The Other Shrine

By the time we'd put sufficient distance between ourselves and the crabs, it was too dark to see much of the valley where we eventually spent the night. I brought my salamander out to light our way, but we were unable to find the valley's shrine among the trees and underbrush; after I nearly turned my ankle in a gopher hole while looking for it, we decided to wait and pay our respects in the morning.

Our night was thankfully uninterrupted by crustaceans of any size. Before breakfast the next morning, we set off to find the shrine so that we could thank the valley's spirit for their hospitality.

The shrine was easily visible in daylight. We hadn't seen it the previous night because it was an entire sandstone boulder, nearly twice my height, standing by the spring that was the source of the valley's stream. The top of the boulder was carved into the shape of an octopus lifting a trapdoor to peek out of it. We'd simply been too close (or so we thought) to make out the carving the night before. There was no obvious space to leave offerings at the front, so we went around the uphill side and found a handful of Jingli characters carved into the stone.

"Please see other shrine," Chak translated for the rest of us.

Everyone shared a significant look. It seemed likely, at this point, that we had stumbled into the valley of a trickster spirit. Unfortunately, once one has begun an interaction with a trickster, the outcome of quitting is usually worse than the outcome of simply gritting one's teeth and following through. Besides, some tricksters can actually be pleasant company if allowed to amuse themselves. Keeping alert, just in case, and mentally preparing ourselves for something annoying, we set off to look for the other shrine.

The valley was a relatively short and narrow one, roughly crescent-shaped, so we didn't have to look long. The stream ended in a small pond at the other end of the valley. As with all the other valleys, it wasn't clear where the water went from there; into the next valley's spring, perhaps. The edges of the pond were lined with cattails and amphibious blackberry vines, but after some searching, we managed to find the shrine hiding among them.

This shrine was carved in the shape of an upended tortoise. Where one might expect a tortoise on its back to look alarmed, this one was smoking a pipe and sipping from a mug of tea, looking entirely comfortable in its position. The mug held a small stone octopus with a few tentacles curled over the rim. The flat underside of the tortoise's shell would have made a good space for offerings if it had been left clear; instead, it was occupied by an open stone book with a few more lines of Jingli characters carved into its pages.

"No, not this one either," Chak translated in a flat voice. "Try the other end again."

This was more or less the sort of thing we'd been expecting. Still, it was a pleasant enough morning - the sky was blue, the breeze was cool, and the winged gophers who'd endangered my ankle the night before were singing harmonies in the acacia branches - so we didn't mind a little extra walking.

On returning to the spring at the upper end of the valley, we were somewhat surprised to find that the boulder had been replaced with a fountain. Several tiers of singing stone frogs spat water into basins, which eventually emptied into the stream, while a stone octopus conducted them with a baton from the top. The entire structure was darkened with age and water and had clearly been there for years; but then, so had the boulder before it.

"Just one more," Chak read from a plaque at the base of the fountain. "Keep walking, you're almost there."

Back at the pool, we found that the water now drained into the mouth of a large stone whale. Inside its mouth was a stone walrus; inside its mouth, a stone stonefish. The stonefish's mouth held yet another stone octopus, which was holding up a sand dollar with more writing on it. Chak had to swim out into the middle of the pond to read it.

"I lied!" he translated. "The last shrine is back where you started. This really is the last one, I promise."

Mogen grumbled all the way back to the spring.

Further searching failed to turn up another shrine at the spring end of the valley, nor at the pool end either, when we went back to check there again. As we had been walking for at least an hour on empty stomachs and were beginning to run low on patience, we elected to pause for breakfast and continue searching afterward. Karlishek and I went into the wagon that we shared to fetch some pakals for breakfast, while Mogen and Chak gathered some blackberries from the pond to go with them.

Inside the wagon, among the bags and crates that held our food supplies, we discovered the fifth shrine: a stone octopus sitting on top of an overstuffed stone suitcase. A carved sock protruded comically from one side, despite the octopus' lack of feet. Two tentacles held up a stone luggage tag with even more Jingli carved into it. We called Mogen and Chak back to the wagon - which was, after all, where we had started - and Chak translated the tag while we ate.

"Thank you for being so amusing," he read. "It's funny to watch people with legs walking in circles. This is my niece. She is very bored. Please take her somewhere else so she can see the world and stop driving me crazy."

The small stone octopus looked smug.

A trickster's niece as a passenger hardly seemed to qualify as a gift, or perhaps even a wise idea, but at least the writing had asked us nicely. In fact, aside from the harmless prank played with the shrines, our brief stay in the valley had been quite pleasant; we'd had a peaceful night and fresh fruit for breakfast. After a brief discussion, we decided to take the stone octopus with us, hoping that we'd be able to drop her off in another valley if she became too much of a nuisance. We thanked the spirit, glad that we'd been able to offer it some entertainment, and went on our way.

For the rest of the day, at least, traveling with the octopus was uneventful. Though we never saw it move, her suitcase was in a different spot in the wagon every time we looked, with the octopus on top facing toward whatever interesting piece of scenery was visible outside the wagon at the moment. Attempts to ask her name were met with a different answer each time, all of them carved on the luggage tag in elegant Amrat; apparently, she'd overheard Karlishek and I speaking and realized that we didn't understand Jingli. When Chak, in the next wagon, overheard us calling her by the first name she provided and informed us that it was in fact a rude pun in Jingli, we realized that she was also taking advantage of that fact to amuse herself. Subsequent names turned out, according to Chak, to be more of the same. The octopus had a seemingly endless supply of rude puns and kept herself thus amused for the rest of the day.

Otherwise, she was a quiet, unobtrusive passenger. Though still somewhat apprehensive, we began to hope that perhaps we wouldn't regret bringing her along.

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 Provenance of a Pinecone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Some, I think, might be real."

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

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

I acknowledged that I had, many times.

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

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

The Hidden Passenger

I was not in the best of shape in the few days following our encounter with the Painted Ones. I had been out in the sun painting them for an entire afternoon, and there had been other things on my mind besides keeping cool and drinking enough. I spent the rather unpleasant evening of that day feeling as if my brain had gone slightly crispy around the edges.

Worse than the heat, of course, were the less physical aftereffects. I was rather proud of the way I had handled myself around the Painted Ones; after those first moments among their carrion breath and bloodstained saber claws, I had hardly panicked at all. Unfortunately, I had accomplished this through the time-honored method of shutting the panic in a mental closet until it could come out without upsetting a dozen knife-faced predators. As is usually the case, this only meant that the panic had had more time to froth itself into near-hysteria by the time I was able to face it. The nausea from overheating and dehydration met up with the nervous shakes, and they instantly teamed up to make my life miserable.

In short, my system - normally exceptionally adaptable - had had a little more strain than even it was comfortable handling. I had miraculously avoided the full consequences of sunstroke, but it looked to be a miserable few days until I recovered.

Still, I had served my purpose on the caravan; the Painted Ones have large territories, so we were unlikely to meet another pack during the same journey. No one would have blamed me if I had simply retreated to my assigned wagon and convalesced among the luggage for the remainder of the trip.

That was one reason why I was so surprised when the aquatic passenger invited me to his wagon.

The other reason, of course, was that hardly anyone had seen him since he first joined the caravan. No one even seemed to know his name. He had arrived unseen during the night, before the caravan started, and had been an invisible presence inside his watertight wagon ever since. If not for the lamplight shining through the oiled silk canopy at night, there would have been no indication that anyone was inside at all.

This was not necessarily by choice. The Desert climate is hard on fish and amphibians from other places, and they usually survive by isolating themselves from it as thoroughly as possible. Most don't enter the Golden Desert at all. No one knew why the aquatic passenger was there, but we were all quietly impressed that he had come to a place that required such elaborate preparations to keep him alive.

Of course, his necessary isolation didn't mean that he was completely out of touch with the rest of the caravan. Most of his business was conducted through his servant, a stocky reptilian woman by the name of Mogen, who kept him updated on the caravan's progress and supplied him with the least salty of the available food. Mogen was the one who came the day after our encounter with the Painted ones, to where I lay sweating between suitcases in the almost-cool shade of the wagon, and invited me to visit her employer.

Even in my exhausted and slightly feverish state, I was excited to finally see the inside of the silk-shrouded wagon that had been such a mystery to all of the caravan's passengers. The lamplight that shone from it at night cast no clear shadows on the canopy. We could hear the sloshing of water inside when the wagon was on the move, and unseen frogs and crickets sang from it at night, but its lone civilized occupant seemed to be entirely silent. No one was even sure what he looked like.

Mogen led me to the back of the wagon and unzipped a long slit in what looked like seamless fabric. There were no fasteners on its edges; like the spider-woven bubble-wrap used by travelers in the Great Shwamp, the fabric seemed to be just sticky enough to seal itself together. Cool, damp air wafted from the opening, like the breath of a pond. Mogen smiled and motioned me into the wagon. I climbed through the opening, somewhat awkwardly, and she sealed it silently behind me.

Inside, I felt for a moment as if I'd returned to the Great Shwamp - a small, rectangular slice of it, at least. The entire bed of the wagon was filled with water, broken here and there by rocks and aquatic plants. A few trunks sat on top of the rocks, out of the water, though their wood and brass were coated in just enough moss and blue-green oxidization to look respectably aged in the style of the Scalps. My arrival was greeted by a series of small plops as frogs dove into hiding from rocks and reed stems.

Most of my attention, however, was quickly drawn to the wagon's inhabitant, who filled the space like a fish in an aquarium several sizes too small.

Like many aquatic people, he had no legs. Instead, his torso tapered smoothly into a long tail, edged with a frill of transparent fin, like that of an eel or a salamander.

"Greetings, Mr. Tangelo," he said, smiling at me over his spectacles. He spoke flawless English in the percussive accent of the Scalps, mixed with some other accent I couldn't identify. "My name is Chakramalsian, but you may call me Chak." ("Chuck?" I attempted. "Chak,” he corrected me with a patient smile.) "I heard of your impressive performance yesterday, and of its toll on you, and thought that you might appreciate a cooler place in which to recover."

I don’t think I even considered turning down his offer. After the mind-scalding heat of the previous day, the cool, damp air felt like Heaven, or at least someplace with a similar climate. I accepted almost without thought. As grateful as I was, it took nearly an hour of rest, lying in the water between the suspicious stares of re-emerging frogs, before I was thinking clearly enough to wonder how I could thank him for such generosity.

As it turned out, he had thought of that too. He wanted me to paint the wagon's canopy for him. The blank white ceiling had been restful at first, he said - but he was used to living under a lake, and it was getting harder and harder to ignore the thought of the parched air and blistering sun on the other side of the pale fabric. He needed to have fish overhead again. I was delighted to provide some.

He gave me several books from which he wanted me to work. One held old fabric patterns from the Scalps; another had elegant drawings of unfamiliar fish. The third was in a language I'd never seen, bookmarked at a page filled entirely by a single swooping character. It meant "patience," he told me, adding with a rueful chuckle that that particular trait had been nearly as essential as water during his journey.

Once she heard that I had taken the job, Mogen went to search the caravan for paints. Luckily, one of the other travelers had a supply of oil-based dyes that would work on the slick, waterproofed silk of the canopy. I fetched a set of brushes from my own luggage, still slightly damp from their use the previous day. I was still too unsteady to stand. Instead, I began work on a border around the base of the canopy while sitting in the cool water. Chak talked to me as I worked.

He had brought a trunk full of books, another of supplies for writing. His true passion, however, was accounting - and he had had nearly no opportunities to practice it during the journey. The caravan had its own accountants, Desert-dwellers who could actually leave their wagons and be present for outdoor transactions. They had no need of him. Even sightseeing was difficult. He could open the entrance of the wagon to look out, but he was used to the constant spray and mist of the lake city where he'd been born; the dry Desert air stung his eyes and burnt his skin after even a few minutes of exposure. After several such episodes, he had asked Mogen to notify him only for the most spectacular scenery. He didn't want to know what else he was missing.

With no way to make himself useful, he had eventually tired of most of the occupations he'd brought, finally resorting to eavesdropping on conversations through his wagon's canopy. These, and his periodic updates from Mogen (a fine retainer, he said, but rather limited in conversation), were his only contact with the outside world.

His skill in accounting was the reason he was making this difficult journey in the first place. He had helped to build up a new branch of the family business in SuyMaTmakk, working from their ancestral mansion under the surface of Lake Twiliat, and had brought it to a point at which it no longer needed his skills. Building businesses was his specialty; once built, the everyday maintenance of their finances bored him. He had been delighted to receive a letter from his father's side of the family, in distant Changrakata, saying that they had heard of his success in the Scalps through an elaborate chain of corresponding relatives and wanted to invite him to visit them. He had not been to Changrakata since a visit in his childhood, when the two countries had been much closer together and he had been little more than a tadpole. He had packed up and left only a day or two behind the letter containing his acceptance.

It has been a long journey for Chak, and will continue to be so for quite some time. Still, though my own conversation was rather limited as well, I was glad to be able to relieve some of the monotony of it - even with so little as some paint and a fresh pair of ears.

A Different Kind of Voice

During our time in the face-speakers' village, we never did manage to even begin speaking the village's language, nor they ours. We lacked color-shifting abilities of any kind; they appeared to be completely mute. The only sound we ever heard them make was a soft pop of the lips - which was not so much a word as a signal for attention, asking those nearby to turn and read the speaker's face.

Nevertheless, my three companions and I managed to communicate well enough, by gesture and expression, to make do for a few days. We were all grateful for the chance to rest. To be honest, we also might have been somewhat reluctant to venture back into the wild after the circumstances under which we had left it. A brush with death, however brief, tends to make one more appreciative of safe places for a while.

At one point, we even got to help with the harvest. I'm not sure what the season was in the Golden Desert at that time, or even if that particular part of it has any seasons that I would recognize. For all I know, the rainbow-faced villagers might harvest constantly all year.

Most of the harvesting - like everything else they did - happened at night. Like many nocturnal people, they didn't appear to actually need light to see, other than that of the moon and stars. The fires in their houses were only for heat and cooking. I never saw them eat meat of any kind. Their main sources of food seemed to be drought-wheat, which they grew in vast, dry fields of sand around the village, and a sort of fruit-like green tuber - like a hybrid of potato and zucchini - that grew under the wet sand of the village's oasis. This was what we had eaten in the soup on the night of our arrival. The name of the vegetable was a green oval with a sort of golden twizzle inside, which was actually a fairly accurate representation of the way it tasted. The villagers harvested it with long, spoon-like implements. They would walk around, stamping on the wet sand until they found a spot that felt somehow different. I never was sure exactly how they knew one of the vegetables was below. Once they had found it, they would dig their spoon into the sand and pull back on its long handle, scooping the vegetable out of the sand and high into the air. The children, lacking the necessary weight and upper-body strength for this task, instead ran around with baskets and caught the vegetables as they fell from the sky.

Upon realizing that we wanted to help, the villagers found a few spare spoons somewhere and let us try. We achieved nothing like the same level of skill, but the villagers' silent laughter at our efforts was good-natured enough.

No ordinary settlement in the Golden Desert can exist without a water source. The village's oasis was relatively small - hence their reliance on drought-wheat, a crop which seems to be able to survive on nothing more than vague rumors that there might be water somewhere nearby.

The resident aquifrax was… unusual, to say the least.

The water spirit seemed to spend most of its time making ice sculptures. It was rather prolific, actually. I can't imagine how much energy it must have taken to freeze so much water in the middle of the Golden Desert. Perhaps that's why it had left its oasis so small - or perhaps it simply preferred it that way. The motivations of spirits are rarely easy for mortals to understand, especially the more eccentric ones.

Most of the ice sculptures seemed to be sea creatures - the fantastic variety, like those drawn by illustrators who have never visited the ocean and have to rely on verbal descriptions of beasts they've never seen. One of the sculptures might have been an octopus. Another resembled a dolphin, or perhaps one of the sleeker varieties of beetlebrow fish. It was difficult to tell, anyway; we could only see them clearly during the day, and they always started melting long before sunrise. By noon, nothing was left but sad little lumps of ice bobbing in the lukewarm water. The only exception was a particularly massive sculpture - possibly a whale or a dire manatee - that lasted a full day and a half, though it more closely resembled a horribly ill blowfish by the second day.

We never saw the aquifrax, of course. Most of the life in the Golden Desert could not exist without their work, but the spirits themselves - like most spirits - rarely show themselves in person.

Perhaps my favorite part of our time in the village, though, was the music. Most of what we heard at first was simple and percussive. Workers in the drought-wheat fields, for example, would keep up a steady rhythm by plucking their toenails with their neighboring toes. (I managed to duplicate the technique myself, though with far less volume.) A whole team of workers could achieve a fairly complex rhythm this way. Still, for several days, this appeared to be all the music the village had. There was certainly no kind of singing.

We were somewhat surprised, on the third night, when the villagers brought out a couple of string instruments and something like a stone xylophone and proceeded to play music in a circle around the oasis. There were only three or four instruments - like the hybrid offspring of a banjo and a harp, no two alike - which the villagers passed around between themselves. Nearly everyone seemed able to play them, though their skill varied. I didn't recognize any of the tunes they played. Many of them were accompanied by rhythmic light shows on the musicians' faces; these were songs with words, apparently, even if I couldn't hear them. The instruments made their slow way around the oasis. When Red-Streaks-On-Yellow had finished playing, he or she hesitated before passing the instrument to me, uncertain of whether or not I could play it.

I couldn't, of course. Instead, I stood up and sang.

It was nothing particularly impressive - just a rendition of "Factory Fool" by Rango Tress. It's a song with a strong rhythm, which seemed to be a major part of the villagers' music, and its melody sounds good in my baritone range.

When I started, all the villagers froze and stared at me, motionless. I'm not actually sure if they had ever heard singing before. I began to be a little nervous when they hadn't moved by the end of the first verse.

Halfway through the second verse, they started to join in.

It was just a simple clap at first - one of our hosts' children, I believe, though I confess that I couldn't tell most of the children apart. A few others took it up as well. Someone started embroidering the rhythm a little. By the end of the third verse, I felt as if I was providing the melody for an entire Thiglian drum circle. It was amazing how many different sounds the villagers could achieve with just their palms and fingers (the rest of their bodies being far too fluffy for percussive purposes). I finished to wild applause.

My three companions received much the same response. Karlishek chose a skittering patter-song from Sham-Tarkazia, which gave the villagers all sorts of challenging rhythms to keep up with. Mirenza sang a thousand-year-old drinking song - evidently not at all worn out by age - which had everyone clapping and silently laughing, even though no one understood the words. Garnet surprised us all with a haunting song about coyotes (they're called feyul in the Golden Desert) that sent chills down my spine.

No one clapped through that one; it didn't need it. Instead, we were surprised again by the occasional clear, ringing note from the half-formed ice sculptures in the oasis. The aquifrax had decided to join in.

We left the village the night after that, feeling much more at peace than we had before our arrival. We said our goodbyes at sundown. The villagers - those who were up that early, at least - stopped what they were doing to give us a parting gift of dried tubers and drought-wheat crackers* and kiss us goodbye on our strangely wordless cheeks. We were sad to leave them; they had been the best possible hosts.

As we were walking away from the village, we heard a single stringed instrument taking up the melody of the song I had sung. It made good music for walking. I kept humming it long after the village was too far away to hear.



* The baker has yet to be born who can turn drought-wheat into anything as moist as, say, flatbread.

A Digression on Language

The most commonly accepted theory, at present, is that languages develop with a certain type of mouth in mind.

This is obviously the case with languages such as English, with its many subtle uses of the lips and teeth; or Hmakk, which has an M in its very name. Languages such as these are difficult to speak with a beak or insectile mouthparts. Presumably, they developed in parts of the world where most people had lips, just as Kakaran originated in mountain clifftops inhabited solely by avians.

Over time, however, the various races of the world have wandered and mingled together. It is rare now to find even the smallest of villages inhabited exclusively by mammals, or avians, or reptiles. Even if they begin with different languages, those who share a common home usually come to share a common tongue. In many places, the speaking of English without lips, or Kakaran without a beak, has become only another kind of accent. Most avians cannot pronounce the lip-borne consonants so familiar to me - P, B, F, M, V - and I doubt I will ever manage the clacks and harsh demi-vowels of avian languages such as Hreet. However, despite our imperfect pronunciations, we rarely have difficulty understanding one another.

Those of the exoskeletal persuasion are somewhat more deeply separated. Many of them do not even breathe through their mouths. They have developed instead languages of chitinous clicks and hisses, or elaborate sign languages for multiple limbs. Many of these are more difficult for a person with only two soft-skinned arms to mimic. Still, we usually manage. Universal languages such as Sikelak help to fill in the most difficult gaps.

In addition, love is - and has always been - a great bridger of gaps. The marriages between vertebrates and invertebrates have created many surprising combinations. I have met many insects and arachnids who possessed, somewhere behind their scissoring mouthparts, the anatomy necessary to speak English clearer than my own. In the other direction are people such as the Hsshra tribe of the High Fields: silent, long-legged humans who breathe through elegant spiracles between their ribs.

Still, the villagers we met beyond the valley must have the most unusual language I've ever encountered.

We left the valley the night after the encounter with the saber-dingoes. We had no desire to sleep there; it would have surprised none of us if the pack had returned to attack us in our sleep. There was little we could do to keep them from tracking our scents, but we hoped that the cliffs would provide enough of an obstacle to dissuade them from following us. The climb was rather unnerving in the dark, but - largely thanks to Garnet's and Karlishek's night vision - we managed to fumble our way to the top with no more than a couple of scraped knees and elbows.

We were about to make camp at the top of the cliff when Garnet spotted a light on the horizon.

As exhausted as we were, the possibility of civilization - and of sleeping indoors, out of the chilly night wind, for the first time in weeks - was enough to get us walking again. No one said it, but I think we were all glad to put a little more distance between us and the saber-dingoes' valley as well.

As is so often the case in the Golden Desert, the light proved to be much farther away than it appeared. It must have been nearly midnight by the time we reached it. As we walked closer, we found that it was not a single light, but many - the glow of a small village full of dimly lit windows. The houses were low half-spheres of stone and clay. Only about half of them were lit, though, and we heard none of the chatter and bustle of an active village. We assumed the inhabitants were asleep for the night.

We walked into the middle of the village to find ourselves in the middle of market day - or, more correctly, market night.

The villagers were about Garnet's height, shorter than the rest of us. They were more or less humanoid. Their bodies were covered in downy white fur, except for their hands, feet, and faces; the overall effect faintly resembled mice or baboons, though their eyes were as wide as those of owls. They wore only simple skirts of pale brown cloth. If they were male and female, I never noticed any way to tell the difference.

Their most noticeable features by far, however, were the patterns on their faces. Streaks and blotches of bright colors shifted constantly across their skin, pinks and golds and emerald greens, like an endless fireworks display on every cheek and forehead. The colors glowed in the dark. There are many animals, such as angler-fish and torch-mice, that have luminescent patches on their bodies; most of them, however, can achieve only one or two colors each, like the repeated plucking of a single note. Each villager's face was a full symphony of light.

It was a silent one, though. In the entire marketplace, the only sounds were soft padding of feet in sand, the rattling of wagons, and the clinks and thumps of containers being moved. Not one of the people spoke. In the dark, with the rippling glow of all those silent faces, the effect was as eery as it was beautiful.

We had been staring for what I hope was only a few seconds when one of the villagers approached us. The body language was the same on both sides - smiling, non-threatening friendliness - but when we tried greetings in several languages, the uncomprehending smile on the villager's face didn't change. A few flashes of pink and blue passed over the smile and then went still.

It took us some time to realize that that had been the villager's greeting, or perhaps a question. The shifting colors were their language.

Eventually, we managed to convey by gesture that we had been walking in the Desert for a long time and were very tired. The villagers - we had drawn something of a crowd by then - gave us a sympathetic chorus of blue and lavender. The one who had first greeted us followed that with a flickering orange light in a green semicircle, like the cooking fires inside the dome-shaped houses, and led us to one of the larger ones. The ceiling was not quite high enough for us to stand up. Inside, we were greeted by another adult - the first one's spouse? - and a trio of tiny children as fluffy as owlets. Light flashed across their small faces as well, but they seemed to have difficulty doing more than two colors at once. Perhaps they were only just learning to speak. The whole family welcomed us in with many hugs and blue-pink greetings, and we soon found ourselves sitting on dusty cushions around a stone table, sharing slices of unfamiliar but tasty green vegetables. I looked in my bag and found a couple of slightly dusty candies from Thrass Kaffa; Mirenza rummaged through her pockets and found a motley assortment of nuts and dried fruit. All of these were enthusiastically received, especially by the children.

The name of the village, we were told, was an orange flash peppered with green spots. Our hosts' names were Expanding Blue Concentric Circles and Wavy Red Streaks On Yellow. They didn't introduce their children by name; perhaps, in a society where a person's name is an entire visual performance, children are given time to design their own. We introduced ourselves as well, but they had no more way to repeat our names than we had to repeat theirs.

The conversation around the table was quite lively. In fact, there were two conversations going on simultaneously, but since one was silent and the other was invisible, they didn't seem to interfere with each other.

Though nocturnal, the villagers must have been at least somewhat familiar with other sleep schedules - or perhaps they just accepted that we were tired, no matter the time of day. In any case, Blue Circles went out after dinner (for them, I suppose it was something like lunch) and returned with four extra blankets to spread across the sandy floor. We thanked our hosts profusely, hoping that our smiles and surreptitious yawns would convey the meaning our words couldn't. I dropped off to sleep quite quickly. All night, though, I had the strange feeling that the colored afterimages on my eyelids were trying to speak to me.

Canyon Town, part three

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps. 

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