The Provenance of a Pinecone

After a day or two in Chakramalsian's wagon, I was feeling strong enough to stand and begin painting the centerpiece of its roof: the character for Peace, surrounded by a stately procession of the aquatic traveler's favorite fish.

"Put at least one of them in a funny hat, please," he added. "If a mural doesn't include a fish in a funny hat, one might as well not even bother."

In addition to the painting, Chak was also starved for conversation, which I was happy to provide as I worked. Not only was I glad to return something for his hospitality, but he turned out to be my favorite type of conversationalist: one who enjoys speaking eloquently and at length on nearly any subject with even the most minimal of encouragement. After several pleasant hours spent discussing our respective travels, favorite extinct restaurants, the breeding of photosynthetic cats, the use of explosives in Thiglian stomp opera, and the practical considerations of housekeeping at the bottom of a lake, the conversation turned to the subject of family heirlooms.

I took out my grandfather's extra-foldable ruler, the one he used to build so many cunningly hidden secret compartments into the walls and floors of the family home. (Please do let me know, by the way, if you've discovered any more during my absence, especially any more that are deeper than the walls that contain them.) While I'm no dimensimancer myself and can't use it to build elegantly impossible carpentry, I do find it useful, on occasion, to be able to pull a ruler twice my own height out of my pocket.

Chak, in turn, took a box from one of the smaller of his various moss-encrusted trunks. Inside was what appeared to be a pinecone made of brass, small enough to hide in one's fist. Each scale was coated with blue enamel and linked to its neighbors with small loops of wire. When he picked up the pinecone by a larger loop at one end, the individual segments slid over each other with a faint chiming sound, and it telescoped to nearly twice its original length.

"It's a family heirloom," he said, smiling at the pinecone. "No practical use to speak of, but it's pretty, isn't it? I never travel without it. According to family legend, it once belonged to the master burglar Fenish keTmeel." He gave me a hopeful look.

One is rarely offered such a clear invitation to hear a story. Naturally, I asked who Fenish keTmeel was, and Chak launched smoothly into what I soon came to recognize as his don't-believe-a-word-of-this storytelling voice.

"Fenish keTmeel is practically a legend now, like Orbadon or the Ratty Hatmaker, but she was an infamous burglar in the Scalps - if she actually existed - about a century and a half ago. She was a Wayfinder, of course. Nearly all successful burglars are; otherwise, they couldn't rely on ever actually finding their way to anything worth stealing. According to the legends, she could simply turn a corner and walk straight into any vault or treasure room she pleased. Everyone who had a vault or treasure room quickly caught on and posted armed guards, but somehow, she walked right past them. Most of them never even realized she'd been there until she was gone, and the most valuable objects in the room with her. It was remarkable. A number of wealthy dragons nearly exploded.

"She didn't just keep or sell everything she stole, either. If something she took had already been stolen, she often left it out somewhere public - if possible, in such a way that it would incriminate whoever had been holding onto it. During her career, a remarkable number of foreign works of art turned up years or decades after everyone thought they'd been destroyed. A handful of them even got returned to their rightful owners eventually. She kept the vast majority of what she stole, of course, but that bit of theatrical public service was more than enough to make her a sort of folk hero, at least to everyone who had nothing worth stealing. My family's in business, so they've always been rather ambivalent about her, but I admit I've always found the stories quite exciting.

"Especially since most of them agree that, after a while, she started bringing things out of vaults that had never been in them in the first place. Marvelous, impossible things. Soup pots that never ran empty, books that could only be read with one's eyes shut, spectacles that made people who were nearby look and sound as if they were far away. This is a story from the Scalps, remember," he added with a smile. "But that's what she's truly famous for: stealing things from nowhere and no one."

I inquired as to what had eventually become of the thief.

"No one knows!" Chak said with delight. "There are at least a dozen different endings to the story that I've heard. She retired to a life of anonymous luxury in Kennyrubin, or she tried to rob the wrong dragon and got herself roasted, or reality caught up with her and she stopped existing, or she found the thing she'd been looking for all along - an heirloom, or an egg, or her own heart; it varies depending on who's telling the story. My aunt maintains that she was merely a fiction created to cover up a massive streak of banking fraud, but then she's always been a dedicated cynic.

"Besides, the things she stole still turn up from time to time, usually when someone tries to pawn or auction one of them off and the dragon it was stolen from finds out. Then everyone runs around trying to sell it to some other poor fool so that they're not the one left holding it when the dragon catches up. No one's foolish enough to try to argue ownership with a dragon who has a legal claim to something. No one who lives very long, anyway," he amended.

"And of course, there are a million small trinkets sold every day in the Scalps that claim to be from Fenish keTmeel's hoard - more of them than a thousand thieves could possibly have stolen in a lifetime of burglary. Most of them are fakes. But some…"

He held up the enameled pinecone by its other end and gave it a shake. With a chorus of metallic rattling, its scales flipped themselves in the opposite direction, and the entire pinecone turned itself inside-out and became an exquisitely jointed blue enameled goldfish.

"Some, I think, might be real."

He dropped the fish into the water, where we watched it swim around for a minute or two. Despite being mostly brass, it showed no sign of sinking. When he held out a hand under the surface, it came to rest there, nestled in his palm; he gave it another gentle shake, and it turned inside-out again and became a miniature crocodile, still formed entirely out of jointed enamel scales. It swam around for a short time more, theatrically snapping its tiny brass teeth.

"It used to be my great-grandfather's," Chak said, watching the crocodile fondly. "He said he fed it his secrets. I've kept up the tradition; I've few enough secrets to feed it at my age, but it doesn't seem to mind. There's no other power source that I've ever been able to find, no springs or gears - it's just enameled brass and wire. I'd suspect that it's a Hill Builder relic, but… You've seen their work, yes?"

I acknowledged that I had, many times.

"So you know that it tends toward the utilitarian or the inscrutable. I've rarely seen anything they designed that I'd describe as… charming." He petted the crocodile under the chin, and it gave his finger a small play-bite, like a kitten, before swimming back to rest in his palm. "Possibly it's the work of some other artisan, but if so, they didn't leave a mark or a signature." The crocodile yawned and, with another series of chiming rattles, folded itself back into a pinecone again. Chak shook the water out of it and gently set it on a cloth to dry before returning it to its box.

Pausing my work to watch was enough to make me realized how tired I'd grown. After a little more conversation, I put my paints away for the day, and Chak and I retired to separate pursuits, most of which - in my case - involved sleeping. First, though, I asked if any of the other pieces from Fenish keTmeel's ill-gotten collection were available to view, and Chak was kind enough to write me a (somewhat damp) list of museums. I'll make it a point to visit at least a few of them if I ever find myself in the Scalps again.

Urban Bonsai

Nothing particularly unusual happened today, so I have little to write about other than what I told you yesterday. Instead, I think I'll tell you about my visit to Fresmareel.

It was a few years ago, during my trip to the Railway Regions. Fresmareel is one of the few villages in the Regions that is not connected to the railroad. Perhaps it will be someday. The town is built on land ruled by the dragon Agnathrommilax, a drake of middle years - three or four centuries - and somewhat eccentric tastes. He paints his scales in bright colors, wears the flags of extinct cities like scarves around his long neck, and collects gramophone records of Rampastulan opera. On clear days, the villagers can sometimes hear him singing along on distant mountaintops. They often mistake the sound for thunder.

The dragon lives alone in his cave. However, the villagers have known him to fly off for several days, carrying a plump mammoth or a particularly nice boulder of quartz, and they suspect that he might have a sweetheart on one of the other mountains.

He has allowed them to live on his land as long as they follow a series of rules.

They can hunt the deer and ground sloths in the area, but are forbidden to harm wolves, foxes, and dreadgoats, as many of the ones in the area are intelligent and the dragon's personal friends.

They must ask the dragon's permission before clearing large areas of land, and certain plants - such as wild lilies and whistle-sedge - are to be left alone entirely.

The village must be built in a perfect circle. Every building within it must also be a perfect circle. They are allowed to expand the village, but only in concentric rings around the current outlines, so that they preserve its shape.

The houses are to be painted white or other pale colors. They can paint their roofs in any colors or patterns they like, as long as they stick to a palette selected by the dragon. He seems to favor reds, oranges, browns, and the occasional intense blue.

Certain colors, such as black, mauve, and chartreuse, are forbidden except on special occasions, such as funerals. Other than that, the villagers may wear anything they like.

The dragon encourages singing; he has even been known to give lessons to those villagers whose voices particularly offend his ears.

The land is a rich and beautiful one, and aside from broad aesthetic decisions, the dragon leaves the people of Fresmareel free to govern their lives as they choose. Most of them see it as an exceptionally good agreement. Other than a certain care in their hunting and their choice of pigments, most hardly notice the effects of the dragon's rules at all. Many even consider themselves lucky to live in such a beautifully designed village.

The villagers note that several of the rules, such as those on expansion, have only come into effect when the colony reached a certain size; there had been no need for them before. Presumably, new ones will continue to be introduced as the population continues to grow. This might also be the reason for some of the more mysterious rules, such as the unusually wide streets.

Hunters have occasionally come upon the dragon perched on one of the many rocky cliffs that surround the valley, gazing down at the colony with a satisfied expression, as one might wear when observing a garden or a favorite work of art. Some have speculated that, rather than collecting art or metalwork - the most common manmade objects that dragons hoard - he is instead a connoisseur of urban planning.

It seems he is growing a bonsai town.

Dragons, after all, live for centuries and can afford to take their time. Who knows - perhaps Agnathrommilax is already planning what the city will look like hundreds of years from now.

Cactus Flutes

Today, the road took me through stands of flute-cacti. I had never heard of these plants before this trip to the Golden Desert; in the past few months, though, I've seen them in at least three or four places. They are tall plants, but otherwise unremarkable - at least when they're alive. When a flute-cactus dies, though, it leaves a dry stalk full of holes, which blows soothing notes in the wind. Birds like to nest in them, as do the more musically inclined varieties of lizard.

I first saw flute-cacti in the desert around Teshirak. The villagers there tend the cacti and encourage the ones with the sweetest notes. Some cut the dry stalks and arrange them around their houses, so that the village is filled with music whenever the wind blows.

The village of Korfa also has flute-cacti growing nearby. There, skilled instrument-makers cut them and attach complex systems of wooden stops and levers, turning the dry stalks into lightweight, eight-foot-long flutes that are quite popular among dragons and other large creatures.

The smaller nose-cacti, which also grow near Korfa, play a high, nasal note like a whining child. These the villagers hunt down and uproot without mercy.

This grove seemed to be wild. There were several stalks lying on the ground, cracked and silent except for the occasional faint half-note, but I didn't see any of the stumps that flute harvesters leave behind. The wind was blowing, as it always does in the Golden Desert. The cacti surrounded me with a constant, airy cloud of chords; miraculously, they were almost all in the same key. I found myself whistling as I walked. It was hard to resist. I went through a few melodies that harmonized with the cacti, finally settling on a sea shanty by Rango Tress. At the end of the first verse, I paused to drink some water.

The cacti whistled the tune back at me.

My first thought was that the heat was starting to affect my brain. I'd been lucky enough to avoid that so far, but there's always a first time. I felt fine, though, aside from the fact that my mouth was dry from whistling.

I whistled the melody again. This time, the reply came from a cactus a few feet farther down the road.

As strange as this was, I wasn't particularly alarmed; musical plants are rarely dangerous.* I took another sip of water and kept walking, whistling as I went. The music followed me. It always came from a cactus nearby; I never heard it from a distance. After a few minutes of simply mimicking my whistling, the cacti started to do variations and harmonies.

I'm fairly sure the source of the music was a zephyr. They're some of the more curious wind spirits - perhaps the only ones that take any interest in people - and they often have surprising artistic tendencies. Many of them like to draw in fine dust and sand. I've heard that some have even developed ways of making sculptures, though I couldn't tell you how.

After I finished the sea shanty, I moved on to a few of Majenti Huddle's clockwork ballads, then to an operetta by Sherm Trupelo. The zephyr - if that's what it was - seemed to be hungry for new melodies. Out here in the Desert, there probably aren't a lot to choose from. It picked up tunes almost as fast as I could whistle them, filling in two- or even three-part harmonies as it went. Sometimes it whistled the melody and I harmonized. I'm not much of an improvisational musician, but I've sung in enough choruses, here and there, that I can make up a fairly decent harmony when I need one. We whistled jazz, folk music, concertos from the Caroque period, slow torch songs and rapid arzenroyds, even a few rock songs by the Poltergeists. The zephyr had some trouble with the idea of percussion until it found a way to knock two cacti against each other.

I must have whistled fifty songs over the course of the afternoon. My lips were getting dry by the time I reached the end of the flute-cacti. The Desert stretched out before me, seeming strangely empty with no sound but the hiss of sand blowing off the dunes. Behind me, I heard the first few notes of an old Desert song of farewell. I whistled the next few notes. The zephyr and I harmonized one last time, exchanging a musical goodbye, and I set off - with some reluctance - into the less musical section of road ahead.

As I left, I felt a tiny breath of air on my face - hardly enough to notice, except that it was blowing in the opposite direction from the wind. It was like the ghost of a goodbye kiss.

Long after the shimmering horizon had swallowed them from view, I could still hear the cacti singing behind me.



* A notable exception is the siren nasturtium. Fortunately, those only grow in semi-tropical areas, and most of them have been tamed for medicinal purposes, as their music provides a powerful anesthetic.

The Cat's Radishes

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

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

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

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

I introduced myself, and he nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hadn't.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Besides, I like radishes.

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

Malanian

During my time in Mollogou, I stayed for over a month in the town of Malanian. It was relaxing - a stable island in a sea of geographical chaos.

Geography is inconstant, to some extent, in every part of the world; this is why maps are useless before they're completed, and why Wayfinders' abilities are in such high demand. Mollogou is worse than most countries. There are very few towns in Mollogou that bother to have names. They are simply collections of random buildings, rearranged in different groups every day, shuffled and dealt across the entire country like a pack of cards. Your neighbors today could be a hundred miles away tomorrow. Mollogoons consider themselves lucky if their houses even stay intact; most houses trade rooms with other buildings, apparently on a whim. Nothing in the country stays where it's put. This is why parents in Mollogou don't put their children down until they're old enough to fend for themselves. Once something - or someone - is out of sight, chances are they'll never see it again.

Most people in Mollogou try not to get too attached to anything.

Malanian is the largest town in Mollogou. It's one of the only ones with a name. The town is built in the domain of Malanian, the pill bug spirit, which is where the name comes from (it means "Silver Shell" in an archaic dialect of Togol). There are a ridiculous number of local spirits in Mollogou; practically every copse and hilltop has one. No one can possibly be expected to remember them all. The spirits' names are usually written on their shrines, so that strangers (which means practically everyone in the country) can pay proper respect. In Malanian's case, they simply named the town after the spirit and saved themselves the trouble.

Malanian (the spirit) tends to keep to his or herself.* The spirit only appears occasionally, in visions and dreams. During the days of the locust marauders, Malanian is said to have sent nightmares to the entire town and woken them before every attack. Other than the occasional practical message, though, Malanian rarely appears to come out of its shell.

This is not always the case with spirits. A few of the ones in Mollogou have even been known to have romances with mortals; it's surprisingly common to meet people there who claim to be descended from spirits. (The truth of these claims is usually impossible to prove.) Two of the fox spirits in one forest (brother and sister, however that works with spirits) each seem to take a new spouse every century or so. Their clever, elusive descendants number in the hundreds. A Samoval spirit in Gonrang has been married for nearly two hundred years to a man who is immortal due to the Shapeshifter's Curse.

Malanian is not one of these. There are an unusual number of chitinous people in the town - not surprising, I suppose, in a town with an isopod patron - but none of them claim to be descended from the pill bug spirit. Nearly everyone in the town is fond of it, though, and of the ordinary pill bugs that live around it. The streets of Malanian are full of randomly placed rocks, logs, and damp crevices - just the sorts of places pill bugs like. The largest ones run around in the houses like mice (only better behaved). People watch where they step and don't bother to sweep their kitchen floors. Any crumbs or scraps will be eaten by the next day. It's common to see children - and adults, for that matter - walking around with pill bugs on their shoulders or in their hands. They carry them like pets or good luck charms. There's a good reason for this; the town owes its very existence to the pill bug spirit.

Malanian is a dense collection of buildings arranged in a circle, with the outer buildings forming a seamless stone wall around the outside. There are arches through which to enter the town. The walls curve inward at the top, as if the entire town is half of a giant stone sphere.** They were built several centuries ago as a defense against the local variety of dragon. Mollogou dragons are damp, sticky-fingered creatures, more like giant flying frogs than the usual reptilian variety. They are rather insanely fond of leather. They like to chew it. This caused something of a problem several centuries ago; the dragons had a habit of swooping down into towns to carry off all the shoes in sight, and they didn't particularly care if the shoes still had people in them. (People may, in fact, have served as convenient handles, making the shoes easier to grab.)

The people of Malanian (the town) apparently came to an agreement with Malanian (the spirit): if the people built the wall, protecting the town from the sides, the spirit would protect it from above. The spirit's only condition was that the wall be round. As it turned out, this worked quite well. The dragons made several more raids, the spirit repelled them (accounts vary as to how), and they left the town alone after that.*** This protection has made Malanian a haven from many other dangers in Mollogou's history, such as the Locust Marauders and the Laughing Storm.

Though it's not currently needed for defense, this being a relatively peaceful time, the wall is the reason that Malanian is the largest town in Mollogou. It keeps the town together. Malanian's buildings have stayed Malanian's buildings ever since the wall's foundations were laid. The farms around the town still have a tendency to wander off when no one's looking, as all the land in Mollogou does, but the town itself has stayed more or less in one piece. The people all know each other and happily trade with whichever farmers live nearby on any given day.

People in Malanian seem to care about things more than most people in Mollogou. Perhaps it comes from knowing they'll still be there tomorrow.

* As is the case with most spirits, no one seems sure whether Malanian is male or female. It's difficult to tell even on an ordinary pill bug.

** There are a lot of spheres in the town. The spirit likes them, apparently. I suppose that's not surprising for a pill bug.

*** Several years later, a particularly fearless tanner taught the dragons how to make their own leather. Unfortunately, not all the dragons wanted to bother raising the animals they used for leather, so a number of them just switched from stealing shoes to stealing cows. Farmers were less than pleased with the tanner for this.

The Scalps

Well. After far too long an absence, here I am, writing to you again. One month of letters. It's far too short, but it's all I can promise for now. At least it's easy to find postbirds here.

After most of a year spent in Mollogou (much easier to find your way into than out of), the Cheeserock Plateaus (much easier to see than to reach), and the Death Marsh (much more pleasant than it sounds, actually), I currently find myself on the Pinstuck Plains - or, as most of the inhabitants call them, the Scalps.

There is very little here besides grass.

Grass is everywhere.

Grass covers the gentle bulges of ground that pass for hills, coating their domes with strands as fine as hair. This is where the Scalps got their name. From a distance, the hills do look surprisingly like scalps, a thousand sleeping giants packed together like eggs in a carton. Their hair is colored in patches - green and gold, blue and gray, russet and a surprising carrot orange. Some even have bald spots of dusty pink clay. It is nearly impossible to build a house on the Pinstuck Plains that does not end up looking like a hat.

Grass hides the myriad small creatures of the plains from the slightly less numerous large creatures that want to eat them. The plains are riddled with the holes of mice and rats, prairie dogs, riddler crabs,* tortoises, rabbits and coneybees, dustbowl eels, and snakes of all sizes and every possible shade of brown. Cerberus hyenas stride over the hills on long, spotted legs, keeping an eye or six out for prey. Coyotes howl at the moons. Gigantulas pad along on bristled, fingery legs as thick as my arm, leaving a trail of thin gray silk tangled in the grass behind them. Dervish lizards spin in dry stream beds. Hawks and falkyries soar overhead, silent except for the occasional sky-splitting scream.

Grass gives the wind a voice, a thousand thousand scratchy whispers from ankle height. Most visitors to the Scalps find themselves talking constantly, a little louder than normal, trying to distract themselves from the sense that someone is constantly whispering in their ear. It's one way, if not a particularly reliable one, to identify the people who were born here. They don't mind the whispering. Some of them simply tune it out. Others, a rare few, learn its language. The people of the Scalps call them Listeners, or Whisperlings, or Giants' Ears - those who listen to the whispers of the hills. They can find water buried six feet below the ground. They can hear tornadoes and locust swarms** coming long before anyone can see them, even across the unbroken miles of the plains. They hear warnings and secrets and long-forgotten stories. The grass, it seems, has a lot to say.

Grass - in more practical terms - also provides most of the plains-dwellers' food, cloth, and building material.

Sheep are rare on the Scalps - domestic ones, anyway. There's something in the wind, or the sky, or the endless miles of unfenced grass, that changes them. It only takes a few generations. Shepherds come to the plains with flocks from the High Fields or the Railway Regions: slow, simple animals that follow anything that moves and devote most of their brains to chewing.

Their children are just a little more intelligent, a little more courageous, a little more… wild.

Their grandchildren unlatch gates and vanish in the night. Some of them pick the shepherds' pockets before they leave.

The people of the Scalps have learned to do without wool.

Wood is equally rare. There are a few forests, but they don't spread easily; feral sheep and thunderbeast tend to eat or trample new saplings before they get even a foot high. The forests are jealously guarded by the timber towns (the plains' largest permanent settlements), by the squirrel clans with their deadly chestnut catapults, or - in one case - by an unusually aggressive grove of warrior dryads. Plains forest wood is taken from dead trees only and sold at exorbitant prices.*** People who attempt to steal it and survive generally wish they hadn't. The largest plant outside the forests is a little dry bush - hair brush, they call it - and it would take acres of those to make enough sticks to build an outhouse.**** Instead, the people make their houses out of grass.

The nomads live in wicker huts like upturned baskets. They're woven in elaborate patterns, diamonds and zigzags and spirals that rival the fanciest knitting. The nomads set them up in rings, like mushrooms, fastened to the ground with stakes and grass rope. They keep them far away from their cooking fires. The nomads travel with crunklewicks - large, hairy, round-backed creatures that look like their ancestors may once have been woolly mammoths, or possibly the hills under their feet. These carry the nomads' belongings and any family members too young or old or ill or pregnant to walk for days on end. The nomads put their houses on the crunklewicks as well; they fit perfectly over the humps, like wicker tea cozies, and make the crunklewicks look less like mammoths and more like giant armadillos.*****

The more permanent settlements on the plains simply dig a bit deeper. Some take whole bricks of root-woven earth, instead of just the stalks on the surface, and make their houses out of sod. Grass grows in the roofs and windowsills. Others hollow out the hills and make their streets out of streambeds. There are towns that are practically invisible from a distance, just a forest of chimney pots sticking out of the ground, until you get close enough to see people looking out at you from doors in the hillsides.

As if all this weren't enough, I've heard that there are even people who make their homes in airborne grass seeds. I've never seen them myself. They must be very small.

* Riddlers are one of the few species of land crabs in Hamjamser, along with the thirsty crab and the juggernaut horseshoe. All three species live on land, returning to water only to lay their eggs; it's fairly common to find riddlers in forests, and thirsty crabs are often mistaken for scorpions by desert travelers. Juggernaut horseshoes have been found burrowing in pack ice in the Arctic. The shells of riddler crabs are marked with wiggly patterns that look somewhat like writing - the "riddles" for which they're named. People occasionally find, or at least claim to find, riddlers they can actually read. There was one in the Sconth Museum for several years that had a perfectly legible copy of the Recursive Sonnet written on it. Visitors to the Museum can still read several of its castoff shells. Experts on literature and crustaceans have argued for decades about whether or not it was a hoax.

** Ordinary locusts bear only the smallest resemblance to the Locust Marauders of old, but they still call up bad memories in veterans of the Raids. Many families on the plains have stories of their beloved grandfather - or, almost as often, grandmother - blowing the dust off the old war chest and charging out into a locust swarm, armed with a cutlass and a bathrobe. Their children don't mind; the younger grandchildren tend to behave very well around their grandparents after seeing something like this. Besides, you can make a good meal out of bisected locusts.

*** A large portion of the wood is bought by dragons, who say it produces the sweetest smoke in Hamjamser. When one's hoard consists of entire national banks, I suppose one has money to burn.

**** Technically, the largest plants may be the tombstone cacti that grow in massive, weathered rings (crowns?) on the peaks of the hills. Mature colonies of the cacti resemble standing stones in shape, size, and consistency. They grow, though; I've seen a few broken in half, and they have rings like the trunk of a tree. Some even have stubby branches. Opinion is currently divided as to whether they're a plant or a type of rock crystal. They're too tough to eat, too brittle to spin, and too much work to build with, so the plains-dwellers mostly just ignore them.

***** I've never seen a glyptodont in person, but I've seen engravings and a few well-traveled photographs. They look surprisingly like an armadillo might if it was six feet at the hump.

Cats and Riddles

While in the Railway Regions last year, I had my first encounter with a cathomar. Don't worry - I'm still quite alive and in possession of all my limbs. In fact, as near-death experiences go, it was surprisingly entertaining.

Cathomars are some of the only dangerous animals still common in the Railway Regions. (There is the occasional carnivorous sheep, but they're relatively rare, and most are perfectly safe if they're trained correctly.) Wolves avoid anything that looks civilized, as intelligent creatures like humans are too unpredictable for comfort. The same goes for bears and dreadgoats. Most of the other large carnivores - the intelligent ones, like saberclaws and serrated raptors - have become somewhat civilized themselves; most of them live in towns these days. Once in a while, even the most dedicated predators like to get their meat by paying the butcher for it. The solitary ones, who still prefer to stay out in the forests and hunt, see travelers as sources of conversation rather than food. I've met several raptors who have trampled out of the forest, all muscles and fangs and ripping talons, only to lick the blood off of their claws and politely challenge me to a game of chess. (They're usually quite good at it.)

Even dragons have become relatively peaceful.* Their pillaging days are long gone. They've found that it's easier - if slightly less fun - to pay farmers to raise prey for them.** Half the cows and sheep in the Railway Regions belong to dragons. They acquire their gold (or other expensive collections) from estates of well-managed farms, or put it in banks and buy more gold with the interest. Business, it seems, is more profitable than piracy. Their only feuds are private ones with other dragons.

Cathomars are different. They have no compunctions about eating anything or anyone. Any animal that is not a Cathomar is food.*** The ones that talk are simply more fun.

This one was a tom - sleek, enormous, and fairly old, judging by the size of his fangs. They were nearly as long as my arms. The Train had been taking its time in coming, and I had decided - perhaps foolishly - to try the footpaths that pass for roads in the Railway Regions instead. Now I know why people generally avoid them. The cathomar glided silently out of the woods as I was walking and sat his sand-colored sleekness down neatly in front of me. He looked about twice my height, sitting down, and was slightly wider than the path I was on.

A fly buzzed near his shoulder. Without looking at it, without twitching a single unnecessary muscle, he flicked his tail up and swatted it into the trees.

"Good morning," he purred. "You're not as well-fed as I'd like, but you look educated. What will it be?"

Cathomars are quite polite when they catch intelligent prey. Creatures that can talk are much more entertaining than ones that can't. Instead of killing them immediately, the cathomars will challenge them to a contest of the prey's choice: speed, strength, or riddle. (Technically, this challenge applies even to non-speaking prey; anything that runs away has obviously chosen the contest of speed, and anything a cathomar catches has obviously lost.) If you lose, the cathomar will eat you. If you win, it will leave you alone, forever. Cathomars have excellent memories for faces and always keep their word. If you beat one, you will never need to worry about that cathomar again - only all the other ones.

Most people avoid the first two contests, as the cathomars always win. Only a giant or an exceptionally muscular samoval has much hope at winning a contest of strength, and if you could win a race, the cathomar probably wouldn't have caught up and challenged you in the first place. Nearly everyone chooses the riddles.

Fortunately, I spent several weeks on my first trip to the Railway Regions researching obscure riddles - and coming up with a few of my own - just in case I ever ran into a cathomar. (That was one thing that Plack probably needn't have worried about.) I followed tradition and chose the contest of riddles. In fact, cathomars are no better than anyone else at riddles (thank goodness); they just enjoy them. They could live entirely on non-speaking animals and never go hungry. Intelligent prey is just more fun. Creatures that don't talk are good to eat, but creatures that do talk are good to eat and possibly entertaining as well.

Numerous people have called cathomars psychopaths. This is not entirely correct. They're not insane; they're merely wild. The fact that they can talk doesn't change that. Consciences are only normal for civilized creatures, and cathomars - for all their cleverness and elegant manners - are anything but civilized.

I would love to tell you the riddles we asked each other, but I'd rather not spread them (and their answers) any further than I can help. The cathomar used a variation on the old egg riddle, easily guessed, but that's all I'll give away. You never know when you might need a riddle no one's heard before. Suffice it to say that I won the contest. When the Cathomar finally gave up, lashing his tail and rumbling, I told him the answer to my last riddle. He stopped and stared at me for a moment; then he threw back his head and roared. I thought he was angry at first, but eventually realized he was laughing.

"Very good, meatling," he eventually said, still sneezing with subsiding laughter. "Very good indeed. You have won the game and your life. Go run off and do whatever it is you herbivores do." I happen to be an omnivore, but I thought it unwise to correct him.

"And come back to visit me!" he roared as I walked away, trying very hard not to run. "We'll see if I beat you next time!"

Perhaps I will. It's always a delight to see a game played well. If the stakes are low enough, it doesn't matter whether it's played well by you or your opponent. Losing to a worthy adversary can be as satisfying as winning. It's rare to find anyone who understands that. That was not the case in this game, of course, as I had a rather personal interest in winning, but that couldn't be helped.

Perhaps next time.



* They are not tame. If you call them tame, quite a lot of them are still likely to eat you. "Relatively peaceful" doesn't mean you can insult a dragon and expect to live.

** They pay with Train tickets, of course, not actual coins. Few dragons will willingly part with anything metal.

*** Except llamas.

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.