Wings of Stone

There are many ways of navigating in the Golden Desert. By far the most reliable are the singing sand rats, who can hear the unique song of each town and city and follow it to its source.* Human Wayfinders, blessed with the rare gift of a sense of direction, are also quite popular here. Those unable to afford a Wayfinder travel by kilopede. The great arthropods are just as home in the Golden Desert as in the Mountainous Plains, though they have to drink a lot, and many order snowshoes - several hundred pairs each - so that they can more easily traverse the shifting sand. Other people prefer tree compasses, which forever point to the living sources of their wooden needles. For a prepared Desert traveler, there are almost as many ways of finding places as there are places to find.

We had none of them. For lack of a better method, we fell back on the oldest means of navigation: pick a direction and hope that it leads somewhere. Fortunately, we still had several days of food and water, and we were finding enough on the way to keep our supplies replenished. Death by deprivation was not an immediate worry. All we had to do was keep walking and try to keep ourselves amused.

We spent the first few days singing and telling stories. Karlishek turned out to have a pleasant tenor voice and a large repertoire of folk tales and songs, which made the hot days go by much faster than they might have. (We traveled in the mornings and evenings, resting when it grew too dark to see or too hot to move, but the air was uncomfortably hot by an hour after sunrise and only grew worse from there.) Mirenza's collection of ancient legends and songs, in the bent keys of traditional Desert music, was also fascinating. As the widest-ranging traveler of the group, my eclectic mix of songs and stories made an interesting contrast; the tale of Gan the Foolish Fence-Builder, from the lush and carelessly governed land of Mollogou, required as much explanation from me as the tales of the ancient and highly ritualized Miravi Empire did from Mirenza.

Garnet continued to speak little, murmuring something about her singing voice being out of shape, but she listened closely to everything.

The Miravi Empire was on our minds quite often during those days. Hardly an hour went by when we didn't pass some remnant of it. Broken pillars quivered on the horizon. Piles of stone blocks lay half-swamped by dunes, still retaining just enough right angles to tell that they had once been the foundations of houses. Markers for long-vanished oases gave names to dry depressions in the sand and invited travelers to drink their fill. At night, we slept in old, half-buried ruins, surrounded by ancient stone and illegible hieroglyphs. Statues looked down on us: the stone-faced gods of a thousand years ago. No one but archaeologists remembers their names.

Every single statue had wings, or stumps where wings had once been.

In the ancient Miravi Empire, according to Mirenza, the ability to fly was considered divine. The wingless were normal; the flying were gods, rulers, cloistered and extremely rare. The highest-born spent their entire lives in towers and hammocks, never once setting foot on the ground. The palaces of the Empire were fantasies of towers and balconies and open courtyards, with more doors opening to the air than to the ground. Many rooms were accessible by flight alone. Others had narrow stairs or ladders added as an afterthought, a vulgar necessity for the rulers' poor, earthbound servants.

Those with wings but not flight were considered cursed and cast out into the desert. Even now, the nomadic tribes that wander between cities have an unusually high occurrence of vestigial wings.

As odd as this method of choosing rulers seems to us now, they seem to have run the Empire quite well for a time. It was one of the most prosperous countries in Hamjamser for several centuries. Most of the cultures in the Golden Desert have Miravian roots; the ancient Miravian language is the basis for modern Amrat, the tongue I have been learning from Karlishek and Mirenza. Modern Desert cities are built with the same majestic, highly ornamented architectural flair that the Empire perfected. The ancient Miravian cities were centers of art and trade and science, each city keeping a friendly and respectful relationship with the aquifrax that provided its water. These generous, enigmatic Desert spirits have probably never been as well understood, before or since, as they were by the ancient Miravians.

Unfortunately, as so often happens, this understanding eventually became complacency. All of this prosperity ended when the Miravians finally did something to annoy the aquifraxi. Accounts vary as to exactly what it was. Some historians believe it was due to political or religious differences; aquifraxi consider themselves subjects of the Rain Dragon (and he humors them politely enough, though he's never shown any sign of actually wanting to rule anything but tides and storm clouds). Others theorize that the dispute was over pollution, or excessive irrigation, or an infestation of imported foreign frogs. Whatever the reason, one day, every aquifrax in the Empire simply picked up and left. They took the water with them.

They hadn't gone far, as it turned out; they'd merely relocated to the uninhabited areas of the Empire. Within a few months, what had been empty desert was lush and blooming, and what had been fertile farmland was too dry to grow anything but dust and heatstroke. The people of the Empire packed up their things and left everything they'd built. In some cases, they only had to walk for a few hours to reach fertile ground. Many could still see their old homes as they built their new ones. The division between farmland and wasteland is a sharp one in the Golden Desert, though; people have to follow the water, wherever it happens to be. Without an aquifrax, the old cities of the Empire might as well have been on the moons.

Many of the wealthiest citizens stayed behind anyway, hoping desperately that things would go back to the way they had been, until their grand houses filled up with sand.

Most of the winged nobility were among them. The new settlements had been thrown together quickly, to give the farmers and craftspeople somewhere to sleep while they figured out how to feed an entire displaced Empire. There was nowhere for sky-dwellers to perch.

The Miravi Empire never really recovered. It took a long time to rebuild even a fraction of what had been lost, and in the bustle, most of the Empire's less practical traditions - such as the winged rulers - were left behind and forgotten. The rough settlements grew into stable towns and eventually became the Golden Desert's modern cities, such as Karkafel and Thrass Kaffa. The people developed new, somewhat more cautious relationships with the aquifraxi. Life returned to normal. Like most places in Hamjamser, though, the cities remained separate this time. They continued to trade goods and citizens and ideas with each other, but somehow, they never quite reunited into a single country again. It's not that surprising, I suppose. In every part of Hamjamser, empires have always been the exception, not the rule.

These days, the ability to fly is considered as ordinary in the Golden Desert as it is anywhere else. The winged hold everyday jobs and mingle with the flightless without hesitation. Many even consider the winged nobility to have been a foolish idea. In these modern times, most places in Hamjamser consider it unhealthy for rulers to be always looking down on their subjects. It gives them strange ideas.

Still, I have often seen the people of the Golden Desert gazing silently at the clouds, or at the wings of their neighbors. Perhaps a part of them still remembers a time when wings could bring them closer to Heaven, and not merely to the empty sky.



* They can even find things as small as individual oases, though they say those songs are little more than brief jingles.

Canyon Town, part three

In total, I believe we spent a day or two in the canyons. Perhaps three. Surrounded by so many centuries, it was easy to lose track of a few days.

We had grown accustomed to the sunlight coming only from above, filtering down through the narrow tops of the canyons to glisten on leaks from the raised aqueduct and cast shadows from the plants sprouting along its walls. When we finally turned a corner and found sunlight spilling through a doorway, it took us a moment to realize what it was.

We had reached an exit. Instead of another empty house, the arch before us was full of sunlit desert.

We approached the narrow opening slowly, half-disbelieving, like sleepers waking from a dream. We found ourselves strangely reluctant to leave - and not just because of the contrast between the cool canyon streets and the dry, sun-blasted dunes outside. The town had been home to many people once. Perhaps it was only my imagination, but I thought I felt a hint of sadness from the abandoned walls around us. The town couldn't have gotten guests often, and now we were preparing to leave.

Does a town grow lonely when no one lives in it? I don't know. If we had had a longer supply of food, though, I wonder if this one would have let us go so soon.

At the top of the arch was another statue, its features worn away by weather long ago. It might have been a bird of some sort. The words carved below the statue had lasted better, sheltered by its feet or talons, and Mirenza was able to read them.

"Is old poem of goodbye," she said, tracing the faded characters with one claw. "May wind stay at your back, water rise where you step, and such. Every place in Desert has same poem, little different."

It made sense for such a poem to be carved at the door to the desert, but it still felt eerily as if the town was saying goodbye to us.

When we walked out into the sun, Garnet fell behind for a moment. The small woman had barely said a dozen words since we'd become separated from the caravan. It took me a moment to notice she was gone. I looked back, worrying that we had lost her as well, and saw her whispering something to the stones of the archway. Perhaps she had felt that same sense of loneliness I had, and was giving the town a few comforting words. I don't know. I couldn't hear her, even if I had been rude enough to listen.

Far above her head, a stray breeze plucked a single peach-colored flower from one of the aqueduct plants. It drifted slowly down to land in Garnet's hand. She gave the sandstone wall a kiss and turned to catch up with us.

None of us spoke for several hours. I was quite content to be left alone with my thoughts, and extended the same courtesy to the others. We didn't say a word until the sun set and we set up a rudimentary camp for the night. A rocky outcropping provided shelter, as well as some prehistoric graffiti for Mirenza to read, and Karlishek identified a nearby stand of fat cacti as edible. They were a little like cucumbers that had grown already pickled. I made myself useful by building a fire, a task with which I have some experience, though working with the handful of miserly twigs we were able to find took all of my skill and a good deal of luck. Garnet took out a knife that looked about large enough to peel carrots - potatoes might have been a stretch - and vanished into the darkness, returning a while later to surprise the rest of us with a stringy desert hare and some kind of edible lizard. We ate, for the most part, in silence.

The flower could, of course, have only been chance. 

Perhaps. 

In my dreams, I heard the whistling of wind through narrow windows and doors, the trickling of water, and the sound of laughter so faint it was only a dream of a memory. The stillness had a measure of sadness to it - but there was hope there, too. More than anything, there was patience. A town is meant for people. A town carved in stone can afford to wait until the day when they finally come back.

Canyon Town, part one

We wandered in the canyons for several days.

There is, as yet, no reliable strategy for navigating a maze. Their constant shifting defeats any attempt to be methodical. Most people foolish enough to step into one simply wander around until they reach an exit - or, depending on the maze, perhaps something else of interest.

Wayfinders, being blessed with superhuman navigational abilities, can step into a maze and immediately find a perfectly straight path leading to their destination. As none of us were lucky enough to have this rare ability, we were confined to ordinary methods.

Nearly all of my supplies were, of course, in the wagons that had moved on without us. This could have been a serious problem. Fortunately, I have been a traveler long enough to have developed certain paranoid habits. I had with me a bag containing supplies (food, water, pens and paper; just the essentials) for several days. I try to keep this with me at all times, regardless of inconvenience, for just such situations as these. The supplies inside were meant for one, but could easily be stretched to three for a week or so.

Food, then, was not an urgent problem, as long as we rationed our supplies. Neither was water. The river that had carved the canyons was clearly long gone, but water still flowed through them in a sandstone aqueduct above the street.* Steps led up to it periodically. One of the first things we did was to climb the nearest staircase and fill our canteens.

After that… We wandered.

The city was carved right into the walls of the canyons, themselves carved by thousands of years of water erosion. The graceful, flowing lines of the striped stone dipped in here and there to reveal a window, a staircase, an arched doorway. Mirenza and I kept stopping to sketch particularly interesting pieces of stonework or take rubbings of the carvings on the walls. Mirenza was in her element - surrounded by stone and history and the elegant script of the canyon-dwellers' language. She pointed out glyphs, architectural styles, and geological strata with equal enthusiasm.

Most of the layers of stone were smooth - as smooth as sandstone ever gets, that is - but occasionally, we would find one with fossils embedded in it. The canyon-dwellers had added carvings to a few of these layers, so that the fossil ammonites and eurypterids had tiny stone riders or chariots hitched to them. One particularly large trilobite had an entire city built across its back, with hair-thin rope bridges crossing the gaps between segments.

Whoever the inhabitants had been, they seemed to have left in a hurry. The sand-drifted streets were littered with fallen jewelry, broken pots, wagon wheels rusted into arches of metallic lace.

This was when Mirenza brought out the machine she'd been carrying under her robe.

But I shall write more about that tomorrow.



* Anyone who has lived in a city will know that one never drinks anything that's been below street level.

Message in a Monolith

The stone stood in the sand directly ahead of us. We saw it long before we actually reached it; the vague dark shape had been rippling on the horizon for hours, motionless except for the heat that makes everything in the Golden Desert shimmer at a distance.

When we reached it, it turned out to be a rather unremarkable standing stone. It looked like sandstone of some kind. It also looked old, though - I didn't even recognize the characters that were carved into its single flat side - and nothing made of sandstone keeps its details for long in the gritty wind of the Desert. The writing was still legible.

There are far too many things hidden beneath the sands of the Golden Desert for anyone to even dream of counting them. The dunes roll back occasionally and uncover ruins, tombs, monuments from civilizations long forgotten. They might stay visible for a week, a day, or only a few hours before the dunes swallow them up again. Most travelers (especially if they're of the scientific persuasion) will stop to at least look at things like this stone. The common opinion is that if the Desert has unveiled something for you to see, it's probably worth taking a good look. You'll probably never see the thing again, after all - and even if it holds no meaning for you, who knows? There could be an archaeologist in the next town who's been looking for it for years.

This is the Golden Desert, where the history is deeper than the sand. People stop here for interesting rocks.

Predictably, everyone in the caravan took this as an excuse to take a break. The gafl were unhitched from the wagons, free to go snuffling around in the nearby sand; everyone else got out food or books or pillows and sat down to eat or read or snore for a while.

The team of scientists (I'm still not sure whether they're geologists, archaeologists, something more obscure, or perhaps a combination of all three) piled out of their wagon and gathered around the stone. They tested and measured it with various instruments, taking notes and chattering among themselves. One fished a dilapidated box camera out of her luggage and took a careful photograph or two.

Mirenza, the avian woman I spoke to earlier, stood back a bit from the others. She seemed to be focusing on the writing on the stone. I could hear her muttering under her breath. She squinted at the barely legible hieroglyphs for a few minutes, then turned back to the others with a funny half-smile on her face. I could only pick out a few words of what she said next. The other scientists' reactions ranged from chuckles to confused frowns.

Karlishek told me later that the inscription on the stone roughly translates as follows:

"You have seen the stone I carved, and read the words I wrote. That is all I really wanted. May your travels be happy and your path even."

The signature had been worn away by the sand.

The Baffled Banker

Most of the transportation in the Golden Desert is done either by caravans or along the Desert's few permanent roads. The times when a caravan arrives in a village on a road - such as right now - are prime opportunities for trade, so the caravan will be staying in Denemat for a short time, trading spices and cloth and various other crafts for basic supplies. (Apparently, the caravan's pack animals eat truly prodigious amounts of vegetables.) It will be another day or two before I leave.

I spent today wandering the village and painting various things for people. There is a surprising amount of color in Denemat once one knows where to look for it. Like CheChmit, which I visited last year, Denemat is mostly shades of gray and sandy brown. There's just the occasional red door or green window frame. Some people will just paint a few stones of a house, or a few posts of a fence, outlining them in white or pale yellow to accentuate the pattern of the material. It's a nice touch. It has obviously been some time since any of the paint was retouched, though, and much of it was peeling off. It was a busy day. Fortunately, in most cases, speech was unnecessary for the jobs; the villagers and I could communicate just by sketching and pointing at colors.

A few goat-like people wanted me to paint their horns, which took me a little longer to figure out. Seeing the results - only the most intricate patterns would do - several of the reptilian villagers asked me to paint their scales as well, requesting streaks and spots in bright yellows and oranges. Overall, I might have painted more people than buildings today.

The elderly couple I met yesterday have been kind enough to let me sleep on the bench in their garden for the next few nights. Their names are Fenbit and Hasisha. Before coming to the Golden Desert, I had rarely slept outdoors, except in the wild areas between towns. In the small Desert towns and villages, though, it's quite common; it rarely rains here, and there is little chance of having one's possessions stolen overnight, at least in the small communities. Travelers need little more than a spot out of the wind to spend the night. I'm glad to have met someone kind enough to provide one.

I was on my way back there, just before sunset, when I came upon a man standing just beyond the center of the village. He was dressed in an immaculately pressed tweed suit and carried a briefcase in one hand. Sand was blowing into his shoes.

"Excuse me," he said in English. "Could you direct me to the bank?"

I looked back at the main street of the village, bewildered; I'm not sure if Denemat even has a bank. The villagers usually pay in eggs or radishes and don't even bother with money. When I turned around, he was gone.

At first, I suspected that this was a hallucination brought on by the heat. The man had been rather too opaque to be a ghost. When I drew a rough sketch for Fenbit and Hasisha, though, they exclaimed over it, pointing out the briefcase and the decidedly out-of-place clothing. What I gathered, from the small amount of communication we could achieve, is that the man is a wanderer of an unusual sort. He pops up in town after town in the Golden Desert, constantly asking for directions. No one has ever seen him stay long enough in one place to actually find what he's looking for.

There are many stories of eternal wanderers, such as the Hat Man, the Stubborn Postmistress, and the Flying Dutchman.* I'm not sure what this one would be called. The Baffled Banker? The Confused Clerk? The Disoriented Office Worker? Fenbit and Hasisha had never heard of him introducing himself by name.

Whoever he is, I hope he finds the bank he's looking for.



* The origins of the Dutchman story have, sadly, been lost to history, along with the definition of what exactly a "Dutchman" is. Literary historians have speculated that it is a type of large echinoderm. This would explain why the flying is worth noting.

Creeping Hieroglyphs

After I wrote last night's letter and handed it off to the postbird, the innkeeper led me upstairs to a narrow stone room roughly the size of a coat closet, which I am sharing with an elderly tortoise.

At least, I'm fairly sure it's a tortoise. It hasn't actually come out of its shell yet. I'm certain there's something in there, though, if only because of the snoring.

Exhausted as I was, I collapsed into the heap of mismatched cushions that serves as a bed and fell asleep almost instantly. I dreamed that I had become a creature of living flame. Every time I tried to write a letter, the paper would burn up in my hands, and the words I'd written would speak themselves in the crackling of the flames.

I woke to find that I had left the curtains open last night and was now lying in direct sunlight. This explained the dream. Even early-morning sunlight is hot in the Desert. The room was far too hot to stay in at that point, so I left the tortoise shell to its nap and went out to look at the village. I'd only seen it in the dark last night.

Rikanta is a small town, perhaps two or three dozen houses, centered around an old sandstone castle. These are fairly common in this region. Like most of them, this one was built when the Locust Marauders were at their peak and had started making forays into the Golden Desert. You can still see the tooth marks in the stone. The Marauders are long gone, though, and the castle has been empty for nearly as long. It hasn't had an enemy to keep out in decades. The town's Chooser* lives in a house now, and the castle's few intact rooms are home only to sand-colored day bats and the occasional night wanderer. Swallows and potter wasps build neat clay nests under the crumbling battlements. The outer walls shrink just a little every year as people take the old, elegantly cut stone blocks to build new houses. They're not about to let good stone just sit around.

Most of Rikanta's buildings have a thick, chunky look as a result; they are small houses built with castle-sized blocks of stone. Many of the walls are thicker than the width of the doorways. As well as looking funny, this is actually a good design, keeping the houses cool during the day and warm during the night. There is very little that insulates as well as two feet of solid stone.

The architecture, however, wasn't the first thing I noticed in Rikanta. The town is overgrown with creeping hieroglyphs, a form of two-dimensional life adapted to live on dry stone. They look like letters, neatly painted in faded brown dye, a growth of random symbols that never quite resolve themselves into a readable alphabet. Their seeds are windborne and look like commas. The glyphs alarmed me at first - had the word-plague spread here from Arkit? Fortunately, a few townspeople assured me that the glyphs had been around for decades and had never shown any sign of interfering with the town's actual writing - though the appearance of the occasional Halsi character in the otherwise random symbols suggests that the two might be interbreeding.

Neat, geometric, and completely incomprehensible (though many linguists have tried), the glyphs apparently started at ground level and simply worked their way up. The popular theory in Rikanta is that they started on an old vase or pot buried in someone's basement. Craftsmen in several of the old Desert civilizations used creeping hieroglyphs as decoration, encouraging them to grow on pottery and carvings. No one is sure whether these craftsmen liked the nearly-legible patterns or if they were just too lazy to add their own decorations.

Wherever they came from, the glyphs have spread by now to nearly every (previously) unmarked surface in sight. They seem to fill the role that ivy or tambourine wisteria might in a wetter place. Lines of elegant symbols twist their way up stone blocks and wooden posts, along walls and across rooftops, curling around corners and tracing the most minute imperfections in any surface. On occasion, they will even spread to the skin of a person who sits too long in one place.

Mammals usually don't care; the glyphs are hidden beneath their fur, and being two-dimensional, cause no actual physical change. Some say that they even keep fleas and bedbugs away. The town's furless inhabitants are somewhat more likely to object. Many of the reptilian townspeople have rather dramatic scale patterns of their own, and they don't want to add a layer of meaningless symbols on top of them.

Fortunately, the glyphs can be killed by sufficiently heated debate. Inscripted people often go to the town hall, a stone building completely devoid of glyphs, and attend meetings of the elders' council for a dose of remedial bickering.



* Chooser is a position somewhere between mayor and magistrate; most towns of any size at all have a council of elders and a Chooser. The relationship between them is a complex one, and I don't fully understand it yet, but I suspect that the Chooser's job is to step in when the council finally becomes too exhausted to argue anymore.

Word-Plague

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Sporetower

I've been uncertain whether or not I should write to you about this. It happened back in May, before I started corresponding again, and it is undoubtedly one of the strangest experiences I've ever had. If you have a sensitive stomach, you may prefer to wait until tomorrow's letter.

I was traveling on the boardwalk at the time. It was one of the above-water sections - fortunately, as it turned out. I had been walking for most of the morning without seeing anything particularly unusual. There had been a dead fish or two, but that's not all that strange; fish die all the time in the Great Shwamp. Something always eats them sooner or later.

As I kept walking, I came across more of them. Most were fairly small. When I passed the seventh one, a four-foot marsh pike floating on its side, I started to be uneasy.

The surface of the water gradually became covered with dead fish. The current was moving them along - at least, I hope it was the current. They kept pace with me as I walked. The bodies of water-rats and small alligators joined them, green and brown in the expanse of tan and silver. I'd rather not discuss the smell. Through gaps between the fish, I could see the bleached shells of crustaceans drifting across the silt. I almost didn't notice when the trees began to be covered with mushrooms.

I certainly noticed when I reached the source of the mushrooms. The boardwalk disappeared into a wall of cloud. Whatever force was moving the bodies in the water seemed to be keeping it contained; the edge undulated slowly, but it didn't seem to be spreading. I thought it was fog until I walked - hesitantly - into it.

I got out much more quickly. After a brief and violent fit of sneezing, during which I nearly stumbled off the boardwalk, I turned around and looked at the cloud through watering eyes. It had, I noticed now, a slightly greenish shade.

An avian woman with black feathers and the face of a vulture was standing in front of it. She wore a necklace of teeth and rodents' skulls.

"My apologies," she whistled. "Normally I catch strangers before they walk in. You're new here, aren't you?"

There seemed little point in denying it.

She didn't speak English. It's difficult without teeth or lips. Many avians are capable of pronouncing the full range of necessary consonants with their throats, parrot-style; this one either didn't have the required vocal anatomy or simply hadn't learned. Fortunately, I'd been practicing the whistling language she spoke, the one that non-avians call Whoopish. It's easy enough to pick up if one has any musical ability at all (though it apparently sounds rather comical when whistled with lips).

Her name, she said, was Lady Carnelia Sarcoramph, and the cloud I had walked into was the boundary of the town of Sporetower. Visitors often react that way to it. Due to some quirk of the currents, or perhaps a geographical sense of tidiness, everything that dies in the Great Shwamp (and isn't immediately eaten) ends up there. The water is thick with bones and floating carrion. Fungi cover the entire town, sprouting on every surface, from the damp houses to the contents of the water below them. The cloud that surrounds the town is made of their spores. It's no wonder I couldn't breathe it. The townspeople are used to it; they breathe in spores like incense. Travelers, not being similarly adapted, have to cover their mouths to keep from choking to death.

I was ready to turn around and take another branch of the boardwalk, but Lady Sarcoramph said that wouldn't be necessary. I was a guest of Sporetower and would be allowed to enter the town. Her tone was friendly enough, but I got the impression that the choice was not mine to make. She gave me a tightly-woven silk scarf (to cover my mouth) and a pair of goggles and led me into the cloud.

The sky of Sporetower was perpetually overcast, the sun visible as a blurred and slightly greenish light through the fog. Flies and brightly colored carrion beetles buzzed through the murk. Mushrooms and shelf fungi covered every tree, every post of the boardwalk, many of them taller than the largest pligma or elephant's-cap. There were small toadstools even on the little rafts of mold in the water. The surface was still covered with fish, but they were obviously older than the ones outside the cloud, and continued to get older. I was able to see the entire process of decomposition as we walked. (The scarf and goggles kept out the spores, but did nothing against the smell; I tried not to breathe through my nose.) The fish around the boardwalk were little more than bones held together by floating mushrooms when Lady Sarcoramph stopped.

"Behold," she said. "The town of Sporetower."

As you've probably noticed by now, many of the towns in the Great Shwamp, lacking solid land, build instead on trees and clumps of marsh grass. Sporetower is built on mushrooms. The town floats in the water, sprouting from a raft of accumulated decay, a translucent heap of fungus taller than the nearby trees. I don't know how deep it goes. I don't even know how large it is. We were close enough by then to make out the closest section of the town, bobbing gently on the cemetarial water, but the farther sections were lost in the fog. Most of the buildings I could only see in silhouette. That was enough to make out their shapes. If there's any wood in Sporetower, it's either well-hidden or rotted nearly to nothing by now; the town appears to be built not only on, but out of enormous fungi. They form the walls and columns of every building. Stalks like pillars hold up mushroom-cap roofs, tubular chimneys, walls of fungoid brick or woven mold. The streets are made of enormous brackets, ringed like slices of trees. The town is built on the slope of the fungal heap; the streets climb at steep angles, often built on top of buildings. Twisted bridges stretch from roof to roof. Instead of dogs, carrion beetles of all sizes wander through the streets.

From the middle of this heap grows the Necrophyte, a monumental tower of fungus, porous and translucent and turreted with spore caps. It looks like a crumbling castle of mushrooms. Most of them have been hollowed out inside to make rooms and hallways; the narrowest stems have been carved into spiral staircases, punctured with spongey windows, connected to the rest of the building by high walkways of living mushroom. No one seems sure whether the building is a single fungus or a collection of many.

Lord Microbius Sarcoramph, the Undecayed Baron of Sporetower* and Lady Sarcoramph's father, lives with his extensive family in the Necrophyte. He apparently likes to invite every visitor to the town to dinner. He says it's for hospitality. Lady Sarcoramph says it's so that he knows whose pockets to go through if they return to the town by other means. "Few people come back to Sporetower voluntarily," she said. "Many say they will die before they set foot in the town again. It is surprising how often they turn out to be right."

I saw a few other foreigners on their way to the castle, wrapped up like travelers in the Shattered Waste. None of them live here. Every visitor wore the same scarf I did, and most wore the goggles as well, to keep their eyes from watering uncontrollably. Springtime pollen is nothing compared to the air of Sporetower. The townspeople delight in telling about careless visitors who sneezed to death.

The town is inhabited mostly by avians with no sense of smell. Like Lady Sarcoramph, many of them rather resemble vultures - bald, wrinkly heads, similarly bald and sinewy arms, austere black feathers. (A few are a startling blood-red. I don't know if it's dye or just a rare color, like redheaded humans.) They breathed quite comfortably in the murky air. After ten minutes or so of watching them through my goggles and scarf, I began to feel as if I was underwater, surrounded by fish. Every few minutes, I'd see someone nearby make a little swallowing motion; it took me a while to realize that it happened every time they inhaled a fly. I think a large part of their diet comes from breathing insects.

Like ordinary vultures, the lack of feathers is perfect for the townspeople's work. Most of them are scavengers. They wade through the water, sorting through dead animals, collecting useful bones and other bits and pieces. There's quite a lot of that. Sporetower is the largest source of alligator skin in the entire Shwamp. It's also the most painless, for both people and alligators; all the reptiles are already dead. The people of Sporetower receive all the material of a hunter or a livestock farmer with very little of the work. It's not for everyone, of course, but those who can stand to live in Sporetower consider themselves uncommonly lucky.

Of course, not everything worth scavenging is actually part of an animal. Alligators eat so many inedible things that the people of Sporetower call an alligator's stomach its "purse." A cutpurse in Sporetower is not a thief,** but something between a butcher and a beachcomber. They often find such indigestibles as bottles, eyeglasses, nails, pocketwatches, jewelry, and the metal eyelets from boots. Alligators apparently have a fondness for shiny things. There's a legend in Sporetower that the disappearance of Baron Bredebrick was only solved when his crown, his scepter, and his cousin's dagger turned up inside the same alligator.

This is the sort of legend one hears in Sporetower. Any other place would consider stories like this morbid. The townspeople here just think they're funny.

They have no sense of smell, but their tongues are quite sensitive, flicking into the spore-clouded air like snakes. They can taste which fungi are blooming at any given moment. Women wear mushrooms instead of flowers, choosing those with the brightest colors or the sweetest spores. I saw at least three sporist shops (florists are for plants) with lush bouquets of spore caps in vases of decayed wood or carrion. Restaurants grow carefully selected mushrooms on their tables; the customers shake spores onto their food instead of pepper. (In this town of galvanized sinuses, pepper is considered a rather bland spice, suitable only for the sensitive of palate.)

Many of the avians I saw had rings pierced through the wrinkles of their faces. Some had little bone-and-feather charms hanging from them, swinging freely from a nostril or neck-wattle. A few had bells that jingled whenever they raised their eyebrows. One of the guards at the palace gates had hardly an inch of his face unpierced. A row of rings spanned both eyebrows, a mix of all different sizes. The farthest right was too small for a finger; the farthest left could have been a bracelet. He was tapping out a tune on them as he waited.

The philosophy in Sporetower seems to be that flesh is a temporary thing, a substance that outlives its owner hardly at all, so there's no reason to be particularly careful of it. This makes sense when you realize that most of their contact with the outside world is through its skeletons. They might as well experiment with their faces; a few years after they're dead, there will be nothing left of them anyway. Their bones, however, they treat with exquisite care. However invisible it is in life, a bonesetter's work can endure for centuries beyond its owner's death. As the saying goes, skin is the present; bone is the future.

If I needed any proof of that, I got it when we passed through the gates (the first wood I'd seen since entering the town). The entrance hall was made of a transparent fungus; it was cloudy, like the air, but the surface was as smooth as wax. There was a skeleton sealed inside the wall like an insect in amber. Its hands were crossed over its ribcage. The bones were perfectly arranged, with the shadowy outlines of clothing around them, as if the transparent fungus had simply replaced the flesh and left the rest in place.

Lady Sarcoramph smiled for the first time. "There's my grandmother," she said fondly, gesturing to the skeleton. "Quite well-preserved, don't you think? My grandfather always said she had the loveliest skull he'd ever seen."

Her grandfather was a few feet farther on, equally well-preserved in the shadow of a broad-shouldered suit. Lady Sarcoramph pointed out the symmetry of his eye sockets and bemoaned the arthritis that had distorted his perfect knuckles. Only in Sporetower is beauty judged by the bones rather than what covers them.

The Baron had obviously inherited those bones. He was a magnificent avian, a good six feet tall, his feathers raven-black with faint crimson highlights. A few of the ones on his neck-ruff had been edged with gold paint. This seemed to take the place of a crown. Like perhaps a third of the townspeople, he had wings, though I don't know whether or not he could actually fly. Perhaps he could in his youth. Judging from his appearance, though, he had since been more interested in putting on weight than in lifting it.

One of his eyes was missing; he'd replaced it with a large glass marble, the kind with a swirl of color in the middle. I have no idea why. I would have asked Lady Sarcoramph, but she left as soon as we entered the great hall and sat with her father throughout the meal. The Baron talked at great length and great volume. I got the impression, though, that his daughter was the one actually paying attention to the room. Her conversation was short but carefully attended. If she's not already running Sporetower, I think she will be before long.

The great hall was sealed from the outside, every window made of the same fine silk as the breathing scarves, the air free of spores. All the visitors could take their scarves off to eat. I'd been wondering how we would do that. It was strange to see faces other than vultures - or, for that matter, to see anything unobscured by the spore-fog. After my introduction to the town, I didn't expect to have much appetite, but the feast Baron Sarcoramph provided was surprisingly appetizing. Contrary to popular belief, carrion-eaters don't eat rotten meat. They just aren't so picky about it being fresh. Everything here was quite fresh, though; the fish were only the most recently dead from the water around the town. Some of them had even been alive when caught. I didn't quite have the stomach to eat any meat, but many of the townspeople survive quite well on a diet of fungus, so that's what I ate. Properly prepared - and these certainly were - mushrooms can be as good as meat anyway. I tried not to think about what the mushrooms had been eating.

I don't really remember much of dinner. I found it difficult to concentrate on the conversation; the Baron's substitute eyeball kept distracting me. It spun in circles whenever he blinked. The other visitors were a rather subdued group anyway, many of them more disturbed than I was by the fungal architecture, by the invitation that seemed unwise to refuse, or simply by the amount of death in the town. I think we were all relieved when dinner ended and we were escorted to similarly filtered bedrooms.

Overall, the Sarcoramphs' hospitality was beyond reproach, but it seemed just a little too mandatory for comfort. I left a small sketch of Lady Sarcoramph and the Baron in my room, as a sign of gratitude, and snuck out of the palace before anyone was awake. I was out of the spore cloud by dawn. I don't usually leave a town so quickly, or without thanking my hosts in person, but I can't honestly say I regretted it. Sporetower is a fascinating place - beautiful, even, in its own strange and morbid way - but I prefer to visit towns where I can breathe unassisted and choose where I stay. One visit was quite enough for now. I may return someday, but not any time soon.

Perhaps after I die.





* It's a lifelong position; the title changes only after death. You can probably guess what it becomes then.

** Of course, this depends on whether you consider it stealing when the owner is already dead.

The End of the Boardwalk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Troll Game

The boardwalk has been deteriorating the farther I go. Nearly all of my traveling today involved wading. The boards are there, under the water, but you have to tread carefully or risk putting your foot through a rotten one. Still, despite its erratic condition, the boardwalk is the only way to travel through much of the Great Shwamp without swimming. It's inevitable that such an important route would eventually attract trolls.

For the most part, I object to trolls. I wouldn't mind paying their tolls if they actually provided something in exchange. Some of them do; there are many roads in the Railway Regions that would be completely impassable by now if not for their curmudgeonly but dedicated troll keepers. Few people in the Regions are particularly interested in roads. It's easier to take the Train. Most trolls, however, do nothing but get in the way.

The troll booth was built on the only unsubmerged piece of boardwalk I'd seen all day. Someone had done some work to keep that section, if nothing else, above water. There were so many posts and tree trunks wedged under and around it that it looked like a funnel shrike's nest. Many of them were held together with string. The house itself was more or less mushroom-shaped; the bottom floor was only as wide as the boardwalk, while the second looked just wide enough to lie down in. It was quite obviously a troll house. They're built to get in the way as much as possible.

As if that wasn't enough, the troll herself was sitting outside, fishing. She was one of the Northern trolls - built like a foothill, with a nose the size of a loaf of bread. She was wearing a coat made of strips of odd, shiny leather. They were quite obviously hagfish skins. Most people at least take the heads off first.

Normally, I would simply have swam around the booth.* I have no objection to getting wet. My books and supplies are not quite so waterproof, though. The only way to get them past intact was through the troll's front door.

She stood up when she saw me, her coat creaking in protest, and leaned her fishing pole against the house. The hook was baited with a slice of cucumber. She grinned at me as if she'd just caught a particularly large fish. Her teeth were a mix of brown, gold, black, blue, and missing. One of her tusks had knot patterns carved into the tip. I could see mice climbing through her hair.

"Gots any moneys?"

"Yes," I said quickly. Trolls often see a lack of money as an excuse to take whatever they want.

"Tha'sh good." Her voice creaked more than her coat, and the tusks made her speech even harder to understand. It sounded something like a rusty doorknob being ground up in a landslide. I began digging for change in my pockets, but she held up a long-nailed hand to stop me.

"NO! Firsht we plays ze Game."

"Game?"

She grinned again, even wider, and pulled a pack of battered cards out of her coat.

"Ze Game o' Pickerel Shproot."

From her explanation, I gathered that, unlike most trolls, she preferred to gamble with her victims before taking their money. If she won, she would take twice as much as usual. (What "usual" was, I have no idea.) She didn't say what would happen if I won. It seemed overly optimistic to hope that I would get by for free; a more likely possibility was that I would be eaten in revenge. Maybe no one had ever won before. I suggested that I could just pay her right then and be on my way, but she was quite firm about that.

"No wan getz by wizhout playsh ze Game. Boring here, eh? Gotza have shomething te do."

I couldn't very well argue with that.

From somewhere in her closet-sized downstairs, she pulled a card table with three legs and set it up on the boardwalk. From her coat, she pulled an enormous porcelain pipe; she wedged a lump of coal in the bowl and lit it. The smoke was black. She breathed in deeply and sat down, dealing the cards with the machinelike speed of a professional.

"Now liszen good," she said, "'coz I'z only gonna tell ye ze roolz wance. Ye gotz ninedy-sevhen cardsh in Pickerel Shproot. Twenny iz Flatz, shirty-six iz Numverz, elevhen iz Shproots, nine is Doublez, ten is Upz, ten is Downz, an' wan iz ze Shpit. Ye gotza make pairsh and Threezies. Firsht ta get three pairsh, or two Threezies, an' ye win..."

The rules were long and complicated, and I won't go into them all. I don't even remember half of them now, though I'll probably try to write down as much as I can recall later. I want to know more about this game. Does it even exist anywhere else?

I was surprised at the cards when I finally got to pick them up. The fronts of the cards were unmistakeably the madly detailed engravings of Reddish Crill. I'd never heard of him illustrating a deck of cards, but it's not particularly surprising. He did practically everything before his dramatic high-altitude demise. In my hand, I had the Nine of Corkscrews, the Three of Speckles, the Two and a Half of Rocks, the Reverse Sponge, Toothache, and a card with nothing on it but pink flowers. I tried to keep the backs of my cards hidden as much as possible. I wouldn't have been at all surprised if the troll was able to identify them by the coal stains.

Amazingly, I won the first game, more by beginner's luck than anything else. It's lucky that I pick up game rules fairly quickly; these ones were more confusing than most. The troll was not happy. The coal in her pipe glowed brighter, and smoke started coming out of her nose. She didn't say a word; she just shuffled the cards and laid them out again. I had won, so I got up to go.

"Besht two outta shree," she growled.

It didn't seem wise to argue.

She won the second game, after which she started to look happier. I had enough of a grasp of the rules to play the game, but not enough to be good at it.**

In the third game, I did my best to play badly, preferring to pay twice whatever the usual fee was rather than find out how gracious the troll was about losing. It didn't seem to matter. She was clearly not pleased with her cards. The coal in her pipe glowed hotter and hotter as the game went on, cards clenched in her rootlike fists. It only took a few rounds before it started shooting sparks; after that, it was only seconds before one of the sparks landed on her house. It started smoking immediately.

"FIRE!" roared the troll, erupting to her feet, upsetting the card table, and dropping her pipe in the Shwamp.*** She tore off her coat and began beating the flames with it.

Unfortunately, this was too much for the structure. Many of the strings had already been weakened by fire. At this new assault, they snapped. Knots broke, boards sagged, and as we watched, the entire house slowly tipped over into the Shwamp.

That put out the fire, at least.

Roaring with rage, the troll leapt into the water and sloshed over to her house. It was already starting to sink. It stopped when she dug her hands under it and heaved, lifting the entire structure several inches. I could hear dishes breaking inside.

I decided that that was a good time to leave. She seemed to have the situation in hand. As quietly as I could, I gathered up my luggage and crept over what was left of the boardwalk. I could hear her shouting unintelligible curses at her house long after I was out of sight.

I still wonder who would have won that last game.



*After checking for chekaraul and alligators, of course.

**Besides, the rules of drama require that every contest be decided only in the last round.

***It had obviously spent time in the Shwamp before. There were barnacles on it. From the look of them, some of the cards had been there as well.

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.

A Very Long Explanation for the Curious

Though the incessant rain and occasional hail have stopped (for the most part), the hills around Cormilack are still too sodden from rain and thawed snow to travel safely. Bits of road have a tendency to wander off downhill to explore. Even the Kilopedes are staying away; I haven't seen a single one since I left the one that brought me here.

I suppose you've probably been wondering where I've been these last few months.

After leaving the Kilopede, I stumbled through the hills in the dark for quite some time. Moonlit walks in the dark are much less pleasant when the moons are absent and the hills keep sticking rocks in front of your feet. I must try to get a good salamander someday. They're expensive, but the light would be worth it if wandering through mountains in the dark becomes a habit.

Anyway. Eventually, somewhat scratched, bruised, and muddy, I staggered into the outskirts of Cormilack, watching the stars swallowed up by the shadow of the mechanical mountain that looms over the town. I had no idea what it was then; I only knew that it was interesting, and that I had to draw it as soon as it was light outside.

Unfortunately, I had no idea then that I had arrived right at the beginning of the rainy season.

While most of Hamjamser spends the winter under varying amounts of snow, Cormilack spends it largely underwater; the only snow is on the mountaintops. The weather stays warmer here. The townspeople blame it on the giant machine, saying that it reflects the heat of the sun into the rest of the valley, that it stores heat all Summer and releases it in the Winter, that the mysterious, ice-encrusted mechanisms and antennae sticking up from its roof (peak?) disrupt the weather around Cormilack - there are as many explanations as there are people to make them. Some say that the Sun Dragon likes to wheel overhead and admire the digging machine. That may be true, but if so, I've never seen him. On each of the fifteen days - I've counted - that the sun shone during the winter, there was not a Dragon in sight.

Some say that the machine's engine is still going, and that its heat is what warms the valley.

The people of Cormilack call the machine the Earthmover, sensibly, as that is what it is. The highest hills in the town seem to have been plowed up by its immense blades and wheels - the tallest earthen hills, anyway. The Earthmover itself is the tallest hill in sight. Much of the town is built on it. According to local legends, the Earthmover was used thousands of years ago by the Hill Builders to build the Mountainous Plains. This is why the Earthmover and the Hill Builders are called what they are. Most people in Cormilack agree that the Earthmover was last used to make the perfect spiral of mountain ranges that surrounds the valley (I've only seen the inner mountains, but they say you can see the spiral, as perfect as a snail's shell, if you fly high enough). Upon reaching the center, several important parts broke, most the size of small foothills, at the same time that the Earthmover reached the soft, rich soil in the center of the valley and sank immovably into it. The Hill Builders, having finished sculpting the topography of this particular part of Hamjamser, decided that they had no further use for the thing anyway and left it here.

This is a typical Cormilack legend. The townspeople don't disapprove of romance and mysticism - not exactly - but they don't have much use for them either. When it comes to speculation, they're experts, but they'll take the most sensible explanation whenever they can find it.

However and whyever it's here, the Earthmover has obviously been in bad shape for a long time. Every piece of metal on it is worn and rusted. Even the digging blades at the front - which, according to local mechanics, are at least partially made of hypersteel - have their fair share of chips and scratches. One mechanical arm lies limply over a front wheel with tree-sized wires and pistons hanging from its mangled end. The drill it used to hold lies a mile or so away. Segments have fallen off the tire tread. Struts hang crookedly without their counterweights. One end of a massive snapped cable rises above the village, a crazed column of twisted metal as big around as a house and taller than most of the nearby mountains. The other end is frequently obscured by clouds. The whole mountain of ancient machinery is sunk deeper than the height of six houses into the soft soil of the valley, and grass grows in the gaps between peeling metal plates. The flatter parts are covered with trees and houses as well. It's a magnificent wreck.

As eager as I was to begin drawing the Earthmover, the weather made it completely impossible on the very first night I stayed here. Having found a reasonably good inn - it was sheltered, affordable, and warm, and that was enough for me - I was trying to nurse my fingers back to life with a bowl of soup when the rainy season hit Cormilack.

There's no other way to put it. At first, I thought something had exploded. The sound was a bit like the sound of a wet fish hitting a dock - a fish about the size of an average whale. The entire building shook.

No one inside it seemed particularly concerned. A group of people who had been celebrating a birthday party in most of the room, laughing and shouting and working their way steadily through a cake shaped like a large gear, all calmed down slightly. Still talking, they stood up, opened their umbrellas with a chorus of FLOOMPs (except the more amphibious of them, who didn't seem to care about umbrellas), and walked briskly out the door to disperse, still talking, into the ocean that was falling outside.

"Er - what exactly is happening?" I asked the innkeeper. She paused, heading towards the door with an armful of sandbags for the threshold.

"It's raining," she said simply.

I spent the next few months occasionally sketching the Earthmover, on the rare occasions when the rain stopped, but mostly just trying to keep everything dry. This is nearly impossible during a Cormilack winter. The villagers don't even try to keep their houses from flooding; whenever one floor fills with water, they just move all the furniture to the next one up. This explains why, in the middle of the valley, a house for a family of three can be six or seven stories high. It also explains the faint odor of must and pondweed that lingers around even the cleanest houses.

There is no way to describe how wet Cormilack is in the winter. Nowhere else comes close. The water on the ground is only the least of it. Even when it reaches the fifth floors of the houses, it still answers to gravity.

It's the water everywhere else that's the problem. The air is full of fog AND rain, at the same time, which I hadn't even known was possible. On especially wet days, it's hard to tell whether you're above or below the water. There isn't much difference. The fog creeps into the houses through every crack, filling the rooms inside with thick, opaque gray. Anything more than two feet away is invisible. Water trickles down the walls and drips from the ceiling. Rain comes in through every possible opening. Puddles collect in corners. Cups and bowls left in the open fill and overflow. Carpets squish when stepped on. Most people in Cormilack, in fact, don't even bother to have carpets, as the moss in their houses is thicker and doesn't rot. The air barely deserves the name. There's more water in it than air.

Nothing made of metal, paper, or wood is left out in the winter unless it's well covered in something waterproof - oil, wax, varnish, et cetera. Everything else is wrapped up until the spring. The houses are wooden, but far too big to waterproof, so the villagers just add more boards in strategic places when the old ones rot. It wasn't long before I gave up trying to draw. I kept my paper, pens, and pencils in a watertight oilskin package for most of the winter, the same way everyone else does, and got used to being constantly wet.

The floods receded over a few weeks in March, but - as I mentioned - the rest of the valley is still far from solid. The sun shines more often than not now, though, so I've been able to return to sketching the Earthmover. It will still probably be quite a while before I've got a finished drawing of it.

Unlike the migrant floods, the water that collects under the Earthmover stays there all year; the pools down there are the deepest in the whole valley, and the sun never reaches them. They stay dark and cold. Fishermen go down there occasionally, finding their way with candles, tame salamanders, or (in some cases) echolocation. They wade through rust silt to catch the blind crimson fish that swim through corroding wheels and pylons in the black water. Some say the fish have so much metal in them, you can catch them with a magnet.

I haven't eaten any.

The Palace of Madmen

Interestingly enough, I visited the Palace of Madmen once (or the Changing Maze, the Sanctuary of Dreams, the Labyrinth of Many Names, the Heap, or whatever else you care to call it). I stumbled across one of the back doors. There are no front doors. I suppose you could say that I didn't actually go in - I only took one or two steps into the first room, keeping a tight grip on the knob of the door so that it couldn't get away. I'd heard about the place before. It's almost as hard to leave as it is to enter.

The one room I saw was roughly round, like the bottom floor of a tower, with an assortment of spoons and egg whisks branching like trees out of the ceiling. Mice fluttered through them and hung from prehensile tails. The floor was covered with mushrooms in every imaginable color, from amethyst and aquamarine to copper and cinnabar. A family of six-legged toads appeared to be eating spaghetti and jam on a checkered blanket on the largest one. Upon seeing me, they squeaked, turned immediately into bright green spiders, and attempted to hide against the tomato-red cap of their mushroom.

Of course, they were probably really hiding from the hooded burreler who walked into the room a second later, swinging a large pair of hedge shears on the end of his impossibly long tail. The hood on his head flowed seamlessly into a pair of chain-mail overalls festooned with buttons and elaborately braided green onions. Upon entering the room, he proceeded to shave the fluff off of a small mushroom-patterned carpet, the bristles off of a hairbrush growing among the spoons and egg whisks, and the fringe off of a large mushroom shaped like a lampshade. He was quite efficient. It took him roughly five seconds. All the mushrooms promptly crawled into the floor, spider-toads, picnic blankets, and all, shutting the stonework neatly behind them.

The Palace of Madmen takes in all types of lunatics, and - as far as I've heard - makes more sense to them than the outside world. Like most people on Hamjamser, the vast majority of them are friendly and perfectly harmless. Unfortunately, not all of them are. The maze welcomes the dangerous ones just as readily; it simply keeps the rest of its inhabitants safely away from them.

With the mushrooms gone, the burreler turned a pair of wild, sea-green eyes to me, which was when I noticed that he himself had no fur whatsoever, and his typical black-and-white burreler stripes were actually made up of tiny ceramic tiles stuck to his bare skin. He eyed my hair angrily, swinging his shears and muttering something about flagellated herring.

That was when I left. I didn't know whether or not the maze's protection applied to casual observers. I wasn't particularly eager to find out. The door made a faint ringing noise when I closed it hastily, and the knob folded itself into the faded purple wood with a sound like a silver crab retreating into its shell, leaving no trace in the seamless wood of the door.

When I stepped back, the door frame had gone as well. Only a rectangle of faint purple remained, no more than a stain on the plain wooden boards of the wall where it had been. The window next to it looked out onto the fog-draped fields around the little abandoned cabin.

There had been nothing in the sad little one-room building except the purple door, and now there wasn't even that. Wisps of fog drifted in through the window, split by the few remaining shards of glass. The floor and walls held nothing but shadows and a faint rectangle of purple. There was nothing to see. I left.

The Northern wall of the cabin, where the purple door had been, held only the blank, empty window on the outside. I hadn't noticed it on the way in. There was nothing particularly noticeable about it now. The boards were gray and warped in place. They had obviously stood there for decades, never disturbed by even the hint of a door, much less a purple one to a building out of a dream.

The cabin might have only existed to have the door in it, the one that had opened, shut, and vanished completely. I don't know why. Probably, there was no reason. It just was. That's how the maze works.

There was nothing to see, and there were quite a lot of hills between me and the town of Skither, and the thought of spending the night on the fog-smothered grass by (or in) the empty cabin with the door that wasn't was not particularly appealing, so I set out across the bedeweled grass without much hesitation. The cabin was lost in the mist when I looked back.

I've never found it again. And believe me, it hasn't been for lack of looking.

Anyway. This drawing is based on other stories I've heard of the Palace - from scholars who have spent their life writing in great detail about their few, cherished glimpses of it, from travelers like me who have stumbled across a door or two, and - very rarely - from a few of those who have lived there. There are not many of them. There are even fewer who ever leave. Most of them would rather die. Their descriptions are strange and ambiguous; real words, in the real world, are the wrong shape to hold stories of the Sanctuary of Dreams. This is the closest I can come to making sense of the least senseless accounts. I doubt I will ever attempt to draw my own glimpse of the Palace.

This is not a picture of the Labyrinth of Many Names. It is only as close - I hope - as a sane mind can come to it.

(Dedicated to Colin Thompson, Ursula Vernon, Tanith Lee, and James Blaylock.)

(Image copyright Nigel Tangelo / Ross Emery.)

Cafe )S:))~

I just realized that I drew a picture of Cafe ):S))~ while I was there. The cook, seeing what I was doing, was kind enough to pose with one of her steamed sump squids. After some digging through my old drawings, I managed to unearth this one. Here it is.

Nigel

Breakfast in Baconeg

I actually visited Baconeg (a Baconeg; I think it's a fairly common name) a few years after I read "Breakfast in Baconeg." The smell is better in the underground marketplace; it sort of becomes a second atmosphere. You don't notice it at all after a while. The underground marketplace is full of people trying to sell tuber fish and clockwork pipe crawlers and whatnot, though, so I don't know if it's actually an improvement.

I never was able to find the cafe where "Breakfast in Baconeg" takes place. I searched through the plumbing district for two days. There were pipework shops and moss grottoes and tank crab vendors by the hundreds, but no Cafe Kurgleglump. The only cafe I found was a tiny, dripping little hole in a gap between two pipes. The sign outside it read ")S:))~," and it served steamed sump squid. Nothing else. Three different varieties of steamed sump squid, but nothing else. If you were feeling adventurous, you could have steamed sump squid with pepper on top. The squid steamer occupied half the cafe. I sat at the little three-legged table that occupied the other half and watched while the cook took the squid from the ceiling (the only place there was room to store anything), steamed it, arranged it neatly on a saucer, and served it to me.

I was feeling adventurous after spelunking through the pipe district for three hours, so I had the squid with pepper. It was the best sump squid, steamed or otherwise, that I've ever eaten. I told the cook so, and she smiled from eyestalk to eyestalk and said "squee mur burgle twergilly." Or something to that effect.

As cozy as the )S:))~ Cafe was, though, it wasn't the Cafe Kurgleglump. For one thing, it wasn't nearly large enough, and the Cafe Kurgleglump served a lot more than steamed sump squid - that is, if the book is at all accurate. I never did find the Cafe Kurgleglump. I didn't search through every alley and back drain, but it probably doesn't matter. If it ever existed, I think it's quite Remembered by now.