is not flexible in the same way a vertebrate's is, but I'm beginning to be able to read his expression in the way he holds his antennae. I'm not sure where his voice comes from. It's not from his mouth; unlike me, he's capable of speaking perfectly clearly with his mouth full.

On the day after I sent my last letter, Karlishek and I were sitting beneath the canopy of one of the wagons, comparing the English and the Amrat variations of the Tale of the Three Brothers. There are an almost endless number of these - stories in which the third brother succeeds where the older two fail, often due to their foolishness or arrogance. To the best of my knowledge, these stories show up in every culture and every language. In comparison, similar stories about sisters usually only have two. Quite often, they are stepsisters: one good or clever, the other wicked or foolish.

Karlishek sees this as an indication that there are twice as many foolish men as foolish women. He says that his experience has generally proved this to be correct. We were debating this when a woman peered around the frame of the wagon.

"Are you Mirenza's friends?" she asked, in a voice so soft it was barely audible. "She said to find a beetle and a reptile talking about stories."

That sounded like us. My current reptilian appearance has persisted for over a year now, which has been quite convenient in the Desert.

"She needs you," the woman continued, pointing back the way we'd come. "Back there. She says it's an emergency."

It was unclear, if it was an emergency, why Mirenza had sent for us in particular instead of simply shouting to whoever was nearby. We went anyway.

We arrived, somewhat out of breath, at the end of a small side canyon. Mirenza was standing in front of a circular slab of sandstone leaning against the wall, tracing a series of worn symbols carved in the center.

"Finally!" She gave us a quick, excited smile before turning back to the stone. "I thought you'd never get here. Look at this!"

"It's a rock." Karlishek's voice was flat.

"What's the emergency?" I panted. If there was one, it had yet to show itself.

"You see this?" Mirenza pointed to the glyphs on the stone. "It says, 'keep out.' Come on, help me open it."

This, I suppose, is the reasoning of an archaeologist. We've known Mirenza long enough by now to know that it was pointless to argue.

The base of the stone was covered in sand, which we had to dig out of the way before it would move at all. The woman who had fetched us - she hadn't mentioned her name - helped as well. Oddly, she wasn't out of breath at all. I didn't give this much thought at the time. With the sand out of the way, Karlishek and I put our shoulders to the stone and shoved, while Mirenza - light and agile with her hollow avian bones - leaped up onto a nearby ledge and pushed it from the top.

Fortunately, the sandstone was relatively light; if it had been a slab of granite, I doubt the four of us together could have budged it at all. As it was, we only managed to open a narrow gap before the stone ground to a halt and stubbornly refused to move any further.

Even that small gap was enough to get a glimpse of what was beyond. The stone had been covering a natural archway in the stone. Another canyon wall continued on the other side, smooth and banded with the same golden brown.

There was a window carved into it.

Distracted by this, we were foolish enough to take our eyes off of the wagons going by behind us, and it took us some time to notice that we could no longer hear the sound of the runners sliding over the sand. When we turned around, the caravan was gone. Not only that, but when we ventured down several of the nearby passages, they all led to dead ends. The canyons had shifted position, as mazes do.

There was nowhere to go but through the door we'd opened.

Urban Bonsai

Nothing particularly unusual happened today, so I have little to write about other than what I told you yesterday. Instead, I think I'll tell you about my visit to Fresmareel.

It was a few years ago, during my trip to the Railway Regions. Fresmareel is one of the few villages in the Regions that is not connected to the railroad. Perhaps it will be someday. The town is built on land ruled by the dragon Agnathrommilax, a drake of middle years - three or four centuries - and somewhat eccentric tastes. He paints his scales in bright colors, wears the flags of extinct cities like scarves around his long neck, and collects gramophone records of Rampastulan opera. On clear days, the villagers can sometimes hear him singing along on distant mountaintops. They often mistake the sound for thunder.

The dragon lives alone in his cave. However, the villagers have known him to fly off for several days, carrying a plump mammoth or a particularly nice boulder of quartz, and they suspect that he might have a sweetheart on one of the other mountains.

He has allowed them to live on his land as long as they follow a series of rules.

They can hunt the deer and ground sloths in the area, but are forbidden to harm wolves, foxes, and dreadgoats, as many of the ones in the area are intelligent and the dragon's personal friends.

They must ask the dragon's permission before clearing large areas of land, and certain plants - such as wild lilies and whistle-sedge - are to be left alone entirely.

The village must be built in a perfect circle. Every building within it must also be a perfect circle. They are allowed to expand the village, but only in concentric rings around the current outlines, so that they preserve its shape.

The houses are to be painted white or other pale colors. They can paint their roofs in any colors or patterns they like, as long as they stick to a palette selected by the dragon. He seems to favor reds, oranges, browns, and the occasional intense blue.

Certain colors, such as black, mauve, and chartreuse, are forbidden except on special occasions, such as funerals. Other than that, the villagers may wear anything they like.

The dragon encourages singing; he has even been known to give lessons to those villagers whose voices particularly offend his ears.

The land is a rich and beautiful one, and aside from broad aesthetic decisions, the dragon leaves the people of Fresmareel free to govern their lives as they choose. Most of them see it as an exceptionally good agreement. Other than a certain care in their hunting and their choice of pigments, most hardly notice the effects of the dragon's rules at all. Many even consider themselves lucky to live in such a beautifully designed village.

The villagers note that several of the rules, such as those on expansion, have only come into effect when the colony reached a certain size; there had been no need for them before. Presumably, new ones will continue to be introduced as the population continues to grow. This might also be the reason for some of the more mysterious rules, such as the unusually wide streets.

Hunters have occasionally come upon the dragon perched on one of the many rocky cliffs that surround the valley, gazing down at the colony with a satisfied expression, as one might wear when observing a garden or a favorite work of art. Some have speculated that, rather than collecting art or metalwork - the most common manmade objects that dragons hoard - he is instead a connoisseur of urban planning.

It seems he is growing a bonsai town.

Dragons, after all, live for centuries and can afford to take their time. Who knows - perhaps Agnathrommilax is already planning what the city will look like hundreds of years from now.

The Baffled Banker

Most of the transportation in the Golden Desert is done either by caravans or along the Desert's few permanent roads. The times when a caravan arrives in a village on a road - such as right now - are prime opportunities for trade, so the caravan will be staying in Denemat for a short time, trading spices and cloth and various other crafts for basic supplies. (Apparently, the caravan's pack animals eat truly prodigious amounts of vegetables.) It will be another day or two before I leave.

I spent today wandering the village and painting various things for people. There is a surprising amount of color in Denemat once one knows where to look for it. Like CheChmit, which I visited last year, Denemat is mostly shades of gray and sandy brown. There's just the occasional red door or green window frame. Some people will just paint a few stones of a house, or a few posts of a fence, outlining them in white or pale yellow to accentuate the pattern of the material. It's a nice touch. It has obviously been some time since any of the paint was retouched, though, and much of it was peeling off. It was a busy day. Fortunately, in most cases, speech was unnecessary for the jobs; the villagers and I could communicate just by sketching and pointing at colors.

A few goat-like people wanted me to paint their horns, which took me a little longer to figure out. Seeing the results - only the most intricate patterns would do - several of the reptilian villagers asked me to paint their scales as well, requesting streaks and spots in bright yellows and oranges. Overall, I might have painted more people than buildings today.

The elderly couple I met yesterday have been kind enough to let me sleep on the bench in their garden for the next few nights. Their names are Fenbit and Hasisha. Before coming to the Golden Desert, I had rarely slept outdoors, except in the wild areas between towns. In the small Desert towns and villages, though, it's quite common; it rarely rains here, and there is little chance of having one's possessions stolen overnight, at least in the small communities. Travelers need little more than a spot out of the wind to spend the night. I'm glad to have met someone kind enough to provide one.

I was on my way back there, just before sunset, when I came upon a man standing just beyond the center of the village. He was dressed in an immaculately pressed tweed suit and carried a briefcase in one hand. Sand was blowing into his shoes.

"Excuse me," he said in English. "Could you direct me to the bank?"

I looked back at the main street of the village, bewildered; I'm not sure if Denemat even has a bank. The villagers usually pay in eggs or radishes and don't even bother with money. When I turned around, he was gone.

At first, I suspected that this was a hallucination brought on by the heat. The man had been rather too opaque to be a ghost. When I drew a rough sketch for Fenbit and Hasisha, though, they exclaimed over it, pointing out the briefcase and the decidedly out-of-place clothing. What I gathered, from the small amount of communication we could achieve, is that the man is a wanderer of an unusual sort. He pops up in town after town in the Golden Desert, constantly asking for directions. No one has ever seen him stay long enough in one place to actually find what he's looking for.

There are many stories of eternal wanderers, such as the Hat Man, the Stubborn Postmistress, and the Flying Dutchman.* I'm not sure what this one would be called. The Baffled Banker? The Confused Clerk? The Disoriented Office Worker? Fenbit and Hasisha had never heard of him introducing himself by name.

Whoever he is, I hope he finds the bank he's looking for.



* The origins of the Dutchman story have, sadly, been lost to history, along with the definition of what exactly a "Dutchman" is. Literary historians have speculated that it is a type of large echinoderm. This would explain why the flying is worth noting.

The Monologue Hermit

The man was sitting in a ruin by the side of the road. I mistook him for a rock at first. He was dressed in a huge, threadbare overcoat almost the same color as the sand. Only his head stuck out of the top. His hair was only a shade darker than the coat, bleached pale at the ends by the Desert sun; his beard had obviously not been shaved in years, but it had been carefully braided instead. There were small pebbles looped into it here and there.

He looked as if he had been there forever. The sand had formed a drift against his back.

He muttered constantly, a string of half-audible syllables that stopped only for the occasional gulp of breath. I couldn't make out any actual words. They sounded like the lyrics of a song - they had a rhythm, and hints of a lost, wandering melody - but if so, it was a song that had been misheard, misrepeated, held in a faulty memory and reduced to so much nonsense.

He was also occupying the only shade I'd seen all day. It was the remains of a tall, round building that looked as if it might have been a watch tower in the past. There was little left now but a jagged ring of stone. The man was sitting beneath the miraculously intact arch of its doorway. Behind him, spiral stairs coiled up to nowhere.

I was reluctant to interrupt him, but I'd been walking all morning, and there was nowhere else to sit if I wanted to rest in the shade. I sat down nearby as quietly as I could. He gave me a vague nod and muttered something that might have been "hello" between the other words. He looked half-starved under his tattered coat, so I gave him some of my remaining bread and a couple of red-skinned radish-potato things from Rikanta. He took them and wolfed them down, still muttering with his mouth full. His hands were covered with an intricate web of blue tattoos. Between the wrinkles and the dust, it was impossible to make out the design. Whatever it was, it was as incomprehensible as the constant mutter of his half-audible monologue.

I tried to resist. I really did. Eventually, though, curiosity overcame me, and I asked him what he was saying. He turned to me with a haunted stare.

"It is the incantation." mumble mumble mumble "It keeps the spiders down. I must not stop." mumble mumble mumble

"What do you do when you sleep?" I asked, fascinated.

"Sleep?" His stare was uncomprehending. "I do not sleep."

I didn't ask him any more questions.

When I finished my own lunch and got up to leave, he held up one hand in a wordless gesture: wait. mumble mumble mumble. Unlike the others, the tattoo on his palm was clear - a chambered nautilus shell, inked in exquisite detail and positioned so that his fingers became its tentacles. A blue ink eye stared at me from the base of his middle finger. With the other hand, he reached down to dig in the sand at the base of the ruined wall. He pulled out a pebble and handed it to me.

It was a perfectly ordinary pebble - small, rough, yellow-brown, and no shape in particular. I would have thought it completely unremarkable if I'd found it myself. In that hand, it took on a strange aura of mystery.

"Take it." mumble mumble mumble "Keep it safe until it is ready. You will know the time." mumble mumble "It will be grateful." mumble mumble mumble

I thanked him. I wasn't sure what else to do. He nodded once, gravely, and turned away, ignoring me again.

Tucking the pebble into one of my sturdier pockets, I turned and walked on. It was a long time before I was sure I could no longer hear the man muttering.

It is always hard to tell the perceptive from the mad. The world is full of all manner of people who see what the rest of us don't. Some of them are visionaries, seeing what is true, or what is hidden, or what could be. Others simply see what is not. For all I know, the pebble could be just as important as the man seemed to think it was; for all I know, it could be as ordinary as it seems, important only within his own mind.

I have no way to tell, so I'll keep it for now. I wouldn't want to disappoint him - or, for that matter, to disappoint the pebble.

Rikanta

Having only arrived in Rikanta two nights ago, I wasn't ready to leave just yet, so I spent today wandering around the town. It's a beautiful place. The old stone gives it a solid, peaceful feel that is hard to find outside of old ruins. It's a town that has settled comfortably into its place. I walked through the streets, following the shade, watching carts roll by and children play elaborately drawn jumping games in the dust, admiring the way the creeping hieroglyphs twined their way around the architecture - though I was careful not to lean too long against any inscripted walls. I didn't want them rubbing off.

Rikanta is a small town. Walk three blocks east, and you reach the river; it's too shallow here for boat travel, but there is the occasional tumbledown dock where people sit to fish during the long, drowsy afternoons. Walk three blocks west, and you come out into farmland, shady orchards and drought-wheat fields where trained shrews scour the crops for particularly succulent insects.

Perhaps "blocks" is the wrong word, though. The town's layout has nothing so regular as that. Inside this narrow patch of land is a maze of twisty little streets that seems far too complex to fit within such a small space. I wandered all day, and I'm fairly sure I was never on the same street twice. Fortunately, there's a tall clock tower in the center of the town, so I could never get entirely lost.

The clock tower is made of the same pilfered castle stones as the rest of the town. It has no clock. When I asked the group of elderly men playing board games in the town square,* they said that the town will get a clock someday. Eventually. When they find one they like. One of the men - who seemed to be winning his game of Hens and Comets, if his opponent's expression was any indication - said that his great-grandfather used to say the same thing.

People in the Golden Desert are rarely in a hurry about anything.



* There is always a group of elderly men playing board games in the town square. This is a universal constant. If it's not the town square, then it's the general store, or perhaps one of the more neatly-kept parks. No matter how far you travel, they are always there. The only things that change are the language and the board games.

If I ever settle down in one place, I hope to be one of them someday.

Creeping Hieroglyphs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

A Place to Stop

After a morning of searching, I found my way between the cities this afternoon, through a twisty little alley draped with yellow-blooming tassely vine. The buildings on both sides overhung so far that they met in the middle; the only sunlight in the alley came in through the openings at the ends. I left behind the glint and whisper of Thrass Kaffa's constant rain and emerged into the dusty streets of Karkafel. Scraps of paper blew across the cobblestones. I couldn't make out the writing on most of them. I can speak enough of the Golden Desert's various languages to understand most of what I hear, but all I can see in their writing is the calligraphy - graceful, but silent.

Most of the streets in Karkafel lead to the Library sooner or later. Some lead directly to it, while others spiral in gradually, like the strands of a spider's web. This was one of those. As usual, it was full of people carrying piles of books and scrolls. Many were reading as they walked. When they bumped into each other, they would mumble some unintelligible apology and keep walking. This is normal in Karkafel.

I reached the Library eventually. It's the largest building in the city. It was grand even when it was first built, nearly a thousand years ago; it's continued to spread since then, sprawling out into new additions and engulfing every neighboring building. It's almost as bad as the Creemer Museum by now. Even the senior librarians don't know where everything is. I spent several hours just wandering through the shelves, pulling out the occasional book or scroll to see if I could read it. I did find a book of legends, three travel journals, and a guide to raising scorpions; most of the time, though, I didn't even recognize the languages in the books. It didn't matter. There's something wonderful about being surrounded by books, even if you can't read a word of them. All those patient blocks of knowledge, resting in quiet stacks until someone needs them… It's as close as I ever get to truly feeling at home. The Golden Desert has no end of stories about treasure chambers and Caves of Wonders, but none of them can compare to a library.

The silence was so deep, I could almost swim in it. Then Blue showed up.

It's impossible to go to the Library of Karkafel and not meet Blue Fir. He goes everywhere. I met him several years ago, on my first visit to the city; we had a long conversation about the work of Millici Trappilack, queen of the dreamlike novel. The conversation continued over dinner at his house, then over the following week while I worked on a mural for a newly built temple. He talks all the time (when he's not reading), and I'm happy to spend entire conversations listening. We get along splendidly.

This time, I ran into Blue in a dusty back corner of the library, by a shelf of mechanical philosophy treatises. He resembles a kangaroo, with dusty blue fur (the color of the tree for which he's named) and rather amazingly long ears. They perked up when he caught sight of me.

"Nigel!" he said, literally leaping over to me. He continued in a stage whisper.* "Where have you been? I haven't seen you in years! I had almost forgotten what you looked like, though obviously you don't look the same now anyway, I think you had hair the last time I saw you, but I can always tell it's you because you carry about a million bags of stuff and your face squishes up that way when you smile, yes, just like that, even when you look like a lizard. I was just telling a lizard about you last week, actually! He landed on our house on his way to Hram - he was the migrating kind of lizard, with a little suitcase and everything - and he wanted to know about that mural you painted the last time you were here, you know, the one with the saxophone elephants, so I told him it was by a traveling artist and that you made the whole thing up out of your head, except for the bits from that Ozmit legend about the cyclone and the sidewinder."

He kept talking as we left the Library and walked back to his house - I walked, that is, and he bounced. Blue never has prolonged contact with the ground unless he's reading. He spends most of his time in the Library; the rest he spends… finding things. He works for the Museum of Antiquities, and sometimes for the Library as well, visiting ruins and scriptoriums and obscure ancient cities. I think his job has something to do with research or exploration - possibly both. He's tried to explain it to me a few times, but he has enough energy for two and a half people and rarely stays long on a single subject. He used to go on expeditions with a friend named Achelyes, a cat with green fur who was good at listening. (No wonder they got along so well.) They lost track of each other years ago, though - easy enough to do when you travel so much - and he hasn't been able to find her since.

"Did you know that the Library has the oldest written copy of that legend? Chrysalie Chalk brought it back from one of her expeditions to the Hatchery ruins. The secretary birds let her take what she likes, because they're inventing better forms of language and they don't have any use for the old ones anymore, or if they do they can just send a messenger apprentice here to get it, because the apprentice birds get all the hard jobs. Chrysalie said the birds were inventing a language that's impossible to forget. She recited a whole a whole poem to me that she'd only read once, but she doesn't know the language and neither do I, so it didn't really do us much good except that it sounds pretty. I want to learn the language if they ever finish it."

Blue is already verbose in at least fifteen languages, five of them extinct. I suspect that he'd be horrified to meet someone and not be able to talk to them.

"Can you imagine how useful it would be to never forget things? Just last week I was trying to remember the name of that corkscrew thing that plunder snails use to drill into boats, and I couldn't! I had to go look it up! It's called a stellithork, by the way. How could I forget a word like stellithork? It sounds like a creature that delivers baby stars, except that that's a siltrath, at least in Silvani mythology. Hardly anyone even knows about Silvani mythology. I don't know if I would even have heard of it if the Hideous Queen hadn't been mentioned in that book, I think it was called Uglification - you know, one of the last books Lord Halda wrote before he completely lost his mind and started writing his Ode to Soup. The library has that, too, but hardly anyone ever bothers to read it, and if they do, they usually give up around the two hundredth verse, because that's when it stops making any sense at all. I never knew there were so many words that rhyme with "herring" until I read that book."

I'm fairly sure that Blue has read more books than anyone else I know, though I'm not sure when he ever stops talking long enough to read. I suspect that he doesn't sleep. He lives in a semi-ruined castle near the edge of the city with his rather large adopted family; they grew up in an orphanage in Thrass Kaffa, in one of the swampier parts of the city, and made a rather spectacular exit from it about ten years ago. That's all I'm sure of. The rest of the story is different every time they tell it (every time Blue tells it, usually), and no one else in Thrass Kaffa will talk about it.

Blue's sister Muriel, who resembles a long-horned cow, studies fencing and is teaching her scriptoscarab to use a typewriter. Thefoi, another sister, is a mammal with coppery red fur and a mane of scarlet hair that reaches to the floor. She's quite easy to get along with, provided you agree that she's the most beautiful mammal in Hamjamser. This could easily be true. As is so often the case, the only flaw in her beauty is that she's aware of it.

Their avian brother never seems to be home. Whenever anyone asks where he is, the others say he's "out working" and quickly change the subject.

Blue was still talking as we reached the house. "There was a man in town last week who said he had a herring he'd trained to sing, but I'm pretty sure it was really a lungfish, because herrings don't usually last this far into the Desert, and their eyes don't bug out like that when they sing. Have you ever heard a lungfish sing? They sound like frogs, all yawp yarp yeep, but they can certainly carry a tune. My friend Snark had a baritone lungfish he'd trained to sing Moldomer's Left-Hand Concerto no. 6, and it did all the oboe trills and everything. He would plop it down on the table at dinner and conduct it with a spoon, which made people complain if they were still eating, because it sort of got slime all over the place. That's why I have my slug eat on the floor - that, and she doesn't really fit on the table, because she's grown since you were here last, and it's getting hard to pick her up anymore. Are you staying for dinner? We're having figs and a cactus-hen that Jill blew up this morning."

Jill is yet another adopted sister, a tall, thin avian who spends most of her time standing on top of things. Her full name is Jillgog Javamarn Jandramaxil Fiogaja; apparently, her family used to be royalty in Specklemax, hence all the names. She's the last one left. She likes blowing things up,** but contents herself with dropping pumpkins off the roof. She usually checks to make sure there's no one underneath.

Dinner was surprisingly good; Anna (yet another sister, though you might think she was the mother of the family if she didn't look like a griffin) has become something of an expert at salvaging exploded meat. There was a hint of gunpowder in the flavor, but it was well-cooked, and it was already in such small pieces that we didn't have to cut it.

The conversation over dinner consisted of Blue talking, just like the last time I was here. Muriel and I nodded and gave the occasional single-word response when it seemed appropriate. Thefoi only interrupted when people neglected to look at her. Fortunately, she keeps a pair of small horned moles who spend all their time gazing at her adoringly, and one of her current admirers was also there to help. Thefoi has a constant procession of young men (and not-so-young men, and quite often women as well, not to mention a few hermaphrodites and at least one talking plant) who come to gaze upon her beauty. Some are artists; others, less lucky, are in love. Thefoi encourages them all equally, which is to say not at all. If she chose one, the others might stop paying attention. As far as I know, she's not interested in love - she just likes having an audience. She certainly gets one. Some of her admirers have been hanging around for years now.

It was after eleven o'clock when I left the table. I would have loved to stay and listen more, but after walking all morning and afternoon, I was exhausted. Everyone refused to let me go back to the inn I'd been staying at in Thrass Kaffa; instead, Anna showed me to one of the empty rooms upstairs. The castle has a lot of them, full of books and explosives and the creative plumbing that a six-hundred-year-old castle needs if you want it to have running water. This room also has half a sofa. The other half has been rebuilt with onion crates and cushions, and it makes quite a comfortable bed. It was hard to stay awake long enough to write.

Someone came into the castle around midnight; I heard a door shut, then the sound of claws on the floor. Whoever it was had vanished into another room by the time I looked up.

I think I'll be here for a while. There's always plenty of work for an artist in the two cities, and I didn't get to explore nearly enough the last time I was here. Besides, I have friends to stay with.

As I write this, my salamander lies in her lantern, curled around her eggs. Their fire provides light to write by and warmth against the cold Desert night. There's a postbird in the window, patiently waiting to take my letter once I finish writing.

This is likely to be my last letter for some time. Farewell, and safe travels. You'll hear from me again next year.

Nigel



* Blue has perfected the art of the stage whisper. When you work in a library and are incapable of not talking, it's a necessary survival skill.

** There's a reason the Fiogajas don't rule Specklemax anymore.