Drawing on the Walls

I'm glad I decided to stay in Chelissera. I was sitting on one of the thread bridges over the water,* sketching a tussock with sheep on top, when a spider climbed down beside me. This was fairly unremarkable until he spoke to me.

"Good moorning," he said. "You are an ahrtist, yes?"

His name was KeChorlitrix. He had a magnificent bass voice with a slight Truvidon accent. I have no idea which of his jointed mouthparts it came from. He was the owner of a restaurant, he told me - he pronounced it "rhoostaurant" - and had just moved into a new building. He was looking for an artist to decorate it. "I would like a myooral," he said. "One with insechts on it, fat ones, to make the coostomers hoongry."

I asked why he wanted me to do it, rather than some artist already in the town. Apparently, art by people with only two eyes is considered exotic in Chelissera. There are very few binocular artists in the town. There are plenty of vertebrates living here - perhaps a tenth or so of the population - but all of them have at least a trace of arachnid in their ancestry. Even the least spidery have four or five eyes each.** The only things with two are the sheep.

I've seen some of the multi-eyed artists' work. I can certainly see the difference. Cubist painters with two eyes have to imagine what their subjects would look like from several directions at the same time; ones with more than two eyes actually see them that way. There's a fragmented, fractal beauty to their work that I can't really describe.

I agreed, of course. I try never to turn down a job, especially one this interesting.

I got a book from the town library for reference; I'm not familiar with the insects in this part of the Shwamp, and most of the ones I could do off the top of my head would have been foreign or imaginary. It was the first time I'd been in the library. Nothing in this town seems to be made out of wood if there's a way to weave it instead. Rather than shelves, the library keeps books in tall lattices of silk. They hang from the rope-beams of the ceiling. The vertical strands are close together, the horizontal ones farther apart, so that each book stands in its own narrow pocket in the grid. They have to stretch some of the pockets to fit in the thicker books. Most of the lattices are sixteen books high or more; you have to climb them like rope ladders to reach the books on the higher shelves. No one seems worried about people falling off. Spiders just don't do that. Even if those of us with four limbs and no claws fell off, though, we wouldn't be hurt. The floor is cloth too.

There were several encyclopedias of insects in the naturalist section, but they were short on pictures. I eventually went and found the librarian. She was busy rearranging books on four shelves at the same time. She was wearing the most spectacular spectacles I've ever seen - not so much a pair as a crown, with more lenses than a microscope. Fortunately, we both knew and could pronounce at least a bit of Sikelak, so I was able to tell her that I was looking for pictures of insects.

She nodded, apparently used to vertebrates making the same mistake, and led me instead to the cooking section.

Interestingly, most of the books printed in Chelissera are made in the accordion style. Instead of being bound on one edge, the pages are segments of a single strip of paper folded in a zigzag. The entire thing can be unfolded and seen all at once. For people with eyes on every side of their head, I suppose this makes sense.

I got lost on my way to the restaurant, wandering through webs of ladders and bridges, but I met a few people who spoke Sikelak and could give me directions. The restaurant was made of silk too. There were a few lightweight tables tilted at odd angles on the cloth floor; most of the seats, though, were on the ceiling. When the restaurant opens, the spider customers will hang in comfortable padded hammocks and drink bottles of half-soup hung from the chandeliers. KeChorlitrix wanted the mural painted in dyes straight onto the cloth walls. (Embroidery would be more permanent, but embroidering a building costs a fortune.) I asked if he had a list of insects he particularly wanted. He handed me a menu.

Being somewhat unfamiliar with this medium - plant and insect dye on architectural spider silk - I started work in an unobtrusive corner, where any mistakes I made would be hard to notice. It was a good thing I did. Painting with cloth dye was a bit like painting with watercolors... on water. The strands took the dye and spread it out in every direction. I would touch the wall with the tip of a brush and get a blotch the size of an orange. I quickly gave up on painting the insects anywhere even close to actual size. Most of one wall is taken up by a gigantic dragonfly, blue with green trim. A beetle the colors of eggplant and blueberry fills another. KeChorlitrix would come in occasionally, roundly extoll the magnificence of my work, and then ask me to make changes to it. "Moore colors!" he kept saying. "Make it brighter!" I was happy to oblige.

There is very little red, orange, or yellow; poisonous insects tend to use these colors to warn predators away. They're about as appetizing to spiders as mold is to vertebrates.

The painting took most of the afternoon, but the canvas I was using was smaller than I had estimated - at least in comparison to the brush strokes - and I finished it before dark. At KeChorlitrix's request, I even managed to climb up and paint a few elaborate butterflies on the ceiling. He thanked me profusely. He offered me dinner. He paid me with a handful of beetles preserved in glass marbles - Sixels, he called them. Apparently, they're the main currency in this part of the Great Shwamp. I'll probably spend most of them soon (customers and stores have been rather scarce on the boardwalk, and I'm rather low on food), but I think I'll keep at least one. I always keep one of everything. If I gave up my collection of coins,*** my luggage would probably be six or seven pounds lighter.

Later that night, I went to the restaurant, which is called the Chuckelgrack.**** KeChorlitrix insisted I order as much I could possibly eat. (It was crunchy, delicious and - thanks to his versatile chef - solid.) I realized when I got there why he had wanted the colors so bright. Most of the buildings in Chelissera are the plain white of undyed silk; a few are dyed in one color, maybe two. Many have only their names written on the outside in tangled spider script. They're lit from inside by lamps and candles at night, white and multicolored, as if the stars had come down from the sky and moved into tents.

Among all of them, the Chuckelgrack stands out like a sunflower among daisies. It has more colors than the rest of the town put together. The paintings on the inside walls shine through, flies and beetles and bolster moths, every detail as clear and incandescent as the pattern on a paper lantern. It was breathtaking.

I may have painted the walls, but KeChorlitrix chose the colors and the setting; this is as much his creation as mine. I've rarely seen any of my work used so beautifully. The money and food are much appreciated, but this is the best payment I could have asked for.



*You can't really call them rope bridges when the individual strands are too fine to see. They look like gauze and are slightly stronger than steel wire.

**I had been wondering about this, but couldn't think of a polite way to ask.

***Most of them are coins, anyway. Not everyone has the same idea of what constitutes currency. I also have a scattering of Toli beads, a few of the little colored stones called Lint, an engraved pleach pit, and seven Train tickets.

****This is a pun in Sikelak combining the words "chuckel" - which means something like "sated" or maybe "bloated" - and "tuckelgrack," a popular variety of half-soup made from beetles.

The Sclesserax (part one)

I think the Sclesserax may be larger on the inside than on the outside. Flishel and I visited it today, and the rooms inside it have no end.

It was completely by chance that we ended up there at the same time. I walked through the first door I found - an ornate archway near the bottom of one of the pillars, covered in little clay snails with paper wings. The flying snail turns up a lot in Carvendrone architecture. I think it's their equivalent of the stone griffins in Rampastula or the cyclopean hammerheads in Cammerlan.

Anyway. The inside of the pillar was one enormous spiral staircase, sunlight shining through all the windows and lighting up the red and yellow chrysanthemums growing from the windowsills. They grow straight out of the architecture. Their roots emerge here and there from the clay walls. Late-blooming sunflowers and Winterthistle join them farther up the staircase, and mushrooms sprout beneath the steps.

At the top of the staircase was an entrance hall shaped like a beehive. Wasps flew in and out through the windows - I wondered how many of them even noticed the stairs - and there was Flishel, standing in the middle of the room and looking around with the same openmouthed awe that I'm sure was on my face. We greeted each other incomprehensibly and continued looking around. The room was lined with paper, intricately twisted origami shapes in gray and white that twisted down the walls and twined around each other on the floor. It was like a folded waterfall. Little crabs and shrimp in mottled clay peered through gaps in the streamers.

We were there all of two minutes before a hornet came to take us away.

I'm not really sure, any more than I am about anything in the Sclesserax, but I think she may be some sort of tour guide (or possibly someone entrusted with keeping random gaping intruders out of trouble). She buzzed up to us, landing catlike on the floor - her head was about level with my waist - and motioned with one claw for us to follow her. We did.

The hornet, whose name I probably heard but didn't recognize, took us on a convoluted route that must have passed through over a hundred rooms in the Sclesserax. We went through miles of twisting passageways, lit by sun or amphibious anglerfish or nothing at all. Wasps don't mind a bit of darkness, and it would be foolish to keep flames in a building that's half paper. We passed the kitchens, where wasps and various other insects were chopping and moulding a hundred different kinds of food I couldn't identify. I think a lot of it had once been fruit. There were cakes in pink and purple, flowers of sliced meat, sugar sculptures of wasps and cacti and giant squid, a towering construction made of layers of meat and green jelly. Whole roast cicadas left the kitchens in carts on their way to the nurseries. Larvae eat a lot.

Our route took us out onto balconies several times. Builder hornets were repairing the roof of the dome above one of them. Wasp-paper is famous for its resistance to sogginess, but pieces of the Sclesserax still get mushy and fall off every now and then. Most of the architecture is in large, sweeping curves and flowing arches, shapes that don't break easily. All the ornamentation is small. Flat floors are uncommon; they're just places to land. Rickety little staircases have been added here and there, for those who can't fly, but they're an afterthought. Most of the Sclesserax's residents don't need them.

We wandered through a library built by bees, with books and scrolls and unfamiliar paper things in folds and coils, all stored neatly in hexagonal wax bookshelves. Very little of the writing was familiar. I recognized the neat alphabet of Carvendrone, three-pointed letters based on the handprints of black beetles, but I can't even pronounce the sounds they represent. Most of the spoken languages were unfamiliar as well. The rest of Carvendrone is a mix of every chitinous species in the Railway Regions, but most of the Sclesserax is inhabited by wasps, the royalty and lesser nobility of the city, and they don't speak English. The language of Carvendrone (which shares the city's name) is an old one, dating back to prehistoric tribes of black beetles in the caverns of Mount Moler. I don't know how much of the constant buzzing and clicking is meaning and how much is motion. Maybe they're the same thing. In a language made largely of buzzing wings, flight can be poetry.

I recognized the occasional conversation in the almost-universally-pronounceable Sikelak, though I'm far from fluent in the language. The fact that almost anyone can speak it means that no one can do so easily.

Our guide kept up a constant cheerful commentary, in clicks and buzzes, on the rooms we went through. (At least, I assume that's what she was talking about. For all I know, she could have been reciting poetry or complaining about the weather.) Her segmented hands never stopped moving. We stopped by the throne room for several minutes, admiring the sculpted swarms on the door, but we never saw the inside. The Queens don't open their doors to just anyone.

Wasps have a reputation for being fiercely territorial. The Queens of Carvendrone are rare exceptions. Over a century ago, the Queens realized that they could create a hive, between the six of them, far larger than a single Queen could even dream of. A wasp can only lay so many eggs a day, after all.

More Queens have joined them since then. Every species of civilized wasp in Hamjamser lives in the Sclesserax - I don't even know how many. There are even a few colonies of bees and a reclusive hive of termites in the basement.

They have their own names for themselves, in the scissoring language of the nobility, spoken with wings and serrated mandibles. It's far more subtle and complex than anything else spoken in Carvendrone. I've heard that some of it is communicated by smell.

Vertebrates can't pronounce it. They call the wasp tribes by other names.

The hornets - such as our guide - are strong and catlike, with tough exoskeletons the dusty red-and-charcoal of bricks. The builders among them work in paper, which they make in their stomachs from chewed wood. The nobility have butter-yellow faces. All of them are sisters, daughters of the Hornet Queen who looms enormous in the depths of the throne room, but only the yellow-faced ones could take her place, trade their predatory grace for a size greater than most whales and the rule of all their sisters, become mothers to a thousand daughters of their own. Most of them don't live that long. Queens take their time dying.

The daubers are long and impossibly thin, blue-black with purple wings. They are constantly in motion. They twitch slightly even when standing still, their wings flickering in place. They prefer clay to paper. Unlike the hornets, they have no Queen Mother; they have small families of their own, like most of Hamjamser, and elect a small council of Queens. The males have made a few attempts to join the council, but they're always outnumbered by the dozens of Queens in their own and other species. Something usually distracts them anyway.

The cicada-eaters are massive and tiger-striped, far larger than anything in the city except the rickshaw beetles. They are mottled rust-brown around the thorax, black on the abdomen, with rippling yellow stripes like war paint. The roar from their enormous bronze wings is deafening. They fly as unstoppably as meteors. The towers of the Sclesserax are theirs, all of them, even the ones built by other wasps; the cicada-eaters perch protectively on the pinnacles, wings and legs delicately folded like dragons or winged cats. No one knows why. They raise their grubs in the lower rooms of the Sclesserax. The huge, boneless children of the cicada-eaters spend the first year of their lives wedged comfortably into clay and stone crevices, devouring half the cicadas raised in Carvendrone.

I'll write more tomorrow. We spent all day in the Sclesserax, walking constantly, and I'm currently falling asleep over my pen.

The Mysterious Departure of Professor Flanderdrack

I'm still not entirely sure what happened today, so I'll start with my second visit to Scarloe. I went back for another hour or so while the Train was unloading a few large crates of pickaxes.

Tourists are not allowed down in the mines, of course. The last thing the miners want is a constant crowd of people getting in their way. Instead, I went to the bookshop that sells what comes out of them.

Like nearly all the buildings in Scarloe, the bookshop doesn't have a real roof. There's no rain to keep out, after all; the only reasons to have buildings at all are warmth and privacy. Most of the buildings in the village are just walls with cloth stretched over the top. The villagers add extra layers in the Winter.

It was around noon when I went to the bookshop, so the sun was shining through the canvas ceiling. The whole shop was full of soft, brownish light that didn't seem to come from anywhere in particular. Several other people (all of them passengers from the Train) were wandering through the shelves.

The books made in Scarloe are all different sizes; they have to be. No two pages from the mines are exactly the same size. The largest one ever found was almost six feet high. It hangs on the front wall of the shop, behind the counter. The smallest ones are the size of postage stamps. The books in the shop are sorted by size - like the Illegible Library in Sconth, nothing else makes sense - so the smallest ones have several shelves to themselves, at the back of the shop. The shelves are about three inches high; the books are slightly less than that, little leather-bound cubes the size of walnuts. The very smallest ones have one letter (or symbol, anyway) on each page.

The books grow steadily in size all the way to the front of the shop. At the very front are massive volumes the size of the "atlases" produced by mapmakers (a different way of filling entire books with nonsense, only in diagrams instead of writing). A few are even bigger than the Sconth Extended English Dictionary.

I didn't buy a book, of course. (What would I do with it?) All I did was flip through a few of them. I recognized very few of the languages in the creased and dust-stained pages. When I finally found one in English,* it stood out like a lighthouse on a dark night. Of course, I only understood the individual words, not the sentences they formed. Here's an example:

Unfortunately, when the frog got out of bed, it found that an eggplant had invaded its nest and stolen all its jewelry. This was a catastrophic occurence, for the frog's jewelry was the key to the box in which slept the kidneys of a very old fish, and not a drop of wine could be had to bring them back. It was most inimitable. After weighing the options on a small scale, the frog decided there was nothing to be dome but call in the camel passages to worm their way out of the loch. This would take time, though, and every second was a second that could have been spent playing the violin. There was simply no replacement for all that fur. Time could wait, but clocks are notoriously impatient when their lunch is on the line. That, then, was the state of things when the new year arrived in a stagecoach and dropped her teeth like snow over the city. The sewers froze overnight. Clams fled to the streets, clamoring for sausages to save them from the cold, but it was no use. They were all washed to sparkling sanitation before the pipes could say a word. Fingers would never have accepted such an impasse in their digits. Disaster loomed. Trains buckled their belts and settled down for a long Winter. Ice crept over the line and was punished. The frog hardly knew which handle to turn, because they were all misty in the half-dusk. Moldy spiders were no help. And worst of all, the jewels were still missing, for the sleet had kept them silent against their will. No one noticed. Come daybreak this evening, it will all end in tears. Mark my words. They are written in ink.
No good can come of this.
Limber.

Professor Flanderdrack was there as well, but he hardly stepped into the shop at all. He just went to the very first shelf inside the door, picked out a gigantic volume half as tall as himself - I assume he picked it for the cover, as he barely glanced at the pages inside - and bought it.

The Train left shortly after that. The Professor spent most of the rest of the day making more notes or calculations in his notebooks, which he packed neatly away in various suitcases when he had finished. The book from Scarloe was the only thing he left out. He then placed it on the floor, picked up all his luggage at once - no small feat by itself - and proceeded to stand on the book. He swayed slightly with the motion of the Train.

"Well," he said cheerfully, "it has been a pleasure to travel with you three gentlemen. I have enjoyed your conversation immensely. Remember to look for the Caribou Rotunda - it likes cheese. Wish me luck!"

"Good luck," I said, bewildered. Flishel said something that sounded equally confused. The sleeping passenger snored. There was a noise outside the compartment just then - the beginning of an impromptu game of sea-legs ninepins in the corridor outside, as it turned out - and I looked out for a second to see what it was. When I looked back, Professor Flanderdrack and his luggage had disappeared. The floor of the compartment was completely empty.

I still don't know what happened. I can guess, of course; perhaps the Professor found out how printed pages get into the ground beneath Scarloe, and perhaps he managed to turn that form of transportation to his own use. Perhaps he was pulled away to somewhere else like the words in an ambiguous novel. Perhaps it was something else altogether. The Omnipresent Telescope probably had something to do with it, if that was what he found in the Vanister Museum, and the book from the mines of Scarloe was obviously important. Unless it wasn't. In a few years, maybe everyone will be traveling by book. Maybe not. I suppose I'll never know.

I never did find out what he was a Professor of, exactly.



* One of the great unsolved mysteries of the page mines is how a geological layer thousands of years old, at the very least, can contain languages that have only been around in their present forms for a few hundred years. This is one of the main arguments used to support the theory that the mines are somehow getting words from somewhere else, like an enormous subterranean ambiguous novel that's completely lost its mind. It's also used to support the theory that the whole thing is an elaborate hoax.

Books Within Books

The weather was exceptionally beautiful today. It's been an unusually warm November in the Regions - almost like October all over again, though it's hard to believe we could be that lucky. October is always too short. People have written songs about it.

Even the Vanister Museum, probably my favorite building in Hamjamser that isn't a library, couldn't compete with the mountain around it. I didn't feel like walking around inside all day. Instead, I walked around Vanister and the surrounding forest all morning, sketched a few things here and there, bought a tin of lemon cookies at the Rinkler Bakery, and brought them - and a book - to the old standing stones uphill from the town. I like to sit and read under the one shaped like a platypus.

I think I've mentioned before that all the books I own are ambiguous novels. When you travel all the time, you can't carry a lot of books around with you, and libraries won't always be in the same place by the time you've finished a book and want to take it back. Ambiguous novels are the only good way to read new books on the road.

Recently, I've discovered yet another favorite author in Iliev Machinel, whose books have been showing up in one of my novels with rather alarming regularity. I just hope they continue to do so. I love them. Between Iliev Machinel and Inian Gleam - the book's current favorite authors, apparently - I feel like I've spent half of the last few months in strange places beneath the streets of Golgoolian.

Ambiguous novels, from what I've heard, are generally made by mixing up pages from seven or more different books inside one cover. This makes the book so confused about its own contents that it gives up and starts copying other books instead. It generally goes after books similar to the ones used to make it, though nearly every ambiguous novel gets bored and tries something else occasionally.

Reading ambiguous novels takes some practice. Once someone has seen the last page of a story, that's it; the book will have a different one the next time it's opened. I've had to track down over a dozen books at various libraries, having glimpsed the last page too early and missed the ending.

One of mine always contains fantasy, of nearly any kind. That's the one that's been obsessed with Gleam and Machinel lately. It's also the book that got me started on Ramer Oswelt, Tratch R. Pettery, Lena Tithe, Milici Trappilack, H. T. Garnix, and even Oswina Dennenjay. Another mixes fantasy and science fiction, and seems to have a particular fondness for Inry Varnel, Curl R. Hatcreak, and the unlikely technologies of Herbert G. Welleger. The third - put together, apparently, from a wider variety of books - alternates fantasy with murder mysteries (mostly by Trachia Ghastie), obscure works of biology and cryptozoology, and the occasional rather silly romance.

The fourth contains only graphic novels, which it seems to choose completely at random, but occasionally fills itself with what look like ancient Rampastulan hieroglyphs. I don't know where it gets them. They must be written somewhere - ambiguous novels don't invent their own words - but I've loaned the book to several Rampastulan archaeologists, and none of them had ever seen these particular hieroglyphs before. They were delighted to have them. All I can think is that the book has found some old ruin near Rampastula, probably buried deep underground or lost in the heaps and layers of architecture that make up the city, and is copying the occasional interesting wall. Maybe hieroglyphs and graphic novels don't look all that different if you're a book.

Completely unrelated to anything else, Mr. and Mrs. Dreefel - the fortune-teller and her husband - celebrated their son's negative second birthday today. Mrs. Dreefel says he'll be born in exactly two years. They had a party in the Train's dining room, with their friends and a few random strangers that are apparently going to be their friends someday, and divided a cake with two candle-shaped holes in it.

I love living on the Train.

The Illegible Library

Today, I found the Illegible Library. It's no wonder I missed it yesterday. Apparently, when it was built, the only space the builders could find for the front entrance was an alley between the massive Fiction and Entomology Libraries. It's about five feet wide. The front door (fifteen feet high and just wide enough to get through if I turned sideways) opens onto a magnificent entrance hall, floored with a single row of mosaic tiles, with a colonnade of marble half-pillars against each wall. They're offset from each other, so there's room to sort of zigzag between them.

Walking this way, ducking under the occasional lantern, I eventually reached the front desk. It's wedged between the walls six feet above the floor so that people can walk under it. I asked the receptionist, a large, white-furred samoval, how they got it through the door; she replied in a distracted voice, without taking her nose out of the volume of triptych semaphore she was reading, that it had been built there. A ten-foot-long pair of fireplace tongs hung on the wall by her seat. I assumed they were for picking up dropped papers.

The heart of the library, once you get past the entrance, is a much wider space, though it's not immediately obvious. The high-ceilinged rooms are only sporadically lit and have been divided up into labyrinths of bookcases.

In them, and surrounding them, are the books.

Most of the libraries in Sconth - and everything else in Sconth, for that matter - are kept rigidly organized at all times. The Illegible Library isn't. Books and scrolls and tablets are stacked and piled and crammed onto shelves with no organization whatsoever. There's no way to organize them when nothing in them makes sense. Bookshelves stand and lean at odd angles to each other, forming high, narrow passageways lined with incomprehensible titles and lit dimly by the occasional lantern in the gloom overhead.

I think the building may have been a cathedral at one point. In the thin trails between stacks and piles of books, it's just possible to glimpse the paths of an old cathedral floor labyrinth, twisting invisibly beneath the newer wood-and-paper labyrinth piled on top of it. The passages open out occasionally into open, irregular rooms, piled high with books and the occasional piece of furniture. Sofas and armchairs are the most common, but I also saw several papasan chairs, a hammock, and the leather-padded cockpit of an antique airship.

Theoretically, the purpose of the Illegible Library (besides providing a habitat for linguists and a Place To Dump All This Gibberish) is to keep the incomprehensible writing in a place where people can find it. The hope is that it will all eventually make the proud journey to the Library of Obscure and Extinct Languages, an old and dusty building that holds about three times as many books as it actually has. Each translated book is shelved with several more books explaining how to read the original.

Books don't actually make the journey very often, though. Only one or two get translated every year. Most of the ones that make any sense at all have already been translated. The few brave linguists who still frequent the Library build their own little dens down in the stacks (formerly the crypts?) and hoard the books they're attempting to translate. If someone moves a book before they decipher its language, they'll never find it again.

(Many thanks to the Library denizens who came at least halfway out of their books to explain things to me. I admire your ability to talk and read at the same time.)