Canyon Town, part two

Mirenza's machine was little more than a small lens in a brass frame. Small buttons and levers protruded from it here and there, like a combination of a pocketwatch and a jeweler's compound eyepiece.

My Amrat and her English have improved since I first met her, so - with some help from Karlishek - she was able to explain a little more fully exactly what the device does.

As far as I could understand it, the lens shows the past. Sometimes. Other times it doesn't. The precise working of it is immensely complicated; the one Mirenza had was the simplified portable version, and even then, her explanations of the functions of all its knobs and switches quickly rose to heights of technicality beyond even Karlishek's ability to understand. Mirenza eventually gave up and just demonstrated for us.

The first subject she tried was a heap of green glass beads lying in an empty doorway. Garnet, Karlishek, and I had to crowd closely around the lens, as it was really only designed to fit a single eye. At first, the lens simply showed the heap, as if we were looking through ordinary - if somewhat dark and distorted - glass. Mirenza gave expert flicks to a couple of switches. The lens darkened, then cleared again to show a different image, grainy and flickering, like the pictures in an antique slide projector. When viewed through the lens, the beads were now on a string. A few more flicks of switches, and the view pulled back to show a dark-haired girl - perhaps fourteen or fifteen, with the stubs of an adolescent pair of antlers on her forehead - wearing the beads around her neck. She laughed, soundlessly, and vanished through the doorway where we had found the beads. In the lens, the opening had a wooden door in it, carved with symbols. "Health and protection," Mirenza identified them in a distracted mutter.

The girl closed the door, and the image blurred into darkness. Mirenza's claws flew over the switches. The darkness gave way to a burst of scratches, which cleared to reveal a priest. (Mirenza identified him by his robes and by the Amulet of Humility* around his neck.) Above the amulet, he was wearing the same necklace. His face bore little resemblance to the girl's, but he did have a magnificent set of antlers.

We watched for what seemed like hours as Mirenza flicked through image after image, following a dizzying array of people. Some had a family resemblance to the girl; many did not. All of them wore the beads around their necks. The lens was watching the beads, in their previous form as a necklace, and their wearers simply happened to be in the picture as well. One brief glimpse showed a glassworker actually making the necklace and giving it to her husband, whose eyes were an identical shade of brilliant green. Other images - much blurrier than the rest - showed only blowing sand, or an outcropping of greenish rock, which we assumed to be the sources of the beads' material and pigment. Apparently, anything further back than that no longer resembled the beads closely enough for the lens to observe it.

Most of the people showed up many times. One heartbreaking scene showed the first girl, a few years older, grieving for the death of her young husband. We had seen the two of them courting in many of the previous images. The next one showed the two of them, decades older, eating a quiet dinner with a small boy so similar that he had to have been their grandson. They were listening, clearly fascinated, while he described something to them with many soup-flinging gesticulations of his spoon.

This was when I started to be doubtful of the accuracy of what the lens was showing us. Mirenza switched it off a moment later, returning it to an ordinary glass lens, and explained.

The lens doesn't see the past; it sees all of the pasts. The pictures in it show both what was and what could have been. Mirenza had pointed it at the remains of the necklace, and we had seen where the necklace had been - and where it might have been, had things been different.

It is an archaeologist's dream. It is an archaeologist's nightmare.

Fittingly, Mirenza's group of archaeomechanogeolinguists calls these devices "arkmasith," which translates roughly to "historians' dreams." They've been working on them ever since Hashmax Bensathrack, their biometallovitrialchemist,** found that he could see strange things through a batch of glass he'd accidentally mixed with the powdered shells of oracular crabs. The creation of more lenses has progressed slowly, as oracular crabs are quite difficult to catch. They always seem to know where you're going to look for them.

The team has managed to improve the accuracy of the lenses somewhat, using the elaborate mechanical workings around them, plus an exhausting amount of testing with objects whose pasts are well-documented enough for comparison. The small one Mirenza had was an early model, with few adjustments for accuracy, considered by most of the team to be past its usefulness. She had kept it anyway. "We are look for beginnings," she explained, with a smile at the edges of her beak. "We never should forget beginnings of our own work. Also, is shiny thing."

We wandered through the canyons for the rest of the day, taking turns looking through the lens at whatever remains of the vanished community caught our eyes. We looked back to when that streak of rust was (probably) the wheel rim of a cart pulled by goats and miniature saurians, when this rock was (possibly) at the bottom of a swift-moving canyon river full of fish and freshwater nautilus, when that doorway was (perhaps) carved by a stubborn one-armed sculptor who clenched his chisel in his teeth, when this fossil was (dubiously) a small trilobite who spent its days tracing geometrical proofs into the silt of an ocean floor, when the hollow cave-houses were (most likely) inhabited by families who lived and died and danced and prayed beneath statues that had not yet lost their sandstone faces to centuries of wind and rain and neglect.

Not one view gave us any hint as to why they had left.



* The Amulet of Humility is commonly worn by the priests of Uncertainty, who teach that true knowledge comes only through sufficiently complete observation. "Sufficiently complete" observation, in the strictest division of the faith, is possible only by omnipotent beings. The most exceptionally adventurous and introspective of mortals might, by the end of their lifetimes, come to know all there is to know about themselves. To know everything about another person is usually considered impossible. To know everything about a place, or a society, or a species - much less the rest of the world - is utterly beyond hope. True knowledge is therefore restricted to the central deity or possibly deities of the Uncertain (His/Her/Its/Their followers don't presume to know anything at all about Him/Her/It/Them, including whether or not He/She/It/They actually exist). Mortals must learn to accept that the sum of their knowledge will forever be a microscopic grain of flawed and partial observations in the vast and incomprehensible universe. Followers of Uncertainty consider it a sin to be certain and a virtue to admit to being wrong. This perhaps explains why there have always been so few of them.


** All of the terms I'm using are broad approximations made up based on Mirenza's attempts to explain the scientists' work to me, and are probably laughably inaccurate. Language barrier aside, they simply do not seem to divide the sciences into the same categories with which I'm familiar.

Word-Plague

It has been an interesting couple of months in the town of Arkit.

The first sign of the word-plague was when the clockwork pipe crawlers began to literally tie the town's plumbing in knots. This happens occasionally, even with healthy pipe crawlers; it is usually a sign that they are bored, or that some set of instructions was not clear enough. As fine as their metal and crystal workings are, clockwork pipe crawlers are essentially simple creatures. They are capable of following simple instructions and very little else. This is why they so often end up assigned to plumbing repair.

The pipe crawlers' trainers inspected their notes, but they found nothing that could have led to this sort of behavior. What was more, further instructions to the pipe crawlers changed nothing.

This was cause for alarm. No one wants a repeat of the construction of Bratakar, where the bricklaying pipe crawlers stopped responding to instructions and built neat foundations across half the town before someone realized that a misinterpreted command had led them all to turn off their eyes. Arkit's pipe crawler trainers immediately went to work, testing the little machines for every error they've been known to encounter. Still, nothing worked.

This, incidentally, was when the town's schoolteacher began to notice an unusually high number of spelling errors in her pupils' writing. No one took much notice of this at the time.

Over the next few weeks, the pipe crawlers' behavior grew steadily more erratic. Some continued to fix pipes, though many of them fixed them in wild and fantastic shapes more suited to a sculpture museum than to plumbing. Others wandered farther from their assigned tasks, obsessively polishing a single length of pipe, or cutting faucets into careful slices with their metal-cutting tools. (This was when the trainers removed all the heavy-duty tools from the crawlers.) Yet other pipe crawlers wandered off into the town's underground, only to show up later rearranging tableware or carving endless hatch marks into stone walls.

The spelling errors continued to proliferate as well. Several of the town's accountants began to quietly wonder if they were going mad.

Then came the fateful day when every piece of writing in the town spontaneously translated itself into an old and obscure dialect of Halsi. That was when it became clear to everyone that this was not a mere mechanical problem, but some kind of linguistic plague. Spoken words remained unaffected, to the great relief of everyone in the town; the written ones were another story - literally, in some cases. My collection of ambiguous novels briefly opened their pages full of gibberish, then went blank, possibly out of self-defense. I was afraid that they had simply lost their voices and would remain blank forever.

The Halsi lasted only another day or two before Arkit's writing made its final descent into raving alphabet soup. It was not just novels anymore. Every letter had become ambiguous.

It was a great relief when the linguist-philosophers arrived.

The town's fastest flier, a bat-winged girl named Hatraskee, had packed a supply of food and water and taken off across the Desert to fetch them the day the words went bad. The linguist-philosophers traveled quickly and arrived before the town, deprived of written language, could descend into complete chaos. Fortunately, Arkit has never been an exceptionally literate place. If this had happened in a library city like Karkafel, the effects could have taken years for them to fix.

They came armed with glyphs and scrolls, thesauri and syllabaries, imperious tomes of grammar and punctuation - all the tools and weapons of an elite linguist-philosopher. They had dictionaries in a dozen languages. They had powerful epigrams and couplets, engraved in steel and fortified with many layers of rhymes. The largest of them carried stone tablets with carefully worded runes carved an inch deep. Nothing was going to change those words.

I really have no idea what all of this equipment was for. It was quite impressive, though, and whatever they did with it, it worked. Within three days, they had sorted the town's letters back into their separate alphabets; within six, they had corralled them back into languages. A further two weeks of constant writing and chanting finally forced the words back to their proper places. It was quite something to watch, too - the elaborately equipped linguist-philosophers often stood in the middle of the town square, chanting at the tops of their lungs while they did graceful and dramatic calligraphy, weaving a net of words to catch the town's wayward language. Quite a lot of the townspeople found that they had pressing business in the square on those days. Some of them stayed all afternoon.

If they ever get tired of language repair, I think the linguist-philosophers could have quite the career in theater. Whether the performance was really necessary, or whether they simply had a flair for the dramatic, I don't know - but the success of their work was undeniable. It was a great relief when the words of the town's ledgers and record books (and my own ambiguous novels) finally settled back into their familiar order. If there was a comma out of place here and there, no one complained.

Accompanying the linguist-philosophers was an expert on Hill Builder technology (as much as such a thing exists). Her job was to fix the pipe crawlers. Whatever language it is - if any - that flows through the crystal brain of a pipe crawler, it is quite different from the ones used by speaking creatures. The mechanic's task was to determine if the pipe crawlers' madness and the word-plague were the same thing, and if so, if the linguist-philosophers had cured the source of the problem or only a symptom.

I heard much less about this process. The details of machinery are as opaque to me as those of linguistic epidemiology, and the mechanic's work was much quieter than that of the linguist-philosophers. Most of it took place indoors and underground. I got the impression that she found all the noise somewhat irritating. Whatever the details, though, within another week, the pipe crawlers were back to making straightforward, functional repairs with no trace of the madness they had shown a month earlier.

Several of their more creative work, however, was sent to the museum in Hemrikath. Art is art, after all. Being made by machines or the mad does nothing to change that.

The Edge

After barely a whole day of traveling, we had to stop this morning; the road had come to an end. For that matter, so had the ground. The road led straight off the edge of a sheer cliff.

This is not what one expects to find on the Scalps. After months of flat plains, it's easy to forget that the world even has vertical surfaces. I certainly wasn't expecting a cliff.

The River KleMit skirted dangerously close to the cliff, but only a small branch of it actually went over. it vanished into the mist that rose up from below. It was impossible to tell how high the cliff was. Looking to either side, it was equally impossible to tell how wide it was. There was just the edge, tufted with grass and small bushes, winding away into the mist.

The Edge, as I found out later, is one of the areas most hotly debated by theoretical geographers. If it truly is the Edge of the world, it would prove the round-world theorists entirely wrong, as a sphere cannot have an edge. They maintain, of course, that the Edge is merely a very large hole. The flat-world theorists insist that it is indeed the Edge, while the mosaic and amalgam theorists don't really care one way or another. According to the mosaic-world theory, the world is neither round nor flat. It's merely a bunch of small pieces of ground that happen to be connected to each other at random (and constantly changing) points. The world doesn't have a shape; it just shares edges. You might as well say that literature has a shape because books share words.

To be honest, this has always sounded like the most reasonable theory to me.

The amalgam theorists maintain that space is an illusion and that every place in the world is simply a different facet of the same single location - similar to the way that, in geometry, an infinite number of circular slices can be taken from the same sphere. Every place is the same one looked at from a different angle.*

The debate between the four theories (and numerous more eccentric ones) has been going on for centuries, and everyone is still unsure whether the Edge is the actual edge of the world or just an unusually large hole. The mist never clears, so it's impossible to see. No climber or flier has ever found a bottom. Explorers have walked along the Edge for months, even years, and never returned to where they started. The cliff doesn't appear to curve in either direction. Of course, the constant mist makes it hard to tell; it just sits there, drifting up and down in plumes, wafting through the cliff's fringe of hanging grass, making it impossible to see any distance below or beyond the Edge. Possibly the Rain Dragon could be persuaded to do something about the mist, but no one ever knows where to find him.

I heard all of this from a team of experimental geographers staying at the Edge. It's a popular place for them, as you might expect. Some of them have been here for years. They have that disheveled-but-enthusiastic look that scientists often get when they've found something interesting; they're too busy to care if their coats are inside-out.

While I talked to the geographers, FlunDitChukk sat on the wagon and didn't look at the road. Every few minutes, he'd take a quick glance at it, just in case it had decided to lead somewhere else while he wasn't looking. So far, it hasn't. Maybe the dunderblub has been peeking at it. I doubt anyone could tell.

The geographers have a small forest of instruments set up at the Edge. There are telescopes, mist-lenses, all manner of surveying tools,** and dozens of other things I couldn't identify - devices like giant sextants and exploded clocks on carefully calibrated tripods. One geographer was inspecting the Edge with a sonograph and a trio of specially bred echo-frogs. Salamander lanterns burned everywhere, more for heat than for light. The mist makes it almost chilly near the Edge. A group of large samovals - research assistants, I assume - were gathered around one lantern, scribbling busily in tiny notebooks like a scientific sewing circle. Their thick fur is less help than usual here. The mist condenses in it, making it stick out all over in damp spikes.

The assistants, when they aren't busy, amuse themselves by throwing things over the Edge. If there's anyone down there, they're probably not amused.

* I have probably explained this entirely wrong. I don't pretend to understand the amalgam world theory in the slightest.

** Contrary to common belief, these actually have some practical uses and are not merely amusing mechanical curiosities. Surveying is not as pointless a pursuit as cartography. It can be quite useful in measuring the heights of large objects, such as mountains or termite mounds.

The Hley

The dry stream eventually joined another dry stream, forming a somewhat wider dry stream that still had no water in it. This continued for a day or so before reaching the river.

The river is called the HleyPakkPakkKa. (Yes, that's a triple K, though it's technically a double K followed by a single. Hmakk is not meant to be written in this alphabet.) When someone pronounces the name correctly, it sounds like fireworks are going off inside their mouth. This is how you identify people who grew up in the Scalps. When I try to talk about the river, it sounds more like someone pulling their boot out of a swamp.

Fortunately, many people simply call it the Hley. I can manage that.

The Hley isn't particularly wide or deep; only the middle is over my head, as I found out a few times when the heat got to be too much for me. It's still the largest - possibly the only - body of water I've seen in months. Since the highest hills in the Scalps are about as tall as I am, the river doesn't flow particularly quickly either. You can use its surface as a mirror. It meanders so crookedly over the plains that the banks are made up entirely of peninsulas. Nearly every one of them had someone fishing on it as I walked by. I said hello to a few of them, but they told me - rather irritably - to shut up before I scared away the fish. I stopped after that.

One woman had a pole as thick as my arm, strung with rope and what looked like a grappling hook. She was baiting it with pickles. I don't know what she was fishing for, but the teeth hanging from her hat would have put a smilodon to shame. A few were longer than my fingers.

I didn't ask. From the way she was frowning, I got the impression she would have broken me in half if I'd scared off the fish - though what could scare off something with teeth like that, I have no idea.

I tried to stay out of the deep sections after that.

There are very few boats on the river, but a great many other things. I suppose you could call most of them rafts. Many are made of sticks - the kind you get from the little bushes of the Scalps - tied into bundles and lashed together with string. Others are floating collections of bottles, or barrels, or empty pots. One raft I saw floated on empty snail shells the size of pumpkins. Their openings were sealed with wax. Other people poled by in enormous baskets, either sealed with tar or simply woven well enough to be watertight. A few people were in coracles of oiled cloth stretched umbrella-style over a thin frame. They folded them up at the dock and carried them away on their shoulders.

Then, of course, there are those who don't need boats. There seem to be almost as many people in the water as on it. This is the case in most of the highly populated parts of Hamjamser, but it still surprises me occasionally. Maybe I just haven't spent enough time underwater. Everyone here is quite used to it, of course; it's fairly common to see people stick their heads up out of the water and start conversations with people in boats. Some seemed to be dropping their children off with friends for the day. A group of small mammalian girls - sisters, I'd guess - jumped off a raft at one point to join an otter-like family that looked like they might be cousins. A bit later in the day, a pair of small frogs in straw hats climbed up onto a raft to eat lunch with a family of avians. Everyone seems to know everyone, in and on the river, or to simply not care if they don't.

At around noon, I passed a raft that had stopped on the bank. Everyone on it had gotten off and was doing something in the grass. When I got closer, I found that they were picking strawberries.

Patches of wild strawberries turn up here and there along the banks of the Hley. I'd found a few of them already, but this was by far the largest yet. The people from the raft turned out to be a family - HeMiKa (a reptile), HmoTan (a mammal), and their children (various combinations of the two). Their last name was TiLeKraNa, and they were a family of glassblowers. The raft (which was made of corncobs) was piled high with glass bottles and fishing floats. It clinked every time anyone moved. The family lives somewhere upstream, near a convenient sand pit, but they come down the river every few weeks to sell their wares in the city.

They told me all of this over lunch. After I helped them gather up the last of the strawberries, they invited me to come the rest of the way downstream with them, and I was happy to accept. There's only so much walking I can do in one day when it's this hot. The little awning on the raft was the only shade I'd seen since sunrise.

As is traditional, I contributed the most exotic bits of food I had left. Most of my current supplies are plain food from the plains - bread, dried clackrabbit, and various things made of locusts - but I still had a few of those little sugar things I picked up in Mollogou. The children loved these, though their parents limited them to one each.

While we ate, the family told me all about the city, though the two smallest children kept interrupting to show me various blobs of glass they'd made. Their names are TiLi and HnerKipPeLo. (HnerKipPeLo is at a stubborn age and refuses to let anyone shorten his name.) They've started learning the trade already, apparently, and they seem quite good at it; TiLi had made a bottle large enough to hold a grape, which she showed me several times, and even the blobs were quite beautiful. There were streaks of blue and green in them. (The source of this color is a family secret.) The oldest son, MetTeyy, has started making some of the precision glassware used by the alchemists and apothecaries in the city. He doesn't talk quite as much as his two siblings. I'm not sure anyone does.

Once they found out that I'd never visited SuyMaTmakk, the city became the main topic of conversation. I'd been interested before; now that I've heard a bit more about the place, I can't wait to get there. The raft arrives (probably) tomorrow. I'll write more then, but I want to see this place with my own eyes first.

Cats and Riddles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps next time.



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

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

*** Except llamas.

The Essentials

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sand Rat's Apprentice

Like kilopedes, postbirds, and the uncommon Wayfinders, the singing sand rats of the Golden Desert have the rare ability to actually find their way from place to place on the surface of Hamjamser. This is especially useful in the Golden Desert. Its cities and villages tend to cluster around oases and rivers, and they stay small and scattered. Very few of them are ever within sight of each other. Finding one is not like looking for a needle in a haystack; it's more like looking for a flea.

The singing sand rats say they find their way by listening. Each city and village, they say, has its own song, and they can hear them and follow them to their source. Nothing else on Hamjamser can hear these songs. Only the sand rats. Their name comes from their tradition of singing the songs they know to their children; almost every sand rat's dream is to become a guide, and practically all of them achieve it. Guides on Hamjamser are rare and precious.

So the sand rats spend the first few years of their lives listening to their parents or teachers, learning the songs of the Golden Desert or the Railway Regions or the Mountainous Plains, until they know by heart the mechanical rhythm of Miggle-Meezel, the sweet trills of Samrath Kazi, the ancient clank of Cormilack, the bubble of Baconeg, the murmur of Vanister, the drone of Sconth... The more talented ones even learn the variations on a theme that are the thousand islands of Kennyrubin, or the song of the lost city of Fasra Koum, passed from rat to rat for generations for its indescribable beauty despite the fact that the city itself has been gone for centuries. Singing sand rats never forget a tune.

When they have learned all the songs they can from the sand rats they know, they go off to live with the people they will guide. Many of them leave for other parts of Hamjamser; most stay with the white-cloaked nomads of the Golden Desert. It is their home, after all, and the people there need them the most.

Besides, Fasra Koum was built in the Golden Desert. There is always the chance - however slight - that some rat, someday, might hear its voice again.