A Different Kind of Voice

During our time in the face-speakers' village, we never did manage to even begin speaking the village's language, nor they ours. We lacked color-shifting abilities of any kind; they appeared to be completely mute. The only sound we ever heard them make was a soft pop of the lips - which was not so much a word as a signal for attention, asking those nearby to turn and read the speaker's face.

Nevertheless, my three companions and I managed to communicate well enough, by gesture and expression, to make do for a few days. We were all grateful for the chance to rest. To be honest, we also might have been somewhat reluctant to venture back into the wild after the circumstances under which we had left it. A brush with death, however brief, tends to make one more appreciative of safe places for a while.

At one point, we even got to help with the harvest. I'm not sure what the season was in the Golden Desert at that time, or even if that particular part of it has any seasons that I would recognize. For all I know, the rainbow-faced villagers might harvest constantly all year.

Most of the harvesting - like everything else they did - happened at night. Like many nocturnal people, they didn't appear to actually need light to see, other than that of the moon and stars. The fires in their houses were only for heat and cooking. I never saw them eat meat of any kind. Their main sources of food seemed to be drought-wheat, which they grew in vast, dry fields of sand around the village, and a sort of fruit-like green tuber - like a hybrid of potato and zucchini - that grew under the wet sand of the village's oasis. This was what we had eaten in the soup on the night of our arrival. The name of the vegetable was a green oval with a sort of golden twizzle inside, which was actually a fairly accurate representation of the way it tasted. The villagers harvested it with long, spoon-like implements. They would walk around, stamping on the wet sand until they found a spot that felt somehow different. I never was sure exactly how they knew one of the vegetables was below. Once they had found it, they would dig their spoon into the sand and pull back on its long handle, scooping the vegetable out of the sand and high into the air. The children, lacking the necessary weight and upper-body strength for this task, instead ran around with baskets and caught the vegetables as they fell from the sky.

Upon realizing that we wanted to help, the villagers found a few spare spoons somewhere and let us try. We achieved nothing like the same level of skill, but the villagers' silent laughter at our efforts was good-natured enough.

No ordinary settlement in the Golden Desert can exist without a water source. The village's oasis was relatively small - hence their reliance on drought-wheat, a crop which seems to be able to survive on nothing more than vague rumors that there might be water somewhere nearby.

The resident aquifrax was… unusual, to say the least.

The water spirit seemed to spend most of its time making ice sculptures. It was rather prolific, actually. I can't imagine how much energy it must have taken to freeze so much water in the middle of the Golden Desert. Perhaps that's why it had left its oasis so small - or perhaps it simply preferred it that way. The motivations of spirits are rarely easy for mortals to understand, especially the more eccentric ones.

Most of the ice sculptures seemed to be sea creatures - the fantastic variety, like those drawn by illustrators who have never visited the ocean and have to rely on verbal descriptions of beasts they've never seen. One of the sculptures might have been an octopus. Another resembled a dolphin, or perhaps one of the sleeker varieties of beetlebrow fish. It was difficult to tell, anyway; we could only see them clearly during the day, and they always started melting long before sunrise. By noon, nothing was left but sad little lumps of ice bobbing in the lukewarm water. The only exception was a particularly massive sculpture - possibly a whale or a dire manatee - that lasted a full day and a half, though it more closely resembled a horribly ill blowfish by the second day.

We never saw the aquifrax, of course. Most of the life in the Golden Desert could not exist without their work, but the spirits themselves - like most spirits - rarely show themselves in person.

Perhaps my favorite part of our time in the village, though, was the music. Most of what we heard at first was simple and percussive. Workers in the drought-wheat fields, for example, would keep up a steady rhythm by plucking their toenails with their neighboring toes. (I managed to duplicate the technique myself, though with far less volume.) A whole team of workers could achieve a fairly complex rhythm this way. Still, for several days, this appeared to be all the music the village had. There was certainly no kind of singing.

We were somewhat surprised, on the third night, when the villagers brought out a couple of string instruments and something like a stone xylophone and proceeded to play music in a circle around the oasis. There were only three or four instruments - like the hybrid offspring of a banjo and a harp, no two alike - which the villagers passed around between themselves. Nearly everyone seemed able to play them, though their skill varied. I didn't recognize any of the tunes they played. Many of them were accompanied by rhythmic light shows on the musicians' faces; these were songs with words, apparently, even if I couldn't hear them. The instruments made their slow way around the oasis. When Red-Streaks-On-Yellow had finished playing, he or she hesitated before passing the instrument to me, uncertain of whether or not I could play it.

I couldn't, of course. Instead, I stood up and sang.

It was nothing particularly impressive - just a rendition of "Factory Fool" by Rango Tress. It's a song with a strong rhythm, which seemed to be a major part of the villagers' music, and its melody sounds good in my baritone range.

When I started, all the villagers froze and stared at me, motionless. I'm not actually sure if they had ever heard singing before. I began to be a little nervous when they hadn't moved by the end of the first verse.

Halfway through the second verse, they started to join in.

It was just a simple clap at first - one of our hosts' children, I believe, though I confess that I couldn't tell most of the children apart. A few others took it up as well. Someone started embroidering the rhythm a little. By the end of the third verse, I felt as if I was providing the melody for an entire Thiglian drum circle. It was amazing how many different sounds the villagers could achieve with just their palms and fingers (the rest of their bodies being far too fluffy for percussive purposes). I finished to wild applause.

My three companions received much the same response. Karlishek chose a skittering patter-song from Sham-Tarkazia, which gave the villagers all sorts of challenging rhythms to keep up with. Mirenza sang a thousand-year-old drinking song - evidently not at all worn out by age - which had everyone clapping and silently laughing, even though no one understood the words. Garnet surprised us all with a haunting song about coyotes (they're called feyul in the Golden Desert) that sent chills down my spine.

No one clapped through that one; it didn't need it. Instead, we were surprised again by the occasional clear, ringing note from the half-formed ice sculptures in the oasis. The aquifrax had decided to join in.

We left the village the night after that, feeling much more at peace than we had before our arrival. We said our goodbyes at sundown. The villagers - those who were up that early, at least - stopped what they were doing to give us a parting gift of dried tubers and drought-wheat crackers* and kiss us goodbye on our strangely wordless cheeks. We were sad to leave them; they had been the best possible hosts.

As we were walking away from the village, we heard a single stringed instrument taking up the melody of the song I had sung. It made good music for walking. I kept humming it long after the village was too far away to hear.



* The baker has yet to be born who can turn drought-wheat into anything as moist as, say, flatbread.

Charcoal Chrysalis

Back in the Autumn, I visited the village of Glimrack. It's a tiny village in a barren corner of the Scalps. The whole area looked as if it had been burned recently; there were plants here and there, but the soil they sprouted from was completely black. It seemed to be mostly ash. On the way to the village, I passed through a whole burned forest, a field of blackened sticks poking into the sky. None of the plants sprouting beneath them looked more than a year old.

There was very little soil, even ash, around Glimrack itself. Most of the village is built on bare stone. The villagers make their living by farming mushrooms in caves; most of their food comes from the nearby village of Gramfimly. All the buildings are made of stone with slate roofs. There are wooden beams underneath, but they're well hidden. When I arrived, the only wood in sight was piled up in tall heaps on the plain outside the village - broken chairs, dead branches, and what looked like several years' worth of firewood. Everyone in the village was running back and forth, adding more wood. Wagons rolled into town, one after the other, piled high with dead logs from the surrounding forests.

All the people I saw were reptiles, which was interesting by itself; even the smallest villages usually have at least a few mammals and avians as well. I asked a few of them what it was all for. "For the moths," they said. "They hatch tonight." None of them would tell me any more. They kept running back and forth, their arms laden with wood. I stayed and watched. Eventually, I started helping; there didn't seem to be much else to do. The piles of wood kept growing until they covered most of the plain. The bare stone was still visible, but more than half of it was buried under the splintered heaps.

After dark, they lit them.

It was the largest collection of bonfires I've ever seen. They turned the plain into a fiery maze, paths of bare stone between walls of flame. The air had been chilly all day, but it quickly grew so hot that I had to back away. The villagers didn't seem to care. They walked out into the maze, shedding their coats and jackets as they went. Slowly, solemnly, they began to dance.

The reason for the burned forest became clear when moths of flame emerged from the bonfires, swirling up and out in cindery clouds, sparks dripping from their burning wings. They swooped in wild curves through the flames, rising on updrafts and whirling around each other. The people danced through the flames, most of them stripped to the waist or further, spinning in graceful circles with the tiny scraps of living fire.

It seemed to be special when a moth landed on someone. Whenever it happened, the person would stand perfectly still as the moth dripped fire on their skin, smoke rising from the singed scales. Everyone else would do wild leaps and turns around them. When the moth finally left, the standing person would press their hands to the burns left behind, then throw themselves back into the dance with renewed vigor. I must have seen it happen more than twenty times during the night.

I learned later that this is actually part of the life cycle of the moths. They return every year to lay their eggs in the ash, the way monarch butterflies lay their eggs on their native patches of milkweed or viperwort. The caterpillars are gray and ordinary-looking. They live ordinary lives all year, eating ash and charred wood, until a fire burns away their solid bodies and releases the adult flame moths inside. A hundred years ago, there was a forest where Glimrack is now; its frequent fires provided the moths' first hatching ground. The trees are long gone, but the people of the village still gather wood all year long for the Autumn bonfire. The moths have been part of the villagers' lives since the days of their forest-dwelling five-times-great-grandparents. They don't want them to find another place to lay their eggs.

I still don't know exactly what the moths mean to the villagers. Whatever happened that night is obviously quite important, to be worth enduring so much pain, but I don't know why. No one I spoke to offered any information, and I didn't ask.

It was almost dawn before the fires finally burned down to embers. The dancing slowed down as the fires died. A few people paused to receive a last fiery kiss; then, all at once, the whole burning cloud of moths lifted into the sky. The villagers watched the moths until they vanished in the glow of the rising sun. Then, silently, they turned and walked back to their houses.

In the morning, they emerged with the shapes of tiny wings burned into their scales.

Market Street, Day 4: the Singing Huntresses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Market Street, Day 2: the Waitress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hadn't.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"This night shall see their unraveling."

"Indeed. Let us begin."

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

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

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

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

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

"Fam'ly? Whazzat?"

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

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

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

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

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

Hollowane

This October, I happened to be in Golgoolian on Hollowane Night. I'm glad I was. The city throws itself into the holiday with more enthusiasm than anywhere else I've ever been.

Hollowane is the night of illusions, when everyone tries to look as strange as possible in the hopes of getting candy. Half the people in the city dress up and go out onto the streets; the other half dress up and stay home to feed the random strangers at their door. There are chocolates and candied fruit and muffins wherever you look, lollipops and peppermints and sugar beetles, berries and bonbons, fruit jewels and candymoss and the little spiral pastries called Shwamp shnails. The bakeries, fruit stalls, and sweet shops of Golgoolian are nearly emptied for Hollowane.

I wasn't out to get candy (I took what people in the crowd gave me, but that's all I want to carry), and I didn't have anywhere to give it out from, so I mostly just walked around the city. I wandered through Golgoolian all night. There were people and things everywhere, walking and eating and singing at the slightest provocation.

Practically everyone in Golgoolian is in costume on Hollowane. They mismatch their clothes, paint their skin and scales and fur, and hang curtains from their antlers. Groups of courtiers trade masks of their own faces and become each other for the night. Acrobats walk on their hands and put sock puppets on their feet. A few of the people in the crowd actually had two heads; others were two people sharing a costume. A spiny reptile had stuck fruit and vegetables on every spike - onions, turnips, squash, and a small cherry on the tip of his nose. A large samoval had rubbed something into his fur that made him glow pale blue all over. One... something... seemed to have covered itself with most of a hillside. It shed dirt in clumps as it walked. Grass covered its back and shoulders, pebbles dotted it like scales, and a small tree was growing out of its head. Someone else was wearing an outfit of creased leather that, in the dark, looked exactly like the wooden skin of a Drae. There were blue eyes behind the dark knotholes.

Golgoolian has more costume makers than anywhere else in the Railway Regions. They spend all year getting ready for that one night. The makers of wigs and artificial tails (a common sight in any city or medium-sized town) serve a steady stream of the bald and unentailed all year, but they still do more business in October than in all the other months together.

All over the city, the toads were dancing in the sinkhole gardens. It was like...

Well...

I can't explain it. If you've never seen a toad dancing, no amount of description can possibly tell you what it's like.

The moons were full. The moons are always full on Hollowane. It's a tradition. A group from the Lupine Astronomers' Guild had decided to come to Golgoolian for the celebrations, and the streets were full of grinning, hairy shapes. Some looked like ordinary people of canine ancestry; others looked like wolves, or large dogs, or massive hulks of teeth and bristles half-glimpsed in the darkness. The crowds of big furry stargazers added something to the celebration, a sort of intense canine happiness that seems to follow them wherever they go. Everything's more fun with werewolves.

They would stop every now and then, as if on cue, to howl hauntingly at the moons. Several of them had started doing four-part harmony and jazz improvisations by the end of the night.

Hollowane is the one night when shapeshifters all over Hamjamser (full shapeshifters, not their half-malleable descendants, like the werewolves or myself) get to show what they're really capable of doing. They can walk the streets undisguised, in all their frilled, multicolored, glittering glory, each one completely different from the others and many different from one moment to the next. If anyone recognizes them, they can always say that it was just a costume.

The people of Golgoolian also believe that on Hollowane, the things that live under the city come out to join the celebration. No one is sure exactly what the things under the city are, but almost everyone is sure that they're there. All that space has to have something in it. There are tales of mole-people, of albino alligators, of earthworms bigger than the Train and mud that writes poetry. You can find all of those on the streets during Hollowane. They're part of the city's mythology. It's anyone's guess how many of them are people in costumes.

As if that weren't enough, every ghost in Hamjamser gets stronger on Hollowane night. They refuse to be overshadowed by real people. No one is sure why. Some ghosts have even been known to leave their usual routines for the night, doing something new instead of the one thing they've been echoing for years or centuries. Three years ago, the ghostly actors in Tazramack stopped halfway through "Without the Dragon," the show they've been repeating since their deaths, and instead launched into an impromptu performance of "The Importance of Being Hairy," a comedy by the brilliant Worsel Acid. According to the audience (the theater allows a larger one than usual on Hollowane, due to the temporary amplification of the ghosts), they put on a splendid show. Scofferell Flint and Giacomo Cargellini even managed to acquire a plate of ghostly muffins for one scene. It's never happened again.

There are a lot of ghosts in a city as large as Golgoolian. In the dark, it's hard to tell them apart from real people.

For quite a lot of people, including me, that's the most exciting thing about Hollowane: the people out on the streets could be anyone or anything. There are a lot of strange and wonderful things in Hamjamser that stay hidden all year. Some of them are frightening; others, like shapeshifters, are just a little too interesting for their own good. Hollowane is a chance for them all to come out of hiding. By the next day, the shapeshifters have returned to their disguises; the troglodytes have gone back underground; the werewolves have returned to their observatory on Mount Moler. The ghosts fade. The clandestine androids cover themselves once again with artificial skin and rubber muscles. The world goes back to normal, or at least a very convincing imitation of it.

For many people, Hollowane is a chance to dress up as something else. For others, it's a chance to be entirely themselves, if only for a single night.

Books Within Books

The weather was exceptionally beautiful today. It's been an unusually warm November in the Regions - almost like October all over again, though it's hard to believe we could be that lucky. October is always too short. People have written songs about it.

Even the Vanister Museum, probably my favorite building in Hamjamser that isn't a library, couldn't compete with the mountain around it. I didn't feel like walking around inside all day. Instead, I walked around Vanister and the surrounding forest all morning, sketched a few things here and there, bought a tin of lemon cookies at the Rinkler Bakery, and brought them - and a book - to the old standing stones uphill from the town. I like to sit and read under the one shaped like a platypus.

I think I've mentioned before that all the books I own are ambiguous novels. When you travel all the time, you can't carry a lot of books around with you, and libraries won't always be in the same place by the time you've finished a book and want to take it back. Ambiguous novels are the only good way to read new books on the road.

Recently, I've discovered yet another favorite author in Iliev Machinel, whose books have been showing up in one of my novels with rather alarming regularity. I just hope they continue to do so. I love them. Between Iliev Machinel and Inian Gleam - the book's current favorite authors, apparently - I feel like I've spent half of the last few months in strange places beneath the streets of Golgoolian.

Ambiguous novels, from what I've heard, are generally made by mixing up pages from seven or more different books inside one cover. This makes the book so confused about its own contents that it gives up and starts copying other books instead. It generally goes after books similar to the ones used to make it, though nearly every ambiguous novel gets bored and tries something else occasionally.

Reading ambiguous novels takes some practice. Once someone has seen the last page of a story, that's it; the book will have a different one the next time it's opened. I've had to track down over a dozen books at various libraries, having glimpsed the last page too early and missed the ending.

One of mine always contains fantasy, of nearly any kind. That's the one that's been obsessed with Gleam and Machinel lately. It's also the book that got me started on Ramer Oswelt, Tratch R. Pettery, Lena Tithe, Milici Trappilack, H. T. Garnix, and even Oswina Dennenjay. Another mixes fantasy and science fiction, and seems to have a particular fondness for Inry Varnel, Curl R. Hatcreak, and the unlikely technologies of Herbert G. Welleger. The third - put together, apparently, from a wider variety of books - alternates fantasy with murder mysteries (mostly by Trachia Ghastie), obscure works of biology and cryptozoology, and the occasional rather silly romance.

The fourth contains only graphic novels, which it seems to choose completely at random, but occasionally fills itself with what look like ancient Rampastulan hieroglyphs. I don't know where it gets them. They must be written somewhere - ambiguous novels don't invent their own words - but I've loaned the book to several Rampastulan archaeologists, and none of them had ever seen these particular hieroglyphs before. They were delighted to have them. All I can think is that the book has found some old ruin near Rampastula, probably buried deep underground or lost in the heaps and layers of architecture that make up the city, and is copying the occasional interesting wall. Maybe hieroglyphs and graphic novels don't look all that different if you're a book.

Completely unrelated to anything else, Mr. and Mrs. Dreefel - the fortune-teller and her husband - celebrated their son's negative second birthday today. Mrs. Dreefel says he'll be born in exactly two years. They had a party in the Train's dining room, with their friends and a few random strangers that are apparently going to be their friends someday, and divided a cake with two candle-shaped holes in it.

I love living on the Train.

Dancing with Centipedes

I've gotten several letters from relatives (delayed a few months while the postbirds tried to find the Train) asking who Chiliska is. Since she's the only person I mentioned by name on my departure from Cormilack - aside from Lady Akistria Xeredile, of course - I suppose this is reasonable.

The New Year's Ball in Cormilack is always held on the first of April. (Don't ask me why it's called the New Year's Ball. I don't know.) The rainy season has been going for almost a month by then, and the people of Cormilack are starting to get sick of it. The Ball is a way to distract them from the endless rain and let them do more than sit around and drip all day.

I don't really mind that - I usually sit around and write or draw anyway, when I'm not traveling. While the rain made that harder than usual, it didn't keep me from exploring Cormilack and the Earthmover. I was perfectly happy. Also, I usually try to avoid dancing; I have two left feet, sometimes literally.

Lady Xeredile made it very clear, though, that the Ball was not optional for residents of the Palace. She didn't want the people she had to live with sitting around like lumps until May. Since I was staying in the Palace at the time, working on her portrait, that meant that I and my two left feet had to be there.

Everyone who didn't already have a partner (including foreigners like me who didn't know anyone in town) had partners chosen for them at random. All the men and all the women drew numbers and milled around on the floor for several minutes, trying to find whichever person of the opposite gender had the same one. (There were more women than men, so the few hermaphrodites and one mobile plant in attendance joined the men's group to even things out.) I wandered around with everyone else, holding the number 36 (which seems to follow me around) and looking for its twin. I was rather startled to find it in the claw of a giant centipede.




If you think I was nervous about dancing before then, just imagine how I felt when I found I wouldn't even be dancing with someone with the same number of feet. I couldn't think how we'd even dance at the same time - how does a centipede do a dance designed for bipeds, or vice versa? I was about to ruin her evening. I was sure of it.

She had about half of her legs off the ground when we met, rearing up to search the crowd with her head eight feet above the floor. When she found me, she dropped down politely so that our eyes were level. Centipedes can be any height they want. She was wearing one of the long, ruffled things that centipedes sometimes wear instead of dresses. Normally, arthropods don't wear anything at all - there's not really much point - but this was a special occasion. There were bows on her antennae.

One of the musicians told me later that she was a dressmaker for the Palace - had, in fact, made the purple dress with the screws on it that Lady Xeredile wore for her portrait - and that she lived (during the non-rainy season) in a hole under the Earthmover. I suppose that explains why she didn't have a partner already.

We introduced ourselves, and that was the extent of our communication for the rest of the evening. We couldn't understand each other. I don't know more than five words of any of the chitinous languages - even the few I can pronounce - and she seemed more amused than anything when I tried to say "pleased to meet you" in Sikelak (psarkl kssh k'klrga). She didn't seem to understand English either. The most we could manage was each other's names. Hers was Chiliska (at least, that's the closest I could come to it - it was really more like "Tch'lsskhhh," but I couldn't pronounce it correctly). She called me "N'shll."

Lady Xeredile's Palace is built on top of one of the Earthmover's giant drills, high above most of the town. The ballroom windows look out on a gently sloping hillside with ten-foot rivets sticking out of it. It's a good thing I'd already been staying in the Palace for a week at that point; the last thing I needed was to be distracted by the view.

The few dances I recognized were a waltz, a fast calacara (most of which I spent tripping over my own feet), and something that may have been a spangle hop. The rest were unfamiliar. I may have gotten a few of them almost right. It turns out that most dances have multilegged variations - which makes sense, when you think about it - or maybe Chiliska just made them up as she went along. She was certainly a much better dancer than I am. She glided around the ballroom, claws clicking softly on the floor, and I stumbled along with her as well as I could. I think we both enjoyed the Ball, though, and she made up for my two left feet by having about thirty right ones of her own. I don't think she even noticed when I stepped on her claws.

After the Ball was over, we had dinner. I think everyone in Cormilack had brought something. I had pasta, a bit of every dessert I could find, and a lot of things I couldn't identify. Quite a lot of them had been caught in the caves under the Earthmover; as far as I know, maybe no one else could identify them either. Chiliska ate about seven steaks. Centipedes need a lot of meat. After dinner, I walked her to the front door of the Palace (actually, she walked me, as I couldn't find it), we said what I assume was goodnight, and she left.

Somehow, we ended up being friends after that. We never learned any more of each other's languages; there's no way we could have pronounced them. She'd come and find me every time she visited the Palace, though, and we'd have lunch together and talk about what were probably completely different things. During my time in Cormilack, I probably talked more to Chiliska than to most of the people who lived in the Palace and actually understood me. I drew this picture as a farewell present when I left.

The problem with traveling is that, every now and then, you meet people you miss after you leave. I hope I find my way back to Cormilack someday.

The Festival At Which I Was Not

This is the fifth year in a row that I've tried to reach the Moler Festival and failed. It's starting to seem like some sort of geographical running joke. The one time I actually managed to get to Mount Moler at all, it was in the middle of the Summer (four months after the Festival), and I only stayed for three hours. I wouldn't have stayed even that long if the Train hadn't had to stop to restock the kitchen. When your cook is a seven-foot carnivorous spider thing, you stop when he says stop.

Incidentally, the Moler Festival was unusually late this year. It's always held on the first day in Spring when the moon is directly behind the grandmoon. That's when - according to the Moles - the symmetry of the heavens mirrors the symmetry of Mount Moler. They're very proud of their symmetry. The Lupine Astronomers' Guild (the mountain's clan of stargazing werewolves) keeps an eye (or nostril, I should say) on the moons all month long; it doesn't matter whether they can see them or not.

I still don't really know what goes on at the Moler Festival, because no one who's seen it seems to be able to describe it. It's rare to get a description that's even coherent, much less helpful. Most people end up speaking nonsense. Someday, I'll manage to actually get there and find out. I'll send a letter about it when I do.

Don't count on it making sense.

The Glacier Festival

Once again, I have missed the Moler Festival on Mount Moler. It was yesterday. I'm starting to doubt I'll ever get to it. I attempted to reach Mount Moler by kilopede last year, of course, but you know how well that worked.

It was worth missing it, though, to be in Milldacken for the Glacier Festival.

The Spring thaw arrives, as regular as clockwork (like everything in Milldacken), exactly three days after the river starts rising again. The first trickle arrived yesterday morning. The cryo-geologists and spelunkers that have been roaming the caverns under the ice all Winter noticed first, of course, and were packed and gone by sunrise.

That was the signal for the Festival.

The Glacier Festival is held in Milldacken every year, on the day the river starts coming back. This day is called the Eve of the Thaw. Anyone who points out that the actual eve of the thaw is two days later, or that a glacier and a frozen river are entirely different things, is immediately pelted with snowballs. It's a tradition.

Of course, the result of this tradition is that half the children in town spend the day running through the streets yelling, "it isn't a glacier, it isn't a glacier!" at the top of their lungs, at which the rest have no choice but to drop whatever they're doing and begin a snowball fight. It's a tradition, after all. No one expects to get much done on the Eve of the Thaw.

The Festival itself began at noon. Everyone went down into the tunnels in the frozen river, where the sunlight was blue and bubbles were trapped in the walls like insects in amber. This was the first time many of the children had been allowed into the tunnels. They ran around like mad, slipping or skating over the floor and exploring the spaces and strange sculptures carved by the river months before. Some brought ice skates; some didn't bother; some just fell down all the time and didn't seem to mind. One small mammal girl (mostly giant weasel, I think, but with six legs instead of four) practically flew through the tunnels, using only her paws, and slid nearly to the ceiling on tight curves.

Milldacken's family of salamander farmers had gone over the tunnels early that morning; they'd melted and refrozen the floor, making the uneven surface thick and smooth enough for skating, and blocked off all the dangerous and labyrinthine parts of the caverns with newly frozen ice. Several of the more artistic ones had made sculptures of their own. A salamander with enough training can focus its heat into a thin stream, which carves ice like a butter knife, or absorb heat quickly enough to freeze poured water before it hits the floor. No one can make ice sculptures like a salamander trainer. Overnight, the caverns had sprouted trees with crystal blossoms and snowball fruit, transparent animals sleeping inside bubbles in the walls, a full-sized model of the Train's engine, an ice palace with waterfall walls, a dragon made of ocean waves, a peacock with a tail full of prisms, and probably many more that I never found. They shone like diamonds in the frozen sunlight.

Eventually, everyone gathered in the largest cave to watch the sunset, which turned the ice deceptively warm shades of pink and gold and made me feel like I was inside a frozen peach. Nearly everyone there was a mammal or avian; the town's cold-blooded residents, for the most part, won't wake up for another month or two. There were a few reptiles and a spindle beetle in the caverns, but they were so tightly wrapped up that they looked more like pillows than people. They had salamanders or arctic rats stuffed in their pockets for warmth. Three large mounds of ice had been frozen onto the floor; people gradually piled wood on these, and I eventually realized that they were for bonfires.

While they were doing that, the children had the annual standing-in-the-water contest. This is an old tradition, dating all the way back to the nomadic clockmakers who founded Milldacken (and Jiligamant, though the clockwork there has mostly stayed small). The contest is simple: everyone puts a foot (or several feet) in whatever water is flowing through the caverns, mostly snowmelt from upriver, and whoever stays in the longest wins. There hasn't been a contest for adults for the last few generations. Apparently, in the last one, eight of the town's most stubborn men stayed in the water all night until it froze solid, after which their feet had to be thawed out with buckets of hot coals carefully (or not-so-carefully) placed by their extremely displeased wives. (This was before Milldacken was big enough to have a salamander farm.) The only ones allowed to compete now are the children, who will get out when their feet go numb (or, failing that, when their parents say so) and don't notice that the water is kept above frostbite temperature with the surreptitious use of salamanders. The winner this year was a small child with more fur than a mop; he or she (no one could tell) had to stand in the middle of the stream so the others could be sure that whatever paws were under all that fur really were in the water. The prize was a clockwork toy day bat with blue spots, which promptly disappeared into the winner's fur and stayed there for the rest of the evening.

Once the bonfires had gotten started, it was time for the feast. Everyone in the town crowded around the fires, armed with pointed sticks, and toasted whatever they happened to feel like toasting. (For the standing-in-the-water contestants, this included their toes.) For the most part, the carnivores brought sausages and fish, the herbivores squash and zucchini; Milldackeners eat more of those than anything else. I saw a lot of marshmallows being toasted too, though, as well as a plumpkin, a loaf of bread, an alarmingly large sump squid (they really do live everywhere), a dried apple, one or two cupcakes, a clump of spaghetti, and a brick. Hooks had been screwed into the ice above the largest bonfire. From them, the farmers from upriver hung spits and roasted a whole thugroffler (for the carnivores) and a 260-pound pinstripe squash (for the herbivores). The smell of all that food cooking at once was indescribable. I'm not even going to try. I've never felt so lucky to be an omnivore.

It took a while, but everyone eventually finished eating. Most of us stayed and sat around the bonfires, warm and stuffed. Many fell asleep. While everyone waited, the candle-lighters walked through the rest of the caverns, lighting every one of the hundreds of candles scattered through the ice. They became visible as the bonfires gradually died down. It was completely dark when we all got up and walked away from the ashes, parents carrying their children, all of us singing an old hymn of thanks for the Winter and the Spring, the mountains and the river. The Milldacken version has an extra verse praying for a safe thaw. The candles shone through the ice in every direction, making the tunnel walls glow flame-orange and ice-blue, shining like a kaleidoscope filled with a million stars.

Two days from now, the river will thaw, and every last trace of the Festival will be washed away. Where the caverns are now, there will be only water. They're starting to fill up already.

I went to bed last night feeling as if I'd just woken up from a dream. In two days, the only evidence to the contrary will be a few traces of bonfire ash and a little windup bat.

Greetings from the Kilopede

This is quite a surprise! Thank you! I got your letter this morning and nearly fell out of my pagoda. I've never tried writing a blog before, unless you count the time I started interviewing all those spindle beetles who kept mistaking me for Captain Tamarac. That isn't exactly the same, though.

I never did find out who Captain Tamarac was, by the way. None of the spindle beetles seemed to know.

I'm glad to hear that the mountain's doing well! I wish I'd gotten to take a better look at it before I left. If only the Moler Festival were a few days later... Of course, the way things have been going, I still may not get there in time. I suppose I should write something about where I am at the moment. I still haven't reached Mount Moler. I think the Kilopede must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, maybe where it had to go around all the paper kite lizards by the lake. I don't know why this always happens; every time I travel by Kilopede, I somehow end up miles away from my destination. With all the eyes they have, you'd think they would always know where to go.

Now that I think about it, though, they almost always end up somewhere much more interesting than where I intended. Hmm. Maybe they know what they're doing after all. I've always wondered what goes on in those mile-long brains of theirs.

Oh! That's all I can write for now. The Kilopede just stopped to let someone cross it - I don't know who, they're about half a mile closer to its head than I am - and there's something off to the right that I have to get a picture of. I'm going to miss the Moler Festival for certain, but it will happen again next year, and I'll probably never be able to find this place again. As far as I know, the Kilopede is the only one who knows where we are - if even it does. It's a good thing I still have my suitcase packed. I'll try to send this by the first postbird I find after I jump off. I'll write more later...

Nigel