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.

Urban Bonsai

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It seems he is growing a bonsai town.

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

End of the River, End of the Road

Since Karkafel, I've been traveling through the cities and towns along the river Lahra. I reached the last one today.

The river begins with the Neverending Waterfall in Thrass Kaffa and flows through the Desert from there. In most places, rivers get wider as they go, joined by other streams and smaller rivers until they reach the sea. The Lahra gets smaller. There are no other streams or rivers in this part of the Golden Desert, and the hot air dries up more of the river the farther it goes. Numerous towns and cities have sprung up along the banks, diverting more and more water to irrigate their crops, which has only accelerated the process. By the time it reaches Denemat, the smallest and last village, the river is hardly more than a silty trickle. The villagers have to constantly clear sand out of its rocky banks to keep the water above the ground.

Obviously, further travel along the river is impossible at this point. There is no more river. What remains of it is spread out into Denemat's network of irrigation ditches, sucked up into the thirsty roots of the village's dates and drought-wheat.

The road - really just a path by now - continues a short distance past the village, parallel to the largest irrigation canal. I followed it this morning just to see where it led. It ended at a little mud-brick hut where an elderly couple was drinking tea in the shade of a small acacia. They shared a cup with me. The tea was a deep jewel-red, quite strong, with some sort of spice or fruit that made it taste like sunshine on hot metal.

The people of Denemat speak Amrat, a language only distantly related to Halsi. I couldn't understand a single word the couple said. It wasn't a problem. Like other older couples I've known, they were content to sit in silence, and so was I.

In return for the tea, I repainted the door of their house. It had a beautiful pattern of fossil ammonites that had faded nearly to oblivion in the Desert sun. It was a good way to spend the morning. Hospitality is hospitality, even when the guest and hosts can't understand a word the other says.

The hut was surrounded by a small ring of vegetable garden, arranged to take advantage of every drop of water from the vague damp patch that was all that was left of the river. There were Desert roses blooming between the cabbages and parsnips, laden with the occasional garnet-red rosehip. Perhaps that's what was in the tea. Beyond the little ring of flowers and vegetables, the Desert stretched to the horizon, shimmering in the heat, a parched ocean of dunes. It was unmarked by so much as a footprint, much less any sort of path.

It was obviously time for a different method of navigation.

Fortunately, I'd only been here for a day before the caravan arrived. It was late afternoon when the dusty train of wagons slid into the village. The wagons use runners, not wheels, for travel on sand; they seem to be mostly cloth, but I was too distracted by the gigantic hairy creatures that were pulling them to pay much attention. More on those later.

The leader of the caravan is a massive reptilian man named Tirakhai. He's a good foot taller (and wider) than I am, not counting the horns, with a booming voice and sharp golden eyes.

He speaks no English, I speak no Amrat, and both of us speak only a minimum of Halsi and Sikelak, but we managed to communicate well enough for me to ask to join the caravan. (I've found that pointing and offering people money often works almost as well as speech, at least if you're trying to buy something.)

Unfortunately, seats on a caravan are rather expensive, and the fact that my money consists of currencies from over a dozen different regions only complicated things. We were busy haggling over the price (I was losing) until Tirakhai happened to catch sight of the sketchbook in one of my bags. He pointed, and I took it out and showed him a few sketches. He seemed delighted at the sight. With a broad smile, he waved away my money, clapped me on the back hard enough to knock the breath out of me, and ushered me toward the caravan.

Needless to say, I was rather confused. Was he offering to buy my sketchbook? I offered it to him, but he didn't seem interested in the book itself, only in the fact that I had it.

After several attempts to explain why he'd changed his mind, answered by nothing but baffled looks from me, Tirakhai gave up and strode off to one of the rear wagons to fetch a tall insect in a striped vest. The insect (I'm not sure of his or her name, or gender, for that matter) knew a bit of both of our languages and was able to provide rough translations.

What had excited Tirakhai was the fact that I was an artist; they're in short supply here at the tail end of the river. (That explains the state of the door this morning.) He was offering to let me pay my way with skill instead of money.

Apparently, every caravan that travels in this region of the Golden Desert needs to have an artist along because of things called the "written ones," or something like that. I confess that I only had a vague idea of what Tirakhai and the insect were saying; my command of Desert languages, even the relatively familiar Halsi, is still not as good as it should be. This is something I intend to change during this trip. Neither Tirakhai nor the insect managed a clear description of what the written ones are. The claw-and-teeth gestures they made were enough to make me slightly nervous, but I haven't heard of any exceptionally dangerous creatures in this area, and no one else in the caravan seemed particularly worried. For free passage across the Desert, I'll take my chances.

You can tell caravans that have been through this area by the large amounts of decoration on their wagons. It's become something of a status symbol, as well as giving the caravans' artists something to do while traveling. While it's necessary to have an artist for each trip, for reasons I'm still not clear about, it seems that their skills are not always in constant demand, and no caravan will bring along a passenger who doesn't either pay or work the whole time. This caravan is new to the region and, compared to the others, woefully unadorned. They intend to keep me busy.

Being mostly cloth on top, the wagons are, quite literally, a whole series of blank canvases. This should be fun.

Thrass Kaffa

We felt Thrass Kaffa before we saw it. After days in the dry air of the Golden Desert, the breeze this morning carried tiny droplets of water, which collected on every surface in the caravan. People walked along with their mouths open, drinking the water that condensed on their tongues. We were soaked by the time we reached the city.

The city of Thrass Kaffa is built beneath the Neverending Waterfall. The Waterfall comes straight out of the sky; if there were ever any clouds, it could almost be an exceptionally precise rain shower. Most of it has spread into a fine mist of spray by the time it reaches the ground. The constant wind of the Golden Desert blows the spray over the entire town, so everything is constantly wet. Rainbows appear at random in the air. Somehow, a whole collection of jungle plants ended up here many years ago; they've thrived in the dripping heat, growing over and through the entire city. Thrass Kaffa is a tiny patch of rainforest in the middle of the Desert. It's like being back on the Greenhouse Cliff. The buildings are draped with vines; orchids and bromeliads sprout from sandstone gutters. The streets are full of sunlit mist and the dripping green explosions of tropical plants.

There used to be a lake in the middle of the city, but by now, the jungle and the surrounding farmland drink up all the water that reaches the ground. The fish have taken to the trees instead, since there's nearly as much water in the air as on the ground. You can see them occasionally, wriggling up and down the trunks. Groups of Kaffans gather occasionally to race them.

Surprisingly, the city's aquifrax has never complained about the disappearance of its lake; it only seems to care about the Waterfall. The water that reaches the ground is no longer important. The aquifrax refuses solid gifts, disdainful of anything coarse enough to be affected by gravity, but it happily accepts offerings of music and poetry. It's said to have exceptional taste. When walking through Thrass Kaffa, it's common to find writers and musicians with their heads raised, blinking, singing or reciting their work to the rain. Every so often, the rain gives them an answer.

No one knows where the Waterfall comes from. Several of the city's avians have flown as high as they could, trying to find its top, but they all ran out of strength before they ran out of water.

Of course, not many avians live in the Golden Desert; most avians capable of flight need to eat nearly half their weight every day, and food is not quite that plentiful here. There are far more avians in the comparatively lush Blue Desert. In Thrass Kaffa, there are actually a surprising number of amphibian people - nearly all of the ones in the Golden Desert, I believe. Men and women with glistening, speckled skin pass by with perpetually damp clothes and brightly colored lap-frogs, only a few streets away from the waterless dunes.

The city of Karkafel often connects to Thrass Kaffa, though you can only travel between the two through catacombs and obscure back alleys. The cities are only visible to each other in the occasional mirage. Thrass Kaffa is built around the Waterfall, Karkafel around its famous Library; the cities trade life for information, nature for culture. Farmers pick fruit in Thrass Kaffa and bring it to Karkafel to trade for music. Archivists from Karkafel sneak into Thrass Kaffa when they've had enough of dust and dry paper and need someplace green. It's an unusual relationship, but the people of the two cities seem happy with it.

About half of the caravan is staying here; the rest is moving on, taking the jazz birds off to who knows where. I'll miss traveling with their constant warbling improvisations. I have friends in Karkafel, though, and I want to at least stay long enough to try to find them before I leave.

In a Nutshell

At long last, I'm back to civilization (the part of it that's connected to other parts, at least).* I'm writing from Meligma, a small village in the upper reaches of the Great Shwamp. It's a tangled cobweb of a village, a collection of little tents and pod-houses strung between the branches of giant cypress trees. Most of the villagers say they've never seen the ground. The few who have ventured below the canopy say that, in fact, there is no ground; the trees grow straight out of still black water. The knobbled knees that grow from their roots were carved by the ancient tribes into strange shapes, like totem poles or watchtowers. So much new bark has grown since then that it's impossible to tell what any of them were. Gnarled, lumpy shapes are all that remain. They have grown mysterious with age.

Most of the houses in Meligma are the hollowed shells of calabrash nuts, which grow on three ancient calabrash trees in the village. The largest shells are big enough to comfortably house a family of five or six, and even the smallest can serve as gardening sheds.** The chief's house has windowpanes cut from the clear shells of coracle snails. They distort the trees outside into bulbous shapes that look like they might float away at any moment.

The nut experts of the village are called Calabrashers. They know exactly when to harvest a nut - the point at which it has reached its maximum size, just before it drops from the tree and is lost in the swamp below. Calabrash nuts are sturdy and will float a long way before they rot and drop their seeds. They've washed ashore in nearly every river in Hamjamser. Sailors have even found them in the ocean near Kennyrubin.

When a nut is judged ready, the family in line for it (there's always someone ready to leave their tent) gathers to bore through the shell and empty it out.*** The insides are fibrous and squishy - more like a squash than a nut, really. The nuts have to float, so they're mostly air. The large ones still weigh several hundred pounds each. Once the shell is empty, it's light enough to cut from the tree and hang in a different one. The family cuts windows and a smoke-hole and connects the house to the village's network of rope ladders and bridges. Most people paint their houses with fruit dyes. They hang in the cypress branches, colorful balls with doors and windows, connected by garlands of climbing vines.

Staying in Meligma is a bit like living in a giant Christmas tree.



*My apologies, by the way, for another long silence - where I've been, postbirds have been scarce. I was unable to write at all in November, as I usually do. I will try to do so in June instead.

**There's a surprisingly large amount of hanging agriculture in Meligma. Grapes grow high in the trees, where it's sunny, and the lower branches are covered in squidvine, marsh-bloat, and climbing potatoes. Even the giant cypress cones have edible seeds in them.

***Most of the Calabrashers use saws and axes, but there are a lot of rodents in Meligma who still do it the old-fashioned way and use their teeth.

Inkweed

Since the abrupt disappearance of Professor Flanderdrack, our compartment has been only three-quarters full. A few people have taken a look at it, but being less inclined to stay up late than Flishel and I, none of them have stayed. One of the four seats has stayed empty. The sleeping passenger sort of spreads into it occasionally.

Today, we were joined by a fourth passenger.

The Train had stopped at Arkentram, a small town that seemed huge compared to the little villages we've been passing lately. The station was centered around a tall thing like a scrap-metal tree. The station-master explained that it was to attract sunlight. In Arkentram, he said, the sun shines even when it's raining. It certainly did while we were there.

The Train stayed for a few hours, so I went to buy some more ink in the market. I don't know when we'll find another town large enough to have ink vendors. I found the stall just as a heap of coats and scarves, presumably with someone inside them, was leaving with a gallon jug of ink. I bought one of my own and came back to the Train. The heap of coats arrived at our compartment only a minute or two after I did.

"Norrel Hepsidine," it said. "Midnight."

We introduced ourselves.

"Nigel Tangelo, two am."

"Flishel, midnight." (The only English word I've ever heard him use.)

"And, um... that?"

"Never wakes up."

"Ah."

That was all. Without another word, the heap put down its suitcase (her suitcase - Norrel is a girl's name) and settled in. She spent the next half-hour taking off layer after layer of coats and shawls and sweaters. Underneath, she turned out to be amphibian, with a salamander-like face and pale green skin. A fringe of vestigial gills hung down over her ears. Her face was covered with what I assumed were tattoos or paint: black spirals and leaves, like the shadow of a vine.

Her coats took up nearly every coat-hook in the compartment. Fortunately, the Train gets a lot of cold-blooded passengers, so each compartment has about forty hooks for just this reason. The air slowly filled with the smell of cinnamon. We found out why later, when she took a stick out one of the pockets - raw cinnamon, the alpine variety, still in stiff little rolls. She chewed on it absentmindedly all day.

Our compartment stays warmer than most, as a result of having three mammals in it. It would almost be stuffy without the blasts of cold air whenever the Train stops. In the end, all Miss Hepsedine kept on was a knee-length embroidered skirt, like the ones worn in the Golden Desert. (Keeping the chest covered is a purely mammalian habit; no one else has anything to cover up. Male and female amphibians look exactly the same to most people.) Her entire body was covered with the black vines. I was about to ask whether they were tattooed or painted when a leaf fell off of her arm. It dissolved into a puff of smoke before it reached the floor. That seemed to more or less answer my question.

I had only glanced at the falling leaf for a second, but that seemed to be all it took; Miss Hepsedine noticed me looking and grinned. "It's inkweed," she said eagerly. "Do you like it?"

Thus began the rest of the afternoon. Before the subject of inkweed came up, Miss Hepsedine had said all of seven words; after that, she turned out to be capable of talking steadily for hours.

Inkweed is a plant composed entirely of the color black. It's a dermatoglyph, like mobile hieroglyphics or rainbow splodge, a form of two-dimensional life that exists only as patterns on a surface. It can't exist by itself. It has color, but no thickness. A tree with an inkweed vine on it doesn't have stems and leaves stuck to its trunk; it has vine-shaped patches of wood that happen to be black. All inkweed needs is a smooth surface and a source of black, such as ink, tar, ash, or the dark mud on the bottoms of swamps. It has been known to survive on a diet of shadows, but it prefers more substantial kinds of darkness.

Miss Hepsedine, as it turns out, is something of an expert on inkweed. She makes her living off of it. Her suitcase is completely full of books, pens, and jugs of ink (I think she was wearing all the clothes she had), and all but a few of the books are copies of her guide to raising inkweed. She includes seedlings from her own plants when she sells them. The seeds look exactly like commas. They fall off of the plants when they're ripe and stick to the first surface they touch. The seed in each book is carefully planted on a sheet of black paper, which turns white as the seedling sucks the pigment out of it. Each seedling has to be added just before its book is sold; if it stays in it too long, it spreads and starts eating the words.

If it weren't for my disastrous luck with plants - every single one I've raised has died, except the ones that turned out to be weeds - I might be tempted to get an inkweed myself.

Miss Hepsedine fed the inkweed while she talked. Her hands were covered with the feathery black lines of roots. I wasn't sure why they were there, instead of on her feet, until she got out a jug of ink and started pouring it into her palm. I expected it to drip off onto the floor. Instead, it disappeared into her hand like a magician's trick, absorbed by the inkweed without spilling a drop.

She spent the evening writing; she's currently working on a book about dermatoglyph biology. When not discussing inkweed, she hardly talks at all, which is perfect - I don't either, and Flishel talks a lot but doesn't seem to care if anyone's listening. It all works out nicely. If we ended up with someone who talked all the time in a language I knew, I could never concentrate on anything.

Golgoolian

One of the first places the Train stopped in October was Golgoolian, the huge and grimy city on the edge of the Great Shwamp. Nothing ever seems to stay clean there. The mist that comes off of the Shwamp oozes through the city, thick and brown, and leaves a coating of mud behind it. Smoke from chimneys goes up, curls back down again, and stains the buildings black. The whole city seems to attract dirt. The locals blame the wind.

Like Rampastula, Golgoolian is built on top of layers of itself. Each building in the city has two or three more underneath it. The mud has oozed in to fill the old rooms underground. Archaeologists have excavated some of them, digging as fast as they can while the ground sweats and sags in around them. The deepest ones they've found were little more than stone huts. Arrowheads fill the mud like fossilized fish.

Apart from the occasional archaeologist or basement spelunker, Golgoolian's underground is a blank to the people on the surface. No one goes down there. If they do, they don't talk about it. Three-quarters of the city is underground, and no one really knows what's in it. Every fantasy author in the Railway Regions has at least mentioned Golgoolian's underground; some of them seem to use it in every book they write.

Most of Golgoolian is stable now - the only buildings that still sink are the new ones at the edges and an unlucky few in the middle. No one knows why, but there are some buildings that won't stop sinking no matter how much architecture piles up underneath them. The Corkscrew Tower has at least fifty floors, probably more than that. Five of them are above ground. In the centuries since its foundations were laid, the building has never stopped or slowed its steady descent into the earth. The Earl of Mangrel and his family (one of many noble families in Golgoolian) abandon each floor when it starts to fill up with water and mushrooms, which happens about once every five years, and build another one on top to replace it. The tower tilts slightly every year. No floor is quite parallel with the one beneath it, hence the tower's name. It twists its way down into the ground like a segmented corkscrew of stone. It's anyone's guess how deep it goes.

The Corkscrew Tower is just one of many buildings that never solidified. Golgoolian is full of sinkhole gardens, little patches of ground which seem perfectly solid but eat anything built on top of them. Some are only fifteen feet wide. Buildings next to them have stood steady and even for decades; put a rock two feet from the foundations, though, and it will be swallowed up in a few years. Nothing stays in the sinkhole gardens but small plants. Even trees are too heavy. The gardens are little half-wild patches of solid bog in the middle of the city. They're filled with flowers; marsh-lilies raise their speckled blossoms above bluets and violets, crinkleweeds and moss of every kind. Crumpet creeper sprouts at the edges of the gardens, climbing the neighboring buildings and spreading its crusty orange flowers across walls and rooftops. Pitcher plants and whip-vines nibble at the legions of small flying things that spread from the Shwamp in the Summer. Venus flytraps lurk in the shade. Toads join them, one and only one in each garden. They don't multiply to fill the larger gardens; they just grow. The largest toad in Golgoolian is rumored to be the size of a cow.

Every sinkhole garden in the city once had something built on it. Most of them had several. In Golgoolian, if you give up after your first three houses sink, you're considered lacking in patience. It takes a long time to prove the existence of a sinkhole.

Even so, if it were any other building, the Mangrels would have given up on the Corkscrew Tower decades ago. Each floor only lasts about twenty years before it submerges and goes rotten. The tower has to be constantly rebuilt. It has cost the family a small fortune. They keep it, though, because it has made them a large fortune.

Purple pligma mushrooms will grow anywhere where there's more water than sunlight. They pop up in basements, caves, swamps, and places where it's just been cloudy for a week. Candy-stripe pligmas - a great delicacy in the Railway Regions - are pickier. As far as I know, they've only been found in four places in all of Hamjamser. The Corkscrew Tower is their favorite.

No one is actually allowed into the Corkscrew Tower except for the Mangrels, their servants, and a small army of pligma farmers. All I've seen are photographs of the inside. The mushrooms cover the floor of every underground room in forests of little red-and-white caps. It's like a garden of peppermints or tiny striped umbrellas. Half the candy-stripe mushrooms in Hamjamser come from the Corkscrew Tower, picked and packaged in its damp basements. The Mangrel family lives in the five floors above the ground. They've lived comfortably for generations by selling one small crate of mushrooms per week. All the basements of the tower used to be the elegant upper floors, so the dripping underground rooms are lined with floral wallpaper and carved molding. The water dripping down the walls gradually eats away at paint and varnish, eroding wood and revealing the bricks underneath, but it's obvious that the gray, dripping, fungus-coated rooms were once quite lovely. Large pieces of them still are. After all, there's no sense in letting a nice room go entirely to waste. When a floor sinks underground, its windows are removed and used in the construction of the next top floor. The holes are replaced with watertight seals. Any molding and paneling that can be pried off of the walls is used upstairs. The top floor is always a patchwork of new material and pieces of architecture from six floors down; a few murals and painted ceilings have been moved over a dozen times. The art of detachable architecture is thought to have begun with the Earls of Mangrel.

Below ground, the pligma farmers tend and pick the mushrooms from metal walkways bolted into the stone walls of the tower. Most of the old floors are still there; they're where the pligmas grow. After all these years under the soggy ground, though, the wood is about as solid as old cheese. Anyone who stepped on it would go straight to the bottom of the tower (wherever that is). Water seeps in constantly through the walls. There are holes punched in every floor for the tangles of ancient, corroded pipes that keep the rooms from filling up. Mushrooms grow from the rusty valves. Mud, water, and stranger things are pumped up from the bowels of the tower and dumped into the Shwamp. Children sit by the end of the pipe and try to catch the things that come out of it. No one bothers getting pets from outside the city. The more enthusiastic children have rows of jars and fishbowls in their bedrooms, full of strange creatures from below the ground, aquatic centipedes and spider-frogs and axolotls and amphibious eels and a hundred other things no one's bothered to name. This is the Great Shwamp, after all. Aquatic strangeness is just part of life.

Carvendrone

Every region of Hamjamser has a city inhabited mostly by insects. In the Mountainous Plains, it's Sconth; in the Kennyrubin archipelago, it's Crustacle Island; in the Railway Regions, it's Carvendrone.

Normally, the town would be practically deserted at this time of year. The inhabitants would be deep in hibernation beneath the ground and in the warm heart of the hive-palace above the city. Most insects can't survive the cold. In another month, that's the way the city will be: a ghost town, guarded against looters all Winter long by its few warm-blooded inhabitants. This warm November has extended the harvest season a little longer. The insects are still awake; the plants are still blooming.

The gardens - the city is full of gardens - are full of the townspeople's small, feral relatives. Migrating butterflies pause for food on their way to somewhere warmer. Beetles speckle the ground and leaves in myriad trundling shapes. Skippers dart from flower to flower, nimble little brown things, neither moth nor butterfly but something else altogether. The air is filled with bees.

The civilized insects are just as busy as the wild ones. Giant butterflies harvest the nectar from late-blooming cartwheel hibiscus and column-bine. The flowers are small this late in November, the largest only six feet wide. The butterflies collect the nectar in bottles and jars to be stored until next Spring. In other parts of the city, they tend sugarcane, beets, fruit, and candymoss - other sources of sweet food that take more work, but yield more than the flowers' few cupfuls of sugar each. To vertebrates, butterfly farms seem to produce nothing but dessert.

Higher in the city are the carnivores' farms. Cows and pigs share pastures with landlocusts and sausage-grubs. Tame cicadas emerge from the ground earlier in the year, leaving mounds of dirt like three-foot molehills. Generations of them spend years underground eating roots. The shed skins of the larvae, hollow and mud-crusted, hunched over their massive digging claws, are stuck on the roofs of houses for luck. The adults graze in the pastures, as docile as sheep. They're too heavy to reach the trees like their smaller relatives. The buzzing, echoing songs of cicadas, large and small, tenor and bass, harmonize with each other all through the Summer. I wish I'd been here to hear them.

I haven't actually seen much of the city yet, but I went to an art supply store to buy colored pencils and ended up in a conversation with the mantis shopkeeper, who seems to enjoy describing his city to strangers. His descriptions were long and eloquent. He spoke perfect and unaccented English; a vertebrate, marrying into the family of insects generations ago, had left him and several cousins with lungs and voices. His wife interrupted occasionally in an efficient, clicking language spoken with claws and mandibles. (Civilized mantises have given up the habits of their tiny ancestors, of course; the wives no longer eat their husbands.)

I've never been to Carvendrone before. The Train is going to be here for a few days, at least, for which I'm extremely grateful. I love insect cities.

Compass Trees

I spent all day trying to find the Illegible Library, walking from one end of Sconth to the other, and had no success whatsoever. I'm exhausted. I don't feel up to writing much of anything tonight, especially not in the fifteen minutes left in this day, so here's something I wrote a few months ago instead. I thought it might be interesting. Most people who don't travel much aren't familiar with compass trees.

A piece of wood from a compass tree is always attracted to the tree, like iron to a magnet, and can be used to pull a compass needle in its direction. This is a great way to find a place; tree compasses work much better than magnetic ones, which only tell you which way is North. Really, what use is that? You can tell which way is North any time you can see the sun, and there's no telling what happens to be in that direction at any given time. Magnetic compasses are generally little more than harmless toys for mapmakers.

Tree compasses are much more useful. You can use them to find any place where there's a compass tree. You can only find one place per compass, though, and it only works as long as the tree is alive.

That isn't as simple as it sounds. Compass trees are extremely delicate. They have to have exactly the right temperature, the right nutrients, and the right amount of sun and water. They only like to live on top of hills. They have no defenses against insects. They can't compete with any plant bigger than a tuft of grass. They weren't always that way, but after centuries of being pampered by compass-makers, they've gotten spoiled. All but a very few compass trees look like bonsai trees; any conditions short of absolute perfection are as hard on them as a desert or a mountaintop would be to another tree. They grow extremely slowly. Tree compasses are extremely expensive, as a sliver of wood for a compass needle can take weeks or months to grow back. Only the most successful compass makers can afford to buy whole twigs.

Compass tree caretakers make a very good living, but only because they work so hard. They generally grow the trees in greenhouses, so that they have absolute control of the temperature, sunlight, and humidity. Mirrors direct extra sunlight onto the trees in the Winter; many caretakers import sea ice in the Summer. Most greenhouses are reinforced with steel bars to discourage thieves.

Compass trees also, for reasons known only to them, refuse to grow within twelve miles of each other. This further limits the places they can grow and makes reproduction extremely difficult. Every caretaker opens a few tiny holes in the greenhouse each Spring, not enough to let in any chills or aphids, in the hopes that a stray speck of pollen will manage to make it across the countless miles from another compass tree that happens to feel like blooming that year. In the incredibly rare instance that pollen is blown that far, and meets the receiving compass tree's standards, the tree will grow a seed. Just one. Compass tree seeds are about the size of poppy seeds and exactly the same color as their bark. Any caretaker lucky enough to get a flower on their tree will search with a magnifying glass for months afterward, hoping to find the little brown speck that will give them the slight chance of growing another tree. It's a good thing the seeds grow where the flowers do; otherwise, the caretakers would never find them. If a compass tree's seed isn't found in the week or two after it grows, it falls off onto the ground, where it dies. Compass tree seeds need three years immersed in constantly moist earth with an exact combination of nutrients before they'll even start to consider growing into a tree. Most caretakers simply sell the seeds for exorbitant prices, as they're too busy and too sensible to try to raise them themselves.

Despite all this, compass trees have not yet gone extinct. There are actually several hundred of them on Hamjamser, if not more, though no one has ever managed to count them. Nearly every town has one somewhere nearby. Caretakers in swamps and deserts go to great lengths to keep their trees alive.

A few of the richest travelers in Hamjamser have assembled compasses with many needles, each one pointing to a different tree in a different town. They're incredibly expensive and require updating whenever a tree dies, but they're almost as good as a Wayfinder guide when they work properly.

It has become a custom among travelers-by-compass to visit the tree their compass points to whenever they reach its home. It's brought them all the way there, after all; they might as well follow the needle a few extra miles and visit it. Most of them bring some sort of present for the tree or, more often, for its caretaker.

No matter what they're given, though, none of the caretakers ever let anyone else inside their greenhouses. You can never tell who might try to break off a priceless twig when you're not looking.