Canyon Town, part two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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


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

The Radio

On another brief wander this evening, I was passing underneath an open window when I heard the unmistakeable crackly sound of a radio. I'd almost forgotten what they sound like; it's been a few years since I last heard one.

The last time was on my last visit to the Railway Regions, when I would gather occasionally with a small group of passengers on the Train to listen to Mr. Intaglio's salamander-powered receiver, a tiny machine held together with twine and snail glue. We would stay up until the quiet hours of the morning listening to tinny, static-filled broadcasts from exotic places we'd never heard of.

The Inadvisable Music Hour is broadcast from a mountain toll bridge in Skeen, where the bridge-keepers would let musicians cross for free if they played a sufficiently outlandish instrument.

The Nightsound Show is a nocturnal cornucopia of music and philosophy from the distant underground town of Carburrow, where they discuss stories and foreign politics and the supernatural late into the night.

Brendan Harzelflat, age two hundred and three, tells stories of his long and eventful life and sends them out over the Aether from his solitary lighthouse, speaking in a voice as soft and unhurried as waves on a beach.

One opera program we never did find out the name of, since none of us recognized the language.

It was a good few weeks. That little radio receiver was one of many reasons I was sad to leave the Railway Regions. Until today, I'd almost forgotten the sound of static, of scratchy voices riding on invisible waves over impossible distances, of the mysterious and melodic Aether-whistles that interrupt them every so often.

It was startling to hear that sound here, in this tiny town in the middle of the Desert. I looked around to see where the sound was coming from and chanced to be looking up just when a wild-haired man stuck his head out of a second-story window.

"It's working!" he called to the street in general. I was one of the only people actually in sight, so he turned to look at me. "I'm finally getting a clear signal! Well, almost clear. Come up, come up and listen!"

I rarely refuse invitations to interesting things, so I went up to listen.

The building looked like a shop of some kind. It was closed at the moment (possibly because the owner was busy tinkering upstairs), but the door was unlocked. Since I'd been invited, I opened it and went in.

The lower room was full of clockwork and other machinery. The sun slanting in the window struck glints from pocket watches, clocks in various sizes, a gramophone or two, even some of the more complex types of farming equipment, all in various stages of dismantlement. Gears and cranks and other specialized bits of metal lay with an array of tools all over a pair of long tables that stretched the length of the room. The smells of metal and machine oil filled the air. Something clanked rhythmically in a dark corner in the back. It was fairly clear that this was the town mechanic's shop.

A half-dozen salamanders dozed on a table beneath the front window, with their scales turned dull black to soak up every drop of the remaining evening sunlight. Small, slitted eyes opened briefly and then ignored me.

I could hear a crackly, muffled voice coming from the back. Past a curtain, I found a narrow spiral staircase leading up. It looked like it had come from somewhere else. The ornate wrought-iron railings, twisted round with designs of winged weasels and snakes, were wildly different from the simple stone walls around them, and the staircase didn't quite seem to fit the stairwell. The middles of the steps were worn down, the edges scattered with mysterious bits of machinery.

If the downstairs room had been cluttered, the upstairs room made it seem practically empty by comparison. It was all machinery, floor to ceiling, stacked in precarious heaps and hanging from the rafters. Jars of nuts and bolts stood on any surface flat enough to hold them. Loops of chains and wire hung from hooks. Several of the heaps had small, open areas in the middle, showing that there were work tables somewhere beneath all the clutter.

The machines here - when I could pick individual ones out from the chaos - were much more fanciful than the practical, workaday devices downstairs. Here was a fan, a ring of thin blades punched with geometric patterns of holes, designed to be spun by the air rising from a candle flame; there, a music box built to play multiple brass musical cylinders at once; farther in, an ungainly machine for cracking eggs. Judging by the litter of pulverized eggshell around it, it had not yet succeeded in doing so gently.

In the center of the room was the man who had called me in, whom I assumed to be the mechanic himself. He was a short man with a face like a bespectacled sheep and a wild mane of woolly hair. He wore a shirt stained with machine oil and a vest that seemed to be made entirely of pockets.

"Oh good, you found the stairs." He spoke Halsi, almost too quickly for me to follow. "Some people can't. Do you speak other languages? I finally got a signal on this thing and I'm talking to someone, or trying to, but I can't understand a word."

I replied that I spoke several languages. Unfortunately, my spoken Halsi is not particularly good yet; my reply probably sounded something like, "yes, it speaks many language, what need?" This did not appear to fill the man with confidence in my abilities. He was about to say something else when the radio interrupted.

"Finally, someone else," said a crisp, crackly voice from the speaker. "I don't suppose you speak English?"

It was surprisingly pleasant to hear someone speaking my native language again - even if the voice was crackly and coming out of a machine. It's fairly common to hear English, along with every other language, in the larger cities of the Golden Desert. Since leaving Karkafel, however, I've heard very little of it.

The voice on the other end turned out to belong to a Miss Anthetica Mandrigore, who was speaking from a cottage in the High Fields. She's currently trying to assemble a group of radio operators to create a sort of radio communication team - a "network," she called it - between several of the more remote parts of the High Fields. In that country of cliffs, landslides, broken bridges, narrow switchback paths, and weather so unpredictable that even postbirds find it difficult to deliver mail on time, a system like this could be quite useful.

The mechanic introduced himself - when he remembered - as Bofrid Haggadan. With me as a translator, the two of them spent the next few hours discussing radio technology. I got the impression that neither of them often got a chance to discuss the subject with someone who was equally interested. Miss Mandrigore also had rather a sharp tongue, though, so perhaps it was just as well that the two of them couldn't communicate directly just yet. Not everyone patient enough to operate radios has the same amount of patience with people.

I am far from an expert in any of the mechanical disciplines, so the conversation quickly grew to be over my head. Fortunately, many of the technical terms are the same or similar in both languages; most of the words I didn't understand, Mr. Haggadan did.

No one is really quite sure how radio works. People first found the old transmitters in the floating cities; the theory is that the Hill Builders used them to talk to each other. Some of those old transmitters still work, even after thousands of years, and people like Mr. Haggadan and Miss Mandrigore have started making their own.

Electricity has generally been dismissed as an unstable and impatient form of energy, especially compared to salamander power and the ancient Hill Builder reactors that still power the floating cities. No one would consider using electricity for anything practical. Still, the Hill Builders seem to have been fond of the stuff.

Of course, since no one actually knows how radio transmitters and receivers work, the best anyone can do is put wires and magnets and electrically-trained salamanders together and hope that it all works. Those few who try succeed almost half the time. Even when radio does work, it's never reliable. The signals have a tendency to fracture as they spread, becoming crackly and distorted. They can only be picked up in random patches of space. Move two feet to the left, and everything dissolves into static. Many radio operators find themselves yelling across the room to their microphones, holding their antennas out of the window for a better signal.

Fortunately, nothing like that was necessary today. The two radio operators continued to converse, their voices passing each other on tenuous streams of radio waves stretching halfway across the world, until a storm crossing the High Fields finally drowned out Miss Mandrigore's crisp voice in a sea of static. The two of them made plans to contact each other again in a few days. Miss Mandrigore has a niece who speaks Halsi, so they will be able to continue to trade notes after I leave Rikanta. Coming from two such distant locations, it sounded like they had a lot to learn from each other. I suspect that the niece will find herself with a full-time job shortly.

After switching off his radio, Mr. Haggadan thanked me profusely for my help. He said he would have invited me to stay for dinner, except that - like many passionate craftsmen - he had never taken the time to learn to cook, and all his meals consisted of bread and garlic with the occasional cabbage. Besides, it was quite obvious that he wanted to return to work on his radio. I thanked him for the offer and said goodnight. When I left, he was in the middle of dismantling some piece of electrical wiring, muttering enthusiastically to himself and shuffling through the sheaf of notes he'd taken during the conversation. Perhaps this will be the beginning of a more reliable or widespread form of radio.

For now, though, it remains a pastime for the patient and the hopeful, for dreamers and eccentrics, for engineers who are willing to tinker endlessly with half-understood technology for the chance of hearing a stranger's voice from half a world away.

Then again, anyone who answers them is almost certainly a similar sort of dreamer. Perhaps they're not such strangers after all.

Word-Plague

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Market Street, Day 5: the Lucky Bungler

Kekehruy Square is one of several small open spaces that are often connected to Market Street. Today, it was the site of a three-tower clockboard tournament.

Clockboard is generally considered the most elaborate board game in Hamjamser. Each board is unique, laid out to serve the personal strategy of its creator, or simply to make the game work the way they think it should.* People often say that a clockboard looks like a chessboard; this is true, in the same way that a city looks like a brick. Clockboard uses chessboard as a building material. There are multiple layers of black-and-white squares - checkered terraces, spiral walkways, bridges, rotundas, and the checkered towers by which the game is ranked.** The more adventurous clockboards look like mad model cities in harlequin dress. Each board contains some amount of clockwork as well. At the very least, there's a clock in the board somewhere; it usually has three or more hands, only one of which has anything to do with time. The functions of the others vary from board to board. Advanced boards also include clockwork that changes the game, shifting and rotating sections or dropping pieces down hidden chutes to bring them closer or farther from wherever they're trying to go. Half of playing clockboard is anticipating your opponent's moves; the other half is anticipating the moves of the board.

I've never quite been able to figure out three-tower clockboard. It's possible that I could if I took the time, but so far, my experience is limited to the single-tower variety.

This tournament was in its fourth day, so most of the players were seasoned experts. The beginners have been out of the running since Friday. I couldn't understand half of what was going on. The tournament seemed to be going well; nothing particularly exciting was happening, but the players and the audience were interested. Then Spud showed up.

No one has ever managed to find out Spud's last name - or, for that matter, anything else about him. His response to every question is usually something like, "yes, I'm Spud. Where are the doughnuts?" He shows up occasionally at tournaments (some say he's drawn to large concentrations of board games) and usually doubles the size of the audience once word gets around.

He had neglected to bring a clockboard of his own. This was a requirement for the tournament. It's customary, especially at a tournament, for a pair of clockboard players to play pairs of games - one on each player's board. It wouldn't be fair otherwise. A well-built clockboard gives its creator a significant advantage. If one player wins both of the first pair of games, he or she is the winner; if the first pair is a tie, the players move on to a second pair of games. This continues until one player or the other wins both games in a pair.

It often takes a while for this to happen; the Duchesses of Shimrick and Marbelsack once continued a single match of clockboard for almost ninety years. They met every day to play it over lunch. The match was said to have consisted of four thousand and thirty-six separate games (two thousand and eighteen on each board), and it only ended when the Duchess of Shimrick died of such extreme old age that everyone had lost count. The Duchess of Marbelsack is said to have been quite irritated at her timing, as she was winning the current round. It was just like Shimrick, she said, to die at such a contrary moment.

Fortunately for Spud, one of the other contestants had to drop out at the last minute to have a baby. As she left with a doctor and her husband (who looked by far the most nervous of the three), she gave Spud permission to borrow her board, with the clear understanding that she would kill him if anything happened to it. He nodded vaguely, thanked her, and waved as she left.

He proceeded to win every game he played. This is what always happens. Spud has been the world champion of clockboard - and several other games - for years, despite his apparent lack of any strategy whatsoever. I certainly couldn't find any when I watched him play. He moved his pieces seemingly at random; occasionally, he had to ask his opponent what one of them was.*** Several of his opponents appeared to be winning at first, taking full advantage of mistakes a novice player could have avoided, but his luck always changed by the end of the game. Player after expert player saw their detailed strategies overcome by what looked like randomness and sheer luck.

Board game enthusiasts have argued about Spud for years. A third of them think he's a genius who's impossibly good at hiding it; another third think he's an idiot who's impossibly lucky. The remaining third just think he's cheating. If he is, no one has ever managed to catch him at it. Experienced players who've matched wits with Spud - if wits have anything to do with it - are usually certain he's not cheating. What exactly he is doing, they don't know. They just wish they knew how to do it themselves.

Someone - no one remembers who - once called him the Lucky Bungler. The name has stuck. Clockboard players speak of Spud the Lucky Bungler in a tone of voice normally reserved for only the most insane emperors.

The tournament had narrowed down to the last eight players, seven of which were looking rather nervous, when Spud simply got up and wandered off for no apparent reason. Everyone waited for a while to see if he'd come back. In a game that can take years to complete, players quickly learn patience.

He never returned. After a few hours, during which most of the players mobbed the surrounding shops for food and news of Spud's disappearance, the tournament continued without him. The winner and runners-up continued to play well, though they all looked a bit shaken when accepting their checkered clockwork trophies at the end.

I heard later that Spud had shown up at a Go tournament that happened to be taking place simultaneously on the other side of the lake. He won, of course. The city's reigning Go champion, an ancient and brilliant woman named Trihakna Start, reportedly asked him to marry her on the spot. Accounts vary as to what he replied. On his last comment, however, everyone agrees. When asked about his miraculous success at the tournament, Spud simply blinked and replied, "tournament? I thought this was a yard sale."

And then he left.

* For many serious players of board games, the object is simply to play as well as possible; if a game goes well, it doesn't matter who actually wins. An elegant strategy is often all the more satisfying if your opponent surprises you with it.

** Three-tower clockboard is the most complex variety commonly played; double- and single-tower clockboard are more common. I've heard that the game goes up to seven towers, but I've never even seen a board with more than four. Beyond three, it gets so complicated that you might as well try to predict next year's weather as your opponent's next move.****

*** Clockboard has seventeen basic pieces per player, nearly three times as many as in chess. Each piece has its own unique abilities, and advanced players of the game often invent their own.

**** Unless, that is, you're a Weather Dragon. In that case, the weather is easy to predict, as you're the one making it.

Market Street, Day 1: the Scavenger

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

A New Type of Writer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It writes poetry.

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

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

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

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

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

Ink on paper
Black, white
Two becoming
All there is

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

Benevolent Clockwork

After more than a month of water, I've finally reached one of the more solid parts of the Great Shwamp. Early this morning, I saw the familiar shapes of docks in the distance, shaggy with moss and freshwater barnacles. Something was odd, though; they weren't attached to trees. I had to get closer before I saw that they were actually connected to land. I can't remember the last time I saw land - not tussocks or mudbanks, but real land, the kind you can't see all at once. It seems strange to actually see the roots of trees.

There's a branch of the boardwalk here, somewhat better maintained than the one I left, but I think I'll be continuing on land from here. I miss being able to stay dry for an entire day.

I paddled my suitcase up to the docks, earning a round of stares from everyone nearby, and stepped ashore. I'll have to remember this mode of transportation. It was quite convenient to be able to pick up my boat and take it with me. Having no idea where I was, I asked a man on the docks. He was carrying a basket of cleaner snails bigger than himself.* Several had escaped and were crawling on his head and shoulders. This seemed to be a fairly common occurrence; silvery snail tracks covered his upper body like tattoos. He told me that the town is called Truckle Stop, as it's where the River Truckle reaches the Shwamp and stops being the River Truckle. Sensible enough.

Truckle Stop looks more or less like an ordinary marsh town: trees full of moss, houses on stilts, little plank bridges over the ponds and inlets that break up the land like the spots on a cow. Dogs and tame caimans wandered over the wooden streets. Many of the houses had fishing poles hanging from the windows; every so often, a bell would ring, and someone would come to the window to reel in a fish. Half the people travel by foot or moa cart, half by rowboat and canoe. The land changes position when no one's looking, as land does, so you never know when your house is going to be on the mainland or on an island.

The town is centered around a bridge over the River Truckle. It's built of wood, like everything in the Shwamp; if there was ever stone here, it's sunk far beyond where anyone can find it. There's moss growing on the bridge. Moss grows on everything here. Most of it is beaded or silvermoss, but there's an edible variety called spaghetti moss that the Truckle Stoppers try to encourage in the town. I tasted a bit this evening, boiled and served with marsh tomato sauce, and the name is quite accurate.

I'd never heard of the place before, but Truckle Stop is apparently rather famous in the Great Shwamp as the home of Temery Malerian, a local inventor. She makes pipe crawlers. They're the windup variety, of course, not the crustaceans. Everyone has their own opinion on which kind is better. The clockwork ones are easier to train; the live ones can make more of themselves. (So can the clockwork ones, of course, but they can't work at the same time.) Most of the towns in the Great Shwamp have the live kind if they have any at all. It's the perfect habitat for them. In Truckle Stop, however, there are so many clockwork pipe crawlers that there's no need for any other kind. Tesra Malerian** apparently does nothing but build them, all day and often all night. The nocturnal townspeople can hear her clanking away after dark. The town crawls with her previous creations, works of clockwork art that are as much like ordinary pipe crawlers as a jade statue is like a rock. Fortunately, this is one of the more accepting towns;*** the people treat the clockwork menagerie as something between pets and benevolent local spirits, welcoming them into their houses and winding them whenever they run down. The children of the town have the usual interest in animals, catching frogs and raising caterpillars in well-stocked jars to watch their metamorphoses; one little girl is constantly surrounded by a cloud of pygmy dragons, a few of which she's trained to carry her schoolbooks for her. With the pipe crawlers, though, the children never do anything more than watch.

The crawlers are beautiful creatures, elegant assemblies of polished silver and brass, like glittering beetles of rods and gears. No two are quite the same. Many of them do the usual pipe crawler tasks - fixing plumbing, patching roofs, collecting lost coins, and so on. Others are... different. It's common in Truckle Stop to come across geometrical arrangements of snail shells, elaborate abstract designs scratched into the plank streets, spidery webs made of cast-off bits of string and strung between banisters or fenceposts. One particularly large crawler shows up on the doorstep of any family that leaves a red ribbon around the doorknob, waits politely to be let in, and alphabetizes all their books. Another seems to know when construction of a new building begins; it always shows up to press bright pieces of broken glass into the clay between the boards. It spends the rest of its time collecting and filing the pieces smooth. The townspeople have developed a habit of leaving all their broken dishes in boxes on their front steps so this crawler can collect them. It must have thousands of pieces by now. No one knows where it keeps them.

The doorsteps all over town, in fact, are covered with bits and pieces for the pipe crawlers: glass shards, wood shavings, bits of string, nutshells and eggshells, pits from peaches and hobberel fruit, bent pins and old rags and the hair from combs and fur-brushes. The doors are just as thickly covered with signs for the useful crawlers. People leave red ribbons for the book-sorter, chalk marks for the windowsill-duster, daubs of jelly for the spoon-polisher, knotted string for the boot-scraper, and paper flowers for the one that comes in and paints tiny floral patterns on ceilings. In addition to the known signals, people often put things out at random - rocks and stockings and old keys - in the hopes of attracting a new crawler. It's like the fairy-signs in the villages of Fethily. Truckle Stop's fairies just happen to be the windup variety.

The overall effect is strange to anyone who don't know what it's for; there's an odd assortment of tiny things by almost every door, like the sweepings of someone's attic carefully arranged in little boxes. Newcomers to the town are occasionally somewhat disconcerted by this until someone explains it to them.

Tesra Malerian's family does most of the business, buying supplies and selling the ordinary pipe crawlers. (The special ones stay in town.) Fortunately, Truckle Stop is near a large supply of the crystal brains used in pipe crawlers. They mine them like gemstones. No one in Truckle Stop knows how the crystals work; no one in the world does, to my knowledge.**** They just hope they never run out of them. Without crystal brains, even Tesra Malerian's clockwork pipe crawlers would be little more than mindless windup toys.

Apparently, they're quite prized in several of the floating cities. No one uses more pipe crawlers than the floating cities, those weightless mountains of prehistoric machinery that depend on maintenance for their very existence, so that's high praise indeed. The inventor herself never leaves her workshop except for the occasional meandering, distracted walk around the town. She is not interested in business. As long as she's got mechanical supplies, she's content. By all accounts, there is no logic to her process; she simply builds the pipe crawlers "the way that seems right." Her clockwork is more art than science, and she is never satisfied with her own work. She considers all her creations, beautiful as they are, failed experiments. They're useful - worth making and keeping - but they're not what she's aiming for. No one seems able to explain what that is.

The townspeople all wish her luck getting wherever she's going. Still, though no one I've met has been tactless enough to say it, I have a feeling that they hope she takes her time getting there.



* The basket, that is, not the snails. The snails were only the size of his head - not unusually large for cleaner snails. Unlike most mollusks, cleaner snails are bred not as food, but as working animals. Practically every coastal town has a colony or two of them. They're let loose to eat the barnacles and shipworms that weaken wood. I'm used to seeing the ocean variety crawling around on docks and fishing boats; I wasn't aware there was a freshwater breed.

** Tesra is the title, in many parts of the world, for a master craftswoman. A ruler of places is a Lord or a Lady; a doer of deeds is a Sir or a Dame; a maker of things is a Tesser or Tesra.

*** This would never work in somewhere like Dubulith, for instance, where any machine that moves by itself is considered unnatural, and the harmless passing of a floating city overhead gets much the same reaction as a hurricane.

**** The Hill Builders presumably did, being the ones who made them. Whoever the Hill Builders were, though, they've all been gone for centuries. I asked why the crystals haven't sunk into the Shwamp, like every other stone does. No one is entirely sure. A common theory is that the little tunnels in them, those microscopic grooves that carry electricity like the cells of an organic brain, make them lighter than ordinary stone. Another common theory is that they're lifted by the power of thought. I don't claim to understand the science of the brain - or electricity, for that matter, fierce and mysterious substance that it is - so both explanations make equal sense to me.

Leviathump and Thing

It rained today, all day, and the streets of Vanister became little more than rivers of mud. The children of the town had a marvelous time playing in them. Their parents were not quite so happy.

I spent the day in the Museum again. There has still been no sign of Professor Flanderdrack since he disappeared into the building two days ago; as slim as the chances of finding anything in the Vanister Museum are, I was still hoping I might run into him. I didn't.

What I did find was a small room, probably a former washroom or the bottom of a stairwell, with only one thing in it. On a crate in the middle of the room sat a complex little clockwork thing, a bit like a cross between a typewriter and a crab. Its label said simply, "Thing." That was all. The room was otherwise empty except for a little bowl for the dust-mice, which was filling up with the rain that dripped down the narrow window.

(As huge a building as it is, it would be impossible for the curators to keep the Museum clean. They can't even find all the rooms in it. Instead, it's swept and dusted by omnivorous dust-mice (some of the only wild rodents in Hamjamser that people actually encourage to live in their houses). They come out every night to sweep up dust with their tails - which are so fluffy that they look bigger than the mice themselves - and eat it. They live on nothing else; dust and water are all they need. The downspouts on the Museum's many roofs are linked to small basins in each room to provide water for them.)

The room had the usual little brass nameplate, which proclaimed it the "Leviathump," so it wasn't undiscovered. The curator who discovered it simply hadn't done much with it. I still don't know whether the Thing was called that because no one knew what it was, or because no one had bothered to find out, or because that was actually its name. I probably never will know.

I assume it was my footsteps on the floor that woke it up. When I looked later, mine were the only footprints in the dust on the floor - the dust-mice apparently avoided the room, which made the forlorn little water-basin seem rather sad - so no one else had entered it in quite a while. For whatever reason, when I got within three feet of the Thing, it started moving. There was a click, then a tight little chorus of clinking gears, and it raised itself on eight metal legs (made, I think, of dismantled scissors) and began to dig its way through the crate.

I can't think of another word for it. It simply dug into the wooden slats, using three or four little brass shovel attachments, and scooped out slivers of wood. They clattered on the floorboards on either side. Within a few seconds, it had dug straight through the top of the crate and climbed inside.

Cautiously, in case the Thing climbed back out, I leaned over and looked through the hole in the crate. A few slivers of rain-soaked light leaked through the spaces in the side. I could see small flashes of polished metal pieces moving in the darkness. The sound of wood being scooped away like ice cream filled the little box, then suddenly stopped; the glints of light folded themselves downward and vanished.

I waited for a good two minutes before I moved the crate.

Below it, there was a neat, round hole in the floorboards. For some reason known probably only to Mister Creemer, the space beneath them was filled with layers of embroidered carpet. These had been cut neatly away as well. Below them was empty space. The darkness was filled with the muffled clicking of a multitude of surreptitious clockwork.

I backed away from the hole then, wondering where exactly there was an unlit room full of moving machinery in the Vanister Museum, and went to the window to see if there was another one below it. I was surprised to find that the room was now on the ground floor. It had been on the third when I found it. When I went back to the hole, there was nothing below it but dirt. The room had moved.

I'm still not sure what the Thing was. Perhaps it was some sort of sentry, posted to warn the other Things when someone found the room above theirs. That seems rather pointless, though, as I would never have found the dark room if the Thing hadn't burrowed into it. Perhaps something in it had jammed, and it took just the vibration of my feet on the floor to loosen it and let it make its way home. Perhaps it just wanted to be alone, and I interrupted it, or frightened it, or woke it up. I doubt I'll ever know.

I put the crate back before I left. The label saying "Thing" now appears to refer to a hole in the floor. If future visitors to the Leviathump find that confusing, they won't be the first.

Quests, Clutter, and Freshly Picked Umbrellas

I spent most of today wandering through the Vanister Museum. Most of the passengers on the Train did the same thing, flooding through the entrance hall under the coldly bespectacled eye of Miss Corverly, who runs the Museum with a claw of steel and a mind like a dictionary. (She's rumored to have a dungeon full of badly behaved visitors underneath the Museum, but no one's ever found it.) There must have been nearly a hundred people in the Museum today. Beyond the entrance hall, I saw exactly three of them. It's a large place.

One of the other visitors today was Professor Flanderdrack, who claims to have incontrovertible evidence that the fabled Omnipresent Telescope is hidden in the Vanister Museum. As far as most people know, it was lost forever when Parrafan Loofra, the great aeronautical otter, crashed his airship in Gira Gira. Professor Flanderdrack disagrees. There is a clear and unbroken trail, he says, for those who know how to follow it, and it leads directly to Henrijohn Ignitius Creemer. (Everything Mister Creemer owned, of course, is now in the Vanister Museum. There is an entire room devoted to the contents of his bathroom. His nose-hair-clipper collection, I am told, was quite impressive.) Professor Flanderdrack intends to find the Telescope before the Train leaves Vanister. He seems quite confident. I don't know how he's planning to find one thing (not even a very large thing, according to legend) in the towering archival chaos of the Museum; he hinted at plans and methods, navigational strategies and clues in historical records, but refused to go into detail. I gave up eventually and simply wished him luck.

Most of the rooms I found today were in the Gormless Wing,* judging by the lavender bricks and the fact that most of the rooms' names began with Q. The first few were full of statues of geese. They grew in size as I went - the first room had silver ganders the size of midges and barnacle geese carved out of barnacles, while the last one had room for only a single statue, a reptilian-looking thing carved from a giant palm-tree crystal. The card next to it said that it had been found in a ruin in the Golden Desert, and that the creature it portrayed was widely believed to be extinct. That probably comes as a relief to the Desert-dwellers.

I wandered through rooms full of upholstered armchairs and speckled glassware, galleries of steam- and hamster-powered pipe organs, halls of paintings by legends like Tina Tharschryman and complete unknowns like Thoggerell T. HeFeffenaff, whoever he was. There were collections of thimbles, ear trumpets, mechanical antlers, dried gourds, oracular typewriters (all frauds, of course), fishbowls, tentacle socks, silverware, left-handed scissors, ceremonial spatulae, enameled fish, doorknobs previously inhabited by gremlins, teacups, coffeepots, stringed instruments from miniature feefelos to a six-handed garobassum. A broom closet was sealed behind glass, with a sign explaining that it contained Mister Creemer's collection of antique air. Two Museum visitors were debating the meaning of a copy of the Recursive Sonnet (which shows up all over Hamjamser, carved and written on everything from temple walls to handkerchiefs, and seems to have no purpose except to make people debate its meaning. This one was on a chunk of bluestone from a granary in the Blue Desert). One room was full of clocks shaped like the moon, which someone had recently wound. The ticking of mismatched clockwork was nearly deafening. (Tick tockle tick plink tackatacka PING, tick tockle tick plink tackatacka PING...) They were not all running at the same speed. I think some of them may have been using the Phelodean Interval instead of the standard second.

I've been to the Vanister Museum almost twenty times now. With the exception of the entrance hall, I don't think I've ever found the same room twice.

When I got back to the station, I found Flishel selling his umbrellas. He had set up a little stall on the platform (where he got it, I have no idea - maybe it was in his suitcase) and had umbrella leaves in all sizes standing in neat rows. He'd stuck a few unfolded ones on the top of the stall, where they stood like enormous flowers.

He's been painting the leaves for the last few days. The paint smells faintly of hazelnuts. The green has gradually disappeared under lovely abstract patterns, swirls and speckles and hexagons, like easter eggs or soap-bubble rainbows or Karkafelian tilework. I wasn't sure why - as the leaves were still on the plant, I couldn't imagine it was healthy for them. Watching customers eagerly open and close the fresh umbrellas, I understood. He's been planning to sell them all along.

Normally, umbrella leaves aren't unusually strong - they're stiffer than other leaves, certainly, but nowhere near as strong as the waxed cloth used for most umbrellas. They tear easily. Once they die and dry out, they stop being completely waterproof, and they eventually rot and fall apart. They are leaves, after all.

The paint must do something to the leaves to strengthen them - and preserve them as well, I assume. Several of the customers weren't any gentler with them than with normal umbrellas. They folded and unfolded them roughly, dropped a few on the ground, and tapped at the taut surfaces with claws that would have gone straight through an ordinary umbrella leaf. The umbrellas were not harmed in the slightest.

For a minute or two, I simply stood and stared at the bright little stall. The umbrella stems were tipped with the little wooden things that Flishel has been carving since August: shoes, seashells, fruit and little animals of all kinds - even a small model of the Train engine. Flishel put each customer's favorite handle on their favorite umbrella before selling it to them.

Eventually, of course, I had to buy one. I needed a new umbrella anyway; I lost my old one earlier this year, in Tazramack, when a large green thing (possibly a dragon with unusual taste in treasure) came down out of the rain and flew away with it. I hadn't found another one I liked since then. There were several I liked in Flishel's stall - I'd already been admiring them, without knowing what they were, for weeks - and I eventually chose one painted a rich blue (cockleworm dye, I think) with orange sunbursts. The handle is a little mountain sheep with enormous curving horns.

There's nothing left of the umbrella plants now but the stubby trunks - which, as usual, are hollow inside and resemble umbrella stands. Without their leaves, they seem to have finally gone dormant for the Winter. Flishel packed them all into his suitcase this evening. This is rather a relief, really; the umbrella plants had grown so large recently that there was hardly any room in the compartment.

From what I can tell, Flishel sold almost half his umbrellas today. They were a huge success with both Train passengers and Vanister townspeople. As pretty as metal-and-cloth umbrellas are, they're still mechanical things; some people prefer their umbrellas grown.

As I write this letter, which I will give in about two minutes to one of the Train's flock of postbirds, Professor Flanderdrack has still not returned. I hope he's all right.



* Other wings include the Northless, Salient, Spectacular, External, Superterranean, Ghastly, and Flightless. The rooms in them were named by the curators, but the wings were named by Mister Creemer himself.

Rats

I was sitting in the Train station in Jiligamant today, having visited the clockwork market that shows up in the town's main square every so often. Jiligamant is inhabited nearly entirely by mice and rats, who make some of the best clockwork in existence. No one else is better at tiny details.

Of course, having been a center of rodent culture for generations, it's not just the small mice and rats that live in Jiligamant. There are rodents of all kinds - squirrels, capybaras, chinchillas, three-legged gerboas, and probably a lot more that I don't know about. Even the town's humanoid inhabitants look rather rodent-like. There are winged mice the size of bumblebees and a clan of rats the size of hippopotami, who live in what used to be the town's sewers. Jiligamant has six or seven layers of sewers altogether; being a town of rodents, the pipes always have rats living in them, even when they're in use. The rats in the working sewers gradually dry out and brick up parts of them to make houses. This inevitably causes the whole sewer system to back up and stop working, at which point the town builds another one underneath it. Only a sixth of Jiligamant is above ground. The giant rats, who are as close to nobility as you'll find in Jiligamant, have the whole top level - the original sewers - more or less to themselves.

Anyway. I was sitting in the Train station, eating my lunch (some sort of grain thing from a food stall in the market) and waiting for the Train to finish exchanging a boxcar of seeds for a boxcar of clockwork pipe crawlers. A crate of pipe crawlers had, apparently, not been switched off or properly sealed; they were making things rather interesting for the loading crews when a tall gray rat in a blue frock coat came and sat down next to me.

"Morning," he said. It was four in the afternoon. "You ever been to Pickerell's Peak?"

I hadn't, and said so.

"Well, don't." He was quite emphatic. "Nothing there but fir trees and loonies. I was sitting at the Train station there, that little one that looks like an umbrella and never has anyone in it, just sitting there and minding my own business when a lizard in a tuxedo comes along the tracks and says to me, 'have you seen a house around here?' Now, if you'd been to Pickerell you'd know there's not a house within six miles of the station, not even a lean-to, so I gave him the look I give ceiling salesmen and said that if there'd been a house then I'd missed it. So he said fine, he'd wait, and I'll be flanneled if he didn't sit down there and wait! For a house!

"So I sat there with him and ate my lunch, and asked him if he wanted any, but he said he was allergic to cheese, said it made him grow fur, so I said what's wrong with a bit of fur then, and he said that he had nothing against fur but only in the Wintertime. In the Wintertime, he said, he ate cheese until he was so fluffy you could hardly see him.

"Well, I couldn't think of anything to say after that, so I just sat there and ate my lunch. Me waiting for my Train and him waiting for his house. And I'd just said to myself, well, he'll be waiting here a lot longer than I will, when there's a clattering noise off along the tracks, and around the corner comes a house. A house. Perfectly ordinary, the kind you see in Tazramack or anywhere, four stories high and one room wide. It was blue with dormer windows. Had those little fiddly bricks on the chimney. And it was walking, I tell you, just walking along on four great planking feet made all of boards. I could see the nails sticking out of the knees. And it walked right along the tracks, making a racket like you wouldn't believe, and settled down right in front of the station like a big dog, so that its little front porch was level with the platform. And you know what that lizard said? He said, 'my house appears to have arrived at me. Good day to you.' And his house stood there, calm as a horse, while he walked up to the front door and went right in. And then it stood up again on its feet - it had knobs on its toes like on a banister - and it clattered off along the tracks until I couldn't see it anymore. And what I say is, anyone who lives in a house that bounces like that can't have many dishes left by now. I mean, honestly, is it too much to ask for a man to sit and eat his lunch in peace? Why does every loony in the Railway Regions have to come and sit next to me?"

I nodded sympathetically. He gave me a suspicious look at that, stood up, and hurried away without another word.

I could have asked him the same question. Somehow, though, I doubt he'd have taken it well.