The Hidden Passenger

I was not in the best of shape in the few days following our encounter with the Painted Ones. I had been out in the sun painting them for an entire afternoon, and there had been other things on my mind besides keeping cool and drinking enough. I spent the rather unpleasant evening of that day feeling as if my brain had gone slightly crispy around the edges.

Worse than the heat, of course, were the less physical aftereffects. I was rather proud of the way I had handled myself around the Painted Ones; after those first moments among their carrion breath and bloodstained saber claws, I had hardly panicked at all. Unfortunately, I had accomplished this through the time-honored method of shutting the panic in a mental closet until it could come out without upsetting a dozen knife-faced predators. As is usually the case, this only meant that the panic had had more time to froth itself into near-hysteria by the time I was able to face it. The nausea from overheating and dehydration met up with the nervous shakes, and they instantly teamed up to make my life miserable.

In short, my system - normally exceptionally adaptable - had had a little more strain than even it was comfortable handling. I had miraculously avoided the full consequences of sunstroke, but it looked to be a miserable few days until I recovered.

Still, I had served my purpose on the caravan; the Painted Ones have large territories, so we were unlikely to meet another pack during the same journey. No one would have blamed me if I had simply retreated to my assigned wagon and convalesced among the luggage for the remainder of the trip.

That was one reason why I was so surprised when the aquatic passenger invited me to his wagon.

The other reason, of course, was that hardly anyone had seen him since he first joined the caravan. No one even seemed to know his name. He had arrived unseen during the night, before the caravan started, and had been an invisible presence inside his watertight wagon ever since. If not for the lamplight shining through the oiled silk canopy at night, there would have been no indication that anyone was inside at all.

This was not necessarily by choice. The Desert climate is hard on fish and amphibians from other places, and they usually survive by isolating themselves from it as thoroughly as possible. Most don't enter the Golden Desert at all. No one knew why the aquatic passenger was there, but we were all quietly impressed that he had come to a place that required such elaborate preparations to keep him alive.

Of course, his necessary isolation didn't mean that he was completely out of touch with the rest of the caravan. Most of his business was conducted through his servant, a stocky reptilian woman by the name of Mogen, who kept him updated on the caravan's progress and supplied him with the least salty of the available food. Mogen was the one who came the day after our encounter with the Painted ones, to where I lay sweating between suitcases in the almost-cool shade of the wagon, and invited me to visit her employer.

Even in my exhausted and slightly feverish state, I was excited to finally see the inside of the silk-shrouded wagon that had been such a mystery to all of the caravan's passengers. The lamplight that shone from it at night cast no clear shadows on the canopy. We could hear the sloshing of water inside when the wagon was on the move, and unseen frogs and crickets sang from it at night, but its lone civilized occupant seemed to be entirely silent. No one was even sure what he looked like.

Mogen led me to the back of the wagon and unzipped a long slit in what looked like seamless fabric. There were no fasteners on its edges; like the spider-woven bubble-wrap used by travelers in the Great Shwamp, the fabric seemed to be just sticky enough to seal itself together. Cool, damp air wafted from the opening, like the breath of a pond. Mogen smiled and motioned me into the wagon. I climbed through the opening, somewhat awkwardly, and she sealed it silently behind me.

Inside, I felt for a moment as if I'd returned to the Great Shwamp - a small, rectangular slice of it, at least. The entire bed of the wagon was filled with water, broken here and there by rocks and aquatic plants. A few trunks sat on top of the rocks, out of the water, though their wood and brass were coated in just enough moss and blue-green oxidization to look respectably aged in the style of the Scalps. My arrival was greeted by a series of small plops as frogs dove into hiding from rocks and reed stems.

Most of my attention, however, was quickly drawn to the wagon's inhabitant, who filled the space like a fish in an aquarium several sizes too small.

Like many aquatic people, he had no legs. Instead, his torso tapered smoothly into a long tail, edged with a frill of transparent fin, like that of an eel or a salamander.

"Greetings, Mr. Tangelo," he said, smiling at me over his spectacles. He spoke flawless English in the percussive accent of the Scalps, mixed with some other accent I couldn't identify. "My name is Chakramalsian, but you may call me Chak." ("Chuck?" I attempted. "Chak,” he corrected me with a patient smile.) "I heard of your impressive performance yesterday, and of its toll on you, and thought that you might appreciate a cooler place in which to recover."

I don’t think I even considered turning down his offer. After the mind-scalding heat of the previous day, the cool, damp air felt like Heaven, or at least someplace with a similar climate. I accepted almost without thought. As grateful as I was, it took nearly an hour of rest, lying in the water between the suspicious stares of re-emerging frogs, before I was thinking clearly enough to wonder how I could thank him for such generosity.

As it turned out, he had thought of that too. He wanted me to paint the wagon's canopy for him. The blank white ceiling had been restful at first, he said - but he was used to living under a lake, and it was getting harder and harder to ignore the thought of the parched air and blistering sun on the other side of the pale fabric. He needed to have fish overhead again. I was delighted to provide some.

He gave me several books from which he wanted me to work. One held old fabric patterns from the Scalps; another had elegant drawings of unfamiliar fish. The third was in a language I'd never seen, bookmarked at a page filled entirely by a single swooping character. It meant "patience," he told me, adding with a rueful chuckle that that particular trait had been nearly as essential as water during his journey.

Once she heard that I had taken the job, Mogen went to search the caravan for paints. Luckily, one of the other travelers had a supply of oil-based dyes that would work on the slick, waterproofed silk of the canopy. I fetched a set of brushes from my own luggage, still slightly damp from their use the previous day. I was still too unsteady to stand. Instead, I began work on a border around the base of the canopy while sitting in the cool water. Chak talked to me as I worked.

He had brought a trunk full of books, another of supplies for writing. His true passion, however, was accounting - and he had had nearly no opportunities to practice it during the journey. The caravan had its own accountants, Desert-dwellers who could actually leave their wagons and be present for outdoor transactions. They had no need of him. Even sightseeing was difficult. He could open the entrance of the wagon to look out, but he was used to the constant spray and mist of the lake city where he'd been born; the dry Desert air stung his eyes and burnt his skin after even a few minutes of exposure. After several such episodes, he had asked Mogen to notify him only for the most spectacular scenery. He didn't want to know what else he was missing.

With no way to make himself useful, he had eventually tired of most of the occupations he'd brought, finally resorting to eavesdropping on conversations through his wagon's canopy. These, and his periodic updates from Mogen (a fine retainer, he said, but rather limited in conversation), were his only contact with the outside world.

His skill in accounting was the reason he was making this difficult journey in the first place. He had helped to build up a new branch of the family business in SuyMaTmakk, working from their ancestral mansion under the surface of Lake Twiliat, and had brought it to a point at which it no longer needed his skills. Building businesses was his specialty; once built, the everyday maintenance of their finances bored him. He had been delighted to receive a letter from his father's side of the family, in distant Changrakata, saying that they had heard of his success in the Scalps through an elaborate chain of corresponding relatives and wanted to invite him to visit them. He had not been to Changrakata since a visit in his childhood, when the two countries had been much closer together and he had been little more than a tadpole. He had packed up and left only a day or two behind the letter containing his acceptance.

It has been a long journey for Chak, and will continue to be so for quite some time. Still, though my own conversation was rather limited as well, I was glad to be able to relieve some of the monotony of it - even with so little as some paint and a fresh pair of ears.

Lunch Break

I left Rikanta this morning. It was time. After stopping to say goodbye to Mr. Haggadan, who gave me a vague, absentminded reply from the depths of a machine I couldn't begin to identify, I packed up my things and returned to the road.

It was a quiet morning. The average size of the towns along the road has been decreasing over the past month or so, and the traffic on the road has done the same. I saw only two other travelers before noon. They were a pair of rat-like mammalians - twin brothers, if I had to guess - with narrow, pointed muzzles and the striped robes of Gillivan monks. They gave me a polite nod each, then went back to a vehement debate about something. Both spoke at the same time, far too fast for me to understand.

For the next few hours, I walked in silence. A lone flying hyena flew overhead at one point, but unlike the ones from previous days, it made no sound. Other than that, it was just me, the road, and the sun.

I had seen no shade since leaving Rikanta, other than the pale shadows cast by weeds and the occasional small rock, so it was a relief when I finally saw the silhouette of a tree on the simmering horizon. It was one of the giant acacias that you find occasionally in the Desert. They grow from tiny seeds that can blow for miles on the wind. The few seeds that land near some source of water, and aren't immediately eaten by a jackrabbit or Desert rat, grow into tall, elegant trees with wide canopies. This tree was in the center of a depression in the sand, ringed with boulders that suggested a bowl-shaped layer of rock near the surface - perfect for collecting rainwater underground. The tree's roots probably went all the way down to anchor themselves in the stone. Through gaps between the roots, I could see the glint of water in the dark under the tree and hear the peeping of small frogs.

It seemed like a good place to stop.

I set my bags down near the trunk and sat there for a while, just listening to the sounds of the wind in the leaves overhead, the frogs singing in their hidden pool, and the occasional cry of a bird in the distance. It was quite peaceful. It took me a while to notice another sound added to the mix - a low, steady drone, somewhere between a fly's buzz and the deeper rattle of a locust.

At first, I thought the dark shape above the horizon was yet another flying hyena. I realized my mistake fairly quickly; the sound, and the decidedly non-mammalian shape, made it clear that it was an insect of some sort. It looked fairly small at first. It got closer much more slowly than I was expecting, though. In a few minutes, it looked twice as large as before, and I could tell that it was still quite far away. The sound of its wings was deafening by the time it actually arrived. It landed under the tree with one last rattle of its wings and the thump-click of six segmented feet.

The fly was the size of a tiger, leathery black all over with vivid bronze streaks across its pointed abdomen. There were fringes of bronze-colored fur around the plates of its exoskeleton, more fringes around its clawed and padded feet, and a thick tuft like a mustache in the middle of its face. I could see my own face reflected a thousand times in its compound eyes. The six pairs of claws on its feet were quite impressive, longer than my fingers and quite sharp.

If the dagger-like mouthparts and lean, tiger-striped body hadn't made it obvious, the claws did: this was one of the predatory species of flies, and it was large enough to hunt antelopes. I got ready to run if necessary. I'm not sure if it would have done any good.

The fly stared at me for a moment, as if surprised to find me there, then made a quick series of buzzes - bvRRzfbvt - from somewhere below its chest. When that provoked no response, it tried what looked like a sort of four-clawed sign language. I shrugged to show that I didn't understand. It mimicked the gesture, shrugging the complex joints at the base of its wings, then seemed to give up on communication and settled down on the other side of the tree trunk to rest.

When the fly showed no indication of wanting to eat me, I decided it was time to eat lunch. I'd bought a few root vegetables in Rikanta. They grow them interchangeably there; instead of separating the different species, they just toss carrots and potatoes and turnips and any other interesting seeds they have into the same field and harvest whatever comes up. I had a couple of potatoes, in various colors and sizes, and a pair of purple-orange things that seemed to be a hybrid of carrots and sugar beets.

It's considered polite in nearly every part of the world to share food with strangers, but the fly showed no interest in the vegetables, nor in the loaf of bread I pulled out next. I also had most of a jug of beef stew in my bag. When I poured some of this out into my largest mug and set it on a nearby rock, the fly noticed. It reached into a large mail pouch hanging from its neck - I'd been distracted by the claws and eyes and stripes and hadn't noticed the pouch - and pulled out a metal lunch box. There was a pattern of little rabbits stamped into the lid. Those huge claws opened it with great care to reveal a selection of fruit and small cheeses wrapped in paper. The fly plucked a few out and offered them to me.

That's how I found myself eating lunch with a giant fly. We sat there in the shade, sharing food in a companionable silence broken only by the frogs under the tree. The cheese and fruit were delicious - the perfect blend of sweet and strong, with the faintest overtones of metal polish from the lunch box. The fly gripped its own food with a bewildering array of jointed mouthparts and sucked up the stew with a long, crooked proboscis.

Most of the Golden Desert's inhabitants don't travel at noon, at least not on foot. It's just too hot. When I finished eating, I sat for a while and read one of my ambiguous novels. (The story in it at the moment is Toad's Labyrinth, one of my favorites by Oswina Dennenjay.) The fly put its lunch box away and pulled a miniature concertina out of its bag. The rapid, buzzing music it played for the next few hours reminded me of the sound of its own wings. I didn't recognize any of the melodies.

Finally, when the sun was approaching the horizon and the shade of the tree had moved to fall on the rocks to the east, I shouldered my bags and got ready to move on. The fly tucked the concertina back into its own bag and did the same. It gave me a brief, friendly nod before lifting the great veined windows of its wings and taking off in a buzzing blast of sand.

The fly had arrived from the empty Desert to the left of the road. It left in the opposite direction, rattling off across the dunes at a right angle to my own route. I have no idea where it was going. I waved as it left, and I'm fairly sure that I saw it raise one claw in reply. I could hear the buzz of its wings for a long time after it was out of sight.

Word-Plague

It has been an interesting couple of months in the town of Arkit.

The first sign of the word-plague was when the clockwork pipe crawlers began to literally tie the town's plumbing in knots. This happens occasionally, even with healthy pipe crawlers; it is usually a sign that they are bored, or that some set of instructions was not clear enough. As fine as their metal and crystal workings are, clockwork pipe crawlers are essentially simple creatures. They are capable of following simple instructions and very little else. This is why they so often end up assigned to plumbing repair.

The pipe crawlers' trainers inspected their notes, but they found nothing that could have led to this sort of behavior. What was more, further instructions to the pipe crawlers changed nothing.

This was cause for alarm. No one wants a repeat of the construction of Bratakar, where the bricklaying pipe crawlers stopped responding to instructions and built neat foundations across half the town before someone realized that a misinterpreted command had led them all to turn off their eyes. Arkit's pipe crawler trainers immediately went to work, testing the little machines for every error they've been known to encounter. Still, nothing worked.

This, incidentally, was when the town's schoolteacher began to notice an unusually high number of spelling errors in her pupils' writing. No one took much notice of this at the time.

Over the next few weeks, the pipe crawlers' behavior grew steadily more erratic. Some continued to fix pipes, though many of them fixed them in wild and fantastic shapes more suited to a sculpture museum than to plumbing. Others wandered farther from their assigned tasks, obsessively polishing a single length of pipe, or cutting faucets into careful slices with their metal-cutting tools. (This was when the trainers removed all the heavy-duty tools from the crawlers.) Yet other pipe crawlers wandered off into the town's underground, only to show up later rearranging tableware or carving endless hatch marks into stone walls.

The spelling errors continued to proliferate as well. Several of the town's accountants began to quietly wonder if they were going mad.

Then came the fateful day when every piece of writing in the town spontaneously translated itself into an old and obscure dialect of Halsi. That was when it became clear to everyone that this was not a mere mechanical problem, but some kind of linguistic plague. Spoken words remained unaffected, to the great relief of everyone in the town; the written ones were another story - literally, in some cases. My collection of ambiguous novels briefly opened their pages full of gibberish, then went blank, possibly out of self-defense. I was afraid that they had simply lost their voices and would remain blank forever.

The Halsi lasted only another day or two before Arkit's writing made its final descent into raving alphabet soup. It was not just novels anymore. Every letter had become ambiguous.

It was a great relief when the linguist-philosophers arrived.

The town's fastest flier, a bat-winged girl named Hatraskee, had packed a supply of food and water and taken off across the Desert to fetch them the day the words went bad. The linguist-philosophers traveled quickly and arrived before the town, deprived of written language, could descend into complete chaos. Fortunately, Arkit has never been an exceptionally literate place. If this had happened in a library city like Karkafel, the effects could have taken years for them to fix.

They came armed with glyphs and scrolls, thesauri and syllabaries, imperious tomes of grammar and punctuation - all the tools and weapons of an elite linguist-philosopher. They had dictionaries in a dozen languages. They had powerful epigrams and couplets, engraved in steel and fortified with many layers of rhymes. The largest of them carried stone tablets with carefully worded runes carved an inch deep. Nothing was going to change those words.

I really have no idea what all of this equipment was for. It was quite impressive, though, and whatever they did with it, it worked. Within three days, they had sorted the town's letters back into their separate alphabets; within six, they had corralled them back into languages. A further two weeks of constant writing and chanting finally forced the words back to their proper places. It was quite something to watch, too - the elaborately equipped linguist-philosophers often stood in the middle of the town square, chanting at the tops of their lungs while they did graceful and dramatic calligraphy, weaving a net of words to catch the town's wayward language. Quite a lot of the townspeople found that they had pressing business in the square on those days. Some of them stayed all afternoon.

If they ever get tired of language repair, I think the linguist-philosophers could have quite the career in theater. Whether the performance was really necessary, or whether they simply had a flair for the dramatic, I don't know - but the success of their work was undeniable. It was a great relief when the words of the town's ledgers and record books (and my own ambiguous novels) finally settled back into their familiar order. If there was a comma out of place here and there, no one complained.

Accompanying the linguist-philosophers was an expert on Hill Builder technology (as much as such a thing exists). Her job was to fix the pipe crawlers. Whatever language it is - if any - that flows through the crystal brain of a pipe crawler, it is quite different from the ones used by speaking creatures. The mechanic's task was to determine if the pipe crawlers' madness and the word-plague were the same thing, and if so, if the linguist-philosophers had cured the source of the problem or only a symptom.

I heard much less about this process. The details of machinery are as opaque to me as those of linguistic epidemiology, and the mechanic's work was much quieter than that of the linguist-philosophers. Most of it took place indoors and underground. I got the impression that she found all the noise somewhat irritating. Whatever the details, though, within another week, the pipe crawlers were back to making straightforward, functional repairs with no trace of the madness they had shown a month earlier.

Several of their more creative work, however, was sent to the museum in Hemrikath. Art is art, after all. Being made by machines or the mad does nothing to change that.

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.

Fish of the Ground, Beasts of the Air

The people here have a great deal of trouble with flying camels. The beasts just swoop down out of the sky on bristly wings and carry off small children, spiriting them away to their camel fastnesses in the desert, where they raise them on the fruit of the hazzle-cactus and teach them the mystical secrets known only to flying camels. The rare camel-snatches who return to the villages are famed for their wisdom. Most people are willing to overlook their eccentricity and their refusal to explain anything (not to mention the spitting). Still, most parents here keep a close watch on their children while they're small enough to be snatchable.*

One of these camel-snatches was Hanzifan Krickl, who found a fish in the Desert and founded a town on it. The town is called Kellekath, the local word for "coelacanth." The caravan stopped there for water today. According to the legend, Krickl discovered the system of caves beneath the town thanks to a fossil of one of the ancient fish, which pointed the way for him. The water that collects in the caves is all that allows the town to exist. There's an aquifrax in the caves, as there is in every oasis in the Golden Desert, but it allows the town to use the water in exchange for honey and the occasional shiny marble. It probably has hundreds down there by now, unless it's been eating them. You never know with an aquifrax.

These days, the coelacanth fossil is considered to have been a sign from Gilliva, Lady of the Waters, to whom fish are sacred.** Fish show up seldom enough in the Desert that they're generally considered to be a sign when they do. Kellekath is particularly devoted to the Lady; the town keeps a pool full of koi in her honor. Like most koi, they - or their distant ancestors - were imported from Mollogou. Unlike the piebald Mollogou koi, though, the ones in Kellekath have been bred to be shades of blue and green; they range from the deepest ultramarine to the pale green of new leaves and a turquoise the dry desert sky has only seen in its dreams. The townspeople love them and spoil them terribly. Many people wish they could have actual coelacanths in the town, besides the fossilized one, but bringing a whole population of misanthropic saltwater fish to the Golden Desert would be all but impossible. The koi were difficult enough.

Coelacanths aren't the only fossils that show up here. According to geologists, the whole Golden Desert used to be the floor of an ocean. The tall rocks that stick up from the sand often have fossils in them, fish and ammonites and strange spiny beasts with compound eyes. They speckle the stone in layers, like jeweled rings around sandstone fingers. Other parts of the Desert have larger things. The bones of whales and great sea-serpents emerge from the dunes now and then, breaching between the waves of sand, until the wind covers them again. A few travelers have found a mountain that, when seen from the right angle, is unmistakably the skull of a giant fish. The smaller peaks of its vertebrae stretch out in a line behind it. The most dedicated wanderers say they've even found shipwrecks out in the sand, buried up to their bone-dry masts, with shreds of ancient sail flapping in the Desert wind. Archaeologists have found books in some of the wrecks. Their pages are speckled with strange pictograms, beetles and blowfish and delicate assemblies of gears. No one has deciphered them yet. Linguists believe that even the gears are a language, but any meaning remains lost in the machinery.

Perhaps one of the camels' pupils will decipher them one day.



* A few parents with different ambitions send their children outside every day wearing brightly colored clothing. It all depends on your hopes for your child's future, I suppose.

** Fortunately, fish are rare in the Golden Desert. This religion has never caught on in coastal towns.

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.

A New Type of Writer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It writes poetry.

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

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

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

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

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

Ink on paper
Black, white
Two becoming
All there is

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

Gregarials

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bubble-Wrap

The fog rolled in today. I woke up this morning, in my silk hotel room like a giant's coat pocket, and there it was. The gauzy white buildings of Chelissera blended perfectly into the fog and became invisible. Nothing was left but the signs on them. The letters seemed to float in space, abandoned, like names that had forgotten whose they were.

I nearly fell off the thread bridges several times because I couldn't see them. It was not a good day to explore.

Now that I have money again, I spent this morning in the market, buying things I really should have bought earlier. Food, for one thing. I was down to my last salted cuttlefish. Fortunately, every town has some shop where travelers can buy the kind of food that lasts forever. In Chelissera, the best example of this seems to be a thing called "shell cake." No one seems entirely sure what it's made of. I suspect beetles. It is the color of fossilized sand. The main ingredients are shards of crunchy stuff held together with globs of slightly less crunchy stuff. The consistency is rather like fried eggs, if someone forgot to take the eggshells out and then burnt them.

The flavor is actually surprisingly pleasant; it has that spicy, nutty, shrimp-with-a-sunburn flavor that well-cooked insects often have. I suspected it would get monotonous fairly quickly, though, so I bought a few dried crustaceans* and six lumps of the universal travelers' staple, rock bread.

Ah, rock bread. How I love the stuff. It lasts forever and never gets staler.

Having obtained food, I then went to the bookstore and picked up a book, "Sikelak for the Mammalian Mouth."** I've been intending for some time now to improve my Sikelak. Of all the languages I know - not that there are many - it's probably the most often useful. I haven't learned as much as I might because it's so hard to pronounce. It has the flaw of all universal languages. Anyone can speak it; no one can do so comfortably. It strains every voice in the world. Its great advantage is that it strains them all equally.

Like KeChorlitrix, the shopkeeper spoke English. This happens in many invertebrate towns. The most successful shopkeepers are the ones who can speak the languages of lungs and vocal cords - such as Theskerel and English - as well as their native clicks and hisses. The owners who can't speak the languages themselves find someone who can to mind the counter. The spider behind the bookstore counter was every inch an arachnid, behind the compound spectacles and flowered apron, but somewhere in all those jointed mouthparts was something capable of pronouncing English. Clicking, scissory English, but English all the same.

I knew that my third and last stop would take a while. I decided to take a break for lunch. There was a cafe by the weavers' district that sold solid food; I got a pastry with what looked like blueberries, but turned out to be water beetle larvae. It was delicious. While eating, I watched a bristly spider outside weaving a basket, lying on its back and working with all eight limbs at once. The entire thing was done in about twenty seconds. No wonder the Chelisserites can afford to weave everything in the town.

After lunch, I went to the Chelissera tatter-shop. I try to visit the tatter-shop in every town that has one. This is where people bring their broken things - shredded clothes, smashed dishes, mangled machinery - in the hopes that someone else will find a use for it. Someone almost always does. A few people in every town make their living by fixing things from the tatter-shop and selling them. Others just use the pieces.

From the outside, the shop was all bulges and protrusions, like a sack stuffed with too many lumpy things (which I suppose it was). Inside, it was obvious why. The walls and floor and ceiling were hidden behind pure chaos. There were broken typewriters, reams of cloth with rips and stains, mismatched stockings (only five or six of a full set of eight), two-legged furniture (most of it designed for arachnid anatomy and completely incomprehensible to me), dented pots, stopped clocks, broken toys - everything jumbled together without system or reason. Any trace of organization the shop may have once had was more broken than the objects it contained. There were whole barrels full of shattered china. A spider was picking through them, sifting through shards and comparing them like the scrambled pieces of a hundred jigsaw puzzles. From the way everyone ignored him, I got the impression that he spent a lot of time there.

I looked around for quite some time, wondering about the purposes of some things and the state of others. What did that bottle hold before it lost two of its three spouts? What was the purpose of the clockwork beetle with abacus wings? Who in the world has the strength to not only bend typewriter keys, but to crochet them? I wish I knew.

Amazingly, in all the chaos of mystery and malfunction, I found the one thing I have needed for weeks.

Bubble-wrap is a variety of cloth that can only be made by spiders. It's one of the most precious things to come out of Chelissera. Unique among every kind of cloth, it is completely waterproof. All you have to do is wrap something in it; drop it to the bottom of the ocean, and it will remain dry.***

The secret of bubble-wrap is the stickiness of spider silk. Other kinds of cloth are waterproof only to their edges; you can weave them tight as an alligator's grip, oil and wax them until they gleam, and water will still leak through the seams. Bubble-wrap doesn't have seams. A mix of adhesive and static electricity makes it cling so tightly to itself that even air can't escape between the layers. This is why it's so prized by travelers in the Great Shwamp. If you leave enough air inside the wrapping, not only is your luggage waterproof, but it floats as well (hence the name). You can simply tow it along behind you in the water.

The wrap in the tatter-shop was somewhat shredded, which is why it was in the tatter-shop, and why I was able to afford it (it cost only a sixel).**** I spent an hour this afternoon sewing the tears together and sealing them with snail glue. It's not as perfectly waterproof as the bubble-wrap itself, but it will help it stay in one piece.

Inside the wrap was a pocketwatch with six hands and no numbers on its face. I have no idea how one is supposed to read it. Apparently, neither did whoever left it there. The shopkeeper seemed to have given up trying to sell the watch; when I asked about it, she threw it in with the bubble-wrap for free.

I have more useless curiosities than I probably should. I can't help it. There's something irresistably fascinating about devices that do nothing at all.

In a place like the Great Shwamp, though, bubble-wrap is as far from useless as a sheet of cloth can get. I really should have gotten something like this years ago. It's only luck that I haven't been caught in the rain more often than I have, and I can't rely on the Great Shwamp's haphazard assortment of transportation to keep my luggage dry. My encounter with the troll made that quite clear. Sooner or later, I am going to need waterproof luggage.*****



*It's been weeks since I gave up asking people to identify Shwamp crustaceans for me. It's impossible. No two seem to be the same species - if the word "species" even applies - and they blithely ignore all the rules of taxonomy. They combine features of crustaceans, insects, arachnids, and fish. Many seem to have chosen their number of legs by rolling dice.

**Given the variety of people who speak Sikelak, books on the language are sorted not by the native language of the learner, but by their vocal anatomy. The other options were "Sikelak for the Avian Larynx," "Sikelak for the Metatarsi," and "Sikelak for the Bipalate Coccitella." I didn't think those would help me much. I don't even know what a coccitella is.

***Even in Chelissera, city of spinners, bubble-wrap can be only be made by the very best. It takes experience to make fabric so tight it's waterproof. The master spinners hire other spiders with inferior thread to do their hunting for them; it takes a lot of protein to make silk. The masters grow fat and enormous, spending their days eating and spinning and rarely moving from the same spot. Most eventually learn to spin with one pair of limbs; this becomes a mechanical motion that they do with as little thought as I would need to tap my foot. Their remaining limbs are free for whatever occupation they choose to pass the time.

****Sixels, it turns out, are the middle of the Great Shwamp's glass currency system. One sixel equals eight crickles (smaller marbles with ants inside). Four sixels make a terlimick, a larger marble containing a flightless harlequin grasshopper. There's apparently a fourth coin that is large enough to hold an entire crayfish. No one I've met has ever seen one.

*****I borrowed a lovely waterproof chest while I was in Cormilack, the city with more rain than air. Unfortunately, it was too heavy for me to bring along even if I'd owned it.

Drawing on the Walls

I'm glad I decided to stay in Chelissera. I was sitting on one of the thread bridges over the water,* sketching a tussock with sheep on top, when a spider climbed down beside me. This was fairly unremarkable until he spoke to me.

"Good moorning," he said. "You are an ahrtist, yes?"

His name was KeChorlitrix. He had a magnificent bass voice with a slight Truvidon accent. I have no idea which of his jointed mouthparts it came from. He was the owner of a restaurant, he told me - he pronounced it "rhoostaurant" - and had just moved into a new building. He was looking for an artist to decorate it. "I would like a myooral," he said. "One with insechts on it, fat ones, to make the coostomers hoongry."

I asked why he wanted me to do it, rather than some artist already in the town. Apparently, art by people with only two eyes is considered exotic in Chelissera. There are very few binocular artists in the town. There are plenty of vertebrates living here - perhaps a tenth or so of the population - but all of them have at least a trace of arachnid in their ancestry. Even the least spidery have four or five eyes each.** The only things with two are the sheep.

I've seen some of the multi-eyed artists' work. I can certainly see the difference. Cubist painters with two eyes have to imagine what their subjects would look like from several directions at the same time; ones with more than two eyes actually see them that way. There's a fragmented, fractal beauty to their work that I can't really describe.

I agreed, of course. I try never to turn down a job, especially one this interesting.

I got a book from the town library for reference; I'm not familiar with the insects in this part of the Shwamp, and most of the ones I could do off the top of my head would have been foreign or imaginary. It was the first time I'd been in the library. Nothing in this town seems to be made out of wood if there's a way to weave it instead. Rather than shelves, the library keeps books in tall lattices of silk. They hang from the rope-beams of the ceiling. The vertical strands are close together, the horizontal ones farther apart, so that each book stands in its own narrow pocket in the grid. They have to stretch some of the pockets to fit in the thicker books. Most of the lattices are sixteen books high or more; you have to climb them like rope ladders to reach the books on the higher shelves. No one seems worried about people falling off. Spiders just don't do that. Even if those of us with four limbs and no claws fell off, though, we wouldn't be hurt. The floor is cloth too.

There were several encyclopedias of insects in the naturalist section, but they were short on pictures. I eventually went and found the librarian. She was busy rearranging books on four shelves at the same time. She was wearing the most spectacular spectacles I've ever seen - not so much a pair as a crown, with more lenses than a microscope. Fortunately, we both knew and could pronounce at least a bit of Sikelak, so I was able to tell her that I was looking for pictures of insects.

She nodded, apparently used to vertebrates making the same mistake, and led me instead to the cooking section.

Interestingly, most of the books printed in Chelissera are made in the accordion style. Instead of being bound on one edge, the pages are segments of a single strip of paper folded in a zigzag. The entire thing can be unfolded and seen all at once. For people with eyes on every side of their head, I suppose this makes sense.

I got lost on my way to the restaurant, wandering through webs of ladders and bridges, but I met a few people who spoke Sikelak and could give me directions. The restaurant was made of silk too. There were a few lightweight tables tilted at odd angles on the cloth floor; most of the seats, though, were on the ceiling. When the restaurant opens, the spider customers will hang in comfortable padded hammocks and drink bottles of half-soup hung from the chandeliers. KeChorlitrix wanted the mural painted in dyes straight onto the cloth walls. (Embroidery would be more permanent, but embroidering a building costs a fortune.) I asked if he had a list of insects he particularly wanted. He handed me a menu.

Being somewhat unfamiliar with this medium - plant and insect dye on architectural spider silk - I started work in an unobtrusive corner, where any mistakes I made would be hard to notice. It was a good thing I did. Painting with cloth dye was a bit like painting with watercolors... on water. The strands took the dye and spread it out in every direction. I would touch the wall with the tip of a brush and get a blotch the size of an orange. I quickly gave up on painting the insects anywhere even close to actual size. Most of one wall is taken up by a gigantic dragonfly, blue with green trim. A beetle the colors of eggplant and blueberry fills another. KeChorlitrix would come in occasionally, roundly extoll the magnificence of my work, and then ask me to make changes to it. "Moore colors!" he kept saying. "Make it brighter!" I was happy to oblige.

There is very little red, orange, or yellow; poisonous insects tend to use these colors to warn predators away. They're about as appetizing to spiders as mold is to vertebrates.

The painting took most of the afternoon, but the canvas I was using was smaller than I had estimated - at least in comparison to the brush strokes - and I finished it before dark. At KeChorlitrix's request, I even managed to climb up and paint a few elaborate butterflies on the ceiling. He thanked me profusely. He offered me dinner. He paid me with a handful of beetles preserved in glass marbles - Sixels, he called them. Apparently, they're the main currency in this part of the Great Shwamp. I'll probably spend most of them soon (customers and stores have been rather scarce on the boardwalk, and I'm rather low on food), but I think I'll keep at least one. I always keep one of everything. If I gave up my collection of coins,*** my luggage would probably be six or seven pounds lighter.

Later that night, I went to the restaurant, which is called the Chuckelgrack.**** KeChorlitrix insisted I order as much I could possibly eat. (It was crunchy, delicious and - thanks to his versatile chef - solid.) I realized when I got there why he had wanted the colors so bright. Most of the buildings in Chelissera are the plain white of undyed silk; a few are dyed in one color, maybe two. Many have only their names written on the outside in tangled spider script. They're lit from inside by lamps and candles at night, white and multicolored, as if the stars had come down from the sky and moved into tents.

Among all of them, the Chuckelgrack stands out like a sunflower among daisies. It has more colors than the rest of the town put together. The paintings on the inside walls shine through, flies and beetles and bolster moths, every detail as clear and incandescent as the pattern on a paper lantern. It was breathtaking.

I may have painted the walls, but KeChorlitrix chose the colors and the setting; this is as much his creation as mine. I've rarely seen any of my work used so beautifully. The money and food are much appreciated, but this is the best payment I could have asked for.



*You can't really call them rope bridges when the individual strands are too fine to see. They look like gauze and are slightly stronger than steel wire.

**I had been wondering about this, but couldn't think of a polite way to ask.

***Most of them are coins, anyway. Not everyone has the same idea of what constitutes currency. I also have a scattering of Toli beads, a few of the little colored stones called Lint, an engraved pleach pit, and seven Train tickets.

****This is a pun in Sikelak combining the words "chuckel" - which means something like "sated" or maybe "bloated" - and "tuckelgrack," a popular variety of half-soup made from beetles.

A Piece of Summer

Today, I found someone's afternoon. They had lost it. It was a beautiful one, one of those long August days when you can lie in the shade and watch the sunlight pour down on the world.* There was water in a glass, or possibly lemonade, dripping with cold and drops of condensation. There was a book. I couldn't tell what was in it, but the cover was scuffed, and the pages were yellow and bent at the corners from being turned many times. It was obviously well-read and loved. Overhead, the leaves rustled and leaked tiny spots of sunlight onto the ground. Dragonflies flew past like miniature carnivorous biplanes. Lizards basked on lichen-encrusted fenceposts. The air was filled with the antiphonal chanting of cicadas and the fading rattle of painted locusts.

It's not every day that you find a lost afternoon. I put it safely away in my suitcase, wrapped in a scarf I won't need for a while yet. Some things ought to be kept safe. If I ever find a place with oak trees and fencepost lizards and an old brown book that someone has loved, I'll know where the afternoon came from, and then I can give it back.



* Sunlight and rain are strangely similar in large amounts. A hot day and a pounding rain have almost the same feeling - the world is swamped, pounded with too much weather, flooded and filled to overflowing with shining water or torrents of sunlight. The dry or the dark afterwards is clear and quiet, resting, as if after a thoroughly satisfying meal. The world lives on water and light. When it drinks them, it does so not in sips, but in great booming gulps.

Inkweed

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

Today, we were joined by a fourth passenger.

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

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

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

We introduced ourselves.

"Nigel Tangelo, two am."

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

"And, um... that?"

"Never wakes up."

"Ah."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mysterious Departure of Professor Flanderdrack

I'm still not entirely sure what happened today, so I'll start with my second visit to Scarloe. I went back for another hour or so while the Train was unloading a few large crates of pickaxes.

Tourists are not allowed down in the mines, of course. The last thing the miners want is a constant crowd of people getting in their way. Instead, I went to the bookshop that sells what comes out of them.

Like nearly all the buildings in Scarloe, the bookshop doesn't have a real roof. There's no rain to keep out, after all; the only reasons to have buildings at all are warmth and privacy. Most of the buildings in the village are just walls with cloth stretched over the top. The villagers add extra layers in the Winter.

It was around noon when I went to the bookshop, so the sun was shining through the canvas ceiling. The whole shop was full of soft, brownish light that didn't seem to come from anywhere in particular. Several other people (all of them passengers from the Train) were wandering through the shelves.

The books made in Scarloe are all different sizes; they have to be. No two pages from the mines are exactly the same size. The largest one ever found was almost six feet high. It hangs on the front wall of the shop, behind the counter. The smallest ones are the size of postage stamps. The books in the shop are sorted by size - like the Illegible Library in Sconth, nothing else makes sense - so the smallest ones have several shelves to themselves, at the back of the shop. The shelves are about three inches high; the books are slightly less than that, little leather-bound cubes the size of walnuts. The very smallest ones have one letter (or symbol, anyway) on each page.

The books grow steadily in size all the way to the front of the shop. At the very front are massive volumes the size of the "atlases" produced by mapmakers (a different way of filling entire books with nonsense, only in diagrams instead of writing). A few are even bigger than the Sconth Extended English Dictionary.

I didn't buy a book, of course. (What would I do with it?) All I did was flip through a few of them. I recognized very few of the languages in the creased and dust-stained pages. When I finally found one in English,* it stood out like a lighthouse on a dark night. Of course, I only understood the individual words, not the sentences they formed. Here's an example:

Unfortunately, when the frog got out of bed, it found that an eggplant had invaded its nest and stolen all its jewelry. This was a catastrophic occurence, for the frog's jewelry was the key to the box in which slept the kidneys of a very old fish, and not a drop of wine could be had to bring them back. It was most inimitable. After weighing the options on a small scale, the frog decided there was nothing to be dome but call in the camel passages to worm their way out of the loch. This would take time, though, and every second was a second that could have been spent playing the violin. There was simply no replacement for all that fur. Time could wait, but clocks are notoriously impatient when their lunch is on the line. That, then, was the state of things when the new year arrived in a stagecoach and dropped her teeth like snow over the city. The sewers froze overnight. Clams fled to the streets, clamoring for sausages to save them from the cold, but it was no use. They were all washed to sparkling sanitation before the pipes could say a word. Fingers would never have accepted such an impasse in their digits. Disaster loomed. Trains buckled their belts and settled down for a long Winter. Ice crept over the line and was punished. The frog hardly knew which handle to turn, because they were all misty in the half-dusk. Moldy spiders were no help. And worst of all, the jewels were still missing, for the sleet had kept them silent against their will. No one noticed. Come daybreak this evening, it will all end in tears. Mark my words. They are written in ink.
No good can come of this.
Limber.

Professor Flanderdrack was there as well, but he hardly stepped into the shop at all. He just went to the very first shelf inside the door, picked out a gigantic volume half as tall as himself - I assume he picked it for the cover, as he barely glanced at the pages inside - and bought it.

The Train left shortly after that. The Professor spent most of the rest of the day making more notes or calculations in his notebooks, which he packed neatly away in various suitcases when he had finished. The book from Scarloe was the only thing he left out. He then placed it on the floor, picked up all his luggage at once - no small feat by itself - and proceeded to stand on the book. He swayed slightly with the motion of the Train.

"Well," he said cheerfully, "it has been a pleasure to travel with you three gentlemen. I have enjoyed your conversation immensely. Remember to look for the Caribou Rotunda - it likes cheese. Wish me luck!"

"Good luck," I said, bewildered. Flishel said something that sounded equally confused. The sleeping passenger snored. There was a noise outside the compartment just then - the beginning of an impromptu game of sea-legs ninepins in the corridor outside, as it turned out - and I looked out for a second to see what it was. When I looked back, Professor Flanderdrack and his luggage had disappeared. The floor of the compartment was completely empty.

I still don't know what happened. I can guess, of course; perhaps the Professor found out how printed pages get into the ground beneath Scarloe, and perhaps he managed to turn that form of transportation to his own use. Perhaps he was pulled away to somewhere else like the words in an ambiguous novel. Perhaps it was something else altogether. The Omnipresent Telescope probably had something to do with it, if that was what he found in the Vanister Museum, and the book from the mines of Scarloe was obviously important. Unless it wasn't. In a few years, maybe everyone will be traveling by book. Maybe not. I suppose I'll never know.

I never did find out what he was a Professor of, exactly.



* One of the great unsolved mysteries of the page mines is how a geological layer thousands of years old, at the very least, can contain languages that have only been around in their present forms for a few hundred years. This is one of the main arguments used to support the theory that the mines are somehow getting words from somewhere else, like an enormous subterranean ambiguous novel that's completely lost its mind. It's also used to support the theory that the whole thing is an elaborate hoax.