Creeping Hieroglyphs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Malanian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sporetower

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There seemed little point in denying it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps after I die.





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

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

A Hive in Terraces

I walked around Carvendrone today, seeing some things for myself that the mantis shopkeeper had described to me yesterday. The city is a maze of oddly shaped wood and brick. The houses are all domes, or rippling towers, or strange little tapering things like timbered pinecones. Most of them have extra doors on the roof for visitors from the air. Everything is on terraces; nearly half the buildings in the city are underground, dug out of the fronts of terraces with other buildings on top of them. Every road is the roof of all the houses on the next terrace down. The people climb stairs or ladders or simply fly from one layer of city to the next. The air is full of clicks and buzzes and the rattle of transparent wings. Spindle beetles walk the streets next to mantises, bipedal grasshoppers, black beetles, and a thousand other species I can't even name. Wasps and giant butterflies drone or drift through the air overhead. Millipedes pick their way along the streets, their colonnades of legs moving in elegant waves, gathering the city's trash and eating it. Scarabs and roaches pop in and out of tunnels - there are miles of them inside the mountain - through little arches in terrace walls. Caterpillars ripple sideways along the walls to avoid being stepped on. (The people of Carvendrone always watch the ground in front of them, but newcomers aren't always so careful.)

The mantis shopkeeper - his name, he said, was Grchx-spakkkl, but I could call him Fred - had paid me half a dozen Train tickets for repainting his shop's sign. (It was written in three languages. I couldn't understand two-thirds of it, but the calligraphy was lovely.) I spent one ticket and a few tuppenny gears - leftovers from my stay in Cormilack last year - on lunch, a speckled brown curl that turned out to be a sausage grub, with a sort of honey pastry for dessert. The spindle beetle I bought them from seemed to like the gears. I don't think Cormilack coins reach Carvendrone very often.

Rickshaw beetles hurried past every few minutes, trundling along at a surprising speed for insects the size of a walrus. Their black shells gleamed in the sun. Most of them were waxed and polished, even shinier than usual; others were painted in abstract designs, swirls and geometric patterns, or had writing in the tidy alphabet that appears everywhere in the city. A few had seats strapped to their backs, but most pulled the little carriages named after them. The ones without passengers gave me inquisitive looks as they passed. (How a beetle can look inquisitive, I don't know, but they did.) I didn't take a ride on any of them. I wasn't going anywhere in particular, just wandering. I spiraled my way gradually up through the city.

At the peak of the city, and the mountain it's built on, is the Sclesserax. It casts intricate shadows on the terraces below it. Builder hornets are constantly adding onto the hive-palace,* the home of the Queens of Carvendrone and the Vespid nobility, an impossibly huge construction of wasp-paper and sun-baked clay that has long since outgrown the peak on which it was built. It bulges out over the rest of the city like a patchwork thundercloud pinned to the ground. Layers of thick wasp-paper, striped in gray and brown and white like layers of sedimentary rock, are mixed with lumps and patches of clay in every shade of brown. There are sections of wax honeycomb here and there, startlingly geometric in rigid hexagons amid the curves and whorls of wasp architecture. The wasps far outnumber the few small colonies of bees. The spires and domes that make up the Sclesserax grow constantly, built up in rippling layers by the claws and mandibles of its ever-present cloud of workers. The River Glom doubles in width below Carvendrone; the banks recede daily as the clay is flown up and added to the Sclesserax. Pillars and stalactites of chewed architecture stretch down from its edges. Stones and pieces of old machinery are embedded in the walls here and there for decoration. Windows that are also doors speckle every wall with holes, seemingly at random. They're filled with the in and out of wasps and bees. A few non-insects live in the Sclesserax too - there were one or two avians overhead, and I think I saw a day bat at one point.

Seen from a distance, the building is slightly similar to a hornets' nest or the little mud-cases made by daubers and potter wasps, in the way that a plumpkin is similar to a pea. I plan to explore the inside tomorrow.

Oh, yes - apparently, the spindle beetles have not given up on Captain Tamarac. No less than fifteen of them stopped me on the street today to ask where he was. They didn't ask anyone else that I saw. Just me. When I asked them who Captain Tamarac was, they just gave me blank looks, as if I was speaking nonsense.

I'm starting to get rather curious about the Captain's whereabouts myself. If this goes on much longer, I may have to join the spindle beetles in asking random strangers about him.


* "Sclesserax" is a vertebrate mispronunciation of the Carvendrone word for "hive." To wasps, the word means a bit more than "that little buzzing lump over there" - the meaning is closer to "stronghold" or "citadel."

The Essentials

Having spent all of yesterday and the day before in the Illegible Library, admiring the glorious clutter and the menagerie of letters scrawled on every surface in sight, I decided to do something different today. I went to see the Essentials.

Technically, the book's title is Essen Chile's Essential Book of Essential Essentials - it's embossed in foot-high purple letters on the cover - but this is a bit too long and ridiculous for most people's tastes, especially the ones who want the Essentials taken seriously. Most people hope the author was using a pseudonym; almost as many people hope that, given the choice, he or she would have chosen a better one.

According to the keepers of the Essentials, the book contains all the knowledge anyone in Hamjamser could ever need. No one's been able to prove otherwise. In fact, no one has actually lived long enough to read the entire book, so no one's been able to prove much of anything about it. Some people have pointed out that the book must have had multiple authors; no one could possibly have lived long enough to write it all.

There are only three copies of the Essentials in existence. (No one knows who had time to copy the whole thing, much less twice, but there they are.) Several people have tried to make more copies. None of them have ever finished the task. Sooner or later, one of their descendants always loses interest.

One of the three copies, of course, is in Sconth. It's kept in a thick-walled old stone building that used to be a fortress back in the days of the locust marauders. The Essentials keepers live there, spending their lives reading as much of the book as they possibly can and looking things up for anyone who asks. They are all Wayfinders. The book is large enough that its pages and paragraphs behave like geographical features and are never in the same place twice. Wayfinders are the only people who can find anything in the Essentials except by chance.

I didn't have anything I particularly needed to know, and I couldn't really afford to ask anyway - Wayfinders, and the information in the Essentials, are rare enough that they can charge more or less whatever they want - so I just watched. I was allowed to look at a few pages by the short, thickset burreler who was looking through the book when I came in. She was too short to read the book from the floor; instead, she just walked around on the pages in a pair of enormous fuzzy slippers.

She introduced herself, rather distractedly, as Snuffbox, which happened to be the title of the section she was reading. I never was sure how much attention she was paying to anything outside the book.

Apparently, the last person to come in had asked for advice on getting blue floo shrews out of a thugroffler's nose. Snuffbox (or whatever her name was) hadn't asked why. She thought she might have read something about that particular subject on page 736008, though, so she was now trying to find it. The pages are ten feet wide and not numbered in any order that makes sense. While I watched, she turned pages 42, 7758020, 96.24, 145AM, *, and TRUFFLE. Being Wayfinders, though, the Essentials experts can eventually find any page they've read before; page 736008 came up while I was asking about the building (which Snuffbox said was built by the 15th Baron of Sconth as a safe haven for his collection of cookbooks). Sure enough, there on the page were three paragraphs on the subject of removing blue floo shrews from the insides of noses. The section was in tiny letters, written sideways, in the middle of a larger paragraph on pocketwatch maintenance.

The best ways to remove blue floo shrews from a thugroffler's nose, according to the Essentials, are to lure them out with goat cheese or play Thiglian mop opera all day (though it's best to give the thugroffler earmuffs before trying the second method). That'll be good to know if I ever own a thugroffler.

There were a few Essentials keeper apprentices there as well; two spindle beetle nymphs and a little three-foot centipede spent the entire time crawling in and out between the pages Snuffbox wasn't reading. Each one carried a magnifying glass and a small salamander lantern. Just think - children all over the world stay up late reading between the covers, and these three get to do it for a living.