A Different Kind of Stone

I've spent most of the last two days walking. I've seen few people traveling and even fewer staying still. There's been the occasional hut, abandoned and overgrown, home to nothing but desert foxes and chimney swallows; one or two dried-out wells with sand spilling over their brims; a brightly colored tent with the symbol for DO NOT DISTURB painted many times over its entire surface - but nothing more permanent.

This is normal for the Golden Desert. It's rare to ever find two places less than three days' walk from each other.

Yesterday evening, just before sundown, the road wound its way into a cluster of rocky outcroppings. I hardly noticed them at first. The sky was cloudless, but the sun was managing a spectacular sunset anyway, painting the empty sky a hundred shades of gold and crimson. I walked in among the pillars of stone and suddenly felt as if I was in a forest. This has not happened in several months; I would have enjoyed it, except that the stones blocked my view of the sunset. I turned around and settled down near the base of one of the pillars near the edge, shrugging off my bags of books and clothing and art supplies, and took out a couple of pakals for dinner. (I love pakals. I'll write more about them in another letter.) I'd been walking since before dawn, and it was a relief to sit down and rest for a while. I would have sat in the shade, but I couldn't have watched the sunset that way.

It was a pleasant place to rest. There was a cool (relatively speaking) breeze off the river. A pack of winged hyenas was doing wild aerobatics overhead; I'm not sure if they were the same pack I'd been seeing all day or a different one. The sun had set where I was by then, lighting only the craggy tops of the stone pillars behind me, but the hyenas were high enough that their spotted fur shone like gold. Their laughter echoed between the stones.

When both the sunset and my dinner were gone, I got up and moved on. The best time to travel in the Desert is when the sun is just below the horizon; that way, it provides light without extreme amounts of heat.

The air was cool between the pillars of rock. Their surfaces were oddly layered, as if they'd been poured into place - quite different from the usual Desert rock formations. Their shapes didn't look as if they'd been eroded by wind and sand. Most of the smaller ones had holes in the top, which made me suspect some sort of volcanic activity; fountain volcanoes, perhaps, or some sort of geysers, dried up long ago. Several were encrusted with the tough brown lichen that grows in shady places here. I admired their rough, irregular shapes, wondering how they'd been formed, until they were reduced to silhouettes against the darkening sky.

As it turned out, I didn't have to wait long to find out. Right at the end of twilight, when the sky had gone a deep ultramarine and a few of the brightest fish-stars had come into view, a light appeared at the top of one of the nearby pillars. I couldn't tell what it was at first. Backing away, I climbed up on one of the stubbier pillars to get a better view - and watched as a frond of turquoise light rose from the stone.

It was dim at first, but more and more flecks of light appeared as it unfurled, blue and green with the occasional speck of rich violet. It was like a glowing peacock's feather. A second one unfolded from another pillar, purple and deep red, followed by a third in white and pink. I stood in amazement and watched. They shimmered with thousands of points of light, like the flecks of pigment in a pointillist painting. They were breathtaking.

They were also considerably larger than I was. As I watched, a large moth flew into one of the fronds, which snapped shut around it and made a motion that looked disturbingly like swallowing. I got off of the pillar I was standing on quite quickly after that.

The moths obviously found the shimmering light even more entrancing than I did. The night air was full of the sound of fluttering wings, cut off by the soft snaps of the fronds as they plucked one moth after another out of the air. I caught sight of the occasional bat as well, silhouetted against the lights. The gathering of moths must have been a feast for them as well. They had to fly carefully, though; more than once, I saw the fronds snatch at passing bats, though I never saw them catch one. Bats are good at dodging.

I had no idea what the fronds were. I'd heard of things like these - creatures somewhere between plant and animal, such as anemones and sea-ferns, that root themselves to stones and grow hard tubes to pull themselves into - but I'd never seen anything like them on land. For that matter, I'd never heard that they grew anywhere near this large.

I suspect I could have stood and watched this strange carnivorous rainbow all night if I hadn't dozed off eventually. When I woke up, the creatures were gone again; they'd pulled themselves back into their stones well before sunrise. That explained the holes at the tops of the smaller pillars. I looked into a few of them, but I couldn't see anything but darkness inside. The tubes must go deep into the sand.

This evening, exhausted after another whole day of walking, I finally reached a village. I limited myself to only the essential questions:

"Where is the inn?"

"How much for a room?"

"What were those feathery things in the Desert?"

According to the innkeeper, who seemed rather amused at the question, they're called samratheel - which roughly translates as "biting flowers."

The name seems to fit them.

Umbrella Crystals

Another caravan came through Thrass Kaffa today. They had heavy cargo and were moving very slowly. In wetter parts of the world, wagons this heavy would be driven by oxen or pushpigs; in the Golden Desert, they're pulled by tortoises. Tortoises, in fact, are the favorite slow animal in the Desert. They're slightly less stubborn than mules and far less vulnerable to heatstroke. They pull carts and carry people who don't need to get anywhere quickly. (Camels are faster, but a little too unpredictable for day-to-day use.) Nothing speeds them up, and nothing slows them down. A tortoise might take hours to get to town, but it will move just as quickly - or just as slowly, rather - whether it's carrying tiny children or pulling three tons of umbrella crystal in a cart.

That's exactly what these had. Behind the tortoises, sturdy wagons braced with steel rumbled along under the weight of at least thirty umbrella crystals. They were rolling mountains of honey-colored stone; even the smallest crystals were taller than I am. The smoothest ones distorted everything on the other side, squashing houses into narrow towers or inflating them to bloated yellow mansions. Children walked alongside the caravan and made hideous faces at each other through the stone. So did quite a few adults. Umbrella crystals are rare in the Golden Desert, and practically nonexistent everywhere else. They're some of the only stones in the world to be created by plants.

Umbrella palm trees get their name from their leaves, which are the same shape and just as watertight as an umbrella. The divert the water of the Desert's infrequent rainstorms directly onto the ends of a tree's outer roots - which are often nowhere near the trunk - and keep the base of the trunk dry. That's where the trees grow their crystals. The inner roots absorb sand and cement it together into massive stones, anchors against the relentless winds of the Golden Desert.

Nor surprisingly, the crystals have become incredibly valuable all across Hamjamser. They grow at the same speed as their trees, which - while still slow - is still much faster than any crystals that form by ordinary geology. Most of all, though, they're valued for their size. No gemstone on the planet can rival the size of even an average umbrella crystal. Queens and Emperors have had entire sets of dining room furniture - chairs, tables, dishes, even the knives and forks - carved out of a single crystal. The Sultana of Fasra Koum, according to legend, lived in a palace carved from a single stone. It's not hard to believe. The oldest crystals in the Desert, the ones that no one found or harvested before they grew too large to move, are at least large enough to make a respectable mansion. The wind and rain have eroded them into strange, fluid shapes. On some, they've eaten away at the hieroglyphs of long-dead civilizations. Archaeologists make pilgrimages to them with rock-climbing gear or lifter giraffes. They've found whole mythologies carved into a single stone.

Most of the time, though, the trees are cut down when their crystals are still small enough - just barely - to be moved. Most of them don't live that long anyway. Being the only tall things in many parts of the Golden Desert, umbrella palms are frequently struck by lightning. The branching twists of fused sand left by Desert lightning end up stuck to the bottoms of the crystals when that happens, as if the crystal had grown roots. Until only a few centuries ago, most scientists believed that the crystals grew by themselves, like giant stone turnips.

It doesn't matter much when they're harvested, though; the sale of even a relatively small crystal can keep a small village supplied with everything it needs for a whole year. The keepers of umbrella groves guard their locations as fiercely as compass makers guard their twigs. Stone farmers take their jobs quite seriously.

Healthy umbrella palms grow clear, egg-shaped crystals the color of honey; unhealthy ones (much more common in the harsh Desert weather) produce stones full of bubbles and the elegant black traceries of dead roots. In one particularly old and enormous crystal, a group of explorers found the skeleton of a dragon. It had been preserved like an insect in amber, the bones covered layer by slow layer over the course of decades. It's currently in the Museum of Antiquities in Karkafel, where I saw it on my last visit. The skeleton looks like it's sleeping.

I have yet to find a way into Karkafel on this visit. I've caught a few glimpses of it - vague, shimmering towers in the distance - but all the alleys I've tried have simply led me back into Thrass Kaffa. I'll try again tomorrow. I'd rather not have to find my way there through the catacombs again.

The Cat's Radishes

Today, after almost a week of walking, I finally reached a village. Its name is Twokk. There was something on fire in the middle of town, but no one seemed particularly concerned about it, so I assumed it was normal. I'll take a closer look tomorrow.

It was dark when I arrived, and my feet were sore, so I stopped at the first inn I came to (the only one, as I discovered later). It's called the Moons and Magpie.* It's a cozy place, comfortably settled into its space on the street. The inn somehow manages to lean on the buildings to either side and slouch to the rear at the same time. It looks as if it's relaxing in an old armchair.

The locust stew was quite good; the meat was tender, the shells still crunchy. I've heard that's a hard combination to achieve. As so often happens, I had been there hardly ten minutes before someone sat down across the table and started talking. He was reptilian - mostly, anyway - with gray-green scales and whiskers. A thin mane of gray hair ran down the back of his neck, twisted into a tangle of braids and fastened with blue glass beads. His face had more folds than an origami alligator.

"You look like a traveler," he said. "Got that windswept look. You got a name?"

I introduced myself, and he nodded.

"Nigel, eh? I had a cousin named Nigel once. He could play the accordion like nobody else. Got so good that a dragon came and took him away to be its personal musician. Or maybe it ate him. I dunno. I'm Brexical Cheezerbaum, expatriate carter and merchant, but you can call me Cheese. You ever been to the High Fields?"

My single visit to the High Fields had, in fact, been a rather memorable one - I might write about it someday - but I settled for a simple nod.

"Well, there's something you oughta know if you ever go back. Pretty sure it saved my life once. Care to hear the story?"

I almost never say no to this sort of question. It always leads somewhere interesting, and I've found that most people don't particularly care if you say no anyway. I nodded again.

"Well, it was up on the terrace road," he began. "Highest of the High Fields, up near Pelfry and Farcastle, where there's more cliff than ground and weather's something you look down at. I'd stopped to repair a wheel on my cart - roads are terrible up there, see, 'cause the pothole crabs keep digging 'em up. Can't take horses on those roads at all. I had my cart-lizard. Good eating, though, pothole crabs, if you know how to catch 'em…

"Anyways, there I was, putting my wheel back on, when a steeplecat climbs down the cliff above me. You ever seen a steeplecat?"

I hadn't.

"Well, a steeplecat is like a tiger, see, except green instead of orange and with spines all over like an iguana. Sticky feet, too - it climbed down that cliff face like it was walking on the ground. A giant of a steepler, big as a horse, and all muscle under that green fur.

"Well, my poor cart-lizard completely lost his head - can't blame him, I suppose, since the steepler could have eaten him in two bites. First the silly thing tried to hide in a crab-hole in the road, then he realized that wouldn't work and practically turned himself inside-out trying to hide under the cart he was pulling. Me, I just stood there with nothing but the hammer I'd been using to fix my wheel - about as long as one of the steepler's teeth, it was - and the stupid hope that maybe if I stayed still, it wouldn't see me. I wasn't thinking too clearly, you understand.

"Well, as it turned out, the steeplecat wasn't interested in me or my lizard. She went straight to the cart - I could tell she was a female, cause the males have horns when they're full-grown, and this one was more full-grown than most - and she started pawing through the bags and boxes inside. Didn't break anything, just kept digging till she found a box she liked. I was so terrified I couldn't even remember what was in it. She picked at it for a while, scratching at the lid - even tried biting it open, as if it was a nut the size of my head. That gave me the shivers, I can tell you. Looked like she'd done it before.

"Well, the box was one of those little iron-bound chests, the kind you use when you're delivering china by dropping it off an airship and don't want it chipped. Even the steepler's teeth couldn't get through that. She sat there growling at it for a while, while my lizard about had a fit under the cart. Then she picked the box up in those big teeth and walked over - her paws were bigger than my head, and they didn't make a sound - and dropped the box right in front of me. Sat there and looked at me, waiting, till I realized she wanted me to open it.

"Well, I wasn't about to argue with that. I picked up the box - nearly fell over doing it - and opened the lid, though my hands were shaking so bad I nearly dropped it twice. Found it was full of radishes. I'd picked 'em up in Sickle, where they grow 'em in buckle tortoise shells, so they last for months and glow when you put 'em in water. The cat had her whiskery nose in the box soon as I opened it, so I put it down quick and backed off. She plucked those radishes out of the box with a claw and ate them, one by one, dainty as a lady eating chocolates. Didn't stop till the whole box was empty.

"When she'd eaten all the radishes - half a Geint, those cost me, but she could have eaten me instead, so I'm not complaining - she walked over to my cart, climbed up on top, and went to sleep. Right there on my luggage! Softer than rocks, I suppose, which is all there was nearby. I still couldn't quite believe it till she started snoring. My lizard got out from under that cart so fast, I was picking splinters out of his tail for a week.

"I figured eventually we might as well keep moving, since the steepler didn't show any sign of waking up, and she could eat us just as well someplace else if she wanted. My lizard was happy enough to get moving, though he spooked every time the cart went over a bump. In the High Fields, that's practically every two steps. We got another few miles before the cat woke up. She yawned - hope I never see a sight like that again - jumped down from the cart, and gave my lizard a big, friendly lick, like a dog. Poor thing fainted clear away on the spot. I was afraid she'd do the same to me, but she didn't even look at me - just turned and poured herself over the nearest cliff. I looked down and saw her climbing down the rock, faster than I can walk. Still not a sound. My lizard didn't wake up for another hour, but when he did, he was so eager to get out of there, we reached Farcastle by nightfall.

"And if you don't believe me, look at this."

He pulled a wooden box out from under the table. It was scratched and dented all over, both the wood and the metal bands around it; the marks could have come from a pickaxe, except that I've never seen a pickaxe that sharp. A few of the gouges had what looked like grass caught in them. On closer inspection, this turned out to be strands of long green fur. He opened the box to show that it was full of radishes.

"I've never made a trip since without a box of these," he said. "Far as I know, they're the only reason me and my lizard didn't end our trip as lunch. And I'd advise you to do the same."

I bought half a dozen. After a story like that, how could I have done otherwise?

It's entirely possible, of course, that the whole story was an elaborate plot to get me to buy his radishes. (I later overheard him telling a rapt pair of rabbit-eared Mattergovian monks how he had outsmarted a band of pirates with these, yes, these very sea-pickles.) It doesn't really matter. True or not, the story was worth at least the price of a half dozen vegetables.

Besides, I like radishes.

* Or, in Hmakk, Hmika mi Kikimey. I think the name comes from a story from the Scalps.

The End of the Boardwalk

The fog cleared today, and I decided to leave Chelissera while I could still see where I was going. The Pelirikas left the day before yesterday. I was in the middle of painting KeChorlitrix's restaurant; they came to say goodbye while I was eating lunch. Ranapleximilian and Tessemira gave me a snail shell they'd found, banana yellow with black stripes. If you look closely, you can see that the stripes are actually dense lines of small black squiggles, like microscopic hieroglyphics. I wonder if they mean anything.

I'm going to miss talking to the family (though I mostly listened, especially in the case of Mr. Pelirika). I don't think I've enjoyed traveling with anyone so much since I left the Train.

Without the Pelirikas and their wagon, there were no vehicles of any kind scheduled to leave the town for several weeks. Spiders are lurkers by nature. They don't travel much. Lacking any other options besides swimming, I returned to the boardwalk.

I'm glad I bought the bubble-wrap in Chelissera; I don't know what I would have done without it. The boardwalk - already sunken and disintegrating - vanished altogether barely a mile from the town. The last few frayed boards simply disappeared into the silt. There was no trace of them any farther on. Some well-meaning worker had put up a sign: "THIS ROUTE UNDER REPAIR." The sign was almost as rotten as the boardwalk. There was moss growing on it. Somehow, I don't think the repairs ever happened.

The bottom of the Shwamp was fairly flat, so I kept walking. The water continued to get deeper all day. By mid-afternoon, I had emptied my pockets and was walking through water up to my shoulders. It was perfectly clear; I was able to watch for sinkholes and snapping turtles and so on. When the water got deeper than my head, though, I gave up trying to wade and stopped for lunch. The trees were mostly gnorls and marsh manoglia, some of the easiest kinds to climb, so it wasn't hard to find a wide branch to sit on.* I needed a dry place to unwrap my luggage and take out food. While I was there, I checked the bubble-wrap for leaks. There were none. The inside was as dry as a biscuit - unlike me. A small flock of green butterflies flew down while I ate to drink the water from my shirt. I sat there on the branch, perched next to my suitcase, chewing and dripping and wondering if I should turn around.

It was an unusually beautiful part of the Great Shwamp. Plants covered every surface. There were bladderworts and waterlilies in the water beneath me, bryophytes wedged into the bark of the trees, and wispweeds floating through the air on their feathery leaves. The pink blossoms of splash-me-nots clustered on low branches, close enough to the water to see their reflections, but not enough to get their feet wet. The trees around me were full of beaded moss. It hung down in damp, tangled strands, like long green beards with no faces. It was full of the little beads that give it its name. They start out the size and color of peas and change color as they grow, moving through every possible shade of brown and purple. The ripe ones are magenta. If you touch them, they burst and release little clouds of pink spores, which float in every direction and stick to everything. Many of the branches were completely covered on top with pink dust. It looked like an odd cross between sunset and snow. Within a few weeks, it will be gone, turning a more businesslike green as it gets ready to become next year's moss.

I decided to keep going. The water has to get shallower sooner or later. Besides, the bubble-wrap had given me an idea. I resealed it with more air inside, found a relatively straight stick to use as a pole, and turned my luggage into a boat. It wobbles rather alarmingly, but it hasn't quite tipped over yet. I poled my way through the swamp on a suitcase gondola. I sang as I went, of course; someone has to sing on a gondola. I usually resist the urge to sing in public - not everyone likes impromptu recitals of clock songs and show tunes - but there was no one to hear me but the birds. Several of them joined in with harmonies. Sky-blue day bats flitted through the trees overhead. Swamp koi swam lazily under my suitcase, white and orange or black and gold, a few of them the size of dogs. Tree toads watched me pass with eyes that filled most of their heads. Sunlight filtered through the trees, broken into narrow slivers by leaves and hanging moss, full of dust and late-season mayflies. It was a good way to spend the afternoon.



* I sat in one of the gnorls, of course. I don't trust manoglia trees. Most of them stay rooted and mind their own business, but you can never be sure.

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.

Trick-Hunters

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

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

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

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

"Well, not often," he added.

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

The Smokestack

Sure enough, there's a smokestack in the center of Ayagolla. It's a hollow monolith of ancient red brick on the highest point of the mesa. A rusty ladder is bolted to its side. Anyone can climb up and look into the opening on the top, so that's exactly what I did.

The outside of the smokestack is about as tall as a two-story house; it's small compared to most of the ones on Hamjamser. Inside, however, the hole goes down too far to see. It's at least as deep as the bottom of the mesa.

Being large, ancient, inexplicable, and remarkably well-preserved, the smokestacks are generally thought to be yet another mysterious leftover from the Hill Builders. They seem to be made of perfectly ordinary, if rather large, red bricks; several of the stacks are known to be at least a thousand years old, though, and they don't look more than a few hundred. Nobody has ever built as permanently as the Hill Builders. They're named for it, after all.

The smokestacks turn up all over Hamjamser, usually in high places. There are at least fourteen in the Railway Regions. Explorers have found them rising unsinking from the Great Shwamp, drifted in sand in the Golden Desert, and crowning the peaks of half a dozen islands in Kennyrubin. They're all made of identical red bricks, no matter where they are. As far as anyone can tell, the smokestacks are bottomless. Explorers who go down them run out of rope before they reach anything. Attempts to excavate the stacks, to follow them from the outside, have turned up nothing but endless perfect rows of bricks. The shafts are too narrow for flight; the bases are wider than the tops, but they stay the same width below the ground. Katara Katravandisask, the notorious daredevil photographer, probably would have gone down one long ago if her wings could fit.

A few people - geckos and insects, mostly - have managed to climb down the inside walls of smokestacks. They've brought back strange tales of tunnels and rooms at the center of the world. Some say the smokestacks go straight through the planet, and that each one has an identical counterpart on the opposite side. (This theory is only held by supporters of the round-world theory, of course - the flat, shapeless, mosaic, and moebius world theorists think it's complete nonsense.)

No smoke ever comes out of the stacks - they're named only for their shapes - but they're always a few degrees warmer than the surrounding air. The inside of Ayagolla's is full of bats and cliff-swallow nests. Aeroscorpions hook themselves to cracks in the bricks during the Winter. A few of the cold-blooded villagers join them, preferring to hibernate in the warmth of the smokestack instead of their own chilly basements. They hang little tents inside the bottomless hole. From the top, I could see several of them hanging like canvas fruit over the empty blackness. Each tent has at least five or six ropes holding it to the top of the smokestack, as does each person inside it. Apparently, the drop doesn't bother them.

The Ayagollans agreed to let Miss Hepsedine plant a small inkweed sprout at the base of the stack. It's the perfect spot - the bricks are surprisingly smooth after hundreds or thousands of years of weather, and the ground all around them is as black as charcoal.

On a completely different topic, I heard from another passenger on the Train that there was an accident at the Bank of Bannarbangle last month. A dragon's hoard fell through the floor and ended up hopelessly mixed with the vault of gold below it. It took weeks to sort them out. The dragon is thought to have come out of the mess about thirty pounds richer than before; when a dragon says that yes, it is sure that this particular brick belongs to it, you don't argue. The whole thing reminded me instantly of Professor Flanderdrack. I wonder where he is right now.

The Sclesserax (part one)

I think the Sclesserax may be larger on the inside than on the outside. Flishel and I visited it today, and the rooms inside it have no end.

It was completely by chance that we ended up there at the same time. I walked through the first door I found - an ornate archway near the bottom of one of the pillars, covered in little clay snails with paper wings. The flying snail turns up a lot in Carvendrone architecture. I think it's their equivalent of the stone griffins in Rampastula or the cyclopean hammerheads in Cammerlan.

Anyway. The inside of the pillar was one enormous spiral staircase, sunlight shining through all the windows and lighting up the red and yellow chrysanthemums growing from the windowsills. They grow straight out of the architecture. Their roots emerge here and there from the clay walls. Late-blooming sunflowers and Winterthistle join them farther up the staircase, and mushrooms sprout beneath the steps.

At the top of the staircase was an entrance hall shaped like a beehive. Wasps flew in and out through the windows - I wondered how many of them even noticed the stairs - and there was Flishel, standing in the middle of the room and looking around with the same openmouthed awe that I'm sure was on my face. We greeted each other incomprehensibly and continued looking around. The room was lined with paper, intricately twisted origami shapes in gray and white that twisted down the walls and twined around each other on the floor. It was like a folded waterfall. Little crabs and shrimp in mottled clay peered through gaps in the streamers.

We were there all of two minutes before a hornet came to take us away.

I'm not really sure, any more than I am about anything in the Sclesserax, but I think she may be some sort of tour guide (or possibly someone entrusted with keeping random gaping intruders out of trouble). She buzzed up to us, landing catlike on the floor - her head was about level with my waist - and motioned with one claw for us to follow her. We did.

The hornet, whose name I probably heard but didn't recognize, took us on a convoluted route that must have passed through over a hundred rooms in the Sclesserax. We went through miles of twisting passageways, lit by sun or amphibious anglerfish or nothing at all. Wasps don't mind a bit of darkness, and it would be foolish to keep flames in a building that's half paper. We passed the kitchens, where wasps and various other insects were chopping and moulding a hundred different kinds of food I couldn't identify. I think a lot of it had once been fruit. There were cakes in pink and purple, flowers of sliced meat, sugar sculptures of wasps and cacti and giant squid, a towering construction made of layers of meat and green jelly. Whole roast cicadas left the kitchens in carts on their way to the nurseries. Larvae eat a lot.

Our route took us out onto balconies several times. Builder hornets were repairing the roof of the dome above one of them. Wasp-paper is famous for its resistance to sogginess, but pieces of the Sclesserax still get mushy and fall off every now and then. Most of the architecture is in large, sweeping curves and flowing arches, shapes that don't break easily. All the ornamentation is small. Flat floors are uncommon; they're just places to land. Rickety little staircases have been added here and there, for those who can't fly, but they're an afterthought. Most of the Sclesserax's residents don't need them.

We wandered through a library built by bees, with books and scrolls and unfamiliar paper things in folds and coils, all stored neatly in hexagonal wax bookshelves. Very little of the writing was familiar. I recognized the neat alphabet of Carvendrone, three-pointed letters based on the handprints of black beetles, but I can't even pronounce the sounds they represent. Most of the spoken languages were unfamiliar as well. The rest of Carvendrone is a mix of every chitinous species in the Railway Regions, but most of the Sclesserax is inhabited by wasps, the royalty and lesser nobility of the city, and they don't speak English. The language of Carvendrone (which shares the city's name) is an old one, dating back to prehistoric tribes of black beetles in the caverns of Mount Moler. I don't know how much of the constant buzzing and clicking is meaning and how much is motion. Maybe they're the same thing. In a language made largely of buzzing wings, flight can be poetry.

I recognized the occasional conversation in the almost-universally-pronounceable Sikelak, though I'm far from fluent in the language. The fact that almost anyone can speak it means that no one can do so easily.

Our guide kept up a constant cheerful commentary, in clicks and buzzes, on the rooms we went through. (At least, I assume that's what she was talking about. For all I know, she could have been reciting poetry or complaining about the weather.) Her segmented hands never stopped moving. We stopped by the throne room for several minutes, admiring the sculpted swarms on the door, but we never saw the inside. The Queens don't open their doors to just anyone.

Wasps have a reputation for being fiercely territorial. The Queens of Carvendrone are rare exceptions. Over a century ago, the Queens realized that they could create a hive, between the six of them, far larger than a single Queen could even dream of. A wasp can only lay so many eggs a day, after all.

More Queens have joined them since then. Every species of civilized wasp in Hamjamser lives in the Sclesserax - I don't even know how many. There are even a few colonies of bees and a reclusive hive of termites in the basement.

They have their own names for themselves, in the scissoring language of the nobility, spoken with wings and serrated mandibles. It's far more subtle and complex than anything else spoken in Carvendrone. I've heard that some of it is communicated by smell.

Vertebrates can't pronounce it. They call the wasp tribes by other names.

The hornets - such as our guide - are strong and catlike, with tough exoskeletons the dusty red-and-charcoal of bricks. The builders among them work in paper, which they make in their stomachs from chewed wood. The nobility have butter-yellow faces. All of them are sisters, daughters of the Hornet Queen who looms enormous in the depths of the throne room, but only the yellow-faced ones could take her place, trade their predatory grace for a size greater than most whales and the rule of all their sisters, become mothers to a thousand daughters of their own. Most of them don't live that long. Queens take their time dying.

The daubers are long and impossibly thin, blue-black with purple wings. They are constantly in motion. They twitch slightly even when standing still, their wings flickering in place. They prefer clay to paper. Unlike the hornets, they have no Queen Mother; they have small families of their own, like most of Hamjamser, and elect a small council of Queens. The males have made a few attempts to join the council, but they're always outnumbered by the dozens of Queens in their own and other species. Something usually distracts them anyway.

The cicada-eaters are massive and tiger-striped, far larger than anything in the city except the rickshaw beetles. They are mottled rust-brown around the thorax, black on the abdomen, with rippling yellow stripes like war paint. The roar from their enormous bronze wings is deafening. They fly as unstoppably as meteors. The towers of the Sclesserax are theirs, all of them, even the ones built by other wasps; the cicada-eaters perch protectively on the pinnacles, wings and legs delicately folded like dragons or winged cats. No one knows why. They raise their grubs in the lower rooms of the Sclesserax. The huge, boneless children of the cicada-eaters spend the first year of their lives wedged comfortably into clay and stone crevices, devouring half the cicadas raised in Carvendrone.

I'll write more tomorrow. We spent all day in the Sclesserax, walking constantly, and I'm currently falling asleep over my pen.

The Galleria of Jijangola

(This just happens to be my thirtieth post since I started NaBloPoMo (well, thirty-first, but that one on Monday really doesn't count). I have now officially made up for that week I missed. As a result, I will not necessarily be posting every day, but I'll try to keep writing all the same.)

It's Winter in Jijangola. The harvest is over; the fields are empty; the light is fading fast. It's cold outside. The children have nothing to do until the first snow coats the spires and turrets of the Galleria like icing on a wedding cake. Their parents have nothing to do until the Spring planting.

This is when most of the work is done.

The Galleria is Jijangola's center and its people's obsession. Every single one of them spends every spare moment they have working on it, quarrying stone, lifting, cementing, carving, painting, polishing, decorating... It takes up more space now than the village used to. It's been a long time since there was a village. Now, there's only the Galleria.

The whole thing started with someone's nine-times-great grandparent - or everyone's, possibly. It depends on who you ask. Spindle beetles and burrellers and even a few pygmy land-eels all claim the foundations of the Galleria were laid by their own nine-times-great grandmother or grandfather.

It's grown since then. It's large enough by now to start shifting. Rooms and passages move when you take your eyes off them. Murals connect with each other, often - usually - in surprising ways. A stone knight in a winding passage is, quite literally, standing in a forest. The painted trees on the wall continue straight across his chest. Birds and rabbits peer out of gaps in his armor, and roots twine around his segmented feet. There are apples growing on his left shoulder. Farther on, a gray statue of a man is kissing a painting of a woman; her two-dimensional sleeves are painted around his gray neck like an embroidered scarf. A necklace of tiny round windows around her neck lets in tiny needles of sunlight from outside.

Of course, as far as I know, this is how the paintings and statues were made in the first place. It wouldn't be any stranger than a lot of the rest of the Galleria. It's hard to tell, though, because the artists are never around to ask. There are hardly more than a hundred people in all of Jijangola (as much as anyone can keep count); even so, I've never been able to find out who created any particular part of the Galleria unless I found them still working on it. No one ever seems to know who built or carved or painted anything that's been finished.

Perhaps they've taken on a life of their own.

Whoever started the Galleria, they seem to have begun it as a rather small chapel. At least, that's what the Jijangolans say - most of them agree that the little stone chapel, buried now under a labyrinth of walls and passages, is the oldest part of the building. They can still all fit into it when they remember. Jijangola is not a large village, at least not in terms of inhabitants; stones outnumber people several hundred thousand to one.

About a third of the stone in the Galleria is quarried out of its equally labyrinthine basements and catacombs; the rest, according to the people who bring it, comes from something called the Rubble Heap. I'll have to try to find that when we move on - almost half the stone comes already carved. A lot of it looks very old. In a dusty dead-end hallway lit by Gothic arched windows, I found that someone had assembled mismatched carved words and letters into a rhyme:

And hence with LIBRARY buILT beside
THE amber founded northw st side
TOLL BO TH permit INQUIRE INSIDE
and VANisHED To the EXIT

Walking back down the hallway, I realized that the rhyme was only one of many. What I had thought were random assortments of carved fragments in the walls were actually writing, each one assembled the same way. The hallway was built entirely out of rhymes. The one at the end was simply the only one I could understand.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was an entrance to the Palace of Madmen in here somewhere. It might be hard to tell the difference.

Most people in the Galleria seem to spend all their time lost in it. They farm and hunt just like anyone else, but they generally just leave the food laying around the Galleria for anyone who wants it. You never have to look far to find a meal (though exactly what you might find is anyone's guess). Stone and paint are left, when people deliver them, in heaps by the outside doors; the shifting rooms and passages spread them all over the building. It's perfectly normal to walk through a twisting hallway or lofty chamber and find people rummaging through the clutter on the floor, searching for just the right shade of red or the perfect block of marble.

Visitors to the village are expected to either leave money (someone has to pay the people who bring stone and paint and cloth) or help with the Galleria. I, of course, chose the latter. They kindly let me work on part of a massive mural that twists along two hundred feet (so far) of tall passageway and stairwell. A black beetle next to me was working on an entire forest of intricately painted knots. I spent most of this morning continuing the loose ends to a grass-green spider, covered with a field of Summer flowers, hanging from one of a flock of hot-air balloons below the same sunset that greeted our arrival in Jijangola. It seemed fitting.

One tower, the place where I spent the most time yesterday evening, is completely hollow inside; the only way to reach the top is to climb the downspout gargoyles that line the inside in evenly spaced rings. The water from all the nearby rooftops (which have gradually grown almost as high as the tower itself) flows through a maze of pipes and gutters to the outside of the tower, where it pours in through the gargoyles. A thousand and fifty-seven spouts of water (I counted) pour from their mouths, forming a huge waterfall in the center of the tower that falls straight into the well built into the floor. It's like the inside of a sea dragon's throat.

The edges of the tower, between the gargoyles, stay completely dry except for the occasional leak. It's fairly easy to climb to the top.

At the top of the tower is a round room with no openings except a hole in the floor and another in the ceiling. The walls are completely made of stained glass. It's like the top of a lighthouse, except that where the light should be, there's a smaller waterfall that pours down through the hole in the ceiling.

I got soaked climbing up through the hole, but it was worth it.

The roof is a shallow, copper-shingled bowl. The rain swirled down into the hole like dishwater into a drain. Looking down through it, the light of my salamander lantern just reached the converging waterspouts at the top of the tower waterfall. They looked like the petals of a white flower in the darkness. Looking over the outside edge of the roof-bowl, I could see the rooftops of the Galleria spread out below me, a labyrinth of peaks and gables and spires and turrets lit by the moon and hundreds of candlelit windows. Someone with wings was flying around and around a tower, wrapping it in loops of silver chain. The links sparkled every time they passed a window.

It was beautiful. I was getting soaked, though, which is an especially bad idea in December, so I came back down after only a minute or two.

There was a postbird in the room when I got there. How it got in, I had no idea; its wings would never have fit through either of the holes. We sat there for a while in companionable silence. The postbird dozed quietly as I wrote by salamander light. I left last night's letter on the floor when I went to sleep, and it and the bird were gone this morning.

I slept in the stained-glass room all night; it's not every day I find a nice high place like that. I love high places. Climbing down was much easier this morning. The sunlight that comes in through the gargoyles' mouths is still very faint, and the tower has no windows except at the top, but the candles melting on the stone heads weren't drenched by rain this time. Someone had lit all of them. Maybe they had lit themselves. I don't know.

I could spend a year just exploring this place. I have a feeling that I still wouldn't see all of it. I may have a chance to do just that, at least for some time; Plack and I wandered off in different awestruck directions when we entered the Galleria, and I haven't seen him since. Oh well. We'll find each other (and the exit) eventually.

Still, I think we'll be staying here for a while.

Climbing the Needle Tower

Well, I couldn't very well stay in Sconth and not climb the Needle Tower. When am I ever going to have another chance to climb three miles above the ground using only my feet?

The Needle Tower is one of the oldest buildings in Sconth. It's by far the tallest building anywhere in Hamjamser. The foundation is stone, twenty feet thick to support the immense weight on top of it; the tower gets gradually thinner from there. The top floors are barely ten feet from one wall to the other, made of aluminum bars and silk rope.

So far, the fastest person ever to climb the tower - a cliff squirrel gymnast by the name of Tatrika - took eight hours to get to the top and collapsed from exhaustion when she got there. Most people prefer to take the elevators. There are two of them, one on either side of a massive loop of rope hung from an even more massive pulley partway up the tower. A system of gears in one of the tower's basements connects a matching pulley at the other end of the loop to a waterwheel in the river Kastel (yes, the Samrath Kazi coins were named after the river - its main tributary runs through where the village used to be). A large clockwork mechanism, like the escapement of a clock, switches the direction of the elevators (after a pause for boarding) when one reaches the top and the other the bottom.

Unfortunately, the elevators don't go even halfway up the tower; any rope, even the foot-thick rope the elevators use, would snap under its own weight if it were any longer than that. You have to walk the rest of the way.

Fortunately, I'm used to walking, so it only took me ten hours and fifteen rest breaks to reach the top. I was barely able to breathe by the time I got there - partly from the exertion, partly because the air up there is so thin. The wind is freezing. It comes straight through the top room, which is really little more than an aluminum platform with a railing and a pointed roof. It's there mostly for the few anyway. You can see the curve of the horizon from there. The city was spread out beneath my feet like a very small postage stamp, perched on top of the tiny little bump that is the Plateau of Sconth. The clouds hid it from view occasionally. Off to the left, I could see the great metal hulk of the Cormilack Earthmover, gleaming like a tarnished silver toy in the sunset; to the right, the perfectly conical peak of Mount Moler was just visible, deep in the heart of the Railway Regions. There was a thin line of gold on the horizon that just might have been the Golden Desert.

It took me a few minutes to realize that I could see the entire Mountainous Plains. The edges were visible in every direction.

The core of the tower is a single straight rod of hypersteel three miles long - and that's just the part above the ground. It's driven deep into the bedrock beneath the city for stability. Even in the strongest winds, the tower doesn't even wobble. Hypersteel is not flexible. The only sign that the wind touches it at all is a low, metallic humming as the core vibrates in its stone sheath. It's almost too low to hear at all.

All anyone knows about the core is that it was dug up hundreds of years ago and stood on end in a hole dug through the stone (no one knows how anyone managed to lift the whole thing); the tower was then built around it. Like all hypersteel, it's a leftover from the Hill Builders' civilization, and therefore thousands of years old. No one knows how to make the stuff anymore.

The tip of the core is visible in the top room of the tower, protruding five feet above the floor. It's easily the oldest thing in Sconth. Its surface still has the same mirror-smooth shine it probably did when it was made. You can see your face in it.

It's hard to see all of the core's tip, though; draped in a reptilian curl over the top of it is an ancient salamander larger than most true dragons. Its mane of spines is large enough by now to rival the Sun Dragon's, and it fills the entire room with the light and heat of a bonfire. It's been there longer than anyone in the city can remember. No one is quite sure whether it was put there deliberately, possibly to warn airships and floating cities of the tower (yes, it's that tall), or whether it just found its way up there accidentally and decided to stay. It's the perfect place for a salamander that size. The core is the biggest lightning rod on the planet. Entire storms can strike nothing but the tower, if they're high enough, and almost all that electricity goes straight through the old salamander. A smaller one would be vaporized; this one simply drinks it all in. There probably isn't a better source of energy anywhere outside the salamanders' native volcanoes.

Whether or not its light was meant to be a beacon, it works. It's possible to see the light of the Needle Tower even when the rest of Sconth is well below the horizon.

I've been sitting up here so long, looking at the view and writing, that it's gotten dark. I got on the elevator before dawn; it was already sunset when I reached the top. Fortunately, the salamander provides more than enough light for writing. I'm sending this by a postbird who conveniently happens to be resting on top of the tower. I'll climb down again tomorrow.