Changrakata

Over the next several days, the weather turned gradually more humid. The pale, clear sky of the Golden Desert had been shading toward a gentler blue ever since we'd found the first valley; a few weeks later, we began finding dew on the grass every morning. I distinctly remember the first time I looked up to see an actual cloud overhead.

On Chakramalsian's request, we helped him to pull back the canopy of his wagon. He'd been spending as much time as possible outside of it anyway, now that the air outside was no longer dry enough to parch his amphibious skin. "Your painting has been a marvelous help in keeping me sane during the journey," he told me as we rolled up the silk sides of the wagon, leaving the fish-painted roof overhead to provide shade. "But if I have to spend another week without seeing where we're going, I think I might actually go mad."

He spent the rest of the day with his head and shoulders hanging out over the rim of the wagon, like a dog on a carriage ride, splashing the water in its bed with his tail and pointing out every interesting piece of scenery we passed to the endlessly patient Mogen.

The next morning, there was an entire bank of clouds on the horizon, lit up pink by the early-morning sun. A flock of birds was passing in front of it - or what I assumed was a flock of birds, though something was odd about their motions. Some sort of small dragonet or flying snake, perhaps. Distracted by the clouds, I gave them a smile and little more thought.

To Chak, they clearly meant something a great deal more important. He stared at them for several moments. He took off his spectacles and put them back on. Then, with a delighted grin, he uncoiled his long body, lifted himself out of the water, and swam straight up into the air.

"We've done it!" he cried in delight, coiling in graceful loops overhead. Glittering drops of water fell from his frilled tail onto our astonished, upturned faces. "We've reached Changrakata. We're here!"

He explained the situation to us while floating weightlessly above one of the folding chairs we set up for breakfast. While we ate and talked, we watched more schools of fish swimming overhead, which I had originally mistaken for flocks of birds.

There are many varieties of airborne aquatic life all over Hamjamser, of course. The glider-eels of the Railway Regions can remain in the air as long as they keep their long ventral fins dipped in the water. The butterfly guppies of the High Fields are a common sight, darting from flower to flower alongside bees and hawk moths during the Summer months. The sailfin mer-folk of the Crumpled Reef claim to have signed a formal treaty with the Element of Water, which allows them to glide through the air on carpet-like independent wavelets. The floating Sargasso Jungle reportedly has an abundance of floating species, though they tend to be dirigible in nature, filling natural gasbags and float bladders with homemade hydrogen instead of using more mysterious means of flotation.

The conditions that allowed Chakramalsian to float weightless in the air, with his whiskers and external gills drifting lazily in currents that the rest of us felt as mild breezes, are certainly among the more mysterious ones.

The sky of Changrakata is one vast ocean.

The name of the country translates, more or less, to “Sea-Dreaming Land.” The generally accepted theory is that the air of Changrakata somehow remembers the prehistoric time when the country was underwater - something that places such as the Railway Regions or the Golden Desert, for all their ancient aquatic fossils, have long since forgotten. Whatever the cause, any creature in Changrakata (in theory) can swim in the country's air, just like a fish in water, as long as it has a firm and unshakeable belief that it can do so.

In nearly all cases, a belief this strong is found only in creatures that are actually aquatic. The skies of Changrakata are full of fish of all sizes, as well as tree-grazing manatees, gnat-like swarms of darting krill, and giant squid as massive and stately as the grandest airship. However, you will find not a single dog, cat, or hoofed thugroffler among them. Otters take freely to the skies in pursuit of fish; their dry-footed cousins, the weasels and stoats, stay firmly anchored on the ground. Chak told us that even within the Changrakatan branch of his family, he has cousins born with fins who can swim in the air, while their own finless siblings cannot.

Naturally, Karlishek and I gave it a try, doing our best to convince ourselves that we could join Chak in the air. (Mogen declined to do anything so silly, but the prospect of flight seemed more than worth a little indignity to us.) Alas, we remained firmly on the ground. To be born with feet, it seems, is to be forever a walker. *

Chak, in contrast, had no trouble remaining airborne. While the rest of us rode the wagons behind the heavily plodding gafl, he spent the rest of the day swimming: darting down to ground level to examine interesting plants and insects, gliding up above the treetops to watch the fish overhead, or simply keeping pace with us with easy, rippling strokes of his tail. It was impossible not to smile while I watched him. After so many months confined to a single wagon, unable to travel under his own power, his delight at suddenly gaining the freedom of flight was infectious. I even caught Mogen grinning at him once or twice.

We continued to see aquatic life overhead all day. The sight was disorienting at first, but all of us had seen stranger, and we soon grew accustomed to seeing birds and fish sharing the same environment. A fish hawk snatched herring straight out of the air while a sea turtle munched on jellyfish above it. A day bat performed feats of aerobatics in pursuit of gnats and minnows. Every so often, we would briefly come under the shadow of a passing cloud or pod of whales. A few of the fish came low enough, curious about our group of mostly earthbound travelers, that I was able to identify them: tuna, grapplejaw trout, paisley salmon, and a few of the omnipresent sporefish. Catfish snuffled through the underbrush in search of slugs and beetles.

The mingling of salt- and fresh-water species in a single atmosphere is apparently not unusual here. When they're sharing the air with birds and insects, I suppose the usual rules must be somewhat relaxed.

I suspect that I'm going to enjoy Changrakata.

---

* There are exceptions, of course. A previous ruler of Gillirangl (one of Changrakata's larger cities) was mad enough that she believed herself to actually be a fish, even though she more closely resembled a rhinoceros; she was able to swim freely above the towers of her palace. This belief also led to her eventual disappearance. Her madness eventually led her to conclude that the sun was a particularly fat and shining beetle hovering above the surface of the universe, and she swam off into the sky, determined to catch and eat it. As far as anyone in Gillirangl knows, she is still swimming. Several subsequent rulers stated that they would step down if the Empress ever returned, since she would, of course, have the prior claim. Statements of this kind became more common as the chances of the Empress ever returning became increasingly remote. It's quite possible that a few of them even meant it. Tolerance for mad rulers has diminished somewhat in recent centuries, though, and the current popular opinion is that swimming off to eat the sun constituted an abdication of the throne. The city's present rulers are a pragmatic bunch; they have no intention of turning over their well-run city to someone who thinks that heavenly bodies are edible.

Hanagrishel

It was nearly a week before we reached the next inhabited valley.

When we first spotted a narrow peaked roof and chimney over the ridge of the next dune, we were expecting another abandoned (or mostly abandoned) building, like the Blue Hyacinth Tea House. We were surprised when we came over the dune and found the small house on the other side perfectly intact. A neatly tended bed of flowers lay in front of it, and a string of washing was swaying on a line between two trees.

Not wanting to disturb the tidy front yard, we left the gafl happily munching grass on the other side of the valley and crossed a small stone bridge over the stream that ran in front of the house. Garnet sniffed the air as we went. As curious as the rest of us were, she seemed even more so; usually the most shy and retiring of our group, she ended up in front this time. We were surprised yet again when she stepped up and knocked on the door of the house.

There was the sound of slow, shuffling footsteps inside, and the door opened to reveal the oldest werewolf I've ever seen.

She squinted at Garnet, sniffing the air and blinking eyes that were almost lost under a pair of shaggy eyebrows. When she got a good look (or perhaps smell) at the younger woman, her face pleated itself into a maze of smile lines, and she ushered her inside with a delighted "kirim, kiriiim!" Welcome, welcome! Her voice was gravely and surprisingly deep.

Her name, we found out eventually, was Hanagrishel. Whether that was her first or last - or only - name, we were never sure. She spoke an old-fashioned and heavily accented dialect of Halsi, of which I could only make out about one word in five. Garnet seemed to have no trouble understanding her. The two of them kept up a lively conversation all afternoon, though Garnet's side of it was limited to about one sentence every minute or two. Hanagrishel seemed to be trying to make up for several decades' worth of missed conversation in a few hours. Garnet didn't seem to mind; like me, she seems to be the sort of person who prefers listening to talking.

Next to the house, Hanagrishel had a small vegetable garden and a coop of the most evil-looking chickens I've ever seen. As far as we could tell, their eggs were most of what she lived on. She made a great fuss over the chickens while we were there, cooing and stroking their feathers lovingly while they glared beady-eyed murder at the rest of us. A few of them pecked at Garnet's ankles, but she gave them one soft growl, and they stayed politely away from then on.

For our entire visit, I was never entirely sure whether our host actually noticed that the rest of us were there. She set out six plates for lunch (hard-boiled eggs and magnificently purple potatoes, plus a brace of jackalopes that Garnet had caught early that morning). Otherwise, she paid attention only to Garnet. Since she seemed to be somewhat nearsighted and hard of hearing, I got the distinct impression that she navigated the world mainly by smell; perhaps, as the only other werewolf (debatably the only other mammal) around, Garnet was the one she could perceive the most clearly.

After lunch, we offered (through Garnet) to help with any work that might need to be done around the place. To our surprise, there wasn't any. Despite her advanced age, Hanagrishel was apparently perfectly capable of handling all the digging, carpentry, and stonework necessary to maintain the house and garden. Even the house's paint was in pristine condition. "She built her house herself," Garnet informed us. Hanagrishel interjected a few proud sentences. "Three times. There was a tornado and a very large crab. She says it was delicious."

Without any obvious way to repay our host's hospitality (Garnet was already supplying all the socialization she seemed to want), the other four of us gave the two of them some space and walked off to explore the rest of the valley instead. As it wasn't a large one, this only took about half an hour. The ground was too steep and uneven for Chak's tub-barrow, and the stream was too small and rocky for him to swim in, so Mogen just carried him in her arms instead. Karlishek and I offered to take a turn, but she shook her head.

"It's my job," she said matter-of-factly. "Besides, you two would get tired in ten minutes." We had to admit that she was right.

The valley's shrine had a carving of a mother wolf nursing a few small pups and looking on fondly while several older ones played with a bone. Behind the mother wolf was a half-skeletonized deer carcass. Given the carnivorous subject matter, we took this to be the wolf version of an idyllic family dinner, rather than a sign of anything more ominous. The shrine's offering slab had several impressively large bones arranged on it in an artistic fashion.

The talismans hanging from the trees in the valley were similar to the ones in Nemigan's. However, instead of a bowl of honey at the bottom, each one had a glass globe of water containing a single dragonfly nymph. There didn't seem to be any way for them to get out of the globes, or anything inside for them to eat, but each one was the picture of robust, snap-jawed, malevolent health. Perhaps they weren't ordinary nymphs. We asked about them, through Garnet, when we returned. Hanagrishel called them "Prangino gili," a Jingli phrase that Chak said meant "children of the Biter." None of us knew what that meant.

Supper was much the same as lunch, with the addition of another sand walrus that Garnet caught a few valleys over. Hanagrishel clapped her hands when the younger woman returned with it - even more so since Garnet had shifted to her larger, more canine form in order to carry the beast. She seemed shy about it at first, but Hanagrishel made a fuss over her as if she were an adolescent grandchild dressing up in fancy clothes for the first time. I could almost have sworn she actually said "oh, how you've grown," which would have been true enough. The two of them carved up the meat to cook with great enjoyment.

By the goodwill of chance or geography, the moons happened to be full the night we stayed there. Mogen was on watch at midnight when the rest of us were woken by the howling of wolves in the distance. One voice was higher and softer, the other earth-rumblingly low, but they harmonized beautifully while the moons shone overhead.

The next morning, there were two sets of canine paw prints in the soft earth by the banks of the stream. The larger set of prints were roughly the size of my chest; the creature that left them must have been taller than Hanagrishel's house.

We had a pleasant breakfast (more eggs, seasoned with some of our dwindling supply of spices), leaving most of the conversation to Hanagrishel and Garnet. They talked a little less, but seemed to enjoy each other's company more, like two friends or relatives who know each other well enough to do without words now and then.

We had nearly finished packing up to leave when Garnet, after a long hesitation, told us that she was staying in the valley. None of us were entirely surprised. Though we'd enjoyed traveling with her, and hopefully she with us, she'd never seemed entirely at home in either the caravan or our smaller group of travelers - or, from what she'd told us, in most of the other places she'd lived - the way she did in this valley.

"I've been looking for a… for a place where I'm needed. I think I've found it." She smiled across the yard at Hanagrishel, who had pulled out some logs and was busy splitting them into usefully sized sections without the aid of a hatchet. The older woman waved cheerfully and picked a splinter out of her teeth. "Besides, there aren't any other werewolves in my family. I want to learn to be like her."

We parted with a round of hugs and well-wishes. I sketched out a quick portrait of the six of us (Mirenza included, from memory) for Garnet to remember us by. We left her with promises to write and most of the basil and snickleweed remaining in our supply of spices, which she and Hanagrishel had particularly enjoyed the previous night.

When we left the valley, Garnet had taken her claws and fangs out again, and Hanagrishel was showing her how to bite logs in half. Both of them looked happier than I'd ever seen them before.

A message from the Postbird Service

Postbird's note:

The Postbird Service wishes to express its regrets for the delayed delivery of the following parcel of letters. Please note that this delay did not occur due to an error by the Postbird Service. The sender of the letters, a Mr. Nigel Tangelo, evidently purchased an economy-sized book of stamps from a print run that was later found to have an inverted instance of the Traveler's Seal cunningly worked into the design. While the true version of the Traveler's Seal ensures that a letter reaches its intended recipient, regardless of  incorrect addresses, illegible handwriting, and other crimes against the postal arts (but not, the Postbird Service wishes to stress, insufficient postage), this particular version of the Seal invoked every possible mischance upon letters to which it was affixed, causing them to be misfiled, damaged, stolen, and - in a statistically unlikely number of cases - eaten by frogs. The Postbird Service has recalled all unused books of the offending stamps and devoted countless bird-hours to tracking down, wherever possible, all letters and packages unfortunate enough to have been led astray by them.

In the case of Mr. Tangelo's post, unusually, several dozen letters mailed over a considerable span of time (all, unfortunately, using the aforementioned malengraved postage) had all come into the possession of a stalagmite farmer in the subterranean Queendom of Hxgnnnsplik. Though the farmer did not speak English, some of the letters, fortunately, contained illustrations that she found amusing; she had thus kept the entire bundle rather than feeding them to her stalagmites. The Postbird Service purchased the letters from the farmer for the price of a new hextet of boots and re-sealed them with uncorrupted postage before delivering them. Though it is possible that a small number of letters might not have been recovered, we are confident that the majority will reach you in good condition.

As an unrelated matter, the Postbird Service is currently offering a reward of 2700 Lint for information leading to the location of a Ms. Rubilious Herring, formerly employed as an engraver by the Postbird Service. Ms. Herring is likely to be using a pseudonym, as, in retrospect, she most likely was during her time with the Service. She has been described, by various and contradictory witnesses, as a woman somewhere between four and seven feet tall, characterized by an unusually large and elaborate mustache, an eyepatch in the shape of a nautilus, and/or uniformly terrible taste in hats. If you observe any unfamiliar persons matching any one of these descriptions, please contact your local postbird immediately.

The Postbird Service wishes to stress, again, that the unfortunate situation here described does not in any way reflect upon the ability of the Service to deliver mail in a timely and reliable fashion under any but the most abnormal conditions, and that steps are being taken to ensure that future mail cannot be similarly misdirected by malicious graphic design. We hope that you will continue to grant us the honor and privilege of delivering your mail.

With regrets and thanks,
The Postbirds

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.

The Desert Road

Now that the word-plague is cured and the town is no longer under linguistic quarantine, I packed up my things and left Arkit this morning. I made sure to leave before dawn. Travel in the Golden Desert is much more pleasant if you can reach someplace shady by noon.

Arkit is on one of the few permanent roads in the Desert. Elsewhere, there would be little point in roads; an unpaved one would just be sand on sand, and anything more solid would be buried by the sand instead. It would be like building a road on the ocean.*

However, being near the river, there are enough grasses and weeds here (Desert weeds are tough and brown and dead-looking) that the absence of them qualifies as a path. Or, if you're feeling generous, a road.

I'm traveling the Golden Desert on foot, as usual. I've acquired a wide-brimmed hat and some of the loose, blindingly white clothing worn by Desert nomads. These protect me from most of the sun. That only leaves the heat radiating up from the sand, the hot, gritty breeze that smells of dryness and baked stone, and the times - even worse - when the breeze doesn't blow. The air congeals then into something thick and unbreathable, like syrup poured over a pancake sizzling on the endless frying pan that is the Golden Desert.

It has taken me some time to become accustomed to the heat.

Fortunately, my body and the Shapeshifter's Curse I inherited have been as resourceful as ever. My toes have become quite long and thin, spreading my weight across the sand while exposing a minimum of skin to it. My skin, in turn, has developed a coat of scales even whiter than my clothing, with a collection of heat-shedding frills where my hair would be in colder weather. Several people have noted my resemblance to various Desert lizards. This seems like a good sign. The lizards, after all, have had quite a lot of time to adapt to this place; if I can become half as comfortable as them in little more than a year, I count myself quite lucky.

I have become surprisingly comfortable here, in fact. The heat has ceased to bother me much. I enjoy the silence of the long spaces between towns. The settlements of the Golden Desert tend to be bustling, exuberant places, communities of people who will gather around any source of water to build their houses and plant their crops and celebrate the miracle of life existing in the middle of such desolation. I love staying in Desert towns. After a week, though - sometimes two or three - I start to long for the desolation again, for a place where there are no voices to drown out my thoughts. I like people, but in moderation.

I have had many companions on my travels, but silence and solitude are by far the oldest and fondest of them.

They have been good company today. I spent the morning and parts of the afternoon traveling solo, wading through the rippling heat haze over the hard-packed road. My feet fell easily into the familiar rhythm of walking. I passed few travelers. One or two people passed me, traveling in the opposite direction on foot or on faded wooden wagons full of sand-tubers. One woman rode by on a flightless bird, somewhere between ostrich and roadrunner; there were message tubes strapped to both its legs, like a carrier pigeon. Each one must have held a scroll longer than my arm. The woman gave me a crisp salute with one white-gloved hand and shouted a greeting as she passed by. I didn't recognize the language.

Other than that, I spent the day alone. The silence stretched on long enough that started to notice the details of the Desert around me. Even here, there's always something moving. Occasional clouds wandered up over the horizon and burned up in the mid-afternoon sun. The darker shapes of vultures and winged hyenas passed overhead, dismissing me as too mobile for food. The hyenas called to each other with crow-like bursts of cackling that echoed for miles across the sand. Small, unseen creatures rustled in the weeds. Fine sprays of sand sifted from the tops of the nearby dunes. The wind blew dry notes across the brim of my hat.

I walked.

I have no particular destination in mind, and therefore little reason to care when I arrive. It wouldn't much matter if I did. The Golden Desert is a place of vast and changeable distances, impossible to predict; as the saying goes, you'll get there when you get there. People rarely hurry here.

Besides, it's just too hot.



*This has, of course, been attempted in many parts of the world, with varying degrees of success. Notable examples include the Serpent's Backbone, a floating bridge made of giant vertebrae that links a few dozen of the islands of Kennyrubin; Trifrost, an ice causeway kept frozen by imported glacier snails in the tropical waters of Barbaleel; and Skimmer's Path, a road built by the Great Acrobat, who somehow convinced a fifty-mile stretch of ocean to increase its surface tension to the consistency of ankylosaur leather. To this day, no one is sure how he did it.

Pins in the World

The road reappeared today, leading off across the plains instead of leaping over the Edge. It's a relief, and not just because it means we can get the wagon started again. That abrupt end was making me nervous. FlunDitChukk got the dunderblub started again, and after saying goodbye to the geographers, we set out along the new road. It continued to wind through the long grass of the Scalps all day.

After a week in SuyMaTmakk, I'd forgotten just how much open space there is out here. Nothing interrupts it. There are no mountains, no buildings, no hills higher than my waist. I still haven't seen any of the Scalps' precious forests. We did see the occasional single tree - acacias and lightning pine, for the most part - but most of them had jaglars reclining in the upper branches, so we stayed well away. Jaglars are rather possessive about their shade.

For most of the day, though, the wagon was the only thing in sight that wasn't grass. When the wind blows - and it always blows here - the low hills look like waves, an ocean of shimmering grass stretching to the horizon and beyond. I'm not the first to think so, not by any means; many people have written of the Scalps this way. There are even some who build prairie-boats out of lightweight wood. They have sails and run on polished runners, skimming over the grass as if it was snow. A well-built prairie-boat can hold one person - two, if they're small. You can't take much with you, but they're the best way to travel here if you travel light.

Of course, weighed down with art supplies the way I am, they're out of the question for me. I've never been particularly fond of speed anyway. I'll stick to wagons for now.

The grass got thinner and drier the farther we went. Dust rose from the wagon's wheels in dry orange clouds. A few of the jazz birds started coughing halfway through an improvisation, and FlunDitChukk kept me busy bringing them water all afternoon. Patches of dry ground began to creep in between the short clumps of grass - bald spots on the Scalps - and though the grass still shimmered, it was because of heat, not wind. I doubt this is the kind of country that sees many visits from the rainwalkers. With every mile, there were fewer trees. Instead, there were the poles.

I'd heard of them before, but until today, I'd only seen them from a great distance. Most people on the Scalps believe they were left by the Hill Builders. They do have that look. They're battered poles of black metal rising from the ground, probably five times my height where they haven't broken off. Each one has a different shape at the top. You can see them from miles away, silhouetted against the sky, as if they were the glyphs of a very tall language. If there's any logic or meaning behind them, no one's deciphered it yet.

No one is sure what they were for, though there are plenty of theories: radio antennae, vertical shrines, tent poles, the markers of a mysterious game, the dead trunks of metal trees. A compass will go mad if brought too near to one of the poles. Birds don't seem to mind them; there isn't much else to perch on on the Scalps, though, so that could just be a matter of convenience. They seem to have no effect on people, though those who live near them sometimes speak of having unusually vivid dreams. Whisperlings say they can hear the poles humming occasionally. Some of the humming is music, melodies in strange and secret keys, but it never has words.

They've become part of the landscape of the Scalps by now. Birds nest on them. People build sod houses around their bases for support. (Sod houses have a tendency to slouch, especially when it rains.) Unlike many of the things the Hill Builders left behind, the poles are not made of the mysteriously indestructible hypersteel. They're obviously made of a fairly tough metal - they've withstood centuries on the Scalps, after all - but they've been worn and battered over the years. The poles are full of scratches and dents and crookedness. People have carved words into a few of them. Often it's just their names, but I've been surprised at how often the graffiti turns out to be poetry.*

The people of the Scalps call them Kucha, which roughly translates to "pin." This is why the Scalps are also called the Pinstuck Plains.

Archaeologists have tried to dig to the bases of the poles a few times. They always have to stop when they hit bedrock. Some flat-worlders believe that the poles hold the world up, like the pilings of a pier; round-world theorists believe that they go all the way through it, like a giant's hatpins, holding the world together - or perhaps keeping a few specific places apart. Here on the hairy Scalps of the world, that doesn't seem too far-fetched.

* One had a copy of the Recursive Sonnet on it, of course. Quite a few have nonsense poetry by Carlis Rowell.

Leaving SuyMaTmakk

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

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

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

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

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

This could be an interesting trip.

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

Market Street, Day 3: the Animals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Market Street, Day 1: the Scavenger

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

The Burning Man

Today, I was woken at sunrise by horrific screaming. I stumbled to the window, certain that someone was being murdered outside.

The street proved to have a distinct shortage of death. People were walking around and nodding to each other. No one seemed to notice the screaming, though I didn't see them trying to talk either. I doubt anyone could have heard.

The flames I'd glimpsed last night came to mind. Maybe this was just one of those towns where fire and screaming were considered unremarkable. I usually try to avoid those. They're quite rare, fortunately, but it's not always easy to tell when you've found one. I had nearly made up my mind to sneak out quietly, before anyone noticed me, when I happened to see the source of the screaming. It was a little gray bird, about the size and color of a mouse, which sat on a fence post and screamed as if it was being eaten alive. It seemed far too small to have a voice like that. Occasionally, it stopped to sneeze or preen its feathers.

I gave up trying to sleep and went outside instead.

Twokk is a fairly small town, so it was easy to find my way to the center (which was lucky, as I couldn't have heard anyone if I'd asked for directions). There was a man there. He was sitting in the middle of the town square, and he was on fire.

This seemed like the sort of situation that might warrant screaming, but everyone in sight seemed as unconcerned as ever. Several people stood with buckets next to a trough of water. I assumed there were there in case anything else caught fire. They watched the burning man idly, looking almost bored.

"Er… does this happen often?" I asked one of them.

She shrugged. "Usually he only does it once every few months, but there's been a drought lately."

I had been under the impression that droughts were normally a reason not to light fires in the middle of town.

"Normally, yes." The woman took the piece of wood she'd been whittling, eyed it critically, turned it around, and stuck it back in her mouth. I tried not to stare. I can't recall ever meeting someone who could carve wood with her teeth and talk at the same time. "Not in his case. He does this to end droughts, apparently. Something about taking the dry thoughts and burning them away. When he wakes up, he won't even remember there was a drought unless we tell him. I don't pretend to understand it myself, but I've seen it rain after his little bonfires often enough. Whatever he's doing, it works. Besides, the salamanders like it."

I looked closer then, trying to see through the flames. The man was sitting in what looked like meditation - one of those poses that requires minimal use of muscles to maintain. The flames rose from every inch of his body, bright and roaring, as if he was made of dry wood. I could feel the waves of heat blowing from him.* His eyes were closed; his face was peaceful, completely unmarked by the fire.

He was also covered with salamanders. They perched on his head and shoulders, sat around his feet, and clung gecko-style to his bare chest. My own salamander seemed agitated, so I let it join them. It climbed into the flames and settled down on a heap of other salamanders on the man's foot.

Maybe salamanders like the taste of dry thoughts.

One of the other bucket-holders checked a pocket watch. "You showed up just in time. He's been going for almost a whole day now. Can't be much longer."

"Usually, he remembers to take his clothes off first." The whittler pointed to the ground around the man. It was covered with a thin layer of ash and a few half-melted buttons. "Not this time."

"Hmm." The man with the watch put it back in his pocket. "Pity. That was a nice shirt."

We talked for maybe ten minutes or so. The screaming had stopped by then. The bird, I found out, is called a throkelit skeee, which literally means "shriek of death." They're found only in a very small region of the Scalps. Thank goodness. Apparently, the shrieking is a mating call; females are attracted to the males with the most bloodcurdling screams. They occasionally get confused and mob the heroines (sometimes the heros) of particularly melodramatic traveling plays.

We were comparing the plot of "Death in a handbag" (the dialogue in the Hmakk translation is apparently a bit more… explicit… than Trachia Ghastie's original script) to that of "The Perils of Pulgreen" (one of the few plays with an ogre as the heroine) when the burning man woke up. His eyes were wide and golden. Steam hissed as the fire vaporized the water on them. He didn't seem to care.

The fire died down gradually as he sat there, as did the conversation. He looked strangely naked without the coat of flames. (Technically, he was, but since he was a reptile, no one cared.) His scales were orange and yellow, speckled here and there with the intense blue of a fire's heart. I could just make out the shape of clothing silhouetted on him in soot. Other than the ash on the ground, that was all that was left. He got up, stretched, and gave everyone a vague smile.

"My, it's hot out here, isn't it?" he said.

No one seemed to have an answer to this.

A cool breeze wafted in as he spoke, carrying the scent of rain. His smile widened. "Oh. Never mind."

With that, he turned and walked away, shedding salamanders as he went. The rain swept in a few minutes later. Everyone ran to gather their own salamanders, or their children who had been watching the show, and disappeared into various houses. The extinguished man disappeared in a cloud of his own steam. The raindrops sizzled and vanished when they touched his skin. It rained until nightfall, and I spent the rest of the day inside, illustrating the inn's menus.

I never did find out his name.

* It was early, after all. The morning air was barely hot enough to melt candles.

Sporetower

I've been uncertain whether or not I should write to you about this. It happened back in May, before I started corresponding again, and it is undoubtedly one of the strangest experiences I've ever had. If you have a sensitive stomach, you may prefer to wait until tomorrow's letter.

I was traveling on the boardwalk at the time. It was one of the above-water sections - fortunately, as it turned out. I had been walking for most of the morning without seeing anything particularly unusual. There had been a dead fish or two, but that's not all that strange; fish die all the time in the Great Shwamp. Something always eats them sooner or later.

As I kept walking, I came across more of them. Most were fairly small. When I passed the seventh one, a four-foot marsh pike floating on its side, I started to be uneasy.

The surface of the water gradually became covered with dead fish. The current was moving them along - at least, I hope it was the current. They kept pace with me as I walked. The bodies of water-rats and small alligators joined them, green and brown in the expanse of tan and silver. I'd rather not discuss the smell. Through gaps between the fish, I could see the bleached shells of crustaceans drifting across the silt. I almost didn't notice when the trees began to be covered with mushrooms.

I certainly noticed when I reached the source of the mushrooms. The boardwalk disappeared into a wall of cloud. Whatever force was moving the bodies in the water seemed to be keeping it contained; the edge undulated slowly, but it didn't seem to be spreading. I thought it was fog until I walked - hesitantly - into it.

I got out much more quickly. After a brief and violent fit of sneezing, during which I nearly stumbled off the boardwalk, I turned around and looked at the cloud through watering eyes. It had, I noticed now, a slightly greenish shade.

An avian woman with black feathers and the face of a vulture was standing in front of it. She wore a necklace of teeth and rodents' skulls.

"My apologies," she whistled. "Normally I catch strangers before they walk in. You're new here, aren't you?"

There seemed little point in denying it.

She didn't speak English. It's difficult without teeth or lips. Many avians are capable of pronouncing the full range of necessary consonants with their throats, parrot-style; this one either didn't have the required vocal anatomy or simply hadn't learned. Fortunately, I'd been practicing the whistling language she spoke, the one that non-avians call Whoopish. It's easy enough to pick up if one has any musical ability at all (though it apparently sounds rather comical when whistled with lips).

Her name, she said, was Lady Carnelia Sarcoramph, and the cloud I had walked into was the boundary of the town of Sporetower. Visitors often react that way to it. Due to some quirk of the currents, or perhaps a geographical sense of tidiness, everything that dies in the Great Shwamp (and isn't immediately eaten) ends up there. The water is thick with bones and floating carrion. Fungi cover the entire town, sprouting on every surface, from the damp houses to the contents of the water below them. The cloud that surrounds the town is made of their spores. It's no wonder I couldn't breathe it. The townspeople are used to it; they breathe in spores like incense. Travelers, not being similarly adapted, have to cover their mouths to keep from choking to death.

I was ready to turn around and take another branch of the boardwalk, but Lady Sarcoramph said that wouldn't be necessary. I was a guest of Sporetower and would be allowed to enter the town. Her tone was friendly enough, but I got the impression that the choice was not mine to make. She gave me a tightly-woven silk scarf (to cover my mouth) and a pair of goggles and led me into the cloud.

The sky of Sporetower was perpetually overcast, the sun visible as a blurred and slightly greenish light through the fog. Flies and brightly colored carrion beetles buzzed through the murk. Mushrooms and shelf fungi covered every tree, every post of the boardwalk, many of them taller than the largest pligma or elephant's-cap. There were small toadstools even on the little rafts of mold in the water. The surface was still covered with fish, but they were obviously older than the ones outside the cloud, and continued to get older. I was able to see the entire process of decomposition as we walked. (The scarf and goggles kept out the spores, but did nothing against the smell; I tried not to breathe through my nose.) The fish around the boardwalk were little more than bones held together by floating mushrooms when Lady Sarcoramph stopped.

"Behold," she said. "The town of Sporetower."

As you've probably noticed by now, many of the towns in the Great Shwamp, lacking solid land, build instead on trees and clumps of marsh grass. Sporetower is built on mushrooms. The town floats in the water, sprouting from a raft of accumulated decay, a translucent heap of fungus taller than the nearby trees. I don't know how deep it goes. I don't even know how large it is. We were close enough by then to make out the closest section of the town, bobbing gently on the cemetarial water, but the farther sections were lost in the fog. Most of the buildings I could only see in silhouette. That was enough to make out their shapes. If there's any wood in Sporetower, it's either well-hidden or rotted nearly to nothing by now; the town appears to be built not only on, but out of enormous fungi. They form the walls and columns of every building. Stalks like pillars hold up mushroom-cap roofs, tubular chimneys, walls of fungoid brick or woven mold. The streets are made of enormous brackets, ringed like slices of trees. The town is built on the slope of the fungal heap; the streets climb at steep angles, often built on top of buildings. Twisted bridges stretch from roof to roof. Instead of dogs, carrion beetles of all sizes wander through the streets.

From the middle of this heap grows the Necrophyte, a monumental tower of fungus, porous and translucent and turreted with spore caps. It looks like a crumbling castle of mushrooms. Most of them have been hollowed out inside to make rooms and hallways; the narrowest stems have been carved into spiral staircases, punctured with spongey windows, connected to the rest of the building by high walkways of living mushroom. No one seems sure whether the building is a single fungus or a collection of many.

Lord Microbius Sarcoramph, the Undecayed Baron of Sporetower* and Lady Sarcoramph's father, lives with his extensive family in the Necrophyte. He apparently likes to invite every visitor to the town to dinner. He says it's for hospitality. Lady Sarcoramph says it's so that he knows whose pockets to go through if they return to the town by other means. "Few people come back to Sporetower voluntarily," she said. "Many say they will die before they set foot in the town again. It is surprising how often they turn out to be right."

I saw a few other foreigners on their way to the castle, wrapped up like travelers in the Shattered Waste. None of them live here. Every visitor wore the same scarf I did, and most wore the goggles as well, to keep their eyes from watering uncontrollably. Springtime pollen is nothing compared to the air of Sporetower. The townspeople delight in telling about careless visitors who sneezed to death.

The town is inhabited mostly by avians with no sense of smell. Like Lady Sarcoramph, many of them rather resemble vultures - bald, wrinkly heads, similarly bald and sinewy arms, austere black feathers. (A few are a startling blood-red. I don't know if it's dye or just a rare color, like redheaded humans.) They breathed quite comfortably in the murky air. After ten minutes or so of watching them through my goggles and scarf, I began to feel as if I was underwater, surrounded by fish. Every few minutes, I'd see someone nearby make a little swallowing motion; it took me a while to realize that it happened every time they inhaled a fly. I think a large part of their diet comes from breathing insects.

Like ordinary vultures, the lack of feathers is perfect for the townspeople's work. Most of them are scavengers. They wade through the water, sorting through dead animals, collecting useful bones and other bits and pieces. There's quite a lot of that. Sporetower is the largest source of alligator skin in the entire Shwamp. It's also the most painless, for both people and alligators; all the reptiles are already dead. The people of Sporetower receive all the material of a hunter or a livestock farmer with very little of the work. It's not for everyone, of course, but those who can stand to live in Sporetower consider themselves uncommonly lucky.

Of course, not everything worth scavenging is actually part of an animal. Alligators eat so many inedible things that the people of Sporetower call an alligator's stomach its "purse." A cutpurse in Sporetower is not a thief,** but something between a butcher and a beachcomber. They often find such indigestibles as bottles, eyeglasses, nails, pocketwatches, jewelry, and the metal eyelets from boots. Alligators apparently have a fondness for shiny things. There's a legend in Sporetower that the disappearance of Baron Bredebrick was only solved when his crown, his scepter, and his cousin's dagger turned up inside the same alligator.

This is the sort of legend one hears in Sporetower. Any other place would consider stories like this morbid. The townspeople here just think they're funny.

They have no sense of smell, but their tongues are quite sensitive, flicking into the spore-clouded air like snakes. They can taste which fungi are blooming at any given moment. Women wear mushrooms instead of flowers, choosing those with the brightest colors or the sweetest spores. I saw at least three sporist shops (florists are for plants) with lush bouquets of spore caps in vases of decayed wood or carrion. Restaurants grow carefully selected mushrooms on their tables; the customers shake spores onto their food instead of pepper. (In this town of galvanized sinuses, pepper is considered a rather bland spice, suitable only for the sensitive of palate.)

Many of the avians I saw had rings pierced through the wrinkles of their faces. Some had little bone-and-feather charms hanging from them, swinging freely from a nostril or neck-wattle. A few had bells that jingled whenever they raised their eyebrows. One of the guards at the palace gates had hardly an inch of his face unpierced. A row of rings spanned both eyebrows, a mix of all different sizes. The farthest right was too small for a finger; the farthest left could have been a bracelet. He was tapping out a tune on them as he waited.

The philosophy in Sporetower seems to be that flesh is a temporary thing, a substance that outlives its owner hardly at all, so there's no reason to be particularly careful of it. This makes sense when you realize that most of their contact with the outside world is through its skeletons. They might as well experiment with their faces; a few years after they're dead, there will be nothing left of them anyway. Their bones, however, they treat with exquisite care. However invisible it is in life, a bonesetter's work can endure for centuries beyond its owner's death. As the saying goes, skin is the present; bone is the future.

If I needed any proof of that, I got it when we passed through the gates (the first wood I'd seen since entering the town). The entrance hall was made of a transparent fungus; it was cloudy, like the air, but the surface was as smooth as wax. There was a skeleton sealed inside the wall like an insect in amber. Its hands were crossed over its ribcage. The bones were perfectly arranged, with the shadowy outlines of clothing around them, as if the transparent fungus had simply replaced the flesh and left the rest in place.

Lady Sarcoramph smiled for the first time. "There's my grandmother," she said fondly, gesturing to the skeleton. "Quite well-preserved, don't you think? My grandfather always said she had the loveliest skull he'd ever seen."

Her grandfather was a few feet farther on, equally well-preserved in the shadow of a broad-shouldered suit. Lady Sarcoramph pointed out the symmetry of his eye sockets and bemoaned the arthritis that had distorted his perfect knuckles. Only in Sporetower is beauty judged by the bones rather than what covers them.

The Baron had obviously inherited those bones. He was a magnificent avian, a good six feet tall, his feathers raven-black with faint crimson highlights. A few of the ones on his neck-ruff had been edged with gold paint. This seemed to take the place of a crown. Like perhaps a third of the townspeople, he had wings, though I don't know whether or not he could actually fly. Perhaps he could in his youth. Judging from his appearance, though, he had since been more interested in putting on weight than in lifting it.

One of his eyes was missing; he'd replaced it with a large glass marble, the kind with a swirl of color in the middle. I have no idea why. I would have asked Lady Sarcoramph, but she left as soon as we entered the great hall and sat with her father throughout the meal. The Baron talked at great length and great volume. I got the impression, though, that his daughter was the one actually paying attention to the room. Her conversation was short but carefully attended. If she's not already running Sporetower, I think she will be before long.

The great hall was sealed from the outside, every window made of the same fine silk as the breathing scarves, the air free of spores. All the visitors could take their scarves off to eat. I'd been wondering how we would do that. It was strange to see faces other than vultures - or, for that matter, to see anything unobscured by the spore-fog. After my introduction to the town, I didn't expect to have much appetite, but the feast Baron Sarcoramph provided was surprisingly appetizing. Contrary to popular belief, carrion-eaters don't eat rotten meat. They just aren't so picky about it being fresh. Everything here was quite fresh, though; the fish were only the most recently dead from the water around the town. Some of them had even been alive when caught. I didn't quite have the stomach to eat any meat, but many of the townspeople survive quite well on a diet of fungus, so that's what I ate. Properly prepared - and these certainly were - mushrooms can be as good as meat anyway. I tried not to think about what the mushrooms had been eating.

I don't really remember much of dinner. I found it difficult to concentrate on the conversation; the Baron's substitute eyeball kept distracting me. It spun in circles whenever he blinked. The other visitors were a rather subdued group anyway, many of them more disturbed than I was by the fungal architecture, by the invitation that seemed unwise to refuse, or simply by the amount of death in the town. I think we were all relieved when dinner ended and we were escorted to similarly filtered bedrooms.

Overall, the Sarcoramphs' hospitality was beyond reproach, but it seemed just a little too mandatory for comfort. I left a small sketch of Lady Sarcoramph and the Baron in my room, as a sign of gratitude, and snuck out of the palace before anyone was awake. I was out of the spore cloud by dawn. I don't usually leave a town so quickly, or without thanking my hosts in person, but I can't honestly say I regretted it. Sporetower is a fascinating place - beautiful, even, in its own strange and morbid way - but I prefer to visit towns where I can breathe unassisted and choose where I stay. One visit was quite enough for now. I may return someday, but not any time soon.

Perhaps after I die.





* It's a lifelong position; the title changes only after death. You can probably guess what it becomes then.

** Of course, this depends on whether you consider it stealing when the owner is already dead.

A Wagon Without Wheels

For breakfast this morning, I had a sort of chocolate pastry called a mud pie. Given where I was, I was somewhat wary of this, but the baker assured me that there was no actual mud in it (or, at least, as little as is possible in Woodpot). I ate it while wandering through the village. I had only been walking for about ten minutes when I realized that I had a small swarm of large dauber wasps following me. They kept a polite distance, but they were quite obviously waiting for something. I looked at them for a moment, then broke off a piece of my pie and tossed it to them.

There was a brief blur of buzzing black chaos. When it cleared, there was no sign of the crumb, but one of the wasps was cleaning its face and looking pleased with itself. The rest were still waiting.

I decided that this was more fun than eating the pie. The wasps got the rest of it. They continued to follow me as I walked around the village, looking at the architecture and the potters at work. It didn't matter which direction I tossed a crumb; there was always a wasp there to catch it. Some of them eventually got tired and sat on my shoulders, trying to snatch bites of the pie while I wasn't looking. They were surprisingly heavy. They hummed constantly, a faint vibration that I could feel but not hear, like the purring of a cat.

It's quite possible that feeding them is encouraging a bad habit, but I couldn't resist. How often does one get to spend a morning playing with giant wasps?

According to the baker, the boardwalk in the other direction is in even worse condition than the one I arrived on. I decided not to risk walking on it. Instead, I got a ride with a pottery merchant and her family. I met them at the bakery.* Like most people who travel frequently in the Great Shwamp, they can't afford to depend on the boardwalk and have come up with something better. I've met travelers who ride on alligators and giant tortoises, others who use rowboats or rafts, and one or two who have long enough legs (and wide enough feet) to wade in even the deepest water. Many people fly. A traveling tinker I met in May had a clockwork vehicle powered by a pair of capybaras running in wheels. He said they were a special variety bred for racing. The vehicle was amphibious; it had wheels, mechanical legs for soft ground, and a paddle-boat attachment in the back. It seemed to work quite well, aside from an unfortunate habit of shedding gears and breaking down every few hours.

The pottery merchant doesn't have anything so exotic. She and her family travel by wagon. Given the scarceness of solid ground in this part of the Shwamp, they've removed the wheels; instead, each axle has a cluster of ceramic floats tied to it. They look a bit like the glass floats used by fishermen to hold up nets, but in clay instead of glass. Each one is held in a many-knotted web of rope. They're glazed in three or four different patterns, like a mismatched set of dishes. Several have been broken and glued back together with metal. Webs of rusty lines outline the patterns of the cracks, weeping streaks of rust over the glaze.

The pottery reminded me of something I hadn't thought of before. Unbaked clay architecture works well in the desert, where there's plenty of sun to harden it and little rain to melt it. The Great Shwamp has just the opposite. How, I asked, do they keep the houses in Woodpot from melting in the rain?

One of the merchant's sons was happy to explain this to me. His name, he told me proudly, is Ranapleximilian, an old Kletheran name that means "slayer of the great night-frog," and he can pronounce the whole thing. (His sisters and brothers, all younger, have not yet succeeded with their own equally impressive names.) Apparently, the houses are waterproofed with gristlebird oil. Gristlebirds have the oiliest feathers of any bird in the Shwamp; according to Ranapleximilian, they repel water so strongly that they create a bubble of air around themselves when they dive. They eat the stunned fish that fall into it.** To waterproof a roof, the villagers simply lay a few fish on top of it; this inevitably attracts five or six gristlebirds, each of which wants all the fish and is prepared to fight for them. The resulting brawl leaves the roof, walls, and surrounding trees evenly coated with oil. (It also leaves them covered with feathers, dandruff, bird droppings, and half-eaten fish, but those wash off in the rain.)

The merchant herself is named Mrs. Pelirika. She doesn't seem to talk much. For most of the day, she was busy navigating the Shwamp and managing the somewhat temperamental marsh-squid that pulled the wagon. Her five children, in contrast, talk enough for ten. The other four's names, from second-oldest to youngest, are Tessemira, Donrondamole, Coralilamander, and Vanesily. No wonder the younger ones can't pronounce them yet. Vanesily, the youngest, is only just getting his down feathers. Ranapleximilian says that he is almost old enough to fly (he does have a few flight feathers, though they're mostly gaps, like some mammal children's teeth) and kept jumping off the wagon all day in attempts to do so. None of these worked, but he didn't seem to mind landing in the water every time. Quite often, he would come back with some sort of snail or outlandish crustacean. His sister, Tessemira, was fascinated with these; I don't think she ever had less than three or four sitting in her hands or on her head. All five children kept up a constant commentary on every unusual tree and fish we passed, as well as the pottery in the wagon and life in the Shwamp in general. They kept coming up with things for me to draw all day long. I was happy to do so. Hardly anyone makes a better audience than children. If you do something wrong, they will tell you immediately; if you do something right, they can be more enthusiastic than almost anyone. They found my attempts to draw some of the fish they described to me quite hilarious.

Much of the conversation during the day was about the current load of pottery. The children seem to take just as much of an interest in it as their mother; they had something to say about nearly every piece, and quite a lot of the talk of styles and glazes and double-firing went well over my head. The wagon seemed to have something from practically every potter in Woodpot. There are quite a lot of them. The clay under Woodpot is the best in the Shwamp, Ranapleximilian said, so all the best potters (and quite a lot of the others) end up in the village eventually. So do all the pottery merchants. No matter where you go in the Shwamp, you'll find someone eager to buy Woodpot work.

My favorite piece in the wagon is a huge pitcher in the shape of an octopus. The base and handle are made of five of its curled tentacles, and the other three twist above it to form the spout. The children said that this was the work of Artemisia Treble, one of their favorite potters, who is rather famous for beautifully detailed pottery in the shape of aquatic animals. Tessemira showed me a tiny bottle shaped like a marsh snail, in which she keeps buttons.

There appears to be a sixth child on the way. On the floor by Mrs. Pelirika's feet was a portable incubator, a metal basket with smoke coming out of the little oven in the bottom. There was a thermometer stuck in the mound of blankets in the basket, which she checked every few minutes. I assume that somewhere in there is an egg.

I have not met Mr. Pelirika yet. Mrs. Pelirika said only that he doesn't like the sunlight and travels underwater by day. I didn't press any further. The children seem to take after their mother, with brightly colored plumage like jungle parrots; they obviously enjoy the Shwamp, but don't seem particularly aquatic.

Perhaps I'll get to meet him tonight.



*Most of the village seemed to be at the bakery when I arrived. The diggers from the previous day were there - most of them, at least - though I didn't recognize them until they started talking to me. Their faces look different without a coating of mud. Some of them had sculpted patterns in the clay on their faces the day before, pinching it into cracked masks of swirls and ridges. I found it much easier to read their expressions this morning.

**He may have been exaggerating here, but I'm no authority on marsh birds, so I wouldn't know.

Trick-Hunters

Meligma has its share of ordinary hunters, the ones who catch fish and muskrats and duffel pigs and small alligators. They are quiet, serious, and businesslike. These are the people who keep the village fed.

The trick-hunters are different. They hunt birds in the canopies of the Shwamp trees. There's certainly no shortage of birds to hunt up there. There are white egrets, flowerbirds with honey-colored plumage, long-tail screeps and quetzals, toucans and thricans, hairy wolfbirds, featherbats and shrieking trebulons. A flock of kaklbirds have a grove all to themselves, as no other birds can stand to be near them. Silver eagles nest in the treetops and bring back alligators for their eaglets. The trick-hunters hunt all of them. They consider it cheating to actually kill a bird unless they're planning to eat it; this is why they're called trick-hunters. Any child with a bow and arrow can kill a bird. To get close enough to pluck a quetzal's tailfeathers, though, or to steal a silver eagle's egg without losing one's head in exchange, a hunter has to be tricky.* They're hard to miss most of the time, leaping through the treetops and whooping at the top of their lungs, but they can be practically invisible when they want to be.

Of all the trick-hunters, Trilliko seems the most interested in travelers from beyond the village.** He sits with me for hours (or leaps from branch to branch while I sit, actually; none of the trick-hunters seem capable of staying still), asking me endless questions about the Train, the floating cities, the Blue Desert. He's more than returned the favor, though; nearly everything I know about trick-hunting I've heard from Trilliko.

Of course, I'm not entirely sure how much of it is accurate. When I first remarked on the age of the trick-hunters - Trilliko is one of the oldest, at twenty-five - he told me that that was because they all break their necks or get eaten by the silver eagles before they reach thirty. My expression kept him laughing for several minutes, after which he took pity on me and explained that every trick-hunter gets too slow, too bored, or too married to keep trick-hunting by age thirty. (The saying is that if the birds don't clip a trick-hunter's wings, his wife will.)*** They don't get eaten.

"Well, not often," he added.

Many of the Meligmans seem to have some bat in their ancestry. Unusually for an amphibian, Trilliko has wings. They're a mottled green with dark speckles - perfect for camouflage in the Shwamp. He steers with his enormous webbed feet and can do dizzying acrobatics in the air. Of course, this means that several of his favorite adventures to retell are the ones in which his wings were broken or deliberately tied up - triumphing without his biggest advantage - and the ones that took place in midair. There's no excitement in doing something anyone could have done.

As I've mentioned before, Trilliko has a piece of jewelry for every death-defying feat he's accomplished. All the trick-hunters do, actually, but Trilliko has the most of any I've met. There are numerous rings in his webbed hands and toes (not in his wings - they would ruin the aerodynamics). He wears a necklace full of the feathers of particularly deadly birds. Almost as impressive as Trilliko's collection of jewelry is his collection of scars. The two collections cover him more or less all over, and they match. A ring and several toe scars are from his riding of the chekaraul when he first became a trick-hunter. Another ring and most of the scars on his arms are from his taming of the scissorbats. The largest feather on his necklace, and the scars across his nose, are from his defeat of the Dire Pelican four years ago.

This is Trilliko's favorite midair adventure. It was a ferocious battle, against a foe six times his size, and he only barely survived it. He won by blinding the Dire Pelican with mud. Unfortunately, the other head got him while he was doing that, and he only barely managed to withstand the pain long enough to trick it into biting off its own flight feathers. He was in a coma for three weeks until the venom wore off.

That's the way he tells it, at least. Every trick-hunter in Meligma claims to be the one who defeated the Dire Pelican. Each has a different version of the fight, winning by strength or agility or cleverness or sheer suicidal bravery. It's the best story in recent history; who wouldn't want to be the hero of it? I'm not sure which hunter actually defeated the beast.

Maybe it doesn't matter. There is no shortage of genuine feats of bravery among the trick-hunters, but the adventures are only the beginning. Everyone has to stop having them eventually. The stories, however, can be told and retold for the rest of a trick-hunter's life.



*According to Trilliko, the trick-hunters actually rarely bother the silver eagles. They get most of their eggs from the truckle-hens, who always lay more than their nests can hold anyway. Everyone has to face the eagles at some point, but there's no point in risking death every time you want an omelette.

**He's named after the Eternal Chuckler of Shwamp folklore. The name suits him.

***Half the time, the villagers replace "his wife" with "her husband." About two thirds of the trick-hunters are male, but several of the most terrifying are women. The title is open to anyone who can ride the chekaraul. Regardless of gender, though, few people want their spouses fighting eagles up in the treetops when they could be safely hunting duffel pigs on the ground.