Departure

The gafl have apparently eaten their fill, ballooning to three times their previous size, so the caravan packed up and left Denemat this morning. I was surprised to discover how many of the people I've seen around the village are actually passengers on the caravan. Denemat's population, apparently, is even smaller than I thought.

I went back to say goodbye to Fenbit and Hasisha before we left. They were sitting in the shade of their acacia again, though the tree had moved to the other side of their house. Perhaps it wanted a change of scenery. They gave me a package to deliver to their grandson, who apparently lives in a remote town called Snarkish. If the caravan happens to come across the town on its journey, I'll deliver the package myself; if not, I'll give it to someone else before I leave the Desert. It will find its destination eventually.

The package seems to weigh almost half what I do, which is why they're not sending it by postbird. The postbirds refuse to deliver anything that weighs more than they do. Heavy mail has to take its chances with foot travel. Inhabitants of the Golden Desert are used to waiting months or years for their packages to arrive.

The train of wagons had already lined up at the outskirts of the village when I arrived. Everyone was loading things aboard. The merchants in the caravan are transporting a wide variety of cargos. One entire wagon is full of parsnips and munchmelons; another holds cages of pahareets, jazz birds, and salamanders. Several harried-looking potter's apprentices were shifting towering stacks of ceramic tiles, glazed with brightly colored butterflies and sheep and squid and peacocks, and wrapping them in thick woolen blankets before loading them into crates. Further on, a team of the caravan's largest and strongest lifters were carrying heavy chests reinforced with iron bands and massive padlocks. I don't know what was inside them. Most of the lifters were samovals, who tend to be larger and stronger than average; there was also an upright elephant with painted tusks, a few of the masked people I've glimpsed occasionally in the Desert, and a pair of twins who looked almost human, aside from the armadillo scales across their backs. They lifted chests that were larger than I am, and must have weighed three times as much, without any visible effort.

A team of men and women in white robes were taking great care in loading crates onto one of the wagons. A few of the crates were still open, and I could see glimpses of complex machinery inside, all gleaming brass and polished lenses. One of the team - an avian woman with jet-black feathers, who was panting in the heat despite the hood shading her face - gave me an enthusiastic explanation when she stopped to rest.

"Is for, eh, measure the sand, yes?" She fanned herself with one feathery arm. "Is for… Look in sand, see what is before. Sand now is small pieces, but before, maybe is castle, or mountain, or glass, yes?" She pointed to a crate where an elaborate series of lenses sat, half wrapped in cloth, gleaming in the sunlight. "Look with this, see castle, mountain, glass. What sand is before."

I'm still not entirely sure what she meant. Some unusual variety of archaeology, perhaps? The equipment was nearly all packed, so a demonstration was out of the question. My Amrat, unfortunately, is nowhere near as good as her English, and I'm no geologist. Most of what she said went completely over my head. She didn't seem disappointed with my incomprehension; she just shrugged and smiled, a slight rumpling of the feathers at the corners of her beak. "Eh. When you maybe learn more Amrat, I tell you again. Yes?"

One of the wagons has been cleared out and altered to hold a single passenger. Normally, a caravan would not allow this; space is too limited to waste an entire wagon on one person. (I will be sharing a wagon with five other travelers and their luggage, as well as a shipment of assorted fossil shells, and sleeping on top of my luggage.) However, from what I've heard, this passenger is not only wealthy enough to pay for a whole wagon; he is also aquatic. The alterations to the wagon were mostly to make it watertight. The wagon bed has been sealed - I assume with tar, or snail glue, or something of that sort - and filled with river water. The canvas roof has been replaced with a silk canopy nailed down tightly on all sides. This, apparently, will hold moisture inside the wagon and keep the water from evaporating too quickly.

I don't know the passenger's name, but I've heard that he's from a wealthy family of river merchants from the Scalps. How he got all the way out here, I have no idea. I hope he doesn't mind being stuck inside a wagon for the next month or so.

The caravan set off shortly after noon. This was later than it was scheduled to leave - I could hear Tirakhai's voice from one end of the wagon train to the other, booming at steadily higher volumes the later it got - but it's nearly impossible to organize this many people, much less to do it on time. I'm impressed we only left a few hours late.

The gafl handlers had been maneuvering their charges into position all morning, checking harnesses and providing a few last snacks before departure. They steered the gafl with a sort of percussive code, thumping out quick rhythms on the shaggy hides that told the creatures to stop, go forward, turn left, and so on.

I managed to find a good place to sit when we left; it was a seat near the front of one of the central wagons, where I had a good view of the whole caravan. It was quite a sight. All the gafl started nearly at the same time, lurching forward with surprising speed as they stretched and compressed their massive bodies. Hundreds of soft feet hit the sand at once. The sound was like a pillow fight of operatic proportions.

The rest of the day's journey was largely uneventful. The wagons slid over the dunes fairly smoothly, though they seemed to find more bumps and pebbles than I would have thought possible in what looked like perfectly smooth sand. The springs on their shafts at least kept them from sharing the gafl's lurching gait.

There was always someone singing. Over the course of the day, I must have heard dozens of melodies from one wagon or another. Karlishek identified a few of them for me when he happened to be nearby; one was a love song, another a prayer, a third a comical ballad about a man who built a house out of sand.

The sun set an hour or two ago. The wagons are currently arranged in a circle around a large campfire. There is little wood in the Golden Desert, so we're burning gafl dung. The handlers collected enough over the course of the day to make a sizable fire. Thankfully, it has almost no smell at all. The gafl themselves smell strongly of rosemary right now, as their handlers have been rubbing the herb into their fur to keep away parasites. The gafl seem to like the smell; they stuff their faces into each other's fur and sniff happily every time we stop. Most of them are sleeping at the moment. Their silhouettes are like grassy hills in the dark, rising and falling slowly with their breathing.

All the passengers who are still awake sit around the fire. Supper was a bewildering array of shared food, contributed by everyone, followed by an hour or so of songs and storytelling. I missed most of the stories, but I was able to at least hum along with the songs.

By now, everyone is quiet. Most of the passengers have wandered off to their wagons to sleep. The few who remain sit around the crackling fire, writing letters or journals, or playing games with boards and decks of cards that I've never seen before. It's peaceful.

The moon and grandmoon are high in the sky above us, wearing the campfire smoke like veils. There must be a million stars around them. Bats and night birds fly overhead, black on black, little fluttering silhouettes that croon and squeak softly to each other. I have a bed of sorts set up in the wagon, but I might just sleep outdoors tonight.

After all, it's not as if it's likely to rain.

Pakals

Practically every area of the world has come up with its own method of putting food inside bread. There is the sandwich. The pasty. The pie. The calzone. From Froongia, we have smooshi and sashaymi, layered stacks and intricate little slices like edible millefiori wrapped in rice and seaweed; from the Great Shwamp, the gleaming boiled spheres called gulashlub; from Banterkrat, a hundred varieties of intricately folded flatbreads, like origami with food baked inside. If one prefers desserts, there is the cream bun, the eclair, the jambritch, the crepe, the scone, the krifle, the cannoli, the tanchee, the rangoon, the pillidesh. I have yet to find a place without its own variety of food-in-a-crust.

Wherever you go, the purpose is much the same. Everyone wants food they can carry around, food that won't dry out or get squashed or make their fingers sticky. The best way is usually to wrap it in some sort of crust and turn it into its own little self-contained object.

The Golden Desert's version is the pakal.

Pakals are collections of food wrapped in dough and baked, or fried, or occasionally boiled. They are the shape of rounded river pebbles. The crusts are hard on the outside, making a beautiful bready thump when you tap them. They can contain virtually any food that exists in the Desert. Meat, cheese, cabbage, chocolate, fish, fruit, an endless variety of vegetables and spices - if it's edible, you will find it in a pakal sooner or later. They come in practically every imaginable size as well, from tiny ones the size of marbles (popular among children and the Desert's rodent populations) to the steaming, house-sized pastries baked for certain festivals.*

Of course, it's impossible to tell from the outside what is inside a pakal. As a result, it's traditional to punch patterns into the outer crust before baking, like the holes in a pie. The holes let out steam and keep the pakal from exploding when baked. The pattern they form tells you what's inside. Market-goers in the Desert learn to read the crusts as they go. Little fish symbols mean fish of some sort, usually some species from the river Lahra. Triangles mean cabbage. Diamonds mean chocolate. Meat pakals usually have a simple picture of the animal on the top, unless the baker wasn't quite sure what it was, in which case they just have a star instead.

Some pakals are left unmarked, for the adventurous eater.

I have been largely living on these little pastries, in addition to my usual diet of meat and vegetables and chocolate and whatever else happens to be available. (The Golden Desert is sadly lacking in slug meat, but it makes up for it with its wide variety of tasty hoofed animals and edible cacti.) Pakals are common, varied, and cheap, and they travel well. It's what they were made for, after all. Though many modern pakals are essentially pies, juicy pastries of meat or sand-apple, they were originally a way to make dried meat and vegetables last longer and require less packaging on long Desert voyages. In less civilized centuries, some of the more warlike Desert tribes would skewer pakals on their spears, so that they could snack on horseback while fighting each other.

There has been no war in the Golden Desert since the Locust Marauders died out, but it's still easy to find tough, salted pakals baked for long trips. In the dry Desert air, they last nearly forever.

I have always had a kind of magpie attraction to small, beautifully made things.** Pakals are no exception. It is nearly as much fun to collect the little patterned loaves as it is to eat them. I love nearly all food, but there is something special about these compact little gems of the baker's craft.

If they weren't so tasty, it would almost seem a shame to eat them.



* Some of these giant pastries have gone on to become permanent homes. I met a woman in Hemrikath who lived inside one of the empty crusts. It had been emptied of its filling long ago, and larger holes had been cut for windows and a wooden door. I asked her if she ever got the urge to gnaw on the walls. She said no; the old bread had gone stale years ago and was roughly the consistency of granite. The smell of its contents still lingered, though, however faint, and she occasionally woke up from blissful dreams of figs and cinnamon.

** As a traveler with no permanent home, I have to be wary of this tendency, lest I end up as ridiculously overburdened as Elva Ursunorn's fabled Packrat. Though the world is full of beautiful things, I have trained myself to keep only the miniature and the edible ones. People often ask why I have so many random small objects hanging around my neck.

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.

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.

SuyMaTmakk

According to the TiLeKraNas, SuyMaTmakk is the only real city on the Scalps. There are a few large towns that like to call themselves cities when they think they can get away with it, and a couple of ghost cities where no one lives except night-haunts and the intensely solitary, but SuyMaTmakk is by far the largest concentration of living people. It's built around the only lake.

When I first saw SuyMaTmakk, I thought it was on fire. The setting sun caught the cloud of mist that hangs constantly over the city, raised by its hundred waterfalls, and lit it all up in orange. The buildings, made of sticks and straw and sod bricks, cast scarecrow shadows against the sunset.

Every river on the Scalps eventually empties into Lake Twiliat. There are only four of them, so this is not quite as impressive as it sounds, but that's still a lot of water for the Scalps. The Hley comes from the East. The other three rivers are the KleMit (West), the HatPaLikk (South), and the Flyeek (Northwest, except during full moons, when it moves around to parallel the HatPaLikk from the South).

The entire lake spins slowly, as if someone's opened a drain at the bottom. According to those who live in the lake, that's fairly accurate. There's a giant hole in the floor of the lake. It's called the Hwuyk - literally, the Drain. Most lake-dwellers stay away from it; the current is too strong to resist past a certain point. Many people have gone into the hole, curious or simply unaware of it until it's too late. Only a handful have ever come out again. They've returned over land, all of them, stumbling across the Scalps on dusty feet or carried in barrels of water by traveling merchants. Their stories have made little sense. They've raved of moons, of coal-fish, of strange and secret oceans. As they recover their senses, they lose their memories of their journeys. No one has ever gotten any sense out of them. The world beneath the Drain remains a mystery.

Some call Twiliat the Lake with No Plug.

It's actually surprisingly difficult to reach the lake by water. Its constant spinning has carved a huge bowl in the ground over the centuries, and the banks are much higher than the water. In many places, they actually overhang it slightly. Fish lurk in the shadowy places underneath, waiting for prey that doesn't have a hook in it. Water only leaves the lake through the Drain; everything above ground flows into it, not out. The four rivers reach the lake as waterfalls. Only the stupidly adventurous sail over those. There are a few systems of locks around the banks, series of stepped pools that lift boats with clever arrangements of valves and gates, but few boats use them. Instead, most of the city's shipping trade takes place in a ring of canals around the raised edges of the lake.* Much of the city is built around and over these canals, or clinging to the steep banks below them. Many buildings slouch on piers over the slowly swirling water.

The dry part of SuyMaTmakk forms a ring around the lake; the submerged part of the city forms a somewhat smaller ring inside it. Their populations are about equal. The city is evenly divided between the people of the air, the people of the water, and the amphibians who travel between the two.

The only people who sail on the lake itself are fishers and scavengers. Whole islands of debris build up in the center of the lake.** The current draws them together, but it's not strong enough to pull them down into the Drain, so they simply float on the surface, spinning gently. Everything that falls into the lake and floats eventually ends up there. The islands are made up of broken furniture, lost toys, dead fish, papers blurred to illegibility, leaves and sticks and wood shavings and a hundred kinds of dust. Some of them are old enough to have sprouted grass and small bushes. There are people who make their living by rowing or swimming back and forth, scavenging in the shifting heaps of trash and lost things. They bring back what they find and sell it in the city's markets. Their booths are full of stained books, locked boxes with no keys, dolls with waterweed in their hair, wooden clocks with their gears full of silt. The scavenger's booths are the first places people go if they lose something. Chances are it will turn up in one of them eventually.

The city itself is a chaotic jumble of buildings. Wood is just as scarce here as elsewhere on the Scalps, so the buildings are made of wicker, of crooked sticks lashed into bundles, of piled sod bricks topped with grass, of bones taken from the elephant graveyards outside the city.*** I don't think there's a straight line in all of SuyMaTmakk. The city tangles around the edges of Lake Twiliat like the nest of an enormous bird.

I haven't actually seen all that much of it yet. The sun set shortly after my first glimpse of that crazed silhouette against the sky, and it was dark when we began to reach the outstretched fingers of the city's river docks. The lamps on them are lit by bottled fireflies and exquisitely trained salamanders. In a city made of sticks and straw, actual fires are extremely scarce. The streets are mostly dark after sunset.

The inn the TiLeKraNas usually stay at is on the Hley, so we didn't actually set foot on the streets tonight; we simply tied the raft up at the dock, next to a shack built on a huge floating dome, and went inside. I looked back as the door was closing and saw the dome lift its head out of the water. It was an enormous turtle.

The inn is called the Hmofrem Pekelli (the Eloquent Pig). It's a cozy, slouching building made of sod bricks. From outside, it looks like a grassy hill with windows. The walls are threaded with embroideries of living roots, some of which reach pale flowers out to the lanterns or the dusty windows. The most bored or drunk patrons of the bar pour various drinks on them; some turn the next day's flowers interesting colors, as if the plants themselves are drunk. A few regulars have become experts and can combine drinks to give the flowers multicolored stripes or splotches. The other patrons generally agree that they don't have enough to do.

All of this is still only what I've heard from the TiLeKraNas; they come to SuyMaTmakk often enough to be familiar with the most interesting parts of the city. It was late when we arrived, though, and the children went straight to bed (after some protesting), soon followed by the adults. I've only stayed up late enough to write this letter and hand it to the patiently waiting postbird. My own exploring will have to wait until tomorrow.

* Twiliat literally means "Ear." It is, after all, a hole beneath the Scalps. English-speakers call the city's main waterway the Ear Canal.

** This might explain why rafts on the Hley look the way they do.

*** Most of the bone-houses' inhabitants are immigrants from Trammelghast, where a house is not considered homey until it's haunted by at least one shrieking specter. They see the dead as something like eccentric pets. Their neighborhoods tend to remain politely out of earshot of the rest of the city.

Bubble-Wrap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

The Boardwalk

I left Meligma this morning, bringing with me a sack of climbing potatoes (the farmers say they keep longer in the humid Shwamp than any other food) and a few bottles of the fruit dye that the Meligmans use on their pod-houses. Trilliko was quite pleased with the sketch I made of him. In return, he gave me a small charm carved from cypress wood. It's shaped like a spectacled owl and is supposed to protect the wearer from falling from great heights. His mother carved it for him; he's never worn it.

"Not something I need, eh?" he laughed, flapping his wings and knocking one of the other trick-hunters into the water. "Don't tell her I gave it to you," he added. "She thinks I lost it years ago."

I will miss talking to Trilliko.

The Great Shwamp, it turns out, has an extensive system of boardwalks in the wetter areas. This is the only way to travel if you can't fly and don't want to swim. It was mostly built by beavers. Most things in the Shwamp were built by beavers. They have shown little interest in maintaining the boardwalks, though, and age and Shwamp damp have taken their toll. The boardwalk is a ruin of patches and detours now, twisted and sagging, parts of it completely submerged. Half of it seems to be held together by the weeds and fungi growing from the rotten boards. It creaks when stepped on. Whole sections of it have collapsed altogether. Soon after leaving Meligma, I came to a fork in the path - or what had been a fork, long ago. It was not much of a choice anymore. One branch was still intact, though it leaned at a drunken angle and was patched with a mad zigzag of boards, sticks, and broken furniture. The other branch was nothing but a line of disintegrating posts sticking out of the water like rotten teeth. Mushrooms and marsh flowers grew from the stumps.

I didn't go that way.

Large parts of the boardwalk are actually quite beautiful. The trees are enormous here, cypresses and redwoods and inundation willows, feet in the water and heads in the clouds. The branches are dripping with silvermoss and other epiphytes. Brackets the size of cart wheels grow from the trunks. Walking under a redwood at one point, I briefly became the center of a small shower of cones. I don't know what dislodged them - a squirrel, perhaps, or a gust of wind too high to notice from the ground. Fortunately, the cones were the size of grapes and mostly empty space. I might have been injured otherwise. Some trees grow larger and larger seeds the taller they get; redwoods grow taller than any other trees, but continue to produce the same elegant little cones. They just make more of them. Judging from the size of this tree, there were probably tens of thousands still waiting to drop.

Later in the evening, I got my first glimpse of marsh-wisps. Technically, I suppose I didn't actually see them; no one ever does. What I saw was a sudden blooming of blue lights in the water around the boardwalk. Marsh-wisps are gaseous creatures. They eat by finding pockets of swamp gas, those little clusters of bubbles that break the surface every now and then, and igniting them. The small blue flames provide most of the light for night travelers in the Great Shwamp. The ones I saw looked like wildflowers, small blue blossoms among the dark trees, or fireflies that had taken their name more literally than usual. The soft whoosh of flame was quite audible from the closer ones. I was glad that the boardwalk was too rotten to burn.

Even the crumbling path itself has a sort of decrepit charm, like an old ship encrusted with barnacles. You never quite know what you're going to find in it. I ate lunch in the afternoon with a family of mice who live in a chest of drawers, one of many old pieces of furniture that have been used to prop up the boardwalk. I don't know where it all comes from. Several of the mice are actually experts on antique furniture; the abundance of it in the boardwalk is the reason the family moved here in the first place. It's been many generations since then, and they've intermarried with the local water-rats and taken to moss-farming and fishing, but a few in every generation still take an interest in antiques. The chest of drawers they live in was apparently built during the reign of the Dowager Duchess of Glog, who was half marsh serpent and needed monumental wardrobes to contain her outfits. One of her most famous tube-gowns contained a full mile of lace. It quickly became the fashion in Glog to own enormous furniture, which is why so many of the largest houses in the region are now partially submerged. There's only so much weight a Shwamp house can take before it begins to sink. When this became obvious - and several basements became underground lakes - most of the enormous furniture was disposed of, which is how so much of it ended up underneath the boardwalk. This is also the origin of the narrow quarter-dressers that are unique to the Great Shwamp. Much of the furniture was quite beautiful, if oversized; sawn neatly into quarters, it was still perfectly functional and a much more sensible size.

I learned all of this from the matron of the family, a stately mouse who has broken several records by living to the ripe old age of six. In addition to being the thirty-six-times-great-grandmother of most of the little mice who ran around climbing and splashing and squeaking the entire time, she is also the family's current authority on antiques. I think she was glad to have an audience who wasn't tired of hearing about them. She gave me marshweed tea (which was surprisingly good) in a doll's teacup, part of a set they keep for visitors, and I gave her a saltwater scone I'd been saving since I left the coast last month. She thanked me, saying that it should provide the family a whole week of desserts.

The entire time we were talking, her thirty-six-times-great-grandchildren kept sneaking up and running off with pieces of the scone. I'm not sure it will last that long.

Linewurm

The Train came around a curve this afternoon to find what looked like a lizard-shaped heap of scrap metal shuffling along the tracks. It was almost as large as the engine. When it saw the Train, it got off the tracks in a hurry, shedding machinery and pots and rusted sheet metal as it went. The noise was horrendous. It sat by the tracks as the Train went by, lashing its tail and hissing at us. The combination of clanking and hissing sounded like a steam engine about to explode. Its teeth were quite impressive. There were storm-drain gratings fitted over its eyes.

I only recognized the junk-heap creature from photographs and descriptions in books; I'd never seen one above ground. The Train had surprised a linewurm.

Small dragons and their relatives, such as salamanders, are usually content with anything metal. That's one of the many reasons to keep salamanders in lanterns; they've got a piece of shiny metal that's bigger than they are. Craftsmen's salamanders are generally happy with their ovens or forges. The ones in the great metal hulk of the Train - or, better yet, the floating cities - must feel like kings.

Large dragons usually have more refined tastes. They prefer gold. This is by no means true of all dragons, or even most, and the less obsessed ones can get rather unpleasant if you imply that it is. Quite a lot of dragons these days collect gears, or teapots, or umbrellas, or any number of the other pretty things that people make. I know of half a dozen off the top of my head who collect only books. (Frankly, I don't know why everyone doesn't do that, but you know how I feel about books.) Some don't collect anything - though most dragons consider those ones eccentric, or possibly just lazy. Still, all the most traditional dragons collect mainly gold and the occasional gemstone.

The linewurms - distant relatives of dragons, like giant white newts - have almost nothing in common with their winged cousins except their size and their love of metal. They certainly don't share their brains. Even the most uncivilized and temperamental dragon can outthink most smaller creatures; when you live for centuries and have a brain larger than an entire cow, you can hardly help it. Linewurms are considerably less intelligent. They spend all their time hoarding things. They prefer metal, but they'll settle for rocks. They're not picky. When they find something nice and hard, they glue it to themselves with the mucus they secrete, making their own armor plating to cover their soft bodies. They make claws out of old knives and pickaxes stuck to their toes. When two linewurms meet, provided they don't find each other attractive (and most of them don't), they fight. The fact that their claws and scales are secondhand and handmade makes them no less eager to use them. They fight, and the winner takes whatever useful bits and pieces are left on the floor when the loser runs away. The focus is generally on knocking armor off rather than actually hurting each other.

In other words, linewurms collect stuff to fight and fight to collect stuff. People have suggested that they could just leave each other alone, but the linewurms don't seem interested. Perhaps there's nothing better to do down in the caves.

The mucus that holds linewurm armor together eventually covers it with a thick white layer, like glue, giving the metal (and other assorted junk) a pearly shine and softening its edges. It reduces the clank of metal on stone to a quiet rustle. Old linewurms look like the ghosts of junkyards. The mucus also coats the insides of the caves where they live, turning rough stone passages into the smooth tunnels that linewurms prefer.

This, incidentally, is where linewurms got their name: they are wurms* that line stone with slime and line themselves with stone. It seems like rather a pointless cycle, but linewurms seem to like pointless cycles.

A rare few wurms have been known to make sculptures out of mucus, building them up layer by layer with the patience of a cave drip forming a stalagmite. Most don't have the patience.

The hardened mucus is said to be like tree rubber, only better, and there's gotten to be quite a trade in stolen linewurm upholstery. People go down into their caves and peel the coating off of the walls. It's a job for only the exceptionally brave or foolish. Linewurms grow to be several hundred feet long, keep themselves well armed, and suspect everyone they meet of being a thief. (To be fair, they're almost always right.) They're the main reason that abandoned underground villages stay abandoned. Linewurms like abandoned villages. People always leave such nice stuff behind. Fortunately, there's no shortage of abandoned underground villages in Hamjamser, so linewurms rarely need to bother with the inhabited ones.

Of course, not all linewurms live in the wild; quite a lot of them live in Mount Moler, primarily as garbage collectors. Once again, they're not picky. Lineworms have been known to live above ground, but only with completely opaque armor (they sunburn easily) and truly enormous sunglasses. It's extremely rare to see one out in daylight. I still have no idea what the one we saw today was doing. According to the passengers at the back of the Train, it got back on the tracks after we passed, clanking away behind us and lashing its tail angrily. It stopped first to pick up some of the pieces it had dropped.

Later in the day, when the Train stopped at the village of Hoggen, I found a horseshoe and the crank handle from some piece of machinery - a gramophone or pepper grinder, perhaps - caught on the front of the engine. Shreds of rubbery mucus still clung to them. The crank handle looked quite old, an elegant piece of Caroque brasswork. I brought them in and put them in my suitcase. I think I'll hold on to them for a while. It's not every day you get your hands on a piece of a linewurm's coat-hoard. Who knows - maybe I'll get a chance to return them someday.



* "Wurm" being the term for the amphibious variety of dragon. Not to be confused with "worm" (a limbless invertebrate), "werm" (any other limbless animal, such as furry snakes and nullipedes), "wirm" (a long, segmented robot), or "warm" (the same as hot, but slightly less so). "Wyrm" refers only to scaled dragons (though in some parts of Hamjamser, it's considered rude and therefore highly dangerous to use the word to their face). Why we can't just use completely different words for all of these, I have no idea.

Valestrina

The Train had to stop for almost an hour today, in the middle of nowhere, because there was a valestrina on the tracks.

Valestrini are widely considered to be one of the seven most beautiful birds in Hamjamser. (No one seems to be able to agree on which is the most beautiful of all, but the top seven are always the same.) They look a bit like a cross between a peacock and an ostrich. Some believe that's exactly what they are. It's rare to see a valestrina anywhere colder than Clam-Porkle, much less in the Railway Regions during Winter, so half the passengers in the Train tried to get out and have a look at it. After five minutes, the Train was blocked as much by its own passengers as by the valestrina. Several people climbed onto the roof. (One of them was me - I like to be up high, out of the crowd. It's surprisingly easy to get onto roofs with a little practice.)

Every type of feather in existence can be found somewhere on a valestrina. They have rather more feathers than can really fit on a single bird, actually, and they lose them constantly. Predators can track the birds by the trail of feathers they leave behind them. (Not many predators bother with valestrini, though, as they kick like mules and are mostly fluff.) The colors vary from bird to bird - black and white, violet, a peacock's blue and green, or just about anything else. This one was mostly coppery orange. It had a peacock's crown on its head, a scarlet crest all the way down its long and elegant neck, and pink wattles so long they looked like a catfish's whiskers. Round-edged feathers like copper pennies covered its neck and breast. Its flight feathers - such as they were - were tipped with sapphire blue. (Valestrini are quite incapable of flight, though not all of them realize it.) Thick golden feathers covered the top half of its legs; past that, its feet were a vivid pink, and as scaly as a velociraptor's. Its tail was a magnificent sheaf of feathers, like a bouquet of the feathers from the tails of a dozen birds. There were woodpecker stripes in black and copper, the speckled rectangles of a mockingbird (blue and gold instead of gray and white), quetzal plumes almost eight feet long, the fluffy curls of an ostrich, and about fifty peacock eyespots in every shade of gold and copper and jeweled blue. It spread it while we were watching - just once - and there was a sigh of awe from everyone on and around the Train. It was like watching every flower in Melligan bloom at once. Nothing in the world has a tail like a valestrina's.

After a while, it became clear that the bird was not planning to move anytime soon, so a few salamander keepers went out to shoo it off the tracks. The valestrina watched them suspiciously. When they got within ten feet of it, it began to leap up and down and scream as if it was being murdered. Valestrini may have beautiful feathers, but their voices are somewhat less melodious than a crow's. Brilliant feathers flew everywhere. The salamander keepers backed off, alarmed; the valestrina let out a few more ghastly squawks, fluffed its feathers indignantly, and settled back down again.

The same thing happened whenever anyone got near it. The best place on the mountain, apparently, was right in the middle of the tracks, and no one else was allowed there. Eventually, people started settling in, as the valestrina showed no interest in moving two feet over and getting out of the Train's way. Picnic blankets sprouted around the Train. I took about twenty sketches and photographs of the valestrina. I may try to draw or paint it someday, but I doubt I could ever really do it justice.

Mostly, everyone just sat and watched the bird. It made little hiccuping noises. It bobbed its head like a chicken and scratched at its feathers, which fell out. It was still the most beautiful thing on the mountain.

After an hour of this, the valestrina seemed to decide that it had been stared at enough for one day, or that it was bored, or that it actually preferred that patch of ground over there, or something. I don't know. For whatever reason, it got up and poked its lovely way into the woods. Everyone watched it go.

There was a moment of perfect silence.

Then half the people on the ground ran to pick up one of the dropped feathers, and the other half started talking all at once, and the Train workers started shouting to each other, and the engine roared as it warmed up again, and there was all the usual noise and chaos that happens every time the Train leaves a place. It was like waking up from a dream. In fifteen minutes, everyone was back on board, and we were rolling along as if nothing unusual had happened. The rest of the day was perfectly ordinary. Still, whenever anyone mentioned the valestrina, all conversations would stop, and we would stare blindly at nothing in particular, remembering sunlight on feathers the color of copper and sapphire and gold.

Town of Fossils

I spent most of a week this Summer in Tazramack, a cold town high in the mountains, where things keep for a long time. Everything there has a strange, fossilized quality, as if the town exists inside an old photograph. I couldn't escape the feeling that if I had visited a hundred years ago, I wouldn't have been able to tell the difference.

Nothing ever dies in Tazramack. Not permanently. If it does, it is promptly stuffed and put in the nearest museum. A third of the people are taxidermists, and half the buildings are museums. They are dark and dusty and vaguely creepy. The narrow halls and dimly lit rooms are stuffed with stuffed animals - deer, horses, trantelopes, thugrofflers, cats and canines of all sizes, tortoises, seals and dolphins, even fish. There's an entire museum devoted to the art of preserving dead frogs. Another is basically a three-story filing cabinet full of drawers of dried insects. A third specializes in teeth, from micro-shrew bicuspids to a havernack's tusk that required the construction of a second tower, as it is taller than the museum itself. For some reason I could never understand, every museum in the town - no matter what else is in it - has a stuffed alligator hanging from the ceiling somewhere. Just one. It might be in an entrance hall, a dusty back room, or even hanging nose-down in a broom closet, but it will be there somewhere. No one seems to know where the alligators came from originally. People in Tazramack don't ask questions about the past; they just preserve it.

When the town was built, it seems to have been dug out as much as it was built up. The streets are narrow trenches cut into the stone of the mountain. The first floor of every building is hollowed out, rooms carved in the blocks left between streets, and the wooden upper floors were built on top of them later. Some buildings even have stone furniture sprouting like mushrooms out of the floor. Fossils coat every piece of stone in the town. Only the most delicate have ended up in museums; there isn't room for the rest. Half of the mountain seems to be made of fossilized creatures. The streets are paved with stone clams instead of cobblestones. Every wall is lined with trilobites, ammonites, reticulated sea-nullipedes, and hundreds of other things I'd never even seen before. There are shells smaller than grains of sand and sea-serpents so long that they stretch through the foundations of five or six buildings. Scaly coils form arches above alleyways. The central square of the town was hollowed out around the three biggest fossils: a prehistoric shark, a giant squid, and an enormous eurypterid, circling each other on pedestals of stone above the ground. It's impossible to tell whether they're preparing to fight or taking part in some ancient aquatic dance. On market days, the townspeople set up stalls in the spaces between the eurypterid's legs. Pigeons perch on tentacles the size of trees and make their nests between the teeth of the giant shark. People count their sharks' teeth (the main form of currency in Tazramack) and haggle over the price of sump squid in the shadow of creatures that could have eaten them without bothering to chew. No one seems to think anything of it.

I'm still not sure whether I'm glad or not to have shed my skin in Tazramack. It came off in late July this year, when the Train had stopped in the town to pick up a few boxes of coal. (They use it to train the salamanders, the way dog trainers use biscuits.) As I've said before, I enjoy most of the effects of my particular example of the Shapeshifter's Curse; the changes I go through all year mostly seem to be adaptations to make me more comfortable. When the weather changes, I usually have to endure only a few weeks of discomfort before I change to match. If I spent long enough in the water, I'd probably grow gills. (I haven't had much interest in trying that yet.)

I've had fur in the Summer a few times. I don't know how full-time mammals can stand it.

Even when my fur falls out, the way it does almost every Spring, I try to spend the Summer in cold places. the Mountainous Plains practically roast themselves at this time of year. The same heat that keeps Cormilack thawed and soggy all Winter boils it like a squid steamer in July (another reason so few mammals live in Cormilack.) Normally, I shed in the Spring the way most mammals do, except that I don't grow a Summer coat to replace the Winter one. I just stay bald until Autumn. This year, for some reason, it was different - I lost not just the fur, but the top few layers of skin with it, so it all came off in one piece. (I'm used to shedding my skin, but not when there's fur on it.) Underneath was a layer of scales in a rather nice shade of orange. I think my salamander approved.

I was lucky to be in Tazramack at the time, I suppose; skins shed by reptiles are common enough, but there may not be another place on Hamjamser where people would be interested in a skin shed by a mammal. I had half a dozen taxidermists offering to buy it by the next day. I eventually sold it to the Tazramack Museum of Taxidermy (one of over thirty museums of taxidermy in Tazramack - it gets to use the town's name because it's the biggest), which had exactly eighteen of the thirty-six furs shed by shapeshifter's descendants in the Railway Regions. The other eighteen are in a museum in Tetravania. The Tazramack Museum was delighted to have mine and take the lead.

In short, there is now a stuffed Nigel Tangelo at the Tazramack Museum of Taxidermy. They have it dressed up very nicely. They wanted to buy some of my clothes as well, for perfect accuracy, but I refused.

It's a strange town.

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.

The Vanister Museum

Today, the Train arrived in Vanister, my favorite town in the Railway Regions. I think the Train likes the place as well; it seems to stop here more than anywhere else. This is the third time this year.

It's odd how so many towns in the Railway Regions are centered around something larger than they are. In Jijangola, it's the Galleria; in Milldacken, it's the river; in Vanister, it's the Museum.*

Vanister grew up around the Creemer mansion, back before it was a museum. It's one of the town's five oldest buildings and the reason most Train passengers stop in Vanister. The enormous, sprawling building takes up almost a quarter of the entire town with its heaps of wings, turrets, and extensions; it's nearly impossible to find the original mansion in the heart of it all. Like the Galleria in Jijangola, the building is so large that the rooms shift around constantly.

The Vanister Museum was founded - and most of it built - by Henrijohn Ignitius Creemer. (His middle name was something of a family heirloom, handed down from a distant ancestor who happened to be a dragon.) Mister Creemer was one of the first to make his fortune in Milldacken, and it didn't take him long to become a rich and eccentric collector of Stuff. No particular kind of Stuff. Just Stuff. His goal in life was to have one of everything.

He got surprisingly close before he died. As a result, the Museum is quite possibly the largest and most complete collection of Stuff in Hamjamser.

Unfortunately, Mr. Creemer had no interest in any sort of organization. He simply piled things into one room of his mansion until it filled up, then built another. It wasn't exactly messy - everything was neatly stacked, with fragile things carefully wrapped and placed in drawers or airtight containers - but there was no reason or logic to any of it.

Mr. Creemer left his mansion and everything in it to the town when he died, as a museum, under the condition that they would keep and preserve every single thing in it. They agreed gladly; the Creemer mansion had been the main attraction of Vanister for years. The Museum is now the reason most people even know the town exists. Somehow, though, I doubt the first curators really knew what they were getting into. The Museum has teams of cataloguers who have done nothing for a hundred years but look through the piles, sort the things in them, and list them in the Museum's vault of index cards (two million and counting). They still aren't done. Not only are they still listing new things, they're still finding new rooms. There seems to be no end to them.

At first, it was easy to keep track of the rooms; the lobby was in the Grand Foyer, the card catalogue in the old kitchen, the failed flying machines (Mr. Creemer had a special fondness for them) in the ballroom, and so on. Unfortunately, not all the rooms were so distinctive. When they reached the Fifteenth Moderately Small Left-Handed Broom Closet - with no end in sight - the curators decided it was time for a change.

They decided to follow the example of the Lupine Astronomers' Guild on Mount Moler. Their system seemed like a good one. That is why, for the last few decades, anyone who finds a room in the Museum is allowed to name it.

All the curators of the Museum (and there are a lot of them by now) carry rolls of string at all times. When one of them finds a new and unlabeled room, he or she attaches the string to something in it so that it can't get away (the rooms might move around, but the things in them don't... usually) and runs down the central staircase to fetch the Museum's engraver, who grumbles all the way up the stairs and brings a name plate for the room. The curators have gotten quite creative over the years. A lot of them name rooms after themselves, their relatives, their sweethearts, and their favorite authors, of course, but certainly not all of them.

One whole wing (there are over thirty altogether) was first discovered by a lover of mythology from the Golden Desert; she named about a dozen rooms after people and places from Desert stories, and all the following curators have continued the tradition. The wing is full of names like Sham-Tarkazia, Masserath, Karkafel, Masethol and Masaganax, Kim-Raika and Kraf of the Thousand Rubies, Shar-Emishar and Tas-Rampa-Saskireef. The room named for the fabled Fasra Koum is full of enameled vases from Thrass Kaffa, the city of the endless waterfall, each one shining like a hundred jewels in the light from the old arched windows.

There was one curator who named every room he found after himself, much to the annoyance of the rest of the staff. When it was discovered that he had started his own private collection of the Museum's silverware, everyone was only too happy to fire him. That also led to an additional rule that no two rooms could have the same name. (All but one of the rooms named after that particular curator were renamed by public vote, though they were kind enough to leave his name on the biggest one.) That rule, in turn, led to the creation of a second card catalogue to keep track of all the rooms. They have a way of multiplying.

As if there wasn't enough in it already, people from all over the world keep bringing in curiosities they think the Museum might not have. Mr. Creemer's collection includes most of the things that have been invented or discovered since his death. There are two rooms full of prototype gramophones: one for the ones that worked, another (larger) for the ones that didn't.

Of course, the things found in a room generally don't stay in the room, as the curators of the Museum like order more than Henrijohn Creemer did. Once a room is found, its contents are sorted, catalogued, and parceled off to the various rooms and galleries in which they logically belong. The room is then used for whatever needs the space.

Unfortunately, this means that rooms named for their original contents don't necessarily match what ends up in them. The Eggplant room (rumored to have been found filled to the ceiling with ceramic eggplants) currently holds a collection of independent Caroque scrollwork (carved during the Caroque period by a group of carpenters who decided that elaborate decoration didn't have to actually go ON anything). The Chamber of Novelty Pickaxes is lined, floor to ceiling, with neat rows of embroidered buttons. The Rainbow Room holds mourning outfits, the Cacaphonium is full of earmuffs, and the infamous Hall of a Trillion Toilets contains knitting and embroidered samplers.

Some people wonder about Henrijohn Creemer's sense of humor. Others are more concerned about the Museum curators.



*In Samrath Kazi, it was beauty, but that didn't work out so well.

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.

Lunch on the BAS Fernmarvel

There's still no sign of the road, but we found something much more interesting today.

We had been walking for most of the morning, passing hot springs and salamander hunters crouched over lava pools, when the scraps started appearing. They were widely scattered at first - just a shred here and there, pieces of the tough grub silk used for airship balloons. The airtight wax had melted off long ago.

We followed them for a while, having nothing better to do while looking for the road. I picked them up idly as we walked.

There were more of them the farther we went. It was getting hard to find a spring or patch of ground that didn't have a scrap of cloth in it somewhere when we came around a steam vent and saw the gondola.

It was obviously the source of the scraps: an old airship gondola, practically an antique, covered with old-fashioned Caroque scrollwork and tarnished brass. It was half-submerged, nose-down, in a steaming hot spring. The cockpit was completely underwater. It had been brightly painted once; faint patches of red and gold remained in crevices and the frames of the shattered windows. The steam had taken most of it off.

It took me a moment to realize what it was, as I'd never seen an airship gondola without its balloons before. They were completely gone. That was hardly surprising, though, as their remains were spread over several miles of the canyon. The hydrogen must have ignited at some point. The support ropes drooped forlornly from their hooks, rotting in the damp.

As we got closer (after all, if you find a crashed airship, how can you not investigate it?), we saw that the spring it was sticking out of was an odd gray-green color. It smelled like an explosion in a tea shop. Some sort of mineral thing, I assumed. That happens to some hot springs.

We were sitting there staring when a man came out of a small hatch near the back (now the top) of the airship. All we could see from the ground was that he was small and purple.

"Ahoy, visitors!" he shouted. "That's the sight I like to see, yes sir, it is! Got any tea? No? No, you don't look like the type. That's all right, we can't all have tea, after all. Well, what are you waiting for? Come in, come in! I haven't got all day! Well, actually I do, but who cares about that? I've got lunch, that's what matters! Come in and we'll eat it!"

With that, he disappeared back inside, still talking.

We hesitated for a moment. It had been a rather unusual greeting. After walking unsuccessfully all morning, though, I was rather tired of it, and an invitation to lunch was no less welcome because the person who gave it was a bit odd. Most people are a bit odd.

Fortunately, there was another door farther down the airship; there was enough ornamentation on the hull that I could have climbed to the upper door, but Plack couldn't have managed it. Llamas can't climb vertical surfaces. He was reluctant to go in at all at first, but the promise of lunch was enough to tempt someone who had been eating nothing but cube turnips since we left the upper jungle.

The man we had seen opened the lower door as we reached it. He was a reptile of some sort, about four feet tall and stocky, with the most enormous ears I've ever seen. Except for his silver-tinged purple scales, he looked almost like a flightless bat. He was wearing an old captain's uniform, very worn and faded, patched with scraps of the same fabric that lay all over the ground outside. I think it had once been blue. The shoulders and lapels were trimmed with scuffed gold braid.

"Ah, there you are, good!" He beamed up at us. "Come right in, I got lunch all ready on the boiler, we can use the good china from the old days! You must be wondering who I am, eh? I'm the captain of this here ship! Been sailing the skies for thirty years! Been sailing this here puddle for the last twelve, actually, but I likes it here, so that's all right. Only problem is there's no one to talk to. Had to talk to myself since last week. You're here now, though, so I can make up for lost time! Come in and eat!"

The captain spent the next few hours showing us around his airship - the parts of it still above water, anyway - and served us a lunch of boiled cacti (deflated), geyser shrimp, and scones on chipped, fern-patterned gilt china. Apparently, he boiled his food in the hottest part of the spring. It had the same strange herbal smell that the water did. I don't normally drink water that smells strange; the captain seemed perfectly healthy, though - almost frighteningly so - so I didn't worry about it. It did make the food taste good.

The airship was magnificent. It was gradually disintegrating in the heat and the damp of the Boiler Room, but it must have been one of the most splendid airships in the sky before it crashed. Every room was a masterpiece of lightweight Caroque architecture. Carved float-wood panels made up the walls, every unmildewed curve and curlicue still gleaming in the dim orange light coming in through the cracked gallery windows. Light bronze leaf coated the banisters of the stairs. The grand ballroom was missing the entire upper wall; trees grew there, sheltered from the heat outside. Their branches echoed the arches of the broken Palladian windows. Fifteen years of fallen leaves and branches from the jungle overhead had turned into a thick layer of soil, perfect for their fallen seeds.

"Not much of a ballroom now, this place," the captain commented. "A conservatory, that's what it is, and you won't find better on any other airship, they got to be retired like the old Fernmarvel here." (That was how we found out the airship's name; the gilded letters on the hull had long since vanished, either fallen off or stolen.) "You like jellyapples? Course you do, who doesn't like jellyapples, no one I know, and I got 'em growing right over there by the staircase. I'll get us a few after lunch."

We finished lunch (and the promised jellyapples) in the old navigator's cockpit, a small, cozy room full of rusted machinery and water that had leaked in through the shattered observation windows. Like the water outside - even more so, actually - it was green and steaming and smelled like tea. The captain sat right in the middle of the rising steam, perched on the back of an old swiveling chair bolted to the deck. It stuck out diagonally over the water now.

The cockpit was full of souvenirs of the airship's travels: fossils from the Golden Desert, cyclonoscopes from Mount Moler, a compass still faithfully pointing to a tree in Bannarbangle, seashells resplendent with spines and spirals, a tiny lizard saddle, a four-foot havernack tooth from Morianny carved into the shape of a lighthouse, tasselled Tetravanian tapestries, coins from all over Hamjamser strung from the ceiling... An airship can pick up a lot in thirty years. An antique pipe crawler, still ticking, slept in a glass case to keep its clockwork dry. None of the airship's plumbing worked anymore; the captain had replaced its pipe-wrench claws with scissors and a sewing machine needle so that it could repair his uniform. The strange green scent of the water filled the room.

The captain sighed happily and settled down in the middle of it all to chew his jellyapple. "I've never liked the cold." He shook his head fiercely. "Not even when I was young. Never liked it. Only thing I didn't like about flying an airship, well, that and snobby passengers, never liked them either. I'm more comfortable here than I've been in decades. After we crashed, the crew, passengers all left. I stayed behind. Went down with my ship, I did, and I'm not about to come back up without it, no sir! (That's me, you see - sir - since I'm the captain.) I like this place. I got heat, I got steam for me old lungs, high altitudes weren't good to 'em, and-" he pointed to the steaming, greenish water below - "I got the biggest teapot in the world!"

That explained the smell and the odd greenish color, then. Not minerals after all. It was an entire spring of tea.

He grinned. "You must be wondering where I gets it, yes?" (I was, in fact, but he didn't wait for an answer.) "Hunters bring it to me. All kinds. Green tea, chamomile, Vinchess Purple, mint, fruit zinger - I got 'em all mixed in there. I gives 'em information, you see. I know where the big salamanders hide. I can hear 'em." He tapped one enormous, leathery ear. "Hear 'em all the way from here, humming to themselves down in the lava."

We sat there in the tea-steamed clutter of the cockpit for several hours, listening to the captain tell stories of his travels. I might post a few of them someday if I remember. He sent us off near sunset with the leftovers; there was far more food than the three of us could eat in one meal. We've got a whole bag full of cacti, shrimp, and everlasting ship's scones. Overall, it was the best lunch I've had since eating at the Potted Pumpkin in Cormilack. I don't think the salamander hunters just come for advice.

Neither Plack nor I had a chance to say a single word the whole time. The captain talked constantly. We did say goodbye when we left, but he had started an impassioned monologue to his pipe crawler by then, and I don't think he heard us.

I'll have to remember to bring some tea the next time I cross the Greenhouse Cliff.