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 Rubble Heap

The day Plack and I left Jijangola - most of a year ago, by now - we found the source of all the stone they use.

The Rubble Heap is the only thing in Jijangola that's even close to the size of the Galleria. As far as anyone can tell, all the ruins in the Railway Regions (possibly in all of Hamjamser) end up in the Rubble Heap once they're no longer recognizable as ruins (or, to use the official definition, once no stone is left upon another). It stretches for miles. Grass and weeds grow over the older heaps of rubble, wildflowers blooming in the cracks between flowers of stone, and the occasional tree pours its roots over blocks and finials into the tiny patches of ground, like an octopus on ice. Very little grows here that anyone cares about. It's the stone they're after.

Most of the stones are sunk into the ground, immovable, but some of them are loose enough to shift sometimes. Spaces open up under the surface here and there. There are animals living in the abundance of holes and crevices - snakes, lizards, rabbits, ferrets, mountain spiders, subterranean rodents of almost every kind. Their homes shift constantly as the stones settle, as does the surface of the ground. Walking over the Heap is always risky. Moving stones requires an odd combination of strength and quick feet - if you can't leap quickly away from the slightest rumbling sound while carrying a fifty-pound block of granite, you won't last long.

The stone is worth it, though. There are pieces of castles in the Heap. Palaces. There are corners of pyramids, crenelations and arrow slits, steps and keystones and buttresses, broken marble pillars like snapped sticks of giant chalk. Chipped gargoyles malinger beneath blankets of moss and ivy. The ground is a thin layer of soil and plants over granite and marble, flint and cheeserock, alabaster and obsidian, sandstone and ferralax and graywracke and slate and quartz. Gemstones turn up now and then in the grass. There are occasional blocks of mica, cut from some glittering quarry, peeling stacks of stone like books of glass parchment. Whatever was built with them must have shone like crystal in the sun.

Most of the remains of Samrath Kazi, the Beautiful Village, are in the Rubble Heap. All the stones are shattered, of course; the village was fairly high up in the Railway Regions before the avalanche obliterated it. It fell a long way. In between the chunks of alabaster gravel that are most of its remains, you can sometimes find half of a snow-white pillar or a few inches of flower-patterned railing. The elegant lines of calligraphic Shasta script form pieces of words that will eventually end up in one of the Galleria's rhyming collages.

The Galleria of Jijangola is built almost entirely of stone from the Rubble Heap. That explains why it's such a patchwork of a building. The architects have taken the pieces from a thousand hopelessly jumbled jigsaw puzzles and put them together into a picture of their own - and if it's not a picture that makes any sense, well, sense is overrated.

A large number of people make a living just carting stone to Jijangola. They poke through the Rubble Heap until they find an interesting pile (the Jijangolans like carvings and interesting textures), then unearth and unweed the stones and pile them into wheelbarrows. The Jijangolans reward them (if the stone is interesting) with food and whatever other stuff they have lying around. The rock-rollers, as they call themselves, tend to be mismatched sorts of people. One of them, a burreler excavating around a ten-foot pillar shaped like a pine cone, was wearing an old-fashioned leather aviator's jacket several feet too long for him. The edges were held up by enormous safety pins in an elaborate pattern of drapes and twists. He was also wearing half a pair of magnifying spectacles (possibly to make up for the fact that his right eye was twice as large as his left) and what was either a badly battered soup tureen or a frighteningly large helmet. It had a hole cut in the front for his face. From the back, a square leather shape with late Spring snow piling up on the round helmet, he looked a bit like a giant cupcake.

We said hello, poked around in the nearby stones, and asked him a few questions, but he never gave the faintest sign that he heard or saw us. He just kept digging. He was humming a waltz tune under his breath.

When Plack suggested tipping him over to see what happened, I thought it was probably time to move on.

Coming and Going

Well, I'm back, after another long and unexplained absence. At least I can make it a long and explained absence, if nothing else.

However a Wayfinder's abilities work - whatever it is that enables them to find any place, no matter how elusive - I think I must have the opposite. I've been lost in a single building for over a month. I spent Christmas in the Galleria (and there will be a whole post on that later), then wandered around for a few more weeks until I found the door. I could hardly believe it; I was starting to think I wouldn't get out until Spring.

I wonder, now, if the Galleria was just keeping me until I had given it enough paintings. Artists and architects are its life; I can't imagine it would be eager to let them go, especially the traveling ones, who may never find their way back.

When I left, I found Plack sitting right by the door and eating grass. He looked extremely bored. Once he saw me, he let me know that he had, in fact, BEEN extremely bored, and what had taken me so long? I explained that I had gotten lost; he snorted, as if that was only to be expected, and walked away without another word.

We left Jijangola completely unnoticed. Everyone was inside, lost in their own creations, and wouldn't have been interested if they had seen us. It was starting to snow as we left. So much for reaching the Train before the first snowfall... Oh well. The Jijangolans have never gotten around to building a Train station (the foundations of one are gradually being engulfed by the outskirts of the Galleria, but the builder seems to have lost interest before laying any track. Someone else is busy covering the gap-toothed bricks with red and white tiles).

After leaving Jijangola, we wandered through the Trackless forests of the Railway Regions for another month or two, looking for a Train station. We managed to miss every single one of the little foothill towns; the few small villages (and one slug farm, of course) that we passed through were too small to afford a station. Some of them were little more than a collection of cabins. However little room they had, though, they were always just as welcoming as everyone else in the Railway Regions. A blanket on the floor of someone's root cellar is much more comfortable than sleeping outside in January. Plack and I both grew our Winter coats a few weeks after leaving Jijangola, so we were rarely too cold, but it's been a bit too wet in the Regions this year to sleep outside. I can't even imagine what it would have been like if we'd come in through the Great Shwamp instead of the foothills.

We arrived yesterday, tired and muddy from months of travel, in Milldacken. The whole city rumbles day and night - even now, when the river's mostly frozen - but it's still relaxing, if only because it has a Train station. No more trudging through the snow for me. It also has a post office (few postbirds visit Jijangola, as the people there are mostly uninterested in the outside world), so I can finally write again.

Unfortunately, reaching the Train does not put an end to trudging through the snow for Plack. The Train hasn't arrived yet, but there's no need for him to carry my luggage when I'll be able to just cram it safely into the baggage rack in my compartment. I doubt turnstile trolls will be a problem on the railroad.

We said goodbye this morning. Plack said that it had been an interesting trip, if nothing else, and that I was less annoying than he'd expected. (I think that's a good thing.) He even let me draw a sketch of him after I'd taken the luggage off.

The last I saw of him, he was leaving with a large samoval (why do I keep saying that? They're all large), whose luggage consisted mostly of a gigantic baritone balinga in a leather case. Plack did not look happy.

Well, he never does, really, but I'll miss him anyway.

Lunch on the BAS Fernmarvel

There's still no sign of the road, but we found something much more interesting today.

We had been walking for most of the morning, passing hot springs and salamander hunters crouched over lava pools, when the scraps started appearing. They were widely scattered at first - just a shred here and there, pieces of the tough grub silk used for airship balloons. The airtight wax had melted off long ago.

We followed them for a while, having nothing better to do while looking for the road. I picked them up idly as we walked.

There were more of them the farther we went. It was getting hard to find a spring or patch of ground that didn't have a scrap of cloth in it somewhere when we came around a steam vent and saw the gondola.

It was obviously the source of the scraps: an old airship gondola, practically an antique, covered with old-fashioned Caroque scrollwork and tarnished brass. It was half-submerged, nose-down, in a steaming hot spring. The cockpit was completely underwater. It had been brightly painted once; faint patches of red and gold remained in crevices and the frames of the shattered windows. The steam had taken most of it off.

It took me a moment to realize what it was, as I'd never seen an airship gondola without its balloons before. They were completely gone. That was hardly surprising, though, as their remains were spread over several miles of the canyon. The hydrogen must have ignited at some point. The support ropes drooped forlornly from their hooks, rotting in the damp.

As we got closer (after all, if you find a crashed airship, how can you not investigate it?), we saw that the spring it was sticking out of was an odd gray-green color. It smelled like an explosion in a tea shop. Some sort of mineral thing, I assumed. That happens to some hot springs.

We were sitting there staring when a man came out of a small hatch near the back (now the top) of the airship. All we could see from the ground was that he was small and purple.

"Ahoy, visitors!" he shouted. "That's the sight I like to see, yes sir, it is! Got any tea? No? No, you don't look like the type. That's all right, we can't all have tea, after all. Well, what are you waiting for? Come in, come in! I haven't got all day! Well, actually I do, but who cares about that? I've got lunch, that's what matters! Come in and we'll eat it!"

With that, he disappeared back inside, still talking.

We hesitated for a moment. It had been a rather unusual greeting. After walking unsuccessfully all morning, though, I was rather tired of it, and an invitation to lunch was no less welcome because the person who gave it was a bit odd. Most people are a bit odd.

Fortunately, there was another door farther down the airship; there was enough ornamentation on the hull that I could have climbed to the upper door, but Plack couldn't have managed it. Llamas can't climb vertical surfaces. He was reluctant to go in at all at first, but the promise of lunch was enough to tempt someone who had been eating nothing but cube turnips since we left the upper jungle.

The man we had seen opened the lower door as we reached it. He was a reptile of some sort, about four feet tall and stocky, with the most enormous ears I've ever seen. Except for his silver-tinged purple scales, he looked almost like a flightless bat. He was wearing an old captain's uniform, very worn and faded, patched with scraps of the same fabric that lay all over the ground outside. I think it had once been blue. The shoulders and lapels were trimmed with scuffed gold braid.

"Ah, there you are, good!" He beamed up at us. "Come right in, I got lunch all ready on the boiler, we can use the good china from the old days! You must be wondering who I am, eh? I'm the captain of this here ship! Been sailing the skies for thirty years! Been sailing this here puddle for the last twelve, actually, but I likes it here, so that's all right. Only problem is there's no one to talk to. Had to talk to myself since last week. You're here now, though, so I can make up for lost time! Come in and eat!"

The captain spent the next few hours showing us around his airship - the parts of it still above water, anyway - and served us a lunch of boiled cacti (deflated), geyser shrimp, and scones on chipped, fern-patterned gilt china. Apparently, he boiled his food in the hottest part of the spring. It had the same strange herbal smell that the water did. I don't normally drink water that smells strange; the captain seemed perfectly healthy, though - almost frighteningly so - so I didn't worry about it. It did make the food taste good.

The airship was magnificent. It was gradually disintegrating in the heat and the damp of the Boiler Room, but it must have been one of the most splendid airships in the sky before it crashed. Every room was a masterpiece of lightweight Caroque architecture. Carved float-wood panels made up the walls, every unmildewed curve and curlicue still gleaming in the dim orange light coming in through the cracked gallery windows. Light bronze leaf coated the banisters of the stairs. The grand ballroom was missing the entire upper wall; trees grew there, sheltered from the heat outside. Their branches echoed the arches of the broken Palladian windows. Fifteen years of fallen leaves and branches from the jungle overhead had turned into a thick layer of soil, perfect for their fallen seeds.

"Not much of a ballroom now, this place," the captain commented. "A conservatory, that's what it is, and you won't find better on any other airship, they got to be retired like the old Fernmarvel here." (That was how we found out the airship's name; the gilded letters on the hull had long since vanished, either fallen off or stolen.) "You like jellyapples? Course you do, who doesn't like jellyapples, no one I know, and I got 'em growing right over there by the staircase. I'll get us a few after lunch."

We finished lunch (and the promised jellyapples) in the old navigator's cockpit, a small, cozy room full of rusted machinery and water that had leaked in through the shattered observation windows. Like the water outside - even more so, actually - it was green and steaming and smelled like tea. The captain sat right in the middle of the rising steam, perched on the back of an old swiveling chair bolted to the deck. It stuck out diagonally over the water now.

The cockpit was full of souvenirs of the airship's travels: fossils from the Golden Desert, cyclonoscopes from Mount Moler, a compass still faithfully pointing to a tree in Bannarbangle, seashells resplendent with spines and spirals, a tiny lizard saddle, a four-foot havernack tooth from Morianny carved into the shape of a lighthouse, tasselled Tetravanian tapestries, coins from all over Hamjamser strung from the ceiling... An airship can pick up a lot in thirty years. An antique pipe crawler, still ticking, slept in a glass case to keep its clockwork dry. None of the airship's plumbing worked anymore; the captain had replaced its pipe-wrench claws with scissors and a sewing machine needle so that it could repair his uniform. The strange green scent of the water filled the room.

The captain sighed happily and settled down in the middle of it all to chew his jellyapple. "I've never liked the cold." He shook his head fiercely. "Not even when I was young. Never liked it. Only thing I didn't like about flying an airship, well, that and snobby passengers, never liked them either. I'm more comfortable here than I've been in decades. After we crashed, the crew, passengers all left. I stayed behind. Went down with my ship, I did, and I'm not about to come back up without it, no sir! (That's me, you see - sir - since I'm the captain.) I like this place. I got heat, I got steam for me old lungs, high altitudes weren't good to 'em, and-" he pointed to the steaming, greenish water below - "I got the biggest teapot in the world!"

That explained the smell and the odd greenish color, then. Not minerals after all. It was an entire spring of tea.

He grinned. "You must be wondering where I gets it, yes?" (I was, in fact, but he didn't wait for an answer.) "Hunters bring it to me. All kinds. Green tea, chamomile, Vinchess Purple, mint, fruit zinger - I got 'em all mixed in there. I gives 'em information, you see. I know where the big salamanders hide. I can hear 'em." He tapped one enormous, leathery ear. "Hear 'em all the way from here, humming to themselves down in the lava."

We sat there in the tea-steamed clutter of the cockpit for several hours, listening to the captain tell stories of his travels. I might post a few of them someday if I remember. He sent us off near sunset with the leftovers; there was far more food than the three of us could eat in one meal. We've got a whole bag full of cacti, shrimp, and everlasting ship's scones. Overall, it was the best lunch I've had since eating at the Potted Pumpkin in Cormilack. I don't think the salamander hunters just come for advice.

Neither Plack nor I had a chance to say a single word the whole time. The captain talked constantly. We did say goodbye when we left, but he had started an impassioned monologue to his pipe crawler by then, and I don't think he heard us.

I'll have to remember to bring some tea the next time I cross the Greenhouse Cliff.

Troll Booth

All was going well today. Plack and I had been walking along the Greenhouse Cliff road for several hours, having slept at a slightly wider spot covered in moss last night. There are flowers and mushrooms everywhere. Moss covers every inch of rock rough enough to grip, trees and flowering plants grow out of the moss, and more moss and flowers grow on the branches of the trees. It's the same in every direction - left or right, up or down. The roots of the trees above the road hang down and embed themselves in the miniature gardens growing on the trees below. The Cliff jungle grows on itself as much as it grows on the cliff. The trees are only one layer thick; beyond the row of trunks is nothing but empty gray fog. Insects fly everywhere, drops of condensation fizzing off of their rapidly beating wings. Small birds of every possible shape and color are almost as common. Some of them visit flowers; others eat the insects. They have to work harder to find the green or cloud-gray ones. Whole colonies of small frogs fill every rock crevice and bromeliad.

We had just navigated the hairpin turn onto yet another switchback (half the road had crumbled away at the corner, which made it interesting) when we saw a small house ahead. It was two stories high, wedged beneath an unusually high part of the overhanging rock, and about six feet wide. Only two thirds of it actually fit on the road. The remaining two feet hung out over empty space. Another story - a basement? - stuck out of the cliff face beneath the rest of the house, supported by a network of rotting wooden beams.

Though the basement level was sagging and covered with moss, the upper floors of the house were perfectly neat and painted spotless white. A little stove chimney hung out over the cliff on the top floor.

We were standing there, staring at this odd little house built right across the road, when the troll came out.

Like most of the turnstile trolls that plague bridges and narrow roads all over the world, he was large and lumpy, with gray scales and hair. Unlike most of them, his hair was neatly combed (even his mane and ear tufts), and he was wearing an embroidered tunic and stockings. There were buckles on his shoes. Obviously, this was a rather successful troll.

"Your house," said Plack bluntly, "is in our way." He was still behind me, due to the narrowness of the road where we were; I suddenly wished that he wasn't.

"I knows it is," said the troll. With a wide grin full of gleaming white fangs, he then gave us the traditional turnstile troll greeting.

"Your money or your life!"

(This is not strictly true, as trolls have rarely actually killed anyone. It causes them more trouble than it's worth. The worst they usually do is hit people when they're irritated. It sounds scarier this way, though.)

Plack was not scared and not amused. "Why don't we keep both and you move your stupid house?"

"Your money or your life!"

"Or we could move it for you."

"Your money or your life!"

"Oh, shut up," snapped Plack. "Besides, what are you going to do if we don't pay you, you overdressed mushroom? Sit there and blind us with your teeth?"

I was starting to feel rather nervous by that point. When someone is insulting a troll, it's generally not a good idea to stand directly between them.

"You no pays me?"

"No. We doesn't."

The troll then proved himself to be one of the few trolls in the world who had never met a llama. With a slightly more evil grin, he pulled what looked like a four-foot spatula from inside the front door. "Then I wallops you until you does-"

A brown blur flew over my head, landed with a CLANG, and became Plack, standing in front of me and glaring at the troll. The spatula was bent in half in the middle. The troll was standing about a foot farther back than he had been; his feet had left skid marks in the dirt of the road.

His grin didn't even flicker. "-Then I lets you through right away and gives you breakfast."

He proceeded to do just that, showing us through his tiny and spotless kitchen (the entire first floor of his house) with all the care and politeness of a Clam-Porklian waiter. It was less than two minutes before we were on our way again, Plack with a basket of salad and a bottle of grundle juice, me with a sort of mushroom omelet that turned out to be better than what you get in most restaurants. The troll waved us happily on our way and sat down to wait for the next travelers. He might not have known about llamas before, but he does now. Trolls don't become successful by being stupid.

"'Never happened before,'" Plack snorted as we continued down the road. "Hah." He didn't say another word all day, but the smug smile didn't leave his face until after he was asleep.

In the past, several turnstile trolls have made a fairly good living for themselves thanks to me. I should have started traveling with a llama years ago.

The Edge of Sconth

We're leaving Sconth today. I'd like to stay longer and see more of the city, but the art most people like here is a lot more geometric than anything I do. Only two people have bought drawings since we arrived. Besides, we've been here over a week, and if we're going to reach the Railway Regions, I'd rather be on the Train before it starts snowing.

There's no sign of the slope we climbed on the way to Sconth. It's moved on to some other part of the Mountainous Plains. At the moment, the Plateau of Sconth seems to bordered on all sides by the Greenhouse Cliff, one of the only completely vertical regions of Hamjamser. Ever since the Cliff arrived, Sconth has been surrounded by the thick cloud bank that always follows it. The Plateau looks like an island in a sea of mist. Owners of dirigible leaf carriages are flying around on the surface of the cloud, pretending they're in boats. The butterflies that run the hotel have been back and forth to the Cliff all day to gather the bright tropical flowers from below the edge and enjoy the rare warm weather in November. It hasn't been warm enough for them to fly outdoors for over a month.

In a few places, where the cold air meets the mist, small showers of rain have been forming a few feet above the cloud's surface. I've heard there were a few four-foot-high snowstorms last night.

Looking down over the edge of the Cliff, past the scrub and scraggly trees that protect the Plateau's farms from the constant wind of the Mountainous Plains, the glistening canopies of rainforest trees are just visible through the mist. It's a surprising sight in late Autumn. Bright beetles and hummingbirds fly up now and then from the seasonless clouds, hit November in Sconth, and hurry back down again. Farther down, a faint orange glow is just barely visible through the gray. The volcanic vents that keep the Cliff tropical are down there somewhere. We're bound to meet at least a few salamander hunters when we cross them. (Salamanders breed perfectly well in captivity, but the farms like to get wild ones from volcanoes now and then to prevent inbreeding.)

I had hoped to get to the Railway Regions directly from the Mountainous Plains - it would have meant considerably less climbing, for one thing - but I've always wanted to see the Greenhouse Cliff, so I don't mind that much. The climb should be interesting. We've brought several cube turnips, hung by the leaves from Plack's harness like blocky purple saddlebags. They'll be a nice change from my usual diet of potatoes, smoked sump squid (my apologies to Commander Squish, but it travels well and tastes good, no matter how badly I cook it), and whatever else happens to be growing nearby.

Plack, incidentally, is not happy about the appearance of the Cliff. He's just started growing his Winter coat; tropical weather is the last thing he wants to travel through right now. It's not as if we have much of a choice, though, unless an airship shows up before we leave.

The main road through Sconth now reaches the edge of the Cliff and takes a sharp turn over the edge, twisting along between the lush undergrowth that sprouts from every crack and patch of dirt. The road was carved centuries ago into a groove in the stone; the Cliff hangs overhead like a damp gray roof. With the trees growing like leafy pillars at the edge of the road, it feels almost like the cloister of a monastery.

It will probably take us a while to get to the bottom of the Cliff. It's hard to travel quickly when the entire road consists of switchbacks.

City of Chitin and Codes

Only three days of traveling, and we've already gotten somewhere! Plack and I arrived in Sconth, the magnificent city of linguists and mathematicians, early this afternoon. The city was buzzing. It still is tonight, actually; an unusually large number of its inhabitants are insects, so there are always wings rattling overhead. There are spindle beetles everywhere, all different colors (though mostly orange, of course), with every possible number of limbs. A Kilopede was resting a half-mile or so of its length on the roof of a library hive. The buildings are all domes and spires in odd, fluid shapes, like termite mounds in brick and stone.

We spent most of the day wandering around the city, trying to find a hotel and getting lost in back alleys instead. The alleys are... strange. Some of them are laid out in a relentless grid pattern; others twist and turn so much they almost tie themselves in knots. I have a sneaking suspicion that they would form fractal patterns if seen from the top. Professional polyglots wander through them in groups, talking in half a dozen languages at the same time. Mad cartographers lurk in corners and attempt to steal pens from passersby. The graffiti is all mathematical formulas.

The hotel we finally chose is several hundred years old. It used to be a library. Most of the rooms were converted from the old reading chambers; they used to be as tiny and spartan as a monk's cell, but now every spare inch of wall is covered with paintings and tapestries and ribbons and little things made of copper wire and brightly colored beads. The hotel is run by a family of giant butterflies, and they can't stand dull colors. Gray stone has to be painted or covered up or it drives them mad. They live in a maze of ropes and painted platforms hanging from the vaulted ceilings of the central reading room, which has more than enough room for them to fly wherever they want. They let the caterpillars paint murals on the walls. One of the caterpillars wanders around the hallways, using the walls and ceilings just as much as the floor, and follows any guests who look like they might have vegetables.

Tomorrow, I'm going to try to find the Illegible Library and look through all the incomprehensible writing there. The hotel was all we had time to find today; it was getting dark when we stumbled upon it. I'm writing this while listening to troubadours chirping outside.

There are no crickets in Sconth. They can't compete with the people.

Conveniently, there was a pen and a stack of paper in my room already; apparently, there's one in every room. I can hear Plack chewing on his paper next door. The butterfly who came around to light the lamps this evening said (well, wrote, as they can't pronounce English) that that's standard for hotels in Sconth - every room has to have beds and blankets, soap and water, and pen and paper. Just the essentials.

Traveling Companion... or... something

First of all, O relative of mine who has a birthday today, happy birthday!

Second of all, I am now traveling with a llama. I came across a stable yesterday, by the side of whatever road this is, next to a small market and a lemonade stand. The two reptiles that run the stand are trying to get rid of all their remaining lemonade so that they can switch to hot tea and cider for the Winter. They don't see the point of wanting to cool off in the first place, being reptiles, but they make good lemonade anyway.

I'm not one to pass up opportunities like this, so my meals for the last two days have consisted of baked paisley slug and carrots from the market (they're not selling much else that isn't pickled by this time of year), paisley slug stew from the llama stable (it doubles as an inn, so it serves more than hay and salt. Guess where the owner shops), and half-price lemonade. It's been interesting.

There were no llamas staying at the stable when I got there, so - rather than keep lugging my bags around - I stayed overnight. It could be weeks before I find another one. Fortunately, I didn't have to wait long; when I woke up this morning, there was a llama in the stall next to mine. (Doubling as an inn doesn't mean they have any actual rooms.) He was wearing a pair of rather scratched spectacles and chewing some thorny plant as if he wanted to break its bones.

We introduced ourselves. Since I was looking for a llama and he was looking for someone looking for a llama, it was really the only thing to do, but I don't think he enjoyed it much.

His name, he said, was Plack; he didn't care much for people at the moment; the last one whose luggage he carried ran off after a two-month journey without paying him. He had to spend all the money he had left just to stay in the stable last night. He would have skipped the stable altogether, but it's November in the Mountainous Plains, and it was raining. He was not happy. He informed me that I would pay him the full four Loundas before he would carry so much as a sock for me; that my luggage would be padlocked to his carrying harness; and that he would keep the key in his mouth. That way, if I ran off before the trip was over, it would be my problem.

You might think that after being paid, he wouldn't care what I did, but the money is less than half the price to a llama. Customers of llamas are expected to groom them, take care of their traveling equipment, and do more or less anything else that requires hands. In a way, travelers don't hire llamas so much as they trade the use of their hands for the use of the llamas' strength. That's why llamas charge so little. They only need money for stables and repairs to their carrying harnesses.

As if carrying luggage weren't enough, llamas often protect the people they travel with as well. Very few things, no matter how nasty, will mess with a llama. They bite as hard - well, almost as hard - as they kick. Plack wanted to make sure I knew that, especially when he found out I had only a vague idea of a destination and generally just wandered around the countryside.

"You've traveled with llamas before, then?"

"No, actually. I've always carried my own luggage before."

He stared at me, as if luggage were the least of my problems. "What if you get attacked by bandits who've run out of pencils? What if a wild cathomar decides you look like a stupid, edible creature who wouldn't put up a fight?"

"It's never happened before..."

He gave me a disgusted look. "Well, it certainly won't happen while you're with me. Watch this."

With that, he walked over to a tree that was standing innocently nearby.

Fifteen seconds later, it was missing several branches and had four small, round holes straight through its trunk.

I didn't know llamas could spit THAT hard.

On the Road Again, Except Without the Road

Well, I've left Cormilack. Just in time, too - the rainy season started the night before last. The one road along the floor of the spiral valley is already under five feet of water. I'm not getting out that way. I'm leaving over the ridges instead, alternating between dirt (mud) roads, deer trails, and mountain forest barely open enough to let my umbrella between the branches.

I said my goodbyes yesterday - a very short one, in the case of Lady Akistria Xeredile. She's a busy Grand Duchess, after all. There was a whole pack of recently captured bandits sitting in the entrance hall, miserably, waiting to be lectured.

After getting lost a few times, I managed to find Chiliska's burrow under the Earthmover; she's getting ready to move to higher quarters before the caverns flood for the winter, but she stopped to shake my hand in about six of her own and click goodbye. At least, I think it was goodbye. We still can't understand a word of each other's languages. It's quite possible that she was only complimenting me on not falling down a hole. I think it was goodbye, though.

It didn't take long to pack. I never really unpack, no matter how long I stay somewhere, so it was just a matter of stuffing the few things I'd been using back into their various bags and cases. I could swear some of my clothes are still damp from the last rainy season.

I must have gotten out of shape over the last year, staying in one place for so long, because my luggage seems to weigh about twice as much as it did last year. Hopefully, I'll adjust in a few days. Maybe I'll grow another pair of arms. I've got too many bags to carry easily. Food, traveling supplies, art supplies, drawings, notebooks, ambiguous novels,* pocket gramophone music, clothes, my new salamander lantern... I wish I could travel lighter, but there's nothing there I could really do without. Certainly not the books. I could sell some of the clothes if it were Spring, but with the weather getting colder, I'll have to start adding to them soon. Oh well. Maybe I could hire a llama to carry everything, at least until I reach the train.

That's not a bad idea, come to think of it. I don't know why I didn't before. I'll be watching for a stable while I try to reach the Railway Regions. I'm not a Wayfinder, so all I can do - unless I run into a singing sand rat, a Kilopede, or someone with the right compass - is keep walking uphill and hope. There's no telling how long it will take.

*I have a few normal novels as well, four or five of my very favorites; when traveling, though, it's not enough to carry books that always have the same story in them. You'd go through them all in a matter of weeks. Unless you like reading the same book over and over again (and I don't, unless I have a year or two in between) or are willing to exchange books at every bookstore you find (and I'm not, as I don't find them frequently enough), ambiguous novels are really the only choice.