Hanagrishel

It was nearly a week before we reached the next inhabited valley.

When we first spotted a narrow peaked roof and chimney over the ridge of the next dune, we were expecting another abandoned (or mostly abandoned) building, like the Blue Hyacinth Tea House. We were surprised when we came over the dune and found the small house on the other side perfectly intact. A neatly tended bed of flowers lay in front of it, and a string of washing was swaying on a line between two trees.

Not wanting to disturb the tidy front yard, we left the gafl happily munching grass on the other side of the valley and crossed a small stone bridge over the stream that ran in front of the house. Garnet sniffed the air as we went. As curious as the rest of us were, she seemed even more so; usually the most shy and retiring of our group, she ended up in front this time. We were surprised yet again when she stepped up and knocked on the door of the house.

There was the sound of slow, shuffling footsteps inside, and the door opened to reveal the oldest werewolf I've ever seen.

She squinted at Garnet, sniffing the air and blinking eyes that were almost lost under a pair of shaggy eyebrows. When she got a good look (or perhaps smell) at the younger woman, her face pleated itself into a maze of smile lines, and she ushered her inside with a delighted "kirim, kiriiim!" Welcome, welcome! Her voice was gravely and surprisingly deep.

Her name, we found out eventually, was Hanagrishel. Whether that was her first or last - or only - name, we were never sure. She spoke an old-fashioned and heavily accented dialect of Halsi, of which I could only make out about one word in five. Garnet seemed to have no trouble understanding her. The two of them kept up a lively conversation all afternoon, though Garnet's side of it was limited to about one sentence every minute or two. Hanagrishel seemed to be trying to make up for several decades' worth of missed conversation in a few hours. Garnet didn't seem to mind; like me, she seems to be the sort of person who prefers listening to talking.

Next to the house, Hanagrishel had a small vegetable garden and a coop of the most evil-looking chickens I've ever seen. As far as we could tell, their eggs were most of what she lived on. She made a great fuss over the chickens while we were there, cooing and stroking their feathers lovingly while they glared beady-eyed murder at the rest of us. A few of them pecked at Garnet's ankles, but she gave them one soft growl, and they stayed politely away from then on.

For our entire visit, I was never entirely sure whether our host actually noticed that the rest of us were there. She set out six plates for lunch (hard-boiled eggs and magnificently purple potatoes, plus a brace of jackalopes that Garnet had caught early that morning). Otherwise, she paid attention only to Garnet. Since she seemed to be somewhat nearsighted and hard of hearing, I got the distinct impression that she navigated the world mainly by smell; perhaps, as the only other werewolf (debatably the only other mammal) around, Garnet was the one she could perceive the most clearly.

After lunch, we offered (through Garnet) to help with any work that might need to be done around the place. To our surprise, there wasn't any. Despite her advanced age, Hanagrishel was apparently perfectly capable of handling all the digging, carpentry, and stonework necessary to maintain the house and garden. Even the house's paint was in pristine condition. "She built her house herself," Garnet informed us. Hanagrishel interjected a few proud sentences. "Three times. There was a tornado and a very large crab. She says it was delicious."

Without any obvious way to repay our host's hospitality (Garnet was already supplying all the socialization she seemed to want), the other four of us gave the two of them some space and walked off to explore the rest of the valley instead. As it wasn't a large one, this only took about half an hour. The ground was too steep and uneven for Chak's tub-barrow, and the stream was too small and rocky for him to swim in, so Mogen just carried him in her arms instead. Karlishek and I offered to take a turn, but she shook her head.

"It's my job," she said matter-of-factly. "Besides, you two would get tired in ten minutes." We had to admit that she was right.

The valley's shrine had a carving of a mother wolf nursing a few small pups and looking on fondly while several older ones played with a bone. Behind the mother wolf was a half-skeletonized deer carcass. Given the carnivorous subject matter, we took this to be the wolf version of an idyllic family dinner, rather than a sign of anything more ominous. The shrine's offering slab had several impressively large bones arranged on it in an artistic fashion.

The talismans hanging from the trees in the valley were similar to the ones in Nemigan's. However, instead of a bowl of honey at the bottom, each one had a glass globe of water containing a single dragonfly nymph. There didn't seem to be any way for them to get out of the globes, or anything inside for them to eat, but each one was the picture of robust, snap-jawed, malevolent health. Perhaps they weren't ordinary nymphs. We asked about them, through Garnet, when we returned. Hanagrishel called them "Prangino gili," a Jingli phrase that Chak said meant "children of the Biter." None of us knew what that meant.

Supper was much the same as lunch, with the addition of another sand walrus that Garnet caught a few valleys over. Hanagrishel clapped her hands when the younger woman returned with it - even more so since Garnet had shifted to her larger, more canine form in order to carry the beast. She seemed shy about it at first, but Hanagrishel made a fuss over her as if she were an adolescent grandchild dressing up in fancy clothes for the first time. I could almost have sworn she actually said "oh, how you've grown," which would have been true enough. The two of them carved up the meat to cook with great enjoyment.

By the goodwill of chance or geography, the moons happened to be full the night we stayed there. Mogen was on watch at midnight when the rest of us were woken by the howling of wolves in the distance. One voice was higher and softer, the other earth-rumblingly low, but they harmonized beautifully while the moons shone overhead.

The next morning, there were two sets of canine paw prints in the soft earth by the banks of the stream. The larger set of prints were roughly the size of my chest; the creature that left them must have been taller than Hanagrishel's house.

We had a pleasant breakfast (more eggs, seasoned with some of our dwindling supply of spices), leaving most of the conversation to Hanagrishel and Garnet. They talked a little less, but seemed to enjoy each other's company more, like two friends or relatives who know each other well enough to do without words now and then.

We had nearly finished packing up to leave when Garnet, after a long hesitation, told us that she was staying in the valley. None of us were entirely surprised. Though we'd enjoyed traveling with her, and hopefully she with us, she'd never seemed entirely at home in either the caravan or our smaller group of travelers - or, from what she'd told us, in most of the other places she'd lived - the way she did in this valley.

"I've been looking for a… for a place where I'm needed. I think I've found it." She smiled across the yard at Hanagrishel, who had pulled out some logs and was busy splitting them into usefully sized sections without the aid of a hatchet. The older woman waved cheerfully and picked a splinter out of her teeth. "Besides, there aren't any other werewolves in my family. I want to learn to be like her."

We parted with a round of hugs and well-wishes. I sketched out a quick portrait of the six of us (Mirenza included, from memory) for Garnet to remember us by. We left her with promises to write and most of the basil and snickleweed remaining in our supply of spices, which she and Hanagrishel had particularly enjoyed the previous night.

When we left the valley, Garnet had taken her claws and fangs out again, and Hanagrishel was showing her how to bite logs in half. Both of them looked happier than I'd ever seen them before.

The Blue Hyacinth Tea House

Although every valley with any size (and a few without) had at least one shrine, it was nearly a week since leaving the centipede's valley before we found another with signs of more corporeal habitation.

We were surprised to cross a dune and find a small building in the valley below us, but our surprise was lessened somewhat when we realized that it had clearly been abandoned for some time. The building's front wall was made of stone, but the roof and other walls were made of wood and had collapsed years ago. Trees had sprouted in the foundations. None of us were familiar with the species, but the largest ones must have been at least a decade old.

Still, it was a shady place to rest, so we pulled the wagons over and got out to explore. Mogen pulled a folding contraption - something like a cross between a wheelbarrow and a bathtub - out of the undercarriage of Chak's wagon, and he eeled his way into it so that she could wheel him over for a closer look.

Up close, the tiles on the one remaining wall turned out to be decorated with a pattern of blue hyacinth flowers. Two rusted hooks above the sagging doorway had once held a sign, but we could see no trace of it anywhere around the building. There was no risk of falling through the floor - the trees made it obvious that the building didn't have a cellar - so we stepped through the doorway into what had once been the interior.

Inside, standing on grass that showed occasional glimpses of a tiled floor beneath, was a statue.

It was the red-brown of terra cotta, speckled all over with lichen and moss. Its face was sculpted to resemble a round-cheeked dog - an akita or spitz of some kind, perhaps - with polished black eyes and a friendly smile. The rest of its body was much more minimal in detail, as if it had been intended to be covered by clothing. The collar of what I assumed had once been a uniform of some sort still hung around its neck. The rest of the garment had rotted away, and the collar, which looked to have once been a cheerful red, had faded to a pale and ragged pink. The statue's hands held a stack of paper menus, which were yellowed with age but surprisingly intact, considering that the rest of the statue had clearly been out in the elements for some time.

On its forehead was etched a single character. Chak later said that it meant "hospitality."

As soon as Karlishek stepped through the sagging doorway, the statue opened its mouth and spoke.

"Kirim," it said, which means "welcome" in Jingli. While we variously jumped, gasped, and (in Mogen's case) pulled out a crossbow, it repeated the greeting in several other languages. Chak was the first of us to recover his poise; he thanked the statue in Amrat, the one language all of us shared. The statue switched languages smoothly and continued in Amrat.

"Welcome to the Blue Hyacinth Tea House," said the statue - which, I assumed, was in fact some sort of golem. Though it was clearly made of hard-baked ceramic, its face moved as flexibly as if it were flesh and blood. Its voice was soft and androgynous. "Please allow me to apologize for the state of my uniform. Would you like a table for five?"

We held a brief, hushed discussion while the golem waited patiently. Mogen's single vote for caution was outweighed by four votes for curiosity, and we said yes.

A few small vines had grown partway up the golem's legs. The stems snapped when it moved its feet; it had clearly been standing in the same spot for some time. It led us to what had once been an elegant set of wrought-iron chairs and a table. Unfortunately, the seats had long since rotted through, the legs had rusted, and a large portion of the furniture was now rust stains on the overgrown floor. Unlike its uniform, the golem didn't seem to see this as a problem; it gathered the remains of a few more chairs, which shed flakes of rust and in one case an entire leg, and propped them up against the metal outer rim of the table. It carefully balanced five menus on the few scraps of wood that remained of the surface. Given the state of the furniture, we all elected to remain standing (or, in Chak's case, reclining).

"Please let me know when you have made your selection." The golem stepped back a polite distance and surveyed the other tables, which were - if possible - in even worse shape. Finding no other patrons to attend to, it simply stood and waited while we attempted to peruse the menus.

Further questions revealed that the golem had no name; that the proprietor of the tea house was currently on vacation; and that the golem could not presume to say when they would return.

In a set of shelves by the door, several additional menus,  plus an assortment of cracked china, were stacked on the one shelf still intact enough to provide some shelter from the rain. That explained how any of them were still intact.

If protected from the elements, good-quality paper can last for centuries. This, unfortunately, was middling quality at best, and it had been stored for some time in a building without a roof. When I attempted to gingerly pry the brittle, yellowed menu open, it cracked in half at the spine. I felt a somewhat irrational pang of guilt. Rather than try to open another, I simply handed my menu to Chak - the only one of us who could actually read the faded columns of Jingli script inside - and he translated it for us.

The selection seemed to be fairly standard tea house fare: an assortment of cakes, pastries, and biscuits, plus a selection of teas, only a few of which we'd heard of. Most of the teas had reptilian names of some sort: Black Crocodile, Sunlizard, Dragon's Gold.

We were curious as to how the golem planned to produce any of the items on the menu, given the building's apparent lack of a kitchen.When I attempted to order a caramel rice cake and a cup of the Sapphire Dragon tea, which was the variety I was most curious about, the golem's response came as a surprise to no one.

"I am sorry to report that we are missing an essential ingredient for this dish. In fact, we are missing every ingredient for this dish. Could I interest you in something else?"

Still curious, I asked about several other dishes on the menu. The golem informed me that they were also unavailable, as was the Sapphire Dragon tea and, for that matter, every other variety of tea. I probably would have run through the entire menu if Karlishek hadn't interrupted me.

"What exactly is available?" he asked. I had to admit that this was a more efficient approach.

The golem considered the question for a moment. It looked over at the stream running past the front door. "Water." It turned its head to survey a few nearby shrubs and trees. "And a selection of fresh fruit."

That was good enough for us. For the sake of hygiene, I requested that the golem at least boil the water first. Chak rolled his eyes. "Boiled water? For goodness' sake. Mogen, would you please fetch the tea case from my wagon?"

Mogen gave the golem a suspicious look, but hurried back to the wagons and returned a minute later with a watertight chest bound in leather. Inside was a small treasure trove of tea in assorted jars and wooden boxes. The labels were in a bewildering variety of languages. I recognized Amrat, Halsi, Hmakk, English, and even a few in Sikelak. The names were an even wider variety: Jade Serpent, Baconeg Breakfast, Gira Gira Captain's Black, Midnight Purple, Red Rose Lightning, Undertaker's Comfort, Wicked Wilma's Knuckleduster Chamomile.

Chak selected two jars and handed them to the golem with the solemnity of someone presenting a gift to royalty. "Please accept these as a small donation to your tea house."

The golem inclined its head with equal gravity. "The Blue Hyacinth Tea House appreciates your donation. I am pleased to inform you," it added to the table at large, reading the labels on the jars, "that Green Manatee and Baron Smackerly's Blackcurrant are now available."

Both of these are widely known teas, available cheaply in most countries. Chak later informed us that, given the circumstances, he had chosen them mainly for their ability to retain their flavor over long periods of time, and the fact that they were both stored in watertight jars. (And, of course, the fact that they paired well with the flavors of the brassberries and wild mint that he'd noticed the golem looking at, "because I'm not a complete barbarian.")

The golem declined our offers to donate food supplies other than tea to the tea house, citing archaic health codes that none of us had heard of. It was a pleasant meal all the same. The golem even managed to find enough cups and plates for all of us. Most of them were chipped, but they were all intact enough to hold our tea of choice. The china was decorated with a pattern of blue hyacinths.

The prices were quite reasonable - for all we knew, because they were from the previous century - and we paid the bill using little more than small change. The golem took the coins and dropped them with a splash into the rusted-open drawer of what had once been an ornate brass cash register. We also left a tip, of course. The golem attempted to slip the coins into a nonexistent pocket, looked puzzled for a moment, and then placed them on top of its head instead.

As we were leaving, I asked how often the tea house had customers.

"Business has been slow lately," the golem replied. "You are our first customers in twenty-three years, five months, and eight days. If you enjoyed your meal here, please recommend us to your friends," it added hopefully. "Desserts are half-price on Tuesdays if you wear an amusing hat."

We thanked the golem and said that we would certainly recommend the tea house to someone, whenever we reached a more populated area.

By the time we left the valley, the golem had washed the dishes, gathered the menus, and resumed its post by the empty doorway, waiting patiently for the tea house's next customers. I hope the tea is still good when they arrive.

Surprising Sheep

Roughly a century ago, in the town of Specklemax, a modestly successful farmer by the name of Ekestrial Floo decided to supplement the income of his farm by breeding brindled sheep. Brindled sheep were by no means new to Specklemax; the breed had been something of a local specialty for several generations, as had the attractive salt-and-pepper yarn produced from their variegated wool. Not much had changed about the breed since the brindled pattern had first been introduced some decades before.

Ekestrial Floo was at least as much an inventor as a farmer, an enthusiast in amateur engineering of both the mechanical and genetic varieties. He kept a small army of customized clockwork pipe crawlers, which plowed, seeded, and irrigated his fields, and which only occasionally attempted to upend and plant his house. Much of his success was due to his creation of a variety of pumpkin whose fruit, when left to ripen in the sun for a week or two, fermented into a moderately powerful explosive.*

Given this sort of track record, when Floo began to leave more of the day-to-day operation of his farm to his sister (who had her own, far more predictable, farm to run, but evidently never lost the habit of taking care of her baby brother) so that he could devote most of his attention to his sheep project, the people of Specklemax knew that he must be up to something interesting. Neighbors began to drop by the farm more often, partly out of curiosity, partly out of a desire to be forewarned if the lambs began to fly or breathe fire.

The results were far more mundane; journals and letters from the time report that Floo initially succeeded only in producing sheep with a greater variety of striped patterns. He was evidently dissatisfied by this development, though, intending something far more original, so the neighbors kept checking.

They were not disappointed. After four years of work, Ekestrial Floo walked into town one market day proudly leading the first of a new breed of plaid sheep.

They were twins, in fact: one had fleece with a pleasant blue and yellow plaid pattern, the other a handsome red and black. Some of the more cynical townspeople naturally accused Floo of simply dyeing the sheep, but a quick shearing of one plaid flank showed that the pattern was mirrored in the skin beneath.

Floo's triumph was lessened somewhat when he discovered that the process of spinning the plaid fleece into yarn or thread would inevitably blend all of the colors together into a muddy green or brown. He had apparently expected that the sheep would allow the production of plaid fabric - a favorite in Specklemax - without the need to dye the wool beforehand. Unfortunately, he had neglected to speak to a weaver, or anyone with an actual knowledge of textile production, before embarking on his project.

Though he was initially crushed to have wasted four years of his life on a pointless project, Floo did live long enough to see his plaid sheep become one of Specklemax's major tourist attractions, which I hope came as something of a consolation to him. The sheep are now a familiar sight in the area, scattered like brightly patterned handkerchiefs across the hills around the town.

Specklemax, incidentally, is in a relatively low-lying and swampy area of the Mountainous Plains. To the best of my knowledge, it has never been less than several months' travel from any of the more arid regions of Hamjamser.

It came as something of a surprise, therefore, when we crossed a dune on the outskirts of the Golden Desert and found a small flock of Specklemax plaid sheep grazing in the valley below.

They were unmistakably the Specklemax variety; the placement of their eyes, which are unusually protruding even for sheep, is quite distinctive. None of us could imagine how they had ended up in this remote corner of the world.

Naturally, those of us blessed with legs left the wagons and approached the flock for a closer look. Sheep are rarely the most observant creatures around, but these seemed so utterly unconcerned about their surroundings - including our approach - that we paid perhaps less attention than we should have while we walked toward them.

As a result, we were taken entirely by surprise when a giant centipede erupted out of a nearby patch of sand, hissing like a homicidal steam engine and rearing up high enough to block the sun with its outspread legs and fangs.

I don't know what species it was, but it was far larger than even crocodile centipedes ever grow. I've seen streetcars that were shorter and probably weighed less. Mogen had her crossbow out before I could do more than blink, but I doubt it would have had much effect on the creature. Even if she had managed to hit a joint in the centipede's heavily armored body, a single crossbow bolt would likely have done little more than make it angrier.

"My sheep!" The centipede hissed in a voice like a pot boiling over. "Mine! No touch! If you touch them, I will kill you and bite you until you die!"

Oddly enough, this was actually reassuring. Creatures that offer threats instead of simply attacking you can usually be reasoned with.

Being the only member of the group who'd visited Specklemax and encountered plaid sheep before, I was walking slightly ahead of the others. As a result, I found myself in the uncomfortable position of negotiating with the giant angry venomous chilopod. I've traveled by kilopede and have no particular fear of arthropods of any size, but kilopedes are essentially placid creatures. This one was quite clearly not.

Still, it was speaking Amrat, sibilantly accented but perfectly understandable, and it hadn't actually made a move toward us since we'd stopped approaching the sheep. Its sheep, apparently.

I reassured the centipede that we had no intention of touching its sheep; we merely wanted to look at them. It hissed suspiciously at me.

They were, I added, very nice sheep.

At that, the centipede's hostile attitude seemed to melt away completely. It flipped its antennae forward and rubbed its claws together.

"Yesss! Are they not beautiful?" the centipede crooned. With alarming speed for such a large creature, it dropped back to the ground and scuttled over to the sheep, where it curled its body into a circle around the entire flock. It rubbed its head lovingly against a plump red and yellow one. "I have named this one Rock because she is the prettiest." The sheep all continued to chew placidly as if this sort of thing happened all the time.

After that, conversation with the centipede went remarkably smoothly. Once reassured that we had no intention of touching, stealing, eating, bothering, or otherwise interfering with its sheep, the massive arthropod was happy to tell us all of the minutiae of its apparent occupation as a shepherd. We were treated to an exhaustive list of what the sheep did and did not like to eat, given far more information than we needed about their various ailments, and personally introduced to each sheep by name. (For reasons the centipede did not explain, a full third of the sheep in the flock, both male and female, were named Skeezel. Perhaps it simply liked the name.)

As far as we could tell, the sheep had most likely wandered off from another caravan, or perhaps a farmstead with unusual origins. The flock had already been living in the valley when the centipede had arrived "many long times ago." This could have meant months or decades, although given the size of the centipede, I suspect it was closer to the latter.

Finding the sheep too beautiful to eat, the centipede had instead made friends with them. Its method of "making friends" apparently consisted of tipping a sheep over and resting its head on top of it like a pillow. (It was happy to demonstrate the process for us using one of the older sheep, which continued to chew its cud with an expression of long-suffering patience.) Luckily, the centipede didn't seem to feel the need to repeat the process with us; whether that was because we were capable of speech, or because it wasn't interested in befriending non-sheep, I don't know.

We all introduced ourselves as well. The centipede listened politely and, as far as I could tell, forgot all of our names immediately. It certainly never seemed to feel the need to use any of them while we were there. When asked, it introduced itself as "kerlis," which is simply the Amrat word for "centipede."

The centipede insisted on serving us supper and glided off over the dunes in search of prey. Garnet followed it. After an hour or so, the two of them returned with the carcass of what, surprisingly, appeared to be a sand-dwelling variety of walrus. More surprisingly yet, they were chatting animatedly with each other, discussing local wildlife and comparing hunting techniques. I don't believe I'd heard Garnet say so many words in the entire time I'd known her.

While Mogen was roasting the walrus over a large, efficiently built fire, which the centipede found fascinating, I pulled out a small box of pepper I'd picked up in the Scalps. The smell was strong enough to immediately catch the centipede's attention, and I had the rather alarming experience of having a chitinous head with fangs the size of my leg peeking over my shoulder to sniff at it.

"Is food?" the centipede asked hopefully. I confirmed that it was, and made sure to sprinkle some pepper over the centipede's portion - roughly half of the roasted sand walrus - before we sat down to eat.

The centipede reclined like a large cat while it ate, holding its meat with a few pairs of legs. It took one bite and shot upright again with a hiss that made the rest of us jump.

"The food!" it hissed, clicking and smacking its mouthparts in what I eventually realized was enjoyment. "Hot! It is food that bites! Good good, yessss."

The sight of a centipede the size of a small dragon masticating a chunk of walrus with its mouth open is one that I sincerely hope never to see again. Still, it was rather gratifying to see my relatively minor contribution to the meal enjoyed so much. It's easy to forget what a treasure spices are in lands where they're not commonly available.

The night was once again pleasantly uneventful; most wildlife seemed to avoid the valley, for obvious reasons. We did take care to choose a campsite upwind of the centipede (which smelled like acid and carrion) and the sheep (which smelled like sheep).

The next morning, we thanked the centipede for its hospitality before setting off. I left it with a few spoonfuls of pepper in a twist of paper, which it stroked lovingly with an antenna before scurrying off to bury somewhere.

Once we'd said our goodbyes, the centipede appeared to lose interest in us entirely. When we last saw it, it was making a fuss over Rock the ewe, who chewed placidly while the centipede's fangs neatly plucked burrs and twigs from her bright plaid fleece.

---

* The pumpkin - which he dubbed the Firecrack-O-Lantern - won Floo a commission from the Fiogajas, the notoriously pyromaniac royal family of Specklemax, to grow as many as he possibly could each year. The pumpkins became the centerpiece of an annual dinner party held by the Fiogajas, during which servants launched pumpkins off of the manor roof with a homemade ballista and guests competed to detonate the fruits with flaming arrows before they hit the ground. Floo's neighbors were surprisingly pleased with this turn of events, reasoning that as long as the Fiogajas were blowing up fruit on their own land, they were less likely to wander into town and attempt to create a waterspout by dropping dynamite down the town well.

Sadly, the Fiogaja family manor no longer exists. When the family finally exhausted the town's patience, leading to their deposition and exile from Specklemax, the head of the family at the time - Baron Zamran Arketily Spork Fiogaja - ignited the manor's entire cellar full of firecrack-o-lanterns before leaving town. Residents at the time attributed the Baron's act to a fit of pique at his family's expulsion from town, but in his later years - which were evidently happy ones, despite his exile and lack of eyebrows - he admitted that he had "just wanted to see how large a bang it would make."

The pumpkin seeds not consumed by the resulting fireball were propelled, along with very small pieces of the manor, for miles across the surrounding countryside. To this day, volunteer firecrack-o-lantern vines still occasionally sprout in previously non-flammable pumpkin patches as far away as Tazramack, to the usually unpleasant surprise of gardeners. It's considered wisest in the Mountainous Plains to light one's pipe a safe distance away from the pumpkin patch.

Orlogrove

After leaving Nemigan's orchard, most of the valleys we passed through were uninhabited. They continued to be roughly similar to each other: long, narrow strips of green between the bare golden peaks of the dunes, where scatterings of grass, cacti, shrubs, and small trees had grabbed the endlessly flowing waves of sand and rooted them in place.

Most valleys had a small shrine somewhere, usually by the deepest pool in the stream. (There was always a stream.) Apparently, each valley had its own local spirit - perhaps many spirits, if what I saw in Nemigan's valley was any indication - and someone long ago had taken the trouble to travel between the valleys, building a shrine to each one.

Spirits like to have shrines. They are forgetful creatures themselves, or at least remember in very different ways than we do, and many of them find it reassuring to have a shrine reminding passersby that they exist. Also, like most people, they are fond of well-crafted presents.

These shrines were certainly well-crafted. I couldn't identify the speckled gray stone they were carved from, which was neither the typical Golden Desert sandstone nor the pink granite from the gargoyle village, but it was quite hard; the carvings were old, coated with moss and lichen, but they were hardly worn at all. The stone was clearly not from anywhere nearby either. It must have taken a lot of work to transport it across all these dunes.

After my travels in Mollogou, where there's a spirit and a shrine for every hill and hummock, this place seemed oddly familiar - in an upside-down sort of way.

Karlishek and Garnet steered us away from a handful of valleys that, as they put it, smelled wrong. Nothing appeared obviously different about them from the outside, but after the first three or four, I also began to notice myself feeling faintly uneasy around them - the sort of vague sensation that I might normally have dismissed, but which I should perhaps learn to pay more attention to here. Not every location's spirit is a friendly one, especially in the less populated regions of the world.

Other valleys we avoided for different reasons. One we passed by simply because of the cheeky smile on the stone rabbit that adorned its shrine, a hand of cards pressed close to its chest with one paw. None of us were so starved for excitement that we felt like dealing with a trickster. Another had what was clearly a stone grave marker - much more crudely carved than the modestly adorned stone block that served it as a shrine - placed in the ground under its only tree. Though it didn't feel uneasy or hostile, there was an inward-turned sadness about the valley that caused us to quietly pass by and leave it alone. Spirits don't age or die the way that faster-living mortals do, and their mourning periods can last for centuries.

For the most part, though, the valleys were quite pleasant to wander through. It was a relief to be able to rest in the shade of trees again, however stunted, and hear the trickle of water nearby. Though there were no more inhabited valleys for some time, we found plenty of food in the ones we passed through. There were more desert apples and puddens, the occasional cluster of gumdrop cacti, and even a few edible mushrooms. In the sheltered spaces between bushes, we found the occasional cluster of wormflowers - fat, succulent, pink blossoms with a surprisingly sweet flavor.

We were lucky to have Karlishek along; none of the rest of us were familiar enough with the flora of the Golden Desert to reliably know if most of it was edible. Although he couldn't identify every shrub, cactus, and tuber we encountered, he was, in most cases, able to separate the benign from the poisonous or the unhelpfully hallucinogenic.*

Garnet continued to wander off and bring back various fractions of edible animals, depending on how long it had been since we'd last eaten, and Mogen turned out to be surprisingly deadly with a miniature crossbow she pulled out of her pack on the second day. As a result, we had roasted sand quails or brush millipedes to eat on most nights. (brush millipedes, admittedly, are not exactly difficult to catch; they can approach the speed of flowing tar when they feel frisky.)

All of our encounters with rattlesnakes, scorpions, and crocodile centipedes remained happily brief and long-distance. In an encounter between a crocodile centipede and the wagon gafl, the gafl would probably have won - they are heavy, unappetizing, and not extremely sensitive to venom, even in large amounts - but we preferred to avoid finding out for certain. Whenever we saw the long hummock of sand that marked a buried centipede, we made sure to give it a wide berth.

The shrines were endlessly fascinating. There seemed to be little to no pattern to them. Some were representational, carved with people, animals, or beings somewhere in between, in styles ranging from elegant to comical. Some featured only geometric shapes, or abstract sculptures that seemed to hint indirectly at a subject or a personality. One appeared to be an entire geometric treatise in the form of carved pictographs - something relating to the intersections of circles - although none of us were mathematician enough to understand it.

The design of a shrine seemed to have little obvious correlation to the apparent benevolence of its valley. One of the valleys we avoided was as tidy as a well-tended garden and had quite a lovely shrine, an elegantly carved swan with very little moss or lichen covering its form. It was pretty enough, but we felt distinctly that untidy things such as visitors would not be welcome. The next valley we avoided was the opposite: its floor was choked with underbrush, and moss completely obscured the face of the seated stone woman that made up its shrine. None of us were willing to step over the ridge into that valley, though we couldn't have said precisely why. Perhaps Garnet and Karlishek put it best: it just didn't smell right.

In contrast, one of the valleys that felt the friendliest had a shrine decorated with a border of carved skulls. They were small enough that they weren't visible from the edge of the valley (which was why we entered it in the first place). The valley's trees were hung with vines full of plump, blue-black grapes - which smelled pleasantly sweet, although we didn't quite dare to sample them - and the dense foliage overhead provided deep, much-needed shade during the middle of the day (which was why we didn't leave immediately). Once our initial alarm at the shrine's macabre design had faded a little, it was difficult not to feel comfortable in the valley. We stayed until the worst of the midday heat had passed and left wary but unharmed. Perhaps the spirit's aesthetic sensibilities simply tended toward the funereal.

We stopped for the night in a valley with a stone fish half-buried in the middle. It was similar to the standing stones that we'd seen near the abandoned canyon town, including the slow trickle of water leaking from its mossy stone gills. Unlike the standing stones, this fish was neither facedown nor faceup; it was simply propped sideways against a larger stone, as if someone had set it down there absentmindedly and forgotten to come back for it. Several small trees had grown up around it, and the water from its gills had worn a groove in the valley floor, becoming a small tributary of the stream.

The sun was nearing the horizon by then, and our thoughts were starting to turn to where we were going to spend the night. Despite its forgotten appearance, the fish was the first sign of civilization - aside from the shrines - that we'd seen since leaving Nemigan's house. Taking it as a good sign, we set off into the valley, which was somewhat longer than average, to see if there were any current residents to meet.

We found no other buildings or obviously artificial structures, but Karlishek pointed out that many of the trees and other plants were arranged in small copses, overgrown but still distinct. In most cases, there were visible differences between one copse and the next: slightly larger apples, for example, or flowers of a more vivid pink. Though the valley was short on architecture, it seemed to have an abundance of horticulture.

Finally, at one end of the valley, we found a gap beneath an overhanging boulder - a natural shelf of sorts, sheltered from the infrequent Desert rain. It was stuffed with books. They were old and dusty, but still in good condition. Most had at least one or two pages marked with scraps of paper or dried leaves. Though there were no footprints in the patch of sand in front of the shelf - which was damp from the nearby stream and would certainly have shown them - the shelf immediately around the books was clear of sand, as if they'd been moved recently. We were careful not to disturb them.

The whole valley had a charmingly distracted feeling about it. The flowers were thicker than in most valleys, with the remnants of order about them, like a garden left to run wild. Many of the trees had a bonsai sort of elegance. Even the rocks were often arranged in ways that looked deliberate, though overgrown. It was like visiting the workshop of someone who's constantly excited about their newest skill or project, surrounded by work that's perpetually not quite finished, but lovingly crafted all the same.

By that point, we had explored the entire length of the valley, and we were fairly certain that it had no mortal inhabitants. The obvious next step was to introduce ourselves to the local spirit.

The valley's shrine looked like a trio of wooden cabinets, though they were all carved from a single block of moss-furred stone. The two taller cabinets leaned together conversationally over a smaller, wider one, leaving a sheltered triangular space in the middle for offerings. All three cabinets were pleasantly asymmetrical. Their mismatched drawers were open just enough to show tantalizing glimpses of the objects inside (also stone): a book, a branch, a stack of coins, a set of drafting tools.

Most of the drawers, by now, were lined with moss. Another layer of moss was beginning to grow over the few tarnished coins left on the middle surface. It looked as if the shrine hadn't seen any new offerings in some time.

If one is simply passing through a spirit's home, a respectful acknowledgement of their presence is usually sufficient courtesy. As we were hoping to stay the night, something a little more substantial was in order.

In Mollogou, the details of a shrine often hint at the sorts of gifts its spirit appreciates. Hoping that such was the case here as well, we went through our various supplies for any likely-looking books, tools, plants, or currency. Most of what we were willing to part with fell into the latter category. For once, my habit of collecting interesting coins, rather than more sensibly spending them, proved useful.

We dismissed the various coins from the Golden Desert as too mundane; likewise, the small sum of Lint that I keep due to its widespread acceptance in most countries. Spirits almost never need to purchase anything, and we assumed that this one would appreciate novelty over denomination.

In the end, we left an intricately carved ivory coin from the Blue Desert, a three-sided coin from Tetravania called an Oak's Head,** and a clockwork coin from Miggle-Meezel that plays a simple eight-note tune when one turns the gear in its center. (I was reluctant to part with the clockwork coin, but I do have three others like it.)

The offering seemed to be sufficient. We spent a pleasant, peaceful night beneath the valley's absentmindedly tended trees, unmolested by insects or kleptomaniac centipedes. When we woke in the morning, the flat rock in front of the shrine had been laid with breakfast for five: fried apples and sand quail eggs, still steaming on plate-sized pieces of slate. A small fire was just burning itself down to embers in a ring of stones nearby. Though we'd taken turns on watch through the night, due to the unfamiliar territory, the shrine was just far enough away from our wagons that none of us had seen or heard the food being prepared.

As if that wasn't enough, after we finished breakfast, we found that a few rips in the canopy of Chak's wagon had been neatly sewn up with green thread, and someone had braided flowers into the gafl's fur. A small heap of flowers lay nearby, as if the braider had gotten distracted by something else partway through. Both gafl were happily munching on them.

In short, although we never caught sight of our host, their hospitality was impeccable. We all stopped at the shrine to express our appreciation before leaving the valley. When we boarded the non-aquatic wagon and found a sealed letter sitting hopefully on the driver's seat, weighed down with a pebble painted to look like a lopsided frog, I don't think any of us even considered not delivering it.

According to Chak, who had the best command of Jingli among us, the letter was addressed - in archaic but readable script - to a Gingrin Hilljarvel in Pandagula. ("Gingrin" is an academic title, roughly equivalent to "Doctor.")

The sender was marked simply as "Orlogrove."

Whether that's the name of a person or a place, or whether there's any difference between the two when discussing spirits, none of us were certain. If we manage to locate Gingrin Hilljarvel, perhaps we'll find out.

---

* I asked, at one point, if there were any plants that were helpfully hallucinogenic. Karlishek smiled with his antennae. "None that you'd know how to use," he said.

** I asked several people during my time in Tetravania why it's called an Oak's Head, but - as this was Tetravania - I received a clear answer from precisely no one. The closest thing I ever got was "well, oak trees don't have heads, so something has to." After a few weeks in Tetravania, one gets used to this sort of thing. Far more confusing is the fact that the coin, which appears to be a typically coin-shaped flat disc of metal, somehow has three faces on its two sides; one has to flip it over not twice, but three times, to arrive back at the face one started with. The results of a coin toss are by no means to be trusted.

Supper with Nemigan

The crocodilian man in the valley was taking a break with his feet in the stream when we returned, his baskets of fruit set aside. Upon seeing our wagons rolling down between the trees, he rose to his feet with a beaming smile full of friendly fangs and spread his arms wide.

"Kirim!" he called to us in a booming voice. "Um shalassa!" (This, I learned later, is a standard greeting in the border valleys, translating more or less to "Welcome! You look hungry.")

His name, he told us, was Nemigan. That was nearly all I could make out of what he said. He spoke Amrat, but with an unfamiliar accent far thicker than my newfound knowledge of the language could penetrate. Fortunately, Chak and Karlishek seemed to have little trouble understanding him. Mogen, having no business or messages to attend to, didn't seem to feel the need to talk.

After so long in the sun and the dry wind of the dunes, the cool, faintly damp air of the orchard valley was like the kiss of October after a long Summer. I'd almost forgotten what humidity felt like. Even Chak stuck his head out of his wagon to look around.

Each tree in the orchard was hung with what looked like a small talisman - a cord knotted around dangling pebbles and small bones, with a little glass bowl at the bottom. In each bowl was a scrap of honeycomb in a glistening pool of honey. (Though they didn't look like much in the evening shade, the sunlight the next morning lit them up in gleaming amber, dappled with the shadows of leaves and of the various bees, flies, and wasps buzzing around the sweet liquid.)

After we'd made our introductions, Nemigan led us up a path beside the stream that ran through the center of the valley. His house was a cheerfully lopsided sandstone structure with a gaggle of wooden additions hanging off of it, a pale, asymmetrical shape in the bluish dusk. It was built on a rocky outcropping where the stream chuckled its way up out of the ground. Where the water originated, I have no idea; an underground spring, perhaps, or a local aquifrax. The house wore a front porch at a rakish angle, and we shared supper there while watching the sunset over the orchard.

Supper was a masterful display of what one can do with a few types of fruit. Nemigan served us fresh apples, pickled puddens, apple juice, apple jam on pudden bread, and dried pudden slices with apple butter. To provide a little variety, he added a stir-fry of vegetables, mushrooms, and various unidentified crustaceans from the stream. (There were at least a dozen species, but he referred to them all as "kechenin," which means "crunchables.") I got the impression that he didn't get the opportunity to cook for guests as often as he would have liked. The rest of us, finding ourselves in a surprisingly celebratory mood, contributed various small additions of dried meat and bread from our own supplies, including the last of my dried slug meat. I'll have to see about replenishing my supply now that we're in a less arid region of the world.

Garnet took a walk over the dunes while the rest of us were preparing supper and returned with half of a small herbivore, somewhere between a deer and a jackrabbit. Nemigan identified the creature as a "biffery." He was quite impressed - apparently they're not particularly easy to catch - and was polite enough not to inquire where the other half of it had gone. Karlishek and I were already aware of Garnet's lycanthropic metabolism and certainly didn't begrudge her a small extra snack before the meal.

Before eating, Nemigan said what sounded like a brief prayer, which Karlishek said was thanks to the spirit of the valley. (It occasionally appears in the form of a white mouse, formed of the mist that rises from the stream at dawn; it leaves dewy footprints in the grass even on the driest of days.) I couldn't understand the words that Nemigan used, but I paid my respects the best that I could in my own language.

It turned out that Nemigan spoke a mix of Amrat (of which I now have at least a working knowledge) and Jingli, the most common language of Changrakata. His little valley was part of the patchwork region between that much greener country and the Golden Desert. Karlishek, of course, speaks fluent Amrat, and Chak had spent the journey acquiring at least an academic knowledge of Jingli, so all of us were able to converse in one way or another. We traded news of distant places in Changrakata and the Golden Desert all evening. Most of it was at least second-hand, and several months out of date, but this is usually the case with news from other regions of Hamjamser. No one minded.

Sleeping outdoors in the valleys is apparently unwise; the local centipedes have a fondness for shiny objects and are known to frisk sleeping travelers for coins and jewelry. As the centipedes are venomous, roughly the length of my forearm, and liable to bite when startled, we all agreed that it was better to attempt to fit ourselves into Nemigan's house for the night. Space was limited, but we all found a corner to curl up in or a piece of furniture to slide beneath. I spent the night in the root cellar and nearly wept with joy when the subterranean temperature required me, for the first time in what felt like years, to sleep under a blanket again. The fact that I was folded nearly in half between two baskets of puddens felt hardly worth mentioning.

A crooked extension of the building hung slightly over the stream - Nemigan said he disliked having to go outdoors to fetch water on cold nights - so Chak was finally able to spend a night outside of his wagon, submerged to his neck in the cold water. He said the chill helped him sleep.

The best news for Chak, though, came up during supper, when we discovered that we were now on the outskirts of Changrakata. The hardest part of his journey was nearly over.

The Painted Ones

It was lucky that we found the caravan when we did. By that point, after a month or two of traveling through the wild, trackless wastes of the Golden Desert, I had almost forgotten what Tirakhai had hired me to do when we'd started.

I had been unable to get much information about the "Painted Ones," those mysterious beings that apparently required caravans to travel with artists as a precaution of some sort. The people I asked were as ignorant as myself, responding with shrugs and vague rumors they'd heard; or they were strangely reluctant to discuss the topic, giving small shudders and quickly changing the subject. Eventually, I stopped asking. I assumed I would find out if, or when, we actually encountered the Painted Ones. I was slightly less sure by then that I actually wanted to do so.

Less than a week after we rejoined the caravan, the Painted Ones showed up in person and answered all my questions - and as I'd suspected, I almost immediately wished they hadn't.

We never saw or heard them coming. Even Garnet, whose ears and nose were several degrees sharper than average, had no warning. We came around a high dune and they were simply there.

Judging by their appearance, I would guess that the Painted Ones' ancestors included Deinonychus, or one of the other great hunting lizards. They were tall and muscular, with scaly brown hides and sharp, bony faces. They had wide, flat feet - perfect for running on sand - tipped with dagger-like claws as large as my hand. My head barely came up to their breastbones. Even Garnet, I think, would have had difficulty facing one of these. Against a whole pack, the caravan would not have stood a chance.

We had plenty of time to look. The entire caravan froze at the sight of them. The gafl immediately burped out their alarm stink, a reeking cloud that caused several passengers and even one of the gafl handlers to pass out. No one else moved. The Painted Ones didn't seem to mind the smell at all; they just stood there and waited.

There was an aura of casual and utterly terrifying confidence about them. Somehow, standing there with all their sharp edges glinting in the sun, they managed to convey that they would not hesitate to kill and eat every last one of us. It probably wouldn't even take them very long. They looked at the people in the caravan the way you look at fruit in a market stall, considering which ones are the plumpest and ripest and how many pieces you would slice them into before eating them. We would have had about as much chance of fighting back as a fruit would. The only reason the Painted Ones weren't getting started, right now, was that we - I - had something they wanted more than meat.

Then again, maybe they just weren't hungry at the moment. I prefer not to think too hard about that possibility.

Tirakhai had made his way over to me at some point, moving surprisingly quietly for such a large man. I had been somewhat distracted, and I jumped when he whispered to me.

"Well, artist. They have come to meet you." He gave me a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. "Good luck."

I would rather have pulled the tails of a thousand flying hyenas than walk out to meet that pack of fangs and claws. Tirakhai had to give me a rather firm shove before I could make my feet start moving. Still, they hadn't eaten us yet - and nothing focuses the mind quite like the awareness that a creature who would like to eat you might be willing to bargain for something else instead.

I have met plenty of saurian people in my life; most of them are not all that different from any other person, aside from a somewhat higher quota of claws and scales and a habit to tread very carefully on thin floors. The Painted Ones were not like any of them. I am glad to say, in fact, that I have never met anyone like the Painted Ones - with the possible exception of the Cathomar I once riddled for my life. Still, there was only one of him. There were at least a dozen of these tall saurians. (Somehow, I never took the time to count.) Their teeth and claws were wickedly sharp, except where they'd been broken off in jagged stumps. They seemed to have plenty to spare. The bases were crusted here and there with dark substances I didn't attempt to identify. Slit-pupiled eyes, in all shades of gold and copper and blood-red, inspected me with a hungry intelligence that made me feel distinctly uncomfortable. I have heard people speak of "undressing someone with their eyes," but I believe most people would stop at the skin.

Their breath had the faint, metallic tang of old blood.

In my mind, I gave my nose the rest of the day off, to calm its nerves, and gave my full desperate attention to my eyes. The Painted Ones apparently wanted an artist. I swallowed and tried to think like one.

Many of the Painted Ones were marked with what turned out, on closer inspection, to be elaborate tattoos. The pigment had been expertly worked in between the scales to form complex patterns - bold stripes and rings and spots that turned into lacy designs when seen up close. Others of the pack were unmarked. I wondered what the difference was, until I caught a glimpse of what seemed to be a shred of cloth at the base of one hunter's horns. I was still less than comfortable around these tall and exceedingly pointy people, so I was slow and careful in working my way closer. Close up, the shred turned out to be a piece of old, half-detached skin - still marked with the traces of a tattoo.

That was the difference, then. The Painted Ones, like many scaly people, shed their skins periodically - and far more thoroughly than most; tattoos, permanent on most skin, were hardly more lasting than paint for them. They had come to us because they wanted them replaced.

Several of them had pouches hung on strings around their necks, hanging next to brightly colored stones and the occasional clinking bone. (None of them bothered to carry knives.) From these pouches, several of the unmarked took yellowed and much-folded scraps of paper and presented them to me. They were sketches. Done in a wide variety of different pigments and styles, each showed one of the Painted Ones decorated with a unique pattern. The owners of the sketches gestured to the faded designs, then to themselves. These ones, apparently, had their own personal designs and wanted them re-inked.

Others, rather than giving me a sketch, pointed to my sketchbook and made empty-handed gestures. I assumed that these had not yet found a pattern that they liked and wanted me to design one for them to try.

I'd never done tattoos before, but I knew at least the basic theory. Karlishek silently loaned me a few sewing needles - not ideal, but the best tools anyone had on hand - and I got started.

It was almost more than I could manage to drive the needle into the skin of the first hunter's arm. The impatient tapping of its left-hand dagger-claw on the sand was what finally got me moving. The needle didn't even make it flinch.

Once I'd started, the work itself was enough to keep me going; painting and drawing is usually like that, though this was probably the most unusual canvas I'd ever done it on. The Painted Ones' skin was tough and pebbled with scales, hot from the sun, crisscrossed with a hundred small scars. The powerful muscles and tendons beneath it barely twitched with the jabs of my needle. The smells of hot leather and old blood filled my nose. The skin was various shades of brown, from the pale tan of parchment to a deep, rich chestnut color. It looked as if it had originally been meant for camouflage in the Desert. Their culture had clearly left that idea behind, though, favoring bold designs that could probably be recognized from miles away.

That didn't seem to be the only purpose of the patterns, though. Several of the adolescent hunters, for example, seemed to have deliberately chosen their designs to be as painful as possible - lots of dark, intricate work in the relatively soft skin around their nostrils, under their arms, in the bends of their knees and elbows. I could see them grinning at each other as I inked the patterns in. I can handle this much pain, they seemed to be saying to each other. Can you?

The older ones, having apparently moved on to other methods of competition, seemed to choose their designs more aesthetically. Some seemed to be simply abstract; others emphasized physical features, such as unusually muscular arms or protruding brow-ridges. One particularly precise drawing featured a long, jagged line twisting down the left thigh. When I began to paint it, I found myself tracing the path of an old scar, faded nearly out of existence. Apparently, even scars are impermanent for the Painted Ones. They commemorate the best ones in ink instead.

Knowing that gave me a somewhat different view of some of the other patterns.

Karlishek eventually worked up the courage to stand and watch while I worked. He'd been talking to some of the older caravan passengers - apparently, they were less reluctant to discuss the Painted Ones when the real things were standing in front of them - and had found out a little of the history behind this odd arrangement.

Apparently, the Painted Ones used to attack caravans in this region. Unpainted then, they weren't interested in trade; they only wanted the plump, tasty merchant passengers and draft animals. As a result, many caravans started traveling with armed guards. Those that couldn't afford an escort simply set out and hoped. An occasional survivor would return from one of these, parched and delirious from the heat, raving about traveling companions devoured and precious cargo dumped out like inedible garbage onto the sand.

This inspired groups of adventurers to set out from nearby cities (relatively speaking; this is not a densely inhabited region of the Golden Desert).  Drawn by the irresistible combination of riches and danger, they would arm themselves with steel and arrogance and venture into the dunes in search of these lost treasures. Many of them were also eaten. Others, failing to find the treasures they sought, turned to banditry instead - which only made matters worse.

Trade in the region was just short of drying up altogether when one group of the Painted (then the Unpainted) Ones happened to attack a caravan with a tattoo artist aboard. Like many artists, she was rather stubborn, and she continued to work on the tattoo she was in the middle of even as chaos erupted all around her wagon. (Her client, squeamish about pain, had fortified himself with large quantities of Desert ale and didn't notice a thing.) When one of the attackers slashed open the side of the wagon where she was working, she broke his leg with a nearby sledgehammer and went back to work - in plain sight of the astonished predators outside.

This was the turning point in the Painted Ones' career. They crowded around, fascinated by these marvelous paintings beneath the skin. (Until this point, their encounters with the art of the Golden Desert's other cultures had mostly consisted of taking the jewelry off of their supper.) The fighting stopped. Someone, somehow, managed to figure out enough of their language - or perhaps they had learned enough of their prey's language - to negotiate an agreement: the Painted Ones would leave the caravan alone if the artist tattooed each of them. They had found, like many before them, that they preferred art to food.

Word spread quickly. For the next few years, caravans would hire the most spectacularly tattooed people they could find to walk out in front, as advertisements of a sort, hoping that the predators would stop and see what they had to offer before simply taking what they wanted. In nearly every case, it worked. Soon, the display became unnecessary; word had traveled between the packs, and even those who had never been painted knew what to ask for when they found a caravan. No one wanted to be the last Unpainted Ones left in the Golden Desert.

No one is sure how there can be so many of the Painted Ones. There are not enough animals in the Golden Desert to sustain a population of carnivores this large. The most popular theory is that they have some hidden desert paradise - an oasis, a plateau, a secret river valley - that they return to between their voyages across the sand. If it's true, no one has ever found this hidden paradise and returned to tell about it. The Painted Ones themselves certainly aren't telling anyone.

Their language, on the rare occasion that they spoke, sounded to me like a distant relative of Halsi - one that had been put through a meat grinder. They hissed the vowels and chewed the consonants with great relish.

"Mashrakh," they kept saying to me. "Mashrakh farrakesh. Hechram rrkh." I eventually came to suspect that this meant something like "stab harder, weakling. You're barely scratching me." It was easier to work out the signals they used: a wave for "bigger," a slashing motion for "darker," a twiddling of the claws for "more complex." I tried to oblige them as quickly as possible.

Complexity seemed to be reserved for the oldest among the pack. I was surprised when I first noticed that there were children among them, though I shouldn't have been. The smallest ones had only a stripe or two each and tried to chew on my bag of tools when their parents weren't looking. I didn't try to stop them; it could just as easily have been my leg.

Most of the patterns were in black, with touches of red on some of the larger and more dangerous-looking adults. Luckily, I had a good supply of black and red pigments; these colors are easy enough to come by in nearly any area. When I pulled out the small bottle of blue paint, though - the last remains of the cockleworm dye I picked up on the Gray Coast - one of the Painted Ones laid its elegant handful of daggers on my arm and shook its head. (Her head, as I found out later.) The common colors were all very well for the rest of the band; blue was reserved for the leader. She wanted only a few touches of the color at the tips of her horns and tail, possibly to match the tattered blue feathers tied to her horns.

It had been morning when we'd encountered the Painted Ones. The sun was setting by the time I finished. No one complained about the loss of time; in fact, very few people even came out of their wagons all afternoon. A few of the brave but unassuming passengers - usually Karlishek and Garnet - kept me supplied with water and reassuringly non-predatory company, but that was all.

The Painted Ones took several minutes to admire themselves when I finally finished the last one, turning in circles on the sand and making pleased little churring noises. (I hoped they were pleased, anyway.) One of them even gave me a friendly nudge with its muzzle before leaving, making me feel as if a rack of kitchen knives had suddenly decided to get affectionate. By then, though, I was a little more able to take the gesture as a compliment; I was, if not actually comfortable around the hunters, at least not actively terrified. It is always a pleasure to have one's work appreciated, and even more so when the mark of that appreciation is that one is still alive.

The Painted Ones left nothing behind when they glided off over the dunes, running with such a silent, effortless grace that they barely seemed to touch the sand. It was startling to see after being so close to them for so long. I had felt the tough muscle and bone beneath their thick skin; the adults must have weighed at least twice what I did, yet they appeared to weigh nothing at all. They paused at the top of a high dune, a line of boldly patterned shapes against the burning sky, and then were gone with a whisper of sand.

I spent the following day or two inside the wagons. After that day of relentless heat and terror, I needed the rest. The aquatic passenger (more about him later) actually let me share his water-filled vehicle until the shakes went away.

Painting the Painted Ones might be the most difficult project I have ever undertaken. It is certainly the most difficult one I have done without being paid. It was thoroughly unique, though - and in exchange for doing it, I was allowed to remain alive. I consider that an excellent trade.

A Game of Cards

The man was seated in the back of one of the wagons. I met him during one of the caravan's many stops. We were passing through an area of the Desert where we frequently came across massive shards of pottery littering the sand - a wagon-sized hand here, half a gargantuan nose there, jagged spikes of ceramic sticking out of the sand all around. It was as if a giant terra cotta army had shattered where it stood.

The gafl could have climbed over these areas, but they were strangely reluctant to go into them, and the wagons were somewhat less maneuverable. We didn't try to cross the shards. When we came across a patch of them, Tirakhai simply stopped the caravan and had everyone look the other direction until it went away.

It was during one of these interludes, with everyone facing resolutely toward the back of the caravan, that I got out to stretch my legs and came across the man in the back of the wagon. He was seated on a rickety wooden chair, leaning his shirtsleeved arms on a large trunk as if it was a table. Another chair stood, unoccupied, on the other side of the trunk. He tipped his hat to me as I walked by.

"Good day to you."

He spoke perfect English, with a rough, inward-turned accent that I couldn't quite identify. When he found that I spoke the same language, he beamed from ear to pointed ear and set a small wooden box on the table.

"Would you care for a game of cards?"

As a rule, I avoid gambling; I am not a professional, and if I have a desperate need to rid myself of money, I know more rewarding ways of doing so. The man was quick to assure me that he felt much the same way. He simply wanted someone to play with. The game he had was a complex one, and it was rare to find someone who knew the rules or was willing to learn them.

That was enough to catch my interest. I took the other chair, and he dealt the cards.

The deck had eight suits: hearts, diamonds, moons, spoons, arrows, horseshoes, gears, and frogs. Each suit had numbers up to 12, plus a few face cards - which were different in each suit. Hearts was the only one with the Jack-Queen-King arrangement with which I'm familiar. Spoons had Chef, Scullery, and Dog; Moons had Comet, Deer, and Flute; Gears had Golem, Gremlin, and Grapplemouse, whatever that is. Overall, there were slightly more than twice as many cards as in the deck I'm used to.

We started with only four spots on the table where we could put cards - House, Yard, Oubliette, and Forecastle - but these grew steadily more complex as we started using pairs and quartets of cards, flipping cards upside-down to reverse their effects, adding little satellite clusters and linking them together with more cards still. The table soon grew to look like some sort of strange mechanical diagram.

Some cards we left face-down and never revealed. These were called Turnips - possibly based on the Desert legend that one turnip in a million is filled with gemstones - and they gained effects of their own based on the very uncertainty of what they were.

The man kept introducing more rules. Every time I thought I understood the entire game, something new would show up. Many of the rules seemed to be based on songs and rhymes and obscure poetry.

"Five threes." He laid down a handful of threes and turned them sideways, so that the numbers looked - if you were generous - like birds in flight. "Five ravens. Five is for silver, or sickness if you use the other rhyme, so if I have the Physician" - he did; it was one of the face cards for the Horseshoes suit - "I can rescue a card from my Oubliette."

I have no idea whether he was telling me existing rules or simply making them up as he went. I didn't particularly care. The reasoning behind them was fascinating and poetic - and as I've said before, regardless of whether I win or lose, I always enjoy a well-played game.

To no one's surprise, the man eventually won. Laying down a final trio of aces (three houses, which formed a village and completed the road between his Yard and Forecastle), he demonstrated the line of numerically ordered cards he'd formed across his side of the table, stretching from the single two in his House to the Miser of Diamonds ensconced in his Forecastle. I was so surprised that I actually applauded. I had begun to doubt that either of us would be able to complete the Procession; of the six or seven possible ways of winning, it sounded like one of the most challenging.

I congratulated the man on his victory and, perhaps somewhat late, introduced myself. He said he couldn't tell me his name. The last time he'd let it out, it had bitten three people and stolen an entire set of silverware before he caught it again.

This was far from the most unusual introduction I've heard, and I assured him that I didn't mind. We thanked each other warmly for the game. The sun was setting by then, and we were surrounded by the creaks of wagons and the soft, thumping shuffle of the gafl. I hadn't noticed when the caravan had started moving again.

During all my time with the caravan, that was the only time I ever saw the man with the cards. I wish I had thought to ask him the name of the game. I'd like to look it up sometime and find out if it exists anywhere but in that little wooden box.

Unexpected Canines

A few days later, the desert had lowered into a slightly more fertile valley lined with rocky cliffs. It was probably too dry for agriculture - there was a sluggish trail of muddy water down the middle of the valley, no more - but the sand was sprinkled with grass and wiry little bushes. We even caught sight of the occasional goat, though they were always darting out of sight behind rocks by the time we noticed them. They were far warier than we were.

In hindsight, that probably should have told us something.

We walked downstream ("stream" being a generous term) for another day or two. Running water tends to lead to more running water, and enough running water will eventually have people living by it. This is true nearly anywhere in the world. The food - animal and vegetable - was far more plentiful in the valley, and there were occasional clear pools where we stopped to refill our water. Occasionally, there were even trees with enough shade to sit in. Rattlebirds and orange-furred marmlets stared at us from high in the rocks. They scuttled away when we looked at them.

On the third day, we found out why all the animals were so skittish. The valley had gotten deeper, winding in sharp zigzags beneath the sandstone cliffs. There were occasional spots where the water actually trickled instead of oozed. We were in much higher spirits than before. We were walking beside the stream, debating whether marmlets were edible or poisonous like their cousin the nightshade gopher, when we came around a rock and found a pack of saber-dingoes staring at us.

Everyone froze.

Saber-dingoes have gained something of a bad reputation in the Golden Desert; unfortunately, they have earned most of it quite honestly. The most common theory is that they are descended from only the nastiest bits of wild dogs, lions, and wolverines. In most parts of the world, the wild canines - wolves, jackals, thylacines* - will leave people alone, correctly judging that these bizarre upright creatures with their fire and metal are much more dangerous than any wild predator. Saber-dingoes are different. They will not attack large groups of animals - hence the use of caravans for desert travel - but they will not hesitate to attack anything, no matter how large or well-armed, as long as they outnumber it.

There were four of us. There were eight dingoes. The smallest of them probably weighed more than Garnet. We had a few knives between us, ranging from bread knives to potato peelers; the dingoes had claws and teeth. They also had the fangs for which they are named, two each, serrated blades as long as my forearm that hung down to either side of their chins. If anyone had been placing bets, they would not have been on us.

We had been downwind of the dingoes, and they had been busy dividing up a dead goat, so they were as surprised as we were - but considerably more pleased. In moments, they had left the goat behind and were slinking toward us with the casual, eager grace of a predator who has just spotted much larger and better-fed prey.

We raised such pathetic excuses for weapons as bread knives and backpacks and tried not to panic. The goat did not look as if it had had a chance to run very far.

That was when Garnet came out from behind us. We tried to stop her - pointlessly, as a few feet more or less of distance was clearly not going to make much difference to the dingoes - but she shrugged us away and kept going.

She stopped, facing the ranks of saber-toothed grins, and began to grow.

Thick, black fur sprouted along her arms and neck, and her loose clothes rustled and shifted as muscles and limbs expanded beneath them. We could hear her bones creaking. In what seemed like an eternity but was probably less than twenty seconds, there was a nine-foot-tall black werewolf with claws like a velociraptor standing where the small woman had been. She was still wearing the same delicate pink sari she'd had since leaving the caravan. It looked positively tiny on her now.

Wordless, she pulled back her lips and growled at the pack, giving them (and us) a clear view of fangs that would have put a crocodile to shame.

The pack held very still for a second. Then, without the slightest twitch as a warning, the largest saber-dingo - a male with a ragged mane - sprang for her throat.

She met him halfway. There was a brief scuffle, full of flying sand and snarls like ripping cloth. The two of them paused just long enough for us to see that she had somehow gotten her teeth around his throat - he probably would have lost it if not for his mane - and then she flexed the muscles of her neck and shoulders and threw him fifteen feet into a sand dune. She was on him again before he could get back on his paws.

The other dingoes tried to leap at Garnet as soon as her back was turned. After all, the point of a pack is not to attack things alone. The rest of us shouted warnings, and she backhanded them across the sand before they could get near her. They gave up after only a few tries.

The largest one was far more stubborn. I won't go into detail about the rest of the fight, except to say that he was bleeding from a dozen wounds - none of them fatal; she seemed uninterested in killing him - and was missing most of his left ear by the time he finally gave up, crawling away with what remained of his tail between his legs. The rest of the pack followed him without a sound.

Garnet stood there, panting, and watched them go until they were out of sight behind the next bend in the valley. She turned and gave us an apologetic grin with too much red in it.

"Sorry if I frightened you," she said, and collapsed.

It took all three of us to drag her over to the stream. We had cleaned her wounds, as well as we could, and were just starting to bandage them when she shifted back to human. Every cut promptly healed on its own. This is fairly normal for shapeshifters; they never stay wounded for long. When you're reshaping your entire body, there's no reason to leave holes in it.

Garnet remained unconscious until after sundown. When she woke up, she emptied the nearest pool of water, ate our entire supply of dried meat, and followed it with everything that remained of the dingoes' goat. If she hadn't been so exhausted, I suspect she would have gone out into the dark to catch another one.

When she had finished, she apologized again for frightening us and for not telling us sooner. We assured her that no apologies were necessary. After all, if she hadn't been there, we would have been not only frightened, but rather unpleasantly dead as well.

We had to admit, though, that we were rather curious.

Garnet had come from a part of the Desert where werewolves were rumored to live, she said, but none of her relatives could remember there being one in the family before. Apparently, it's a trait that can skip many generations before it shows up again, like blue eyes in a dark-eyed family, or carnivorism in a family of herbivores. She confused her parents to no end as a teenager. She was always hungry - she could out-eat everyone in her family - but she never seemed to actually grow any larger. No one was sure where she was putting it all.

They found out when she changed for the first time, at age fifteen. She had been growing - but not in her normal body. Instead, it had all been going into that mysterious little side pocket of existence where werewolves keep their extra mass. The first time she changed, she destroyed her dress and half of the room she was in, mostly due to panicking and exiting through the nearest wall.

She's been careful to wear loose clothing ever since, just in case.

She stays human nearly all the time because it's easier, she said; she weighs less, eats less, hits her head on fewer doorways, and is far less hot without all that black fur. Also, walking around as a nine-foot pillar of muscle and sharp ends tends to frighten people.

"Actually," she said with a rueful laugh, "it frightens me a little too. It's too big, too strong, too pointy. Most of the time, I just try to forget the wolf is there." She paused for a moment, then smiled. "I guess it was good to have it today, though."

We all quite emphatically agreed.



* Yes, I know that thylacines are not technically canines, but they take much the same role in the parts of the world where they live. The same is true for houndworms, cerulean monitor lizards, and the feral candroids in a few of the wrecked floating cities.

Trick Tracks

Several days into our destinationless journey, Garnet surprised us by bringing a story back with dinner. She had said barely a dozen words altogether since we'd lost the caravan, so this was something of a shock.

It had started, she said, shortly after she'd set off hunting for the day. It hadn't taken her long to find something to track; we were passing through an area with dusty ground instead of sand, and the criss-crossing prints of many animals were quite clear. For most of an hour, she had been tracking a mikit, one of the little miniature antelope that live in the scrubbier areas of the Golden Desert. At least, that's what she thought it was. After a while, she realized that the tracks were bigger than she had thought at first. Not a mikit, perhaps, but some sort of full-sized deer or antelope.

A little while after that, the tracks sprouted toes and become the prints of a lion cub. These soon grew to the prints of a full-grown lion.

By then, it was obvious to Garnet that something strange was going on. She was expecting a shapeshifter of some kind, or perhaps an unusually clever trick - that is, until she heard the lion roar on the other side of a rocky outcropping. Carefully, barely so much as breathing, she peered over the top of the nearest rock.

On the other side was a little desert rabbit. It had stuck its head into a round hole in the rocks and was, somehow, using this to turn its high-pitched voice into a remarkably convincing roar. As Garnet watched, it turned away, making satisfied little chuckling noises, and hopped back to where the lion prints ended in the dust. It leaped into the air.

Its paws came down one, two, four at a time, over and over, tapping at the dust as precisely as the keys of a typewriter. In seconds, it had pounded out a perfect lion's paw print. A couple of tiptoe stabs even gave the print a set of claws. One long leap, and the rabbit had started another a little farther along.

Apparently, it had been forging the tracks the whole time, almost as quickly as Garnet had been following them.

She followed the rabbit for a while longer. (She can move in nearly complete silence when she wants to, which seems to be most of the time.) It didn't seem to have a particularly long attention span. From lion prints, it moved on to camel, then to the segmented claw-marks of a giant sand-mantis. It had just started making the parallel ripple tracks of a sidewinder when the wind changed direction. The rabbit found itself suddenly downwind of one of the most dangerous predators in the Golden Desert: a small, stealthy human. It whirled around, saw her, and vanished.

She would have missed it entirely if she hadn't been looking right at it. As it is, her eyesight must be incredibly sharp. She had only a fraction of a second to see the rabbit's coat ripple, exposing a different layer of fur to view, until it was dust-colored all over. Only a faint blur and a quick-moving shadow were visible as it darted into the rocks and disappeared.

Garnet said that she plans to leave the rabbits alone until we're well out of this part of the Desert. There's no telling how many of the ones in this area share this remarkable talent for footprint forgery. It's not something she wants to discourage.

Besides, what she brought back instead was a Desert iguana nearly her own weight, with sickle claws as long as my fingers. I think we can do without rabbit for a while.

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.

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.