The Blue Hyacinth Tea House

Although every valley with any size (and a few without) had at least one shrine, it was nearly a week since leaving the centipede's valley before we found another with signs of more corporeal habitation.

We were surprised to cross a dune and find a small building in the valley below us, but our surprise was lessened somewhat when we realized that it had clearly been abandoned for some time. The building's front wall was made of stone, but the roof and other walls were made of wood and had collapsed years ago. Trees had sprouted in the foundations. None of us were familiar with the species, but the largest ones must have been at least a decade old.

Still, it was a shady place to rest, so we pulled the wagons over and got out to explore. Mogen pulled a folding contraption - something like a cross between a wheelbarrow and a bathtub - out of the undercarriage of Chak's wagon, and he eeled his way into it so that she could wheel him over for a closer look.

Up close, the tiles on the one remaining wall turned out to be decorated with a pattern of blue hyacinth flowers. Two rusted hooks above the sagging doorway had once held a sign, but we could see no trace of it anywhere around the building. There was no risk of falling through the floor - the trees made it obvious that the building didn't have a cellar - so we stepped through the doorway into what had once been the interior.

Inside, standing on grass that showed occasional glimpses of a tiled floor beneath, was a statue.

It was the red-brown of terra cotta, speckled all over with lichen and moss. Its face was sculpted to resemble a round-cheeked dog - an akita or spitz of some kind, perhaps - with polished black eyes and a friendly smile. The rest of its body was much more minimal in detail, as if it had been intended to be covered by clothing. The collar of what I assumed had once been a uniform of some sort still hung around its neck. The rest of the garment had rotted away, and the collar, which looked to have once been a cheerful red, had faded to a pale and ragged pink. The statue's hands held a stack of paper menus, which were yellowed with age but surprisingly intact, considering that the rest of the statue had clearly been out in the elements for some time.

On its forehead was etched a single character. Chak later said that it meant "hospitality."

As soon as Karlishek stepped through the sagging doorway, the statue opened its mouth and spoke.

"Kirim," it said, which means "welcome" in Jingli. While we variously jumped, gasped, and (in Mogen's case) pulled out a crossbow, it repeated the greeting in several other languages. Chak was the first of us to recover his poise; he thanked the statue in Amrat, the one language all of us shared. The statue switched languages smoothly and continued in Amrat.

"Welcome to the Blue Hyacinth Tea House," said the statue - which, I assumed, was in fact some sort of golem. Though it was clearly made of hard-baked ceramic, its face moved as flexibly as if it were flesh and blood. Its voice was soft and androgynous. "Please allow me to apologize for the state of my uniform. Would you like a table for five?"

We held a brief, hushed discussion while the golem waited patiently. Mogen's single vote for caution was outweighed by four votes for curiosity, and we said yes.

A few small vines had grown partway up the golem's legs. The stems snapped when it moved its feet; it had clearly been standing in the same spot for some time. It led us to what had once been an elegant set of wrought-iron chairs and a table. Unfortunately, the seats had long since rotted through, the legs had rusted, and a large portion of the furniture was now rust stains on the overgrown floor. Unlike its uniform, the golem didn't seem to see this as a problem; it gathered the remains of a few more chairs, which shed flakes of rust and in one case an entire leg, and propped them up against the metal outer rim of the table. It carefully balanced five menus on the few scraps of wood that remained of the surface. Given the state of the furniture, we all elected to remain standing (or, in Chak's case, reclining).

"Please let me know when you have made your selection." The golem stepped back a polite distance and surveyed the other tables, which were - if possible - in even worse shape. Finding no other patrons to attend to, it simply stood and waited while we attempted to peruse the menus.

Further questions revealed that the golem had no name; that the proprietor of the tea house was currently on vacation; and that the golem could not presume to say when they would return.

In a set of shelves by the door, several additional menus,  plus an assortment of cracked china, were stacked on the one shelf still intact enough to provide some shelter from the rain. That explained how any of them were still intact.

If protected from the elements, good-quality paper can last for centuries. This, unfortunately, was middling quality at best, and it had been stored for some time in a building without a roof. When I attempted to gingerly pry the brittle, yellowed menu open, it cracked in half at the spine. I felt a somewhat irrational pang of guilt. Rather than try to open another, I simply handed my menu to Chak - the only one of us who could actually read the faded columns of Jingli script inside - and he translated it for us.

The selection seemed to be fairly standard tea house fare: an assortment of cakes, pastries, and biscuits, plus a selection of teas, only a few of which we'd heard of. Most of the teas had reptilian names of some sort: Black Crocodile, Sunlizard, Dragon's Gold.

We were curious as to how the golem planned to produce any of the items on the menu, given the building's apparent lack of a kitchen.When I attempted to order a caramel rice cake and a cup of the Sapphire Dragon tea, which was the variety I was most curious about, the golem's response came as a surprise to no one.

"I am sorry to report that we are missing an essential ingredient for this dish. In fact, we are missing every ingredient for this dish. Could I interest you in something else?"

Still curious, I asked about several other dishes on the menu. The golem informed me that they were also unavailable, as was the Sapphire Dragon tea and, for that matter, every other variety of tea. I probably would have run through the entire menu if Karlishek hadn't interrupted me.

"What exactly is available?" he asked. I had to admit that this was a more efficient approach.

The golem considered the question for a moment. It looked over at the stream running past the front door. "Water." It turned its head to survey a few nearby shrubs and trees. "And a selection of fresh fruit."

That was good enough for us. For the sake of hygiene, I requested that the golem at least boil the water first. Chak rolled his eyes. "Boiled water? For goodness' sake. Mogen, would you please fetch the tea case from my wagon?"

Mogen gave the golem a suspicious look, but hurried back to the wagons and returned a minute later with a watertight chest bound in leather. Inside was a small treasure trove of tea in assorted jars and wooden boxes. The labels were in a bewildering variety of languages. I recognized Amrat, Halsi, Hmakk, English, and even a few in Sikelak. The names were an even wider variety: Jade Serpent, Baconeg Breakfast, Gira Gira Captain's Black, Midnight Purple, Red Rose Lightning, Undertaker's Comfort, Wicked Wilma's Knuckleduster Chamomile.

Chak selected two jars and handed them to the golem with the solemnity of someone presenting a gift to royalty. "Please accept these as a small donation to your tea house."

The golem inclined its head with equal gravity. "The Blue Hyacinth Tea House appreciates your donation. I am pleased to inform you," it added to the table at large, reading the labels on the jars, "that Green Manatee and Baron Smackerly's Blackcurrant are now available."

Both of these are widely known teas, available cheaply in most countries. Chak later informed us that, given the circumstances, he had chosen them mainly for their ability to retain their flavor over long periods of time, and the fact that they were both stored in watertight jars. (And, of course, the fact that they paired well with the flavors of the brassberries and wild mint that he'd noticed the golem looking at, "because I'm not a complete barbarian.")

The golem declined our offers to donate food supplies other than tea to the tea house, citing archaic health codes that none of us had heard of. It was a pleasant meal all the same. The golem even managed to find enough cups and plates for all of us. Most of them were chipped, but they were all intact enough to hold our tea of choice. The china was decorated with a pattern of blue hyacinths.

The prices were quite reasonable - for all we knew, because they were from the previous century - and we paid the bill using little more than small change. The golem took the coins and dropped them with a splash into the rusted-open drawer of what had once been an ornate brass cash register. We also left a tip, of course. The golem attempted to slip the coins into a nonexistent pocket, looked puzzled for a moment, and then placed them on top of its head instead.

As we were leaving, I asked how often the tea house had customers.

"Business has been slow lately," the golem replied. "You are our first customers in twenty-three years, five months, and eight days. If you enjoyed your meal here, please recommend us to your friends," it added hopefully. "Desserts are half-price on Tuesdays if you wear an amusing hat."

We thanked the golem and said that we would certainly recommend the tea house to someone, whenever we reached a more populated area.

By the time we left the valley, the golem had washed the dishes, gathered the menus, and resumed its post by the empty doorway, waiting patiently for the tea house's next customers. I hope the tea is still good when they arrive.

Crickets and Gargoyles

Unlike the vine-covered ruins of Jandraming or the jumbled heap of ancient architecture that is Rampastula, abandoned buildings in the Golden Desert don't tend to get overgrown by anything. The Desert is short on plants and long on space, and many of its commonly available building materials are resistant to rot, even in the rare places where there's enough moisture to make rot possible. Buildings no longer in use tend to simply remain as they are.

This results in experiences like the one the caravan had a week after our encounter with the Painted Ones.

Chak had proven to be, as well as a generous host, excellent company; the two of us had spent most of that time happily exchanging songs and amusing anecdotes while sheltering inside his wagon, I from the heat, he from the dryness of the Desert air. I'd continued to decorate the translucent cover of his wagon with a design of water and fish that I hoped would help to soften the glare of the sun. Though I suspect the confined quarters would have become monotonous given enough time, it was a pleasant way to spend a period of recovery.

The seclusion was broken one day when Mogen opened the flap of the wagon to inform us that there was something worth seeing outside.

We had come across one of the Golden Desert's many abandoned villages. This one was in even better condition than most; the most abundant local building material seemed to have been a type of pink granite, which had withstood decades in the elements even better than other villages' wood or sandstone.

Several travelers with experience in exploring abandoned buildings (a riskier prospect than it might seem) requested that the caravan stop for the afternoon to allow them the opportunity to search the village, in case anything of use or interest had been left behind.

Tirakhai required little convincing to grant their request. The basement of the largest building was flooded with water clean enough to restock the caravan's reservoirs, and several of the smaller houses were home to a rare breed of domestic cave crickets, hunchbacked and freckled creatures the size of guinea fowl. Though feral, they were entirely unafraid of us, hopping between the shade of the wagons and generally getting underfoot in a fashion that most of the caravan's members found charming (except for the gafl, who were afraid of them despite being several hundred times their size). In short, there was plenty in the village worth stopping to examine.

It was about noon at that point, so most people retreated to either the shade of their wagons or the less monotonously familiar shade of the village's houses (those that had been checked by the explorers and proclaimed free of scorpions, rotten floorboards, cellar howlers, and other common hazards).

Chak and I didn't feel the need to brave the noonday sun to satisfy our curiosity, so we waited, listening to the bustle of chores, exploration, and tea preparation outside the wagon, until the shadows had grown longer. Mogen pulled the wagon into the shade of the largest building; Chak donned a scarf soaked in water to protect his face (ineffective for prolonged exposure, but good enough for a brief peek outside); and we opened up the flap of the wagon for a look.

Every house in the village had at least two or three gargoyles on its roof. They were all relatively ordinary examples of the art: hybrids of various animals that ranged between frightening and comical. Some looked benevolent, others charmingly mischievous; some held positions or objects meant to symbolize luck or prosperity, while others - ostentatiously showing off oversized shoes, pots, or spectacles - were clearly meant to advertise their residents' trades. A few, I suspect, were caricatures of the families that once lived beneath them. All of them were fairly sedate and quite clearly the work of the same three or four artists.

Then there was the main building.

No one in the caravan was certain what, exactly, its purpose had been. Various people suggested a granary, a town meeting hall, or a temple of some sort. It's entirely possible that it was meant to serve all of these functions at once. Whatever it might have been, the village's sculptors clearly saw it as the opportunity to create their masterpiece. The building was a riotous confection of bays, arches, gables, cupolas, and small minarets, all built from the same pink granite, and every possible niche and corner was inhabited by a gargoyle.

The East side of the building, which we could see from where the caravan had stopped, had gargoyles in the traditional positions: sly, beneficent, mournful, and pugnacious. Their forms were inventive enough, and the workmanship was superb - clearly several years beyond the work on the houses - but none of them were especially remarkable for gargoyles.

They continued on the South side, though the grimaces became less intimidating there and more like sneezes and stomachaches. A few of the more closely-placed groups gave the impression of quartets or trios of cheerfully hideous singers. It's probably just as well that no one could hear their voices.

The West side, farthest from the caravan, had the gargoyles sleeping, smoking, cleaning their spectacles, and so on. I got the distinct impression of a group of actors killing time backstage between appearances. Still, they remained in typical gargoyle locations, perched on lintels and peaks and at the edges of balconies.

The North side was complete chaos. The gargoyles there had left their posts and climbed all over the walls. They poked their faces into the windows (which must have been a rather startling sight from the inside) and gnawed at the edges of the roofs. Five or six had gathered inside the top of an arch for what appeared to be an upside-down game of cards. According to a few high-climbing explorers, others in less visible areas of the building were doing things less acceptable in polite society (though accounts were vague on what exactly those things were). If this was true, the gargoyles in question didn't seem to be visible from the ground. Perhaps the sculptors suspected that whatever village leaders commissioned the building wouldn't have approved.

Though our view from the wagon was limited, we spent a fascinated hour or two slowly circling the building and looking at as many gargoyles as we could. I even paused to sketch several of the most inventive. We stopped only when Chak said that his face was feeling singed and my head began to swim again from the heat.

I left the wagon that night and spent the rest of the evening comparing notes with the other observers of gargoyles - a category that included nearly everyone in the caravan by then - over a dinner of cricket's-egg omelettes.

The crickets appeared to lay two or three small but nutritious eggs each day, like domestic hens. Tirakhai and several of the more agriculturally inclined travelers insisted on capturing a few in the hopes of breeding and selling them elsewhere as livestock. Using a combination of carrots, greens, and dried fruit, they had no trouble coaxing several dozen crickets into hastily constructed cages, where the insects sat placidly munching on the food and twittering to each other.

Apparently, the crickets used to be a much more common food source in the Golden Desert; Mirenza says that they're mentioned in several historical records, and the omelettes that night were, in fact, an ancient recipe that she'd never had the chance to test with proper cricket's eggs before. As the omelettes were excellent, with a nutty greenish flavor more subtle than chicken's eggs, I suspect that the crickets might be making a comeback in the next few years.

When we awoke in the morning, the gargoyles had moved.

No one who had kept watch overnight had actually seen them in motion, and no one saw them change position while the sun was up. However, everyone who had paid them any attention agreed: roughly one gargoyle in four was in a different position than it had been the previous day. Some had turned ninety degrees; some had shifted from one perch to another.

Most alarmingly, there were now more of them on the east wall of the main building, the side that faced our campsite, and many that had been on the main building the previous day were now perched on the houses surrounding the caravan. None of them were looking directly at us, but all of them were positioned so that they could have done so, if they wished, without turning their heads.

There was some debate - in tones considerably more subdued than the previous night's conversation - as to whether or not the actual shape of any of the gargoyles had changed. An object switching locations is hardly unusual; it happens every day in Hamjamser, though it rarely occurs with anything smaller than a building. For a carved statue to turn its head or move a limb would have implied that something much more unusual was going on. When one of the debates began to grow rather heated, on the subject of whether or not a particular seahorse-headed gargoyle had had its wings up or down the previous day, I offered to fetch my sketchbook and settle the matter. I remembered sketching the gargoyle in question, as it was one of the few in the village with the features of an aquatic animal.

I opened my sketchbook to find that every gargoyle I'd drawn was now shown, not only in its new location, but staring directly out of the page at me.

That was when we decided to leave.

While the others packed up the caravan, I removed the three pages of gargoyles from my sketchbook (I normally have a visceral aversion to tearing pages from any book, for any reason, but felt no hesitation in this case). Accompanied by one of the urban explorers - a woman named Imichek, with whom I had only a passing acquaintance, but whose dry sense of humor I'd come to appreciate during dinner conversations - I ventured into the main building and left the pages in a dry, sheltered area of the floor. One page had several sketches for the design of Chak's wagon on the other side, which I considered only a minor loss, now that the design itself was already sketched out on the fabric. Though the character for Patience in the center of the design was something that I suspected the gargoyles already had in abundance, I hoped, privately, that perhaps they'd appreciate the sentiment. I imagined I could feel the quiet gaze of stone eyes on us as we left the building.

Our departure from the village was far more subdued than usual. Hardly anyone spoke at all until the last minaret of the village had vanished behind the dunes. Even then, the topic of the gargoyles was conspicuously absent from conversation for the next several days.

What's frustrating (and fascinating) about the whole affair is, of course, the ambiguity of it. When one encounters an unexplained phenomenon in a place that has been long abandoned, for no obvious reason, by all intelligent life, it's usually wisest to make a swift exit, as we did. Still, although I wouldn't have stayed to find out, it's quite possible that the gargoyle's intentions - if they had any at all - were entirely benign.

Perhaps they were simply hoping for another taste of cricket's-egg omelettes.

A message from the Postbird Service

Postbird's note:

The Postbird Service wishes to express its regrets for the delayed delivery of the following parcel of letters. Please note that this delay did not occur due to an error by the Postbird Service. The sender of the letters, a Mr. Nigel Tangelo, evidently purchased an economy-sized book of stamps from a print run that was later found to have an inverted instance of the Traveler's Seal cunningly worked into the design. While the true version of the Traveler's Seal ensures that a letter reaches its intended recipient, regardless of  incorrect addresses, illegible handwriting, and other crimes against the postal arts (but not, the Postbird Service wishes to stress, insufficient postage), this particular version of the Seal invoked every possible mischance upon letters to which it was affixed, causing them to be misfiled, damaged, stolen, and - in a statistically unlikely number of cases - eaten by frogs. The Postbird Service has recalled all unused books of the offending stamps and devoted countless bird-hours to tracking down, wherever possible, all letters and packages unfortunate enough to have been led astray by them.

In the case of Mr. Tangelo's post, unusually, several dozen letters mailed over a considerable span of time (all, unfortunately, using the aforementioned malengraved postage) had all come into the possession of a stalagmite farmer in the subterranean Queendom of Hxgnnnsplik. Though the farmer did not speak English, some of the letters, fortunately, contained illustrations that she found amusing; she had thus kept the entire bundle rather than feeding them to her stalagmites. The Postbird Service purchased the letters from the farmer for the price of a new hextet of boots and re-sealed them with uncorrupted postage before delivering them. Though it is possible that a small number of letters might not have been recovered, we are confident that the majority will reach you in good condition.

As an unrelated matter, the Postbird Service is currently offering a reward of 2700 Lint for information leading to the location of a Ms. Rubilious Herring, formerly employed as an engraver by the Postbird Service. Ms. Herring is likely to be using a pseudonym, as, in retrospect, she most likely was during her time with the Service. She has been described, by various and contradictory witnesses, as a woman somewhere between four and seven feet tall, characterized by an unusually large and elaborate mustache, an eyepatch in the shape of a nautilus, and/or uniformly terrible taste in hats. If you observe any unfamiliar persons matching any one of these descriptions, please contact your local postbird immediately.

The Postbird Service wishes to stress, again, that the unfortunate situation here described does not in any way reflect upon the ability of the Service to deliver mail in a timely and reliable fashion under any but the most abnormal conditions, and that steps are being taken to ensure that future mail cannot be similarly misdirected by malicious graphic design. We hope that you will continue to grant us the honor and privilege of delivering your mail.

With regrets and thanks,
The Postbirds

Wings of Stone

There are many ways of navigating in the Golden Desert. By far the most reliable are the singing sand rats, who can hear the unique song of each town and city and follow it to its source.* Human Wayfinders, blessed with the rare gift of a sense of direction, are also quite popular here. Those unable to afford a Wayfinder travel by kilopede. The great arthropods are just as home in the Golden Desert as in the Mountainous Plains, though they have to drink a lot, and many order snowshoes - several hundred pairs each - so that they can more easily traverse the shifting sand. Other people prefer tree compasses, which forever point to the living sources of their wooden needles. For a prepared Desert traveler, there are almost as many ways of finding places as there are places to find.

We had none of them. For lack of a better method, we fell back on the oldest means of navigation: pick a direction and hope that it leads somewhere. Fortunately, we still had several days of food and water, and we were finding enough on the way to keep our supplies replenished. Death by deprivation was not an immediate worry. All we had to do was keep walking and try to keep ourselves amused.

We spent the first few days singing and telling stories. Karlishek turned out to have a pleasant tenor voice and a large repertoire of folk tales and songs, which made the hot days go by much faster than they might have. (We traveled in the mornings and evenings, resting when it grew too dark to see or too hot to move, but the air was uncomfortably hot by an hour after sunrise and only grew worse from there.) Mirenza's collection of ancient legends and songs, in the bent keys of traditional Desert music, was also fascinating. As the widest-ranging traveler of the group, my eclectic mix of songs and stories made an interesting contrast; the tale of Gan the Foolish Fence-Builder, from the lush and carelessly governed land of Mollogou, required as much explanation from me as the tales of the ancient and highly ritualized Miravi Empire did from Mirenza.

Garnet continued to speak little, murmuring something about her singing voice being out of shape, but she listened closely to everything.

The Miravi Empire was on our minds quite often during those days. Hardly an hour went by when we didn't pass some remnant of it. Broken pillars quivered on the horizon. Piles of stone blocks lay half-swamped by dunes, still retaining just enough right angles to tell that they had once been the foundations of houses. Markers for long-vanished oases gave names to dry depressions in the sand and invited travelers to drink their fill. At night, we slept in old, half-buried ruins, surrounded by ancient stone and illegible hieroglyphs. Statues looked down on us: the stone-faced gods of a thousand years ago. No one but archaeologists remembers their names.

Every single statue had wings, or stumps where wings had once been.

In the ancient Miravi Empire, according to Mirenza, the ability to fly was considered divine. The wingless were normal; the flying were gods, rulers, cloistered and extremely rare. The highest-born spent their entire lives in towers and hammocks, never once setting foot on the ground. The palaces of the Empire were fantasies of towers and balconies and open courtyards, with more doors opening to the air than to the ground. Many rooms were accessible by flight alone. Others had narrow stairs or ladders added as an afterthought, a vulgar necessity for the rulers' poor, earthbound servants.

Those with wings but not flight were considered cursed and cast out into the desert. Even now, the nomadic tribes that wander between cities have an unusually high occurrence of vestigial wings.

As odd as this method of choosing rulers seems to us now, they seem to have run the Empire quite well for a time. It was one of the most prosperous countries in Hamjamser for several centuries. Most of the cultures in the Golden Desert have Miravian roots; the ancient Miravian language is the basis for modern Amrat, the tongue I have been learning from Karlishek and Mirenza. Modern Desert cities are built with the same majestic, highly ornamented architectural flair that the Empire perfected. The ancient Miravian cities were centers of art and trade and science, each city keeping a friendly and respectful relationship with the aquifrax that provided its water. These generous, enigmatic Desert spirits have probably never been as well understood, before or since, as they were by the ancient Miravians.

Unfortunately, as so often happens, this understanding eventually became complacency. All of this prosperity ended when the Miravians finally did something to annoy the aquifraxi. Accounts vary as to exactly what it was. Some historians believe it was due to political or religious differences; aquifraxi consider themselves subjects of the Rain Dragon (and he humors them politely enough, though he's never shown any sign of actually wanting to rule anything but tides and storm clouds). Others theorize that the dispute was over pollution, or excessive irrigation, or an infestation of imported foreign frogs. Whatever the reason, one day, every aquifrax in the Empire simply picked up and left. They took the water with them.

They hadn't gone far, as it turned out; they'd merely relocated to the uninhabited areas of the Empire. Within a few months, what had been empty desert was lush and blooming, and what had been fertile farmland was too dry to grow anything but dust and heatstroke. The people of the Empire packed up their things and left everything they'd built. In some cases, they only had to walk for a few hours to reach fertile ground. Many could still see their old homes as they built their new ones. The division between farmland and wasteland is a sharp one in the Golden Desert, though; people have to follow the water, wherever it happens to be. Without an aquifrax, the old cities of the Empire might as well have been on the moons.

Many of the wealthiest citizens stayed behind anyway, hoping desperately that things would go back to the way they had been, until their grand houses filled up with sand.

Most of the winged nobility were among them. The new settlements had been thrown together quickly, to give the farmers and craftspeople somewhere to sleep while they figured out how to feed an entire displaced Empire. There was nowhere for sky-dwellers to perch.

The Miravi Empire never really recovered. It took a long time to rebuild even a fraction of what had been lost, and in the bustle, most of the Empire's less practical traditions - such as the winged rulers - were left behind and forgotten. The rough settlements grew into stable towns and eventually became the Golden Desert's modern cities, such as Karkafel and Thrass Kaffa. The people developed new, somewhat more cautious relationships with the aquifraxi. Life returned to normal. Like most places in Hamjamser, though, the cities remained separate this time. They continued to trade goods and citizens and ideas with each other, but somehow, they never quite reunited into a single country again. It's not that surprising, I suppose. In every part of Hamjamser, empires have always been the exception, not the rule.

These days, the ability to fly is considered as ordinary in the Golden Desert as it is anywhere else. The winged hold everyday jobs and mingle with the flightless without hesitation. Many even consider the winged nobility to have been a foolish idea. In these modern times, most places in Hamjamser consider it unhealthy for rulers to be always looking down on their subjects. It gives them strange ideas.

Still, I have often seen the people of the Golden Desert gazing silently at the clouds, or at the wings of their neighbors. Perhaps a part of them still remembers a time when wings could bring them closer to Heaven, and not merely to the empty sky.



* They can even find things as small as individual oases, though they say those songs are little more than brief jingles.

Canyon Town, part three

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps. 

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

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.

Canyon Town, part one

We wandered in the canyons for several days.

There is, as yet, no reliable strategy for navigating a maze. Their constant shifting defeats any attempt to be methodical. Most people foolish enough to step into one simply wander around until they reach an exit - or, depending on the maze, perhaps something else of interest.

Wayfinders, being blessed with superhuman navigational abilities, can step into a maze and immediately find a perfectly straight path leading to their destination. As none of us were lucky enough to have this rare ability, we were confined to ordinary methods.

Nearly all of my supplies were, of course, in the wagons that had moved on without us. This could have been a serious problem. Fortunately, I have been a traveler long enough to have developed certain paranoid habits. I had with me a bag containing supplies (food, water, pens and paper; just the essentials) for several days. I try to keep this with me at all times, regardless of inconvenience, for just such situations as these. The supplies inside were meant for one, but could easily be stretched to three for a week or so.

Food, then, was not an urgent problem, as long as we rationed our supplies. Neither was water. The river that had carved the canyons was clearly long gone, but water still flowed through them in a sandstone aqueduct above the street.* Steps led up to it periodically. One of the first things we did was to climb the nearest staircase and fill our canteens.

After that… We wandered.

The city was carved right into the walls of the canyons, themselves carved by thousands of years of water erosion. The graceful, flowing lines of the striped stone dipped in here and there to reveal a window, a staircase, an arched doorway. Mirenza and I kept stopping to sketch particularly interesting pieces of stonework or take rubbings of the carvings on the walls. Mirenza was in her element - surrounded by stone and history and the elegant script of the canyon-dwellers' language. She pointed out glyphs, architectural styles, and geological strata with equal enthusiasm.

Most of the layers of stone were smooth - as smooth as sandstone ever gets, that is - but occasionally, we would find one with fossils embedded in it. The canyon-dwellers had added carvings to a few of these layers, so that the fossil ammonites and eurypterids had tiny stone riders or chariots hitched to them. One particularly large trilobite had an entire city built across its back, with hair-thin rope bridges crossing the gaps between segments.

Whoever the inhabitants had been, they seemed to have left in a hurry. The sand-drifted streets were littered with fallen jewelry, broken pots, wagon wheels rusted into arches of metallic lace.

This was when Mirenza brought out the machine she'd been carrying under her robe.

But I shall write more about that tomorrow.



* Anyone who has lived in a city will know that one never drinks anything that's been below street level.

Message in a Monolith

The stone stood in the sand directly ahead of us. We saw it long before we actually reached it; the vague dark shape had been rippling on the horizon for hours, motionless except for the heat that makes everything in the Golden Desert shimmer at a distance.

When we reached it, it turned out to be a rather unremarkable standing stone. It looked like sandstone of some kind. It also looked old, though - I didn't even recognize the characters that were carved into its single flat side - and nothing made of sandstone keeps its details for long in the gritty wind of the Desert. The writing was still legible.

There are far too many things hidden beneath the sands of the Golden Desert for anyone to even dream of counting them. The dunes roll back occasionally and uncover ruins, tombs, monuments from civilizations long forgotten. They might stay visible for a week, a day, or only a few hours before the dunes swallow them up again. Most travelers (especially if they're of the scientific persuasion) will stop to at least look at things like this stone. The common opinion is that if the Desert has unveiled something for you to see, it's probably worth taking a good look. You'll probably never see the thing again, after all - and even if it holds no meaning for you, who knows? There could be an archaeologist in the next town who's been looking for it for years.

This is the Golden Desert, where the history is deeper than the sand. People stop here for interesting rocks.

Predictably, everyone in the caravan took this as an excuse to take a break. The gafl were unhitched from the wagons, free to go snuffling around in the nearby sand; everyone else got out food or books or pillows and sat down to eat or read or snore for a while.

The team of scientists (I'm still not sure whether they're geologists, archaeologists, something more obscure, or perhaps a combination of all three) piled out of their wagon and gathered around the stone. They tested and measured it with various instruments, taking notes and chattering among themselves. One fished a dilapidated box camera out of her luggage and took a careful photograph or two.

Mirenza, the avian woman I spoke to earlier, stood back a bit from the others. She seemed to be focusing on the writing on the stone. I could hear her muttering under her breath. She squinted at the barely legible hieroglyphs for a few minutes, then turned back to the others with a funny half-smile on her face. I could only pick out a few words of what she said next. The other scientists' reactions ranged from chuckles to confused frowns.

Karlishek told me later that the inscription on the stone roughly translates as follows:

"You have seen the stone I carved, and read the words I wrote. That is all I really wanted. May your travels be happy and your path even."

The signature had been worn away by the sand.

The Baffled Banker

Most of the transportation in the Golden Desert is done either by caravans or along the Desert's few permanent roads. The times when a caravan arrives in a village on a road - such as right now - are prime opportunities for trade, so the caravan will be staying in Denemat for a short time, trading spices and cloth and various other crafts for basic supplies. (Apparently, the caravan's pack animals eat truly prodigious amounts of vegetables.) It will be another day or two before I leave.

I spent today wandering the village and painting various things for people. There is a surprising amount of color in Denemat once one knows where to look for it. Like CheChmit, which I visited last year, Denemat is mostly shades of gray and sandy brown. There's just the occasional red door or green window frame. Some people will just paint a few stones of a house, or a few posts of a fence, outlining them in white or pale yellow to accentuate the pattern of the material. It's a nice touch. It has obviously been some time since any of the paint was retouched, though, and much of it was peeling off. It was a busy day. Fortunately, in most cases, speech was unnecessary for the jobs; the villagers and I could communicate just by sketching and pointing at colors.

A few goat-like people wanted me to paint their horns, which took me a little longer to figure out. Seeing the results - only the most intricate patterns would do - several of the reptilian villagers asked me to paint their scales as well, requesting streaks and spots in bright yellows and oranges. Overall, I might have painted more people than buildings today.

The elderly couple I met yesterday have been kind enough to let me sleep on the bench in their garden for the next few nights. Their names are Fenbit and Hasisha. Before coming to the Golden Desert, I had rarely slept outdoors, except in the wild areas between towns. In the small Desert towns and villages, though, it's quite common; it rarely rains here, and there is little chance of having one's possessions stolen overnight, at least in the small communities. Travelers need little more than a spot out of the wind to spend the night. I'm glad to have met someone kind enough to provide one.

I was on my way back there, just before sunset, when I came upon a man standing just beyond the center of the village. He was dressed in an immaculately pressed tweed suit and carried a briefcase in one hand. Sand was blowing into his shoes.

"Excuse me," he said in English. "Could you direct me to the bank?"

I looked back at the main street of the village, bewildered; I'm not sure if Denemat even has a bank. The villagers usually pay in eggs or radishes and don't even bother with money. When I turned around, he was gone.

At first, I suspected that this was a hallucination brought on by the heat. The man had been rather too opaque to be a ghost. When I drew a rough sketch for Fenbit and Hasisha, though, they exclaimed over it, pointing out the briefcase and the decidedly out-of-place clothing. What I gathered, from the small amount of communication we could achieve, is that the man is a wanderer of an unusual sort. He pops up in town after town in the Golden Desert, constantly asking for directions. No one has ever seen him stay long enough in one place to actually find what he's looking for.

There are many stories of eternal wanderers, such as the Hat Man, the Stubborn Postmistress, and the Flying Dutchman.* I'm not sure what this one would be called. The Baffled Banker? The Confused Clerk? The Disoriented Office Worker? Fenbit and Hasisha had never heard of him introducing himself by name.

Whoever he is, I hope he finds the bank he's looking for.



* The origins of the Dutchman story have, sadly, been lost to history, along with the definition of what exactly a "Dutchman" is. Literary historians have speculated that it is a type of large echinoderm. This would explain why the flying is worth noting.

Fish of the Ground, Beasts of the Air

The people here have a great deal of trouble with flying camels. The beasts just swoop down out of the sky on bristly wings and carry off small children, spiriting them away to their camel fastnesses in the desert, where they raise them on the fruit of the hazzle-cactus and teach them the mystical secrets known only to flying camels. The rare camel-snatches who return to the villages are famed for their wisdom. Most people are willing to overlook their eccentricity and their refusal to explain anything (not to mention the spitting). Still, most parents here keep a close watch on their children while they're small enough to be snatchable.*

One of these camel-snatches was Hanzifan Krickl, who found a fish in the Desert and founded a town on it. The town is called Kellekath, the local word for "coelacanth." The caravan stopped there for water today. According to the legend, Krickl discovered the system of caves beneath the town thanks to a fossil of one of the ancient fish, which pointed the way for him. The water that collects in the caves is all that allows the town to exist. There's an aquifrax in the caves, as there is in every oasis in the Golden Desert, but it allows the town to use the water in exchange for honey and the occasional shiny marble. It probably has hundreds down there by now, unless it's been eating them. You never know with an aquifrax.

These days, the coelacanth fossil is considered to have been a sign from Gilliva, Lady of the Waters, to whom fish are sacred.** Fish show up seldom enough in the Desert that they're generally considered to be a sign when they do. Kellekath is particularly devoted to the Lady; the town keeps a pool full of koi in her honor. Like most koi, they - or their distant ancestors - were imported from Mollogou. Unlike the piebald Mollogou koi, though, the ones in Kellekath have been bred to be shades of blue and green; they range from the deepest ultramarine to the pale green of new leaves and a turquoise the dry desert sky has only seen in its dreams. The townspeople love them and spoil them terribly. Many people wish they could have actual coelacanths in the town, besides the fossilized one, but bringing a whole population of misanthropic saltwater fish to the Golden Desert would be all but impossible. The koi were difficult enough.

Coelacanths aren't the only fossils that show up here. According to geologists, the whole Golden Desert used to be the floor of an ocean. The tall rocks that stick up from the sand often have fossils in them, fish and ammonites and strange spiny beasts with compound eyes. They speckle the stone in layers, like jeweled rings around sandstone fingers. Other parts of the Desert have larger things. The bones of whales and great sea-serpents emerge from the dunes now and then, breaching between the waves of sand, until the wind covers them again. A few travelers have found a mountain that, when seen from the right angle, is unmistakably the skull of a giant fish. The smaller peaks of its vertebrae stretch out in a line behind it. The most dedicated wanderers say they've even found shipwrecks out in the sand, buried up to their bone-dry masts, with shreds of ancient sail flapping in the Desert wind. Archaeologists have found books in some of the wrecks. Their pages are speckled with strange pictograms, beetles and blowfish and delicate assemblies of gears. No one has deciphered them yet. Linguists believe that even the gears are a language, but any meaning remains lost in the machinery.

Perhaps one of the camels' pupils will decipher them one day.



* A few parents with different ambitions send their children outside every day wearing brightly colored clothing. It all depends on your hopes for your child's future, I suppose.

** Fortunately, fish are rare in the Golden Desert. This religion has never caught on in coastal towns.

The Shell of a Town

I'm not sure exactly when we crossed over from the Pinstuck Plains to the Golden Desert; perhaps we haven't yet. There's no clear border between the two, and what there is shifts constantly.

Rain is capricious in the outskirts of the Golden Desert. People settle in the green spaces, plant crops and build towns, only to have the rain move on a decade later and turn their farmland back to dust. There are ghost towns all over the Desert's outskirts. The dust piles up against cracked boards and peeling paint, drifting through the broken glass of carefully shut windows. Years later, if the rain returns, the exiles of a different town will move in and bring the ruins back to life. The people of the outskirts are used to living with someone else's ghosts.

CheChmit is one of these towns. It's new and old at the same time. The people only recently moved in, settling down in the abandoned husk of the town after weeks of traveling. Their old town dried up several months ago. A few months more, and it will look exactly like this one did.

At the moment, though, CheChmit is coming back to life. Weeds grow up around the buildings. In most parts of the world, people would pull them out, but not here. Weeds are a sign of life. When they start dying, you know it's time to leave. The town well has water in it again - though the bucket is rusted through - and the farmers are busy plowing the soil around the town. Families are clearing the dust from the houses, putting new glass in the windows, and replacing curtains worn to white rags by the wind. The children keep finding old wooden toys and glass marbles that have lain in the empty houses, forgotten, for decades. The town is like a hermit crab's home - a dry, discarded thing filled with sudden, bustling life. Before it was abandoned, this place was known as Kelikeff. The place its current inhabitants came from no longer has a name. This is the outskirts of the Desert, where whole villages pack up and move all at once; a town's name goes with its people, not with its buildings.

I walked around the streets for a while (there aren't very many), looking at the deep cracks the wind has worn in the stone and wood of the buildings. People were painting a few of them. Mostly, they limited this to a touch of red here, a yellow door frame there; in the Golden Desert, the texture of well-aged wood and stone is considered at least as beautiful as a coat of paint. I stopped for a while to help a family of reptiles patch the roof of their new old house. They were doing it very carefully, so as not to harm the tree growing up through it.

Their daughter stayed on the ground (her mother didn't want her up on the roof) and drew things on the walls with a piece of charcoal. I came down to take a look when we all took a break for water. She had drawn a procession on the walls; strange, solemn-looking shapes marched in a rough black line around two sides of the house. There were tall ones and short ones, smooth and spiny, bare-faced and hooded, fat and thin. Mostly thin.

"These are the quiet people," she said, without waiting for me to ask. "I see them every time we move. We've moved a lot. They always leave the towns before we get here, because they don't like noise. That's all my mother would tell me. She said it's not polite to talk about them. Too noisy." She returned to drawing. One of the taller shapes was covered in what might have been stripes or bandages. "She didn't say anything about drawing them, though."

I didn't ask anyone else about the quiet people - I wouldn't want to be rude - but I'll have to keep an eye out for them if I visit any more abandoned towns.

FlunDitChukk delivered the jazz birds and musical instruments to the leader of a caravan in town. They'll be moving on to some city or other in the next few days; the caravan is only in CheChmit to pick up the birds and replenish their water supply. I don't know how they managed to schedule the meeting so precisely. In return, FlunDitChukk picked up a load of palm-tree crystals to bring back to SuyMaTmakk. His wagon settled noticeably lower on its wheels when the chunks of honey-colored stone were loaded onto it. I said goodbye before he left, and he replied with a grunt that sounded almost friendly. The caravan leader noticed me a bit later, when I was painting a border of morning glory vines around the window of a house, and offered me a seat on the caravan. Apparently, they need someone to touch up the paint on the wagons.

I accepted. It's been years since I've visited the Golden Desert.

Market Street, Day 1: the Scavenger

After a day spent exploring the market district of SuyMaTmakk, I'm afraid I'm too tired to write much tonight. I did come back with some pictures, though; perhaps they'll make up for it. Here's the first.

This is Harzifan Scrath, scavenger and merchant. He spends most of his days climbing over the islands of flotsam in the center of the lake. On Tuesdays, he brings back what he's found over the week and sells it at the market. His stall is set up by the docks. It's full of old clothes, boxes, and assorted bits of furniture; he found a whole butter churn last week, perfectly intact. A heap of tableware in materials that float (wooden spoons, bone-handled forks) sits next to an array of mismatched jewelry.* There are books so waterlogged that they're shaped like fans, their pages splayed and wrinkled and all but illegible. There's a china doll that looks like the survivor of a shipwreck. Perhaps she is. She has one shoe, patent leather with a brass buckle, and lake-weed in her hair.

A row of bottles stands in an uneven line in front of the stall. They're full of the small, smooth gouges left by the vitreous snail, which makes its shell out of glass. Any glass object left in the lake will be full of the same little pockmarks within days. The snails normally eat sand, processing it into glass in some strange pocket of their digestive system, but they've developed a taste for pure glass since people first settled by the lake. The TiLeKraNas have a colony of them at their house; they bring the occasional shell to the market whenever a snail dies of old age. There were none this time, but the shells are apparently quite lovely. Surprisingly, they're also quite practical. Most of the predators in the lake eat snails - if they like snails - by crunching them up, shell and all. Hail-storks and a few kinds of seagulls can crack even the toughest ones by flying them to great heights and dropping them on the docks.** Nothing bothers to do this with the vitreous snails, though; cracking their shells gives you nothing but a lump of meat full of glass shards.

An ornate wooden mantel clock sits on a back corner of the stall, ticking quietly. Harzifan says he's had it for five years now. It's made of some kind of hardwood - rare and valuable on the plains, where most wood comes in the form of small sticks - but no one has bought it. Harzifan says this might be because of the water stains, which have turned the clock charcoal-black in splotches, or possibly because it's run backward ever since he fished it out of the lake. I'm impressed that it runs at all.

Harzifan himself simply sits there all afternoon, grinning that same piratical grin at everyone who passes by. Every Tuesday, he says, he's more grateful than the week before to have the chance to relax. (His voice is deep and rough, like gravel on a lakebed, or the razor grin of a shark.) He's getting too old to be climbing over heaps of flotsam all day, he says. When someone buys the backward clock, or when it finally stops ticking, that's the day he'll retire.

I took a look at the clock as I was leaving, after I'd thanked Harzifan for letting me sketch him.*** The gears inside, where they were visible, gleamed with polish and good repair; the clock's price was higher than everything else in the stall put together, including the stall itself and possibly Harzifan's hat. Somehow, I don't think he's in a hurry.



* It's impossible to find a matched pair of earrings at a single scavenger's stall. It takes visits to at least a dozen to have the slightest hope of a match. There are people who spend hours going from stall to stall, playing the scavenger market like some sort of giant memory game, cataloguing hundreds of salvaged earrings in their heads in the hopes of finding a match. According to Harzifan, it's surprising how often they succeed.

** This, of course, is what hail-storks are named for. A whole flock of them can produce a short but devastatingly well-aimed shower of snails. This is why dock workers around Lake Twiliat wear such thick hats all the time, even during the hottest weather. They can't just drop what they're doing and run, the way everyone else does when the storks appear overhead; they have to have a different method of avoiding concussions.

*** I bought one of his books, as it seems rude to sketch someone's business and not buy something from it. It's called Hni Teli Paka, which could be translated as either "Greetings, O amusing one" or "Hey you, ugly." Some of its pages still look legible. This could be interesting.

SuyMaTmakk

According to the TiLeKraNas, SuyMaTmakk is the only real city on the Scalps. There are a few large towns that like to call themselves cities when they think they can get away with it, and a couple of ghost cities where no one lives except night-haunts and the intensely solitary, but SuyMaTmakk is by far the largest concentration of living people. It's built around the only lake.

When I first saw SuyMaTmakk, I thought it was on fire. The setting sun caught the cloud of mist that hangs constantly over the city, raised by its hundred waterfalls, and lit it all up in orange. The buildings, made of sticks and straw and sod bricks, cast scarecrow shadows against the sunset.

Every river on the Scalps eventually empties into Lake Twiliat. There are only four of them, so this is not quite as impressive as it sounds, but that's still a lot of water for the Scalps. The Hley comes from the East. The other three rivers are the KleMit (West), the HatPaLikk (South), and the Flyeek (Northwest, except during full moons, when it moves around to parallel the HatPaLikk from the South).

The entire lake spins slowly, as if someone's opened a drain at the bottom. According to those who live in the lake, that's fairly accurate. There's a giant hole in the floor of the lake. It's called the Hwuyk - literally, the Drain. Most lake-dwellers stay away from it; the current is too strong to resist past a certain point. Many people have gone into the hole, curious or simply unaware of it until it's too late. Only a handful have ever come out again. They've returned over land, all of them, stumbling across the Scalps on dusty feet or carried in barrels of water by traveling merchants. Their stories have made little sense. They've raved of moons, of coal-fish, of strange and secret oceans. As they recover their senses, they lose their memories of their journeys. No one has ever gotten any sense out of them. The world beneath the Drain remains a mystery.

Some call Twiliat the Lake with No Plug.

It's actually surprisingly difficult to reach the lake by water. Its constant spinning has carved a huge bowl in the ground over the centuries, and the banks are much higher than the water. In many places, they actually overhang it slightly. Fish lurk in the shadowy places underneath, waiting for prey that doesn't have a hook in it. Water only leaves the lake through the Drain; everything above ground flows into it, not out. The four rivers reach the lake as waterfalls. Only the stupidly adventurous sail over those. There are a few systems of locks around the banks, series of stepped pools that lift boats with clever arrangements of valves and gates, but few boats use them. Instead, most of the city's shipping trade takes place in a ring of canals around the raised edges of the lake.* Much of the city is built around and over these canals, or clinging to the steep banks below them. Many buildings slouch on piers over the slowly swirling water.

The dry part of SuyMaTmakk forms a ring around the lake; the submerged part of the city forms a somewhat smaller ring inside it. Their populations are about equal. The city is evenly divided between the people of the air, the people of the water, and the amphibians who travel between the two.

The only people who sail on the lake itself are fishers and scavengers. Whole islands of debris build up in the center of the lake.** The current draws them together, but it's not strong enough to pull them down into the Drain, so they simply float on the surface, spinning gently. Everything that falls into the lake and floats eventually ends up there. The islands are made up of broken furniture, lost toys, dead fish, papers blurred to illegibility, leaves and sticks and wood shavings and a hundred kinds of dust. Some of them are old enough to have sprouted grass and small bushes. There are people who make their living by rowing or swimming back and forth, scavenging in the shifting heaps of trash and lost things. They bring back what they find and sell it in the city's markets. Their booths are full of stained books, locked boxes with no keys, dolls with waterweed in their hair, wooden clocks with their gears full of silt. The scavenger's booths are the first places people go if they lose something. Chances are it will turn up in one of them eventually.

The city itself is a chaotic jumble of buildings. Wood is just as scarce here as elsewhere on the Scalps, so the buildings are made of wicker, of crooked sticks lashed into bundles, of piled sod bricks topped with grass, of bones taken from the elephant graveyards outside the city.*** I don't think there's a straight line in all of SuyMaTmakk. The city tangles around the edges of Lake Twiliat like the nest of an enormous bird.

I haven't actually seen all that much of it yet. The sun set shortly after my first glimpse of that crazed silhouette against the sky, and it was dark when we began to reach the outstretched fingers of the city's river docks. The lamps on them are lit by bottled fireflies and exquisitely trained salamanders. In a city made of sticks and straw, actual fires are extremely scarce. The streets are mostly dark after sunset.

The inn the TiLeKraNas usually stay at is on the Hley, so we didn't actually set foot on the streets tonight; we simply tied the raft up at the dock, next to a shack built on a huge floating dome, and went inside. I looked back as the door was closing and saw the dome lift its head out of the water. It was an enormous turtle.

The inn is called the Hmofrem Pekelli (the Eloquent Pig). It's a cozy, slouching building made of sod bricks. From outside, it looks like a grassy hill with windows. The walls are threaded with embroideries of living roots, some of which reach pale flowers out to the lanterns or the dusty windows. The most bored or drunk patrons of the bar pour various drinks on them; some turn the next day's flowers interesting colors, as if the plants themselves are drunk. A few regulars have become experts and can combine drinks to give the flowers multicolored stripes or splotches. The other patrons generally agree that they don't have enough to do.

All of this is still only what I've heard from the TiLeKraNas; they come to SuyMaTmakk often enough to be familiar with the most interesting parts of the city. It was late when we arrived, though, and the children went straight to bed (after some protesting), soon followed by the adults. I've only stayed up late enough to write this letter and hand it to the patiently waiting postbird. My own exploring will have to wait until tomorrow.

* Twiliat literally means "Ear." It is, after all, a hole beneath the Scalps. English-speakers call the city's main waterway the Ear Canal.

** This might explain why rafts on the Hley look the way they do.

*** Most of the bone-houses' inhabitants are immigrants from Trammelghast, where a house is not considered homey until it's haunted by at least one shrieking specter. They see the dead as something like eccentric pets. Their neighborhoods tend to remain politely out of earshot of the rest of the city.

Malanian

During my time in Mollogou, I stayed for over a month in the town of Malanian. It was relaxing - a stable island in a sea of geographical chaos.

Geography is inconstant, to some extent, in every part of the world; this is why maps are useless before they're completed, and why Wayfinders' abilities are in such high demand. Mollogou is worse than most countries. There are very few towns in Mollogou that bother to have names. They are simply collections of random buildings, rearranged in different groups every day, shuffled and dealt across the entire country like a pack of cards. Your neighbors today could be a hundred miles away tomorrow. Mollogoons consider themselves lucky if their houses even stay intact; most houses trade rooms with other buildings, apparently on a whim. Nothing in the country stays where it's put. This is why parents in Mollogou don't put their children down until they're old enough to fend for themselves. Once something - or someone - is out of sight, chances are they'll never see it again.

Most people in Mollogou try not to get too attached to anything.

Malanian is the largest town in Mollogou. It's one of the only ones with a name. The town is built in the domain of Malanian, the pill bug spirit, which is where the name comes from (it means "Silver Shell" in an archaic dialect of Togol). There are a ridiculous number of local spirits in Mollogou; practically every copse and hilltop has one. No one can possibly be expected to remember them all. The spirits' names are usually written on their shrines, so that strangers (which means practically everyone in the country) can pay proper respect. In Malanian's case, they simply named the town after the spirit and saved themselves the trouble.

Malanian (the spirit) tends to keep to his or herself.* The spirit only appears occasionally, in visions and dreams. During the days of the locust marauders, Malanian is said to have sent nightmares to the entire town and woken them before every attack. Other than the occasional practical message, though, Malanian rarely appears to come out of its shell.

This is not always the case with spirits. A few of the ones in Mollogou have even been known to have romances with mortals; it's surprisingly common to meet people there who claim to be descended from spirits. (The truth of these claims is usually impossible to prove.) Two of the fox spirits in one forest (brother and sister, however that works with spirits) each seem to take a new spouse every century or so. Their clever, elusive descendants number in the hundreds. A Samoval spirit in Gonrang has been married for nearly two hundred years to a man who is immortal due to the Shapeshifter's Curse.

Malanian is not one of these. There are an unusual number of chitinous people in the town - not surprising, I suppose, in a town with an isopod patron - but none of them claim to be descended from the pill bug spirit. Nearly everyone in the town is fond of it, though, and of the ordinary pill bugs that live around it. The streets of Malanian are full of randomly placed rocks, logs, and damp crevices - just the sorts of places pill bugs like. The largest ones run around in the houses like mice (only better behaved). People watch where they step and don't bother to sweep their kitchen floors. Any crumbs or scraps will be eaten by the next day. It's common to see children - and adults, for that matter - walking around with pill bugs on their shoulders or in their hands. They carry them like pets or good luck charms. There's a good reason for this; the town owes its very existence to the pill bug spirit.

Malanian is a dense collection of buildings arranged in a circle, with the outer buildings forming a seamless stone wall around the outside. There are arches through which to enter the town. The walls curve inward at the top, as if the entire town is half of a giant stone sphere.** They were built several centuries ago as a defense against the local variety of dragon. Mollogou dragons are damp, sticky-fingered creatures, more like giant flying frogs than the usual reptilian variety. They are rather insanely fond of leather. They like to chew it. This caused something of a problem several centuries ago; the dragons had a habit of swooping down into towns to carry off all the shoes in sight, and they didn't particularly care if the shoes still had people in them. (People may, in fact, have served as convenient handles, making the shoes easier to grab.)

The people of Malanian (the town) apparently came to an agreement with Malanian (the spirit): if the people built the wall, protecting the town from the sides, the spirit would protect it from above. The spirit's only condition was that the wall be round. As it turned out, this worked quite well. The dragons made several more raids, the spirit repelled them (accounts vary as to how), and they left the town alone after that.*** This protection has made Malanian a haven from many other dangers in Mollogou's history, such as the Locust Marauders and the Laughing Storm.

Though it's not currently needed for defense, this being a relatively peaceful time, the wall is the reason that Malanian is the largest town in Mollogou. It keeps the town together. Malanian's buildings have stayed Malanian's buildings ever since the wall's foundations were laid. The farms around the town still have a tendency to wander off when no one's looking, as all the land in Mollogou does, but the town itself has stayed more or less in one piece. The people all know each other and happily trade with whichever farmers live nearby on any given day.

People in Malanian seem to care about things more than most people in Mollogou. Perhaps it comes from knowing they'll still be there tomorrow.

* As is the case with most spirits, no one seems sure whether Malanian is male or female. It's difficult to tell even on an ordinary pill bug.

** There are a lot of spheres in the town. The spirit likes them, apparently. I suppose that's not surprising for a pill bug.

*** Several years later, a particularly fearless tanner taught the dragons how to make their own leather. Unfortunately, not all the dragons wanted to bother raising the animals they used for leather, so a number of them just switched from stealing shoes to stealing cows. Farmers were less than pleased with the tanner for this.

Sporetower

I've been uncertain whether or not I should write to you about this. It happened back in May, before I started corresponding again, and it is undoubtedly one of the strangest experiences I've ever had. If you have a sensitive stomach, you may prefer to wait until tomorrow's letter.

I was traveling on the boardwalk at the time. It was one of the above-water sections - fortunately, as it turned out. I had been walking for most of the morning without seeing anything particularly unusual. There had been a dead fish or two, but that's not all that strange; fish die all the time in the Great Shwamp. Something always eats them sooner or later.

As I kept walking, I came across more of them. Most were fairly small. When I passed the seventh one, a four-foot marsh pike floating on its side, I started to be uneasy.

The surface of the water gradually became covered with dead fish. The current was moving them along - at least, I hope it was the current. They kept pace with me as I walked. The bodies of water-rats and small alligators joined them, green and brown in the expanse of tan and silver. I'd rather not discuss the smell. Through gaps between the fish, I could see the bleached shells of crustaceans drifting across the silt. I almost didn't notice when the trees began to be covered with mushrooms.

I certainly noticed when I reached the source of the mushrooms. The boardwalk disappeared into a wall of cloud. Whatever force was moving the bodies in the water seemed to be keeping it contained; the edge undulated slowly, but it didn't seem to be spreading. I thought it was fog until I walked - hesitantly - into it.

I got out much more quickly. After a brief and violent fit of sneezing, during which I nearly stumbled off the boardwalk, I turned around and looked at the cloud through watering eyes. It had, I noticed now, a slightly greenish shade.

An avian woman with black feathers and the face of a vulture was standing in front of it. She wore a necklace of teeth and rodents' skulls.

"My apologies," she whistled. "Normally I catch strangers before they walk in. You're new here, aren't you?"

There seemed little point in denying it.

She didn't speak English. It's difficult without teeth or lips. Many avians are capable of pronouncing the full range of necessary consonants with their throats, parrot-style; this one either didn't have the required vocal anatomy or simply hadn't learned. Fortunately, I'd been practicing the whistling language she spoke, the one that non-avians call Whoopish. It's easy enough to pick up if one has any musical ability at all (though it apparently sounds rather comical when whistled with lips).

Her name, she said, was Lady Carnelia Sarcoramph, and the cloud I had walked into was the boundary of the town of Sporetower. Visitors often react that way to it. Due to some quirk of the currents, or perhaps a geographical sense of tidiness, everything that dies in the Great Shwamp (and isn't immediately eaten) ends up there. The water is thick with bones and floating carrion. Fungi cover the entire town, sprouting on every surface, from the damp houses to the contents of the water below them. The cloud that surrounds the town is made of their spores. It's no wonder I couldn't breathe it. The townspeople are used to it; they breathe in spores like incense. Travelers, not being similarly adapted, have to cover their mouths to keep from choking to death.

I was ready to turn around and take another branch of the boardwalk, but Lady Sarcoramph said that wouldn't be necessary. I was a guest of Sporetower and would be allowed to enter the town. Her tone was friendly enough, but I got the impression that the choice was not mine to make. She gave me a tightly-woven silk scarf (to cover my mouth) and a pair of goggles and led me into the cloud.

The sky of Sporetower was perpetually overcast, the sun visible as a blurred and slightly greenish light through the fog. Flies and brightly colored carrion beetles buzzed through the murk. Mushrooms and shelf fungi covered every tree, every post of the boardwalk, many of them taller than the largest pligma or elephant's-cap. There were small toadstools even on the little rafts of mold in the water. The surface was still covered with fish, but they were obviously older than the ones outside the cloud, and continued to get older. I was able to see the entire process of decomposition as we walked. (The scarf and goggles kept out the spores, but did nothing against the smell; I tried not to breathe through my nose.) The fish around the boardwalk were little more than bones held together by floating mushrooms when Lady Sarcoramph stopped.

"Behold," she said. "The town of Sporetower."

As you've probably noticed by now, many of the towns in the Great Shwamp, lacking solid land, build instead on trees and clumps of marsh grass. Sporetower is built on mushrooms. The town floats in the water, sprouting from a raft of accumulated decay, a translucent heap of fungus taller than the nearby trees. I don't know how deep it goes. I don't even know how large it is. We were close enough by then to make out the closest section of the town, bobbing gently on the cemetarial water, but the farther sections were lost in the fog. Most of the buildings I could only see in silhouette. That was enough to make out their shapes. If there's any wood in Sporetower, it's either well-hidden or rotted nearly to nothing by now; the town appears to be built not only on, but out of enormous fungi. They form the walls and columns of every building. Stalks like pillars hold up mushroom-cap roofs, tubular chimneys, walls of fungoid brick or woven mold. The streets are made of enormous brackets, ringed like slices of trees. The town is built on the slope of the fungal heap; the streets climb at steep angles, often built on top of buildings. Twisted bridges stretch from roof to roof. Instead of dogs, carrion beetles of all sizes wander through the streets.

From the middle of this heap grows the Necrophyte, a monumental tower of fungus, porous and translucent and turreted with spore caps. It looks like a crumbling castle of mushrooms. Most of them have been hollowed out inside to make rooms and hallways; the narrowest stems have been carved into spiral staircases, punctured with spongey windows, connected to the rest of the building by high walkways of living mushroom. No one seems sure whether the building is a single fungus or a collection of many.

Lord Microbius Sarcoramph, the Undecayed Baron of Sporetower* and Lady Sarcoramph's father, lives with his extensive family in the Necrophyte. He apparently likes to invite every visitor to the town to dinner. He says it's for hospitality. Lady Sarcoramph says it's so that he knows whose pockets to go through if they return to the town by other means. "Few people come back to Sporetower voluntarily," she said. "Many say they will die before they set foot in the town again. It is surprising how often they turn out to be right."

I saw a few other foreigners on their way to the castle, wrapped up like travelers in the Shattered Waste. None of them live here. Every visitor wore the same scarf I did, and most wore the goggles as well, to keep their eyes from watering uncontrollably. Springtime pollen is nothing compared to the air of Sporetower. The townspeople delight in telling about careless visitors who sneezed to death.

The town is inhabited mostly by avians with no sense of smell. Like Lady Sarcoramph, many of them rather resemble vultures - bald, wrinkly heads, similarly bald and sinewy arms, austere black feathers. (A few are a startling blood-red. I don't know if it's dye or just a rare color, like redheaded humans.) They breathed quite comfortably in the murky air. After ten minutes or so of watching them through my goggles and scarf, I began to feel as if I was underwater, surrounded by fish. Every few minutes, I'd see someone nearby make a little swallowing motion; it took me a while to realize that it happened every time they inhaled a fly. I think a large part of their diet comes from breathing insects.

Like ordinary vultures, the lack of feathers is perfect for the townspeople's work. Most of them are scavengers. They wade through the water, sorting through dead animals, collecting useful bones and other bits and pieces. There's quite a lot of that. Sporetower is the largest source of alligator skin in the entire Shwamp. It's also the most painless, for both people and alligators; all the reptiles are already dead. The people of Sporetower receive all the material of a hunter or a livestock farmer with very little of the work. It's not for everyone, of course, but those who can stand to live in Sporetower consider themselves uncommonly lucky.

Of course, not everything worth scavenging is actually part of an animal. Alligators eat so many inedible things that the people of Sporetower call an alligator's stomach its "purse." A cutpurse in Sporetower is not a thief,** but something between a butcher and a beachcomber. They often find such indigestibles as bottles, eyeglasses, nails, pocketwatches, jewelry, and the metal eyelets from boots. Alligators apparently have a fondness for shiny things. There's a legend in Sporetower that the disappearance of Baron Bredebrick was only solved when his crown, his scepter, and his cousin's dagger turned up inside the same alligator.

This is the sort of legend one hears in Sporetower. Any other place would consider stories like this morbid. The townspeople here just think they're funny.

They have no sense of smell, but their tongues are quite sensitive, flicking into the spore-clouded air like snakes. They can taste which fungi are blooming at any given moment. Women wear mushrooms instead of flowers, choosing those with the brightest colors or the sweetest spores. I saw at least three sporist shops (florists are for plants) with lush bouquets of spore caps in vases of decayed wood or carrion. Restaurants grow carefully selected mushrooms on their tables; the customers shake spores onto their food instead of pepper. (In this town of galvanized sinuses, pepper is considered a rather bland spice, suitable only for the sensitive of palate.)

Many of the avians I saw had rings pierced through the wrinkles of their faces. Some had little bone-and-feather charms hanging from them, swinging freely from a nostril or neck-wattle. A few had bells that jingled whenever they raised their eyebrows. One of the guards at the palace gates had hardly an inch of his face unpierced. A row of rings spanned both eyebrows, a mix of all different sizes. The farthest right was too small for a finger; the farthest left could have been a bracelet. He was tapping out a tune on them as he waited.

The philosophy in Sporetower seems to be that flesh is a temporary thing, a substance that outlives its owner hardly at all, so there's no reason to be particularly careful of it. This makes sense when you realize that most of their contact with the outside world is through its skeletons. They might as well experiment with their faces; a few years after they're dead, there will be nothing left of them anyway. Their bones, however, they treat with exquisite care. However invisible it is in life, a bonesetter's work can endure for centuries beyond its owner's death. As the saying goes, skin is the present; bone is the future.

If I needed any proof of that, I got it when we passed through the gates (the first wood I'd seen since entering the town). The entrance hall was made of a transparent fungus; it was cloudy, like the air, but the surface was as smooth as wax. There was a skeleton sealed inside the wall like an insect in amber. Its hands were crossed over its ribcage. The bones were perfectly arranged, with the shadowy outlines of clothing around them, as if the transparent fungus had simply replaced the flesh and left the rest in place.

Lady Sarcoramph smiled for the first time. "There's my grandmother," she said fondly, gesturing to the skeleton. "Quite well-preserved, don't you think? My grandfather always said she had the loveliest skull he'd ever seen."

Her grandfather was a few feet farther on, equally well-preserved in the shadow of a broad-shouldered suit. Lady Sarcoramph pointed out the symmetry of his eye sockets and bemoaned the arthritis that had distorted his perfect knuckles. Only in Sporetower is beauty judged by the bones rather than what covers them.

The Baron had obviously inherited those bones. He was a magnificent avian, a good six feet tall, his feathers raven-black with faint crimson highlights. A few of the ones on his neck-ruff had been edged with gold paint. This seemed to take the place of a crown. Like perhaps a third of the townspeople, he had wings, though I don't know whether or not he could actually fly. Perhaps he could in his youth. Judging from his appearance, though, he had since been more interested in putting on weight than in lifting it.

One of his eyes was missing; he'd replaced it with a large glass marble, the kind with a swirl of color in the middle. I have no idea why. I would have asked Lady Sarcoramph, but she left as soon as we entered the great hall and sat with her father throughout the meal. The Baron talked at great length and great volume. I got the impression, though, that his daughter was the one actually paying attention to the room. Her conversation was short but carefully attended. If she's not already running Sporetower, I think she will be before long.

The great hall was sealed from the outside, every window made of the same fine silk as the breathing scarves, the air free of spores. All the visitors could take their scarves off to eat. I'd been wondering how we would do that. It was strange to see faces other than vultures - or, for that matter, to see anything unobscured by the spore-fog. After my introduction to the town, I didn't expect to have much appetite, but the feast Baron Sarcoramph provided was surprisingly appetizing. Contrary to popular belief, carrion-eaters don't eat rotten meat. They just aren't so picky about it being fresh. Everything here was quite fresh, though; the fish were only the most recently dead from the water around the town. Some of them had even been alive when caught. I didn't quite have the stomach to eat any meat, but many of the townspeople survive quite well on a diet of fungus, so that's what I ate. Properly prepared - and these certainly were - mushrooms can be as good as meat anyway. I tried not to think about what the mushrooms had been eating.

I don't really remember much of dinner. I found it difficult to concentrate on the conversation; the Baron's substitute eyeball kept distracting me. It spun in circles whenever he blinked. The other visitors were a rather subdued group anyway, many of them more disturbed than I was by the fungal architecture, by the invitation that seemed unwise to refuse, or simply by the amount of death in the town. I think we were all relieved when dinner ended and we were escorted to similarly filtered bedrooms.

Overall, the Sarcoramphs' hospitality was beyond reproach, but it seemed just a little too mandatory for comfort. I left a small sketch of Lady Sarcoramph and the Baron in my room, as a sign of gratitude, and snuck out of the palace before anyone was awake. I was out of the spore cloud by dawn. I don't usually leave a town so quickly, or without thanking my hosts in person, but I can't honestly say I regretted it. Sporetower is a fascinating place - beautiful, even, in its own strange and morbid way - but I prefer to visit towns where I can breathe unassisted and choose where I stay. One visit was quite enough for now. I may return someday, but not any time soon.

Perhaps after I die.





* It's a lifelong position; the title changes only after death. You can probably guess what it becomes then.

** Of course, this depends on whether you consider it stealing when the owner is already dead.