The Hidden Passenger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Word-Plague

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Place to Stop

After a morning of searching, I found my way between the cities this afternoon, through a twisty little alley draped with yellow-blooming tassely vine. The buildings on both sides overhung so far that they met in the middle; the only sunlight in the alley came in through the openings at the ends. I left behind the glint and whisper of Thrass Kaffa's constant rain and emerged into the dusty streets of Karkafel. Scraps of paper blew across the cobblestones. I couldn't make out the writing on most of them. I can speak enough of the Golden Desert's various languages to understand most of what I hear, but all I can see in their writing is the calligraphy - graceful, but silent.

Most of the streets in Karkafel lead to the Library sooner or later. Some lead directly to it, while others spiral in gradually, like the strands of a spider's web. This was one of those. As usual, it was full of people carrying piles of books and scrolls. Many were reading as they walked. When they bumped into each other, they would mumble some unintelligible apology and keep walking. This is normal in Karkafel.

I reached the Library eventually. It's the largest building in the city. It was grand even when it was first built, nearly a thousand years ago; it's continued to spread since then, sprawling out into new additions and engulfing every neighboring building. It's almost as bad as the Creemer Museum by now. Even the senior librarians don't know where everything is. I spent several hours just wandering through the shelves, pulling out the occasional book or scroll to see if I could read it. I did find a book of legends, three travel journals, and a guide to raising scorpions; most of the time, though, I didn't even recognize the languages in the books. It didn't matter. There's something wonderful about being surrounded by books, even if you can't read a word of them. All those patient blocks of knowledge, resting in quiet stacks until someone needs them… It's as close as I ever get to truly feeling at home. The Golden Desert has no end of stories about treasure chambers and Caves of Wonders, but none of them can compare to a library.

The silence was so deep, I could almost swim in it. Then Blue showed up.

It's impossible to go to the Library of Karkafel and not meet Blue Fir. He goes everywhere. I met him several years ago, on my first visit to the city; we had a long conversation about the work of Millici Trappilack, queen of the dreamlike novel. The conversation continued over dinner at his house, then over the following week while I worked on a mural for a newly built temple. He talks all the time (when he's not reading), and I'm happy to spend entire conversations listening. We get along splendidly.

This time, I ran into Blue in a dusty back corner of the library, by a shelf of mechanical philosophy treatises. He resembles a kangaroo, with dusty blue fur (the color of the tree for which he's named) and rather amazingly long ears. They perked up when he caught sight of me.

"Nigel!" he said, literally leaping over to me. He continued in a stage whisper.* "Where have you been? I haven't seen you in years! I had almost forgotten what you looked like, though obviously you don't look the same now anyway, I think you had hair the last time I saw you, but I can always tell it's you because you carry about a million bags of stuff and your face squishes up that way when you smile, yes, just like that, even when you look like a lizard. I was just telling a lizard about you last week, actually! He landed on our house on his way to Hram - he was the migrating kind of lizard, with a little suitcase and everything - and he wanted to know about that mural you painted the last time you were here, you know, the one with the saxophone elephants, so I told him it was by a traveling artist and that you made the whole thing up out of your head, except for the bits from that Ozmit legend about the cyclone and the sidewinder."

He kept talking as we left the Library and walked back to his house - I walked, that is, and he bounced. Blue never has prolonged contact with the ground unless he's reading. He spends most of his time in the Library; the rest he spends… finding things. He works for the Museum of Antiquities, and sometimes for the Library as well, visiting ruins and scriptoriums and obscure ancient cities. I think his job has something to do with research or exploration - possibly both. He's tried to explain it to me a few times, but he has enough energy for two and a half people and rarely stays long on a single subject. He used to go on expeditions with a friend named Achelyes, a cat with green fur who was good at listening. (No wonder they got along so well.) They lost track of each other years ago, though - easy enough to do when you travel so much - and he hasn't been able to find her since.

"Did you know that the Library has the oldest written copy of that legend? Chrysalie Chalk brought it back from one of her expeditions to the Hatchery ruins. The secretary birds let her take what she likes, because they're inventing better forms of language and they don't have any use for the old ones anymore, or if they do they can just send a messenger apprentice here to get it, because the apprentice birds get all the hard jobs. Chrysalie said the birds were inventing a language that's impossible to forget. She recited a whole a whole poem to me that she'd only read once, but she doesn't know the language and neither do I, so it didn't really do us much good except that it sounds pretty. I want to learn the language if they ever finish it."

Blue is already verbose in at least fifteen languages, five of them extinct. I suspect that he'd be horrified to meet someone and not be able to talk to them.

"Can you imagine how useful it would be to never forget things? Just last week I was trying to remember the name of that corkscrew thing that plunder snails use to drill into boats, and I couldn't! I had to go look it up! It's called a stellithork, by the way. How could I forget a word like stellithork? It sounds like a creature that delivers baby stars, except that that's a siltrath, at least in Silvani mythology. Hardly anyone even knows about Silvani mythology. I don't know if I would even have heard of it if the Hideous Queen hadn't been mentioned in that book, I think it was called Uglification - you know, one of the last books Lord Halda wrote before he completely lost his mind and started writing his Ode to Soup. The library has that, too, but hardly anyone ever bothers to read it, and if they do, they usually give up around the two hundredth verse, because that's when it stops making any sense at all. I never knew there were so many words that rhyme with "herring" until I read that book."

I'm fairly sure that Blue has read more books than anyone else I know, though I'm not sure when he ever stops talking long enough to read. I suspect that he doesn't sleep. He lives in a semi-ruined castle near the edge of the city with his rather large adopted family; they grew up in an orphanage in Thrass Kaffa, in one of the swampier parts of the city, and made a rather spectacular exit from it about ten years ago. That's all I'm sure of. The rest of the story is different every time they tell it (every time Blue tells it, usually), and no one else in Thrass Kaffa will talk about it.

Blue's sister Muriel, who resembles a long-horned cow, studies fencing and is teaching her scriptoscarab to use a typewriter. Thefoi, another sister, is a mammal with coppery red fur and a mane of scarlet hair that reaches to the floor. She's quite easy to get along with, provided you agree that she's the most beautiful mammal in Hamjamser. This could easily be true. As is so often the case, the only flaw in her beauty is that she's aware of it.

Their avian brother never seems to be home. Whenever anyone asks where he is, the others say he's "out working" and quickly change the subject.

Blue was still talking as we reached the house. "There was a man in town last week who said he had a herring he'd trained to sing, but I'm pretty sure it was really a lungfish, because herrings don't usually last this far into the Desert, and their eyes don't bug out like that when they sing. Have you ever heard a lungfish sing? They sound like frogs, all yawp yarp yeep, but they can certainly carry a tune. My friend Snark had a baritone lungfish he'd trained to sing Moldomer's Left-Hand Concerto no. 6, and it did all the oboe trills and everything. He would plop it down on the table at dinner and conduct it with a spoon, which made people complain if they were still eating, because it sort of got slime all over the place. That's why I have my slug eat on the floor - that, and she doesn't really fit on the table, because she's grown since you were here last, and it's getting hard to pick her up anymore. Are you staying for dinner? We're having figs and a cactus-hen that Jill blew up this morning."

Jill is yet another adopted sister, a tall, thin avian who spends most of her time standing on top of things. Her full name is Jillgog Javamarn Jandramaxil Fiogaja; apparently, her family used to be royalty in Specklemax, hence all the names. She's the last one left. She likes blowing things up,** but contents herself with dropping pumpkins off the roof. She usually checks to make sure there's no one underneath.

Dinner was surprisingly good; Anna (yet another sister, though you might think she was the mother of the family if she didn't look like a griffin) has become something of an expert at salvaging exploded meat. There was a hint of gunpowder in the flavor, but it was well-cooked, and it was already in such small pieces that we didn't have to cut it.

The conversation over dinner consisted of Blue talking, just like the last time I was here. Muriel and I nodded and gave the occasional single-word response when it seemed appropriate. Thefoi only interrupted when people neglected to look at her. Fortunately, she keeps a pair of small horned moles who spend all their time gazing at her adoringly, and one of her current admirers was also there to help. Thefoi has a constant procession of young men (and not-so-young men, and quite often women as well, not to mention a few hermaphrodites and at least one talking plant) who come to gaze upon her beauty. Some are artists; others, less lucky, are in love. Thefoi encourages them all equally, which is to say not at all. If she chose one, the others might stop paying attention. As far as I know, she's not interested in love - she just likes having an audience. She certainly gets one. Some of her admirers have been hanging around for years now.

It was after eleven o'clock when I left the table. I would have loved to stay and listen more, but after walking all morning and afternoon, I was exhausted. Everyone refused to let me go back to the inn I'd been staying at in Thrass Kaffa; instead, Anna showed me to one of the empty rooms upstairs. The castle has a lot of them, full of books and explosives and the creative plumbing that a six-hundred-year-old castle needs if you want it to have running water. This room also has half a sofa. The other half has been rebuilt with onion crates and cushions, and it makes quite a comfortable bed. It was hard to stay awake long enough to write.

Someone came into the castle around midnight; I heard a door shut, then the sound of claws on the floor. Whoever it was had vanished into another room by the time I looked up.

I think I'll be here for a while. There's always plenty of work for an artist in the two cities, and I didn't get to explore nearly enough the last time I was here. Besides, I have friends to stay with.

As I write this, my salamander lies in her lantern, curled around her eggs. Their fire provides light to write by and warmth against the cold Desert night. There's a postbird in the window, patiently waiting to take my letter once I finish writing.

This is likely to be my last letter for some time. Farewell, and safe travels. You'll hear from me again next year.

Nigel



* Blue has perfected the art of the stage whisper. When you work in a library and are incapable of not talking, it's a necessary survival skill.

** There's a reason the Fiogajas don't rule Specklemax anymore.

Unexpected Arrivals

I believe I mentioned, perhaps a week or two ago, that my salamander was getting a bit fat. I may also have mentioned that I still didn't know whether my salamander was male or female, as it's nearly impossible to tell unless one is an expert.

Any doubts on the matter were settled this morning, however, when she laid her eggs.

This came as a complete surprise to me. I'm not particularly knowledgeable about the reproductive habits of salamanders, and I hadn't even known that mine was old enough to lay eggs. She's barely longer than my hand. She must have met someone while visiting the burning man in Twokk; as far as I know, that's the only extended period of time she's spent with other salamanders in the last few months. She meets them occasionally, but they usually just exchange polite puffs of smoke and go about their business.

I had absolutely no idea how to care for salamander eggs. Fortunately, I managed to keep from panicking. Instead, I asked random people on the streets - they were quite helpful, probably recognizing the signs of desperation - until I got directions to a salamander breeder in town. He keeps a shop in the basement of a pump house near the Grand Hat's palace.*

In a city where the rain never stops, there are a lot of pump houses. This one keeps water in the Grand Hat's fountains and out of the Grand Hat's gardens. It's a good place for a salamander hatchery; there's plenty of water close at hand when things catch on fire. I had to circle the building, nearly deafened by the thunder of the pumps, before I found a narrow staircase leading down under the street. There was a door of soot-stained metal at the bottom. It was open, so I walked in.

I felt as if I'd stepped into the Minotaur's labyrinth. Salamanders were scattered throughout the dark room behind the door; when I entered, a dozen lizard-shaped flames lifted their heads to stare at me. The man in the middle of the room turned around a moment later. He was built like an ox, and in fact rather resembled one, with wide-set eyes glowering under a broad, shaggy forehead. When I entered, he rose to his feet - hooves, rather, bigger than my head - and clomped over to me, glaring down from somewhere near the ceiling. The floor creaked under his weight, as did all the leather he was wearing. His horns would have scraped the ceiling if he hadn't been hunched over under a massive pair of shoulders. His beard and mane - it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began - were blackened and ragged. Small flames flickered in his hair. He frowned and let out a rumble that might have been a question, or possibly an earthquake.

Attempting to produce something like a smile, I held up the lantern full of eggs.

His expression changed, instantly, from monolithic hostility to wide-eyed delight. "And what is THIS?" he boomed, taking the lantern and peering into it. It nearly disappeared in his hand. "Look at all these beautiful eggs! Who is their mother? Is it you?" He reached a leathery finger as thick as my wrist into the lantern and gave my salamander a gentle rub under the chin. If she'd been a cat, she would have purred. "Of course it is! Such pretty eggs could only have come from such a pretty salamander! You must be very proud, you beautiful thing, and well you should be!"

He continued to make adoring noises over her for a minute or two, then looked up at me. "This is her first clutch of eggs?"

I wasn't quite sure of my voice, so I just nodded.

He grinned, showing several gold teeth. "Your first as well?"

I nodded again.

"Well, you were wise to come here. I am Karloff Hajrastarn, keeper of the finest salamanders in the two cities. Come. I shall tell you everything you need to know." He clomped back over to his chair, motioning for me to follow. The chair had the well-worn look of an old boot, as if it had been crushed into a comfortable shape by the weight of its owner, and the leather upholstery was mottled with singe marks. It creaked when he sat down. The fireplace in front of it held an enormous fire; it would have lit the whole room if Hajrastarn hadn't been sitting in front of it.

It took me a moment to realize that the logs in the fire were actually a pair of salamanders. They were the size of small alligators. One of them grinned and gave me a long, slow wink.

"You have kept the eggs in the fire." At the sound of Hajrastarn's voice, I looked away from the giants, suddenly relieved that my own salamander is a more manageable size. "Good. Do not let it go out; that is the most important thing. Salamanders are creatures of fire, and they must stay in it until they are grown, just as tadpoles must stay in water. This lantern will serve, though you will need a larger one when the hatchlings grow older. Have you been feeding the mother coal?"

I had. She's been much more insistent than usual about it lately; now I know why. I nodded, hoping that that was a good thing.

Apparently, it was. Hajrastarn nodded in approval. "Good. Keep doing so. She will need to build up her fire again after making so many little embers. She is from Cormilack, yes? They are strong salamanders there, and she has been well cared for. It will not take long. Now, when the eggs hatch…"

He spent the next few hours giving me instructions - enough for the next few years, I think, until the hatchlings are old enough to go out on their own. He would pause occasionally to feed his own salamanders (I counted at least fifty just in the one room) or to do various things related to their training.** Sometimes both of us would pause to just look at the eggs.

The eggs are quite beautiful. They're soft-shelled, like most reptile eggs, lying in a leathery heap at the bottom of the lantern. My salamander dug a little nest for them in the smoldering wood shavings. I can't tell what color the shells are through the flames; waves of quick orange light flicker over their surfaces, as if they were burning coals. Occasionally, I can catch a glimpse of the tiny embryos silhouetted inside.

I left the hatchery with ten pages of detailed notes, a bag of supplies,*** and considerably more confidence than I'd had this morning. Hajrastarn wedged himself up the steps of his shop - he had to climb them sideways - and waved as I left.

"Take good care of the little lady!" he bellowed, grinning. "And bring the hatchlings back to see me when they are old enough!"

I'll certainly do my best.



* This is a literal translation of the title of the ruler of Thrass Kaffa. It sounds much more impressive in Kafri - "Shishra Samakat" - but it means the same thing. The title could also be translated as "Biggest Super Hat," but that sounds even sillier.

** Several of his newer salamanders are at a rather overenthusiastic stage, which is why his hair was on fire when he answered the door.

*** My favorites are the little sticks of yellow incense. They're for nutritional purposes. Salamanders originally lived in active volcanoes (the first domesticated ones were caught laying eggs in brimstone deposits near the surface), and the embryos need certain volcanic gases to develop properly. I think the incense is mostly sulphur. It smells like fireworks.

Crucible

The Great Shwamp has a town for everything. Cloth comes from Chelissera, feathers from Meligma, pottery from Woodpot. There is no metal to speak of in the Great Shwamp, so it gets its metalwork from Crucible. There is quite a lot of it there. Lady Peraximander was right when she called it a city of fire and iron. A river of molten iron runs through the center of town. This is what has made the town the area's center of metalworking: it has a seemingly endless supply of iron and no need of fire to melt it.

We could see the town long before we actually came to it. The cloud of smoke and steam it produces is visible for miles, like the plume of a volcano (which, technically, I suppose it is). We didn't see the town itself until we came out of the trees and into the farmland that surrounds it. It was the first time I'd seen a hill in Sedge. Crucible is a great black heap of a town, a mound of black buildings on a black hill, lit like an oven from within. No sun shines through the cloud that hangs over it. The buildings are visible only as firelit silhouettes.

At the outskirts of the town, where the fields gave way to buildings, they also gave way to metal. There was a sheet of it a few inches thick covering the ground. The edge was smooth and rumpled, like wax, as if the metal had flowed molten over the ground and solidified there.

As I later found out, this is exactly what happened. Most of the hill beneath the town is made of iron, built up over centuries by the molten river that springs from its peak; in the soft, stoneless ground of Sedge, that's the only reason there's a hill at all. If the metal didn't spread out so far around the town, the whole thing would probably sink into the ground. It looks like the melted stub of a giant candle. Plants grow in the spaces between flows of iron, where dirt has collected or been exposed by splits in the metal. What streets there are have been melted out of the side of the hill or welded onto it. The melted ones are perfectly flat and mirror-smooth, polished by centuries of feet; the added ones are clattering catwalks of metal gratings. Most of the buildings on the hill are also made of metal, as it's more common that stone and less flammable than wood. With the clanking of the metalworking shops in the background, it's like being in one of the floating cities.

There is so much iron in the water and soil here that even the hair and skin of the people has a rusty reddish tint. It's rare to see any other color that isn't obviously the work of dye. They advise visitors to drink from cisterns of collected rainwater, rather than from the local wells. Like the spores in Sporetower, such a high concentration of metal can be harmful to anyone not raised with it.

The molten river is called the Flare. It follows a meandering path through the streets of the town, making its slow way from the peak to the base of the hill, and fills the streets with the heat of a thousand fires. There are few bridges over it; most people prefer to keep their distance. Strange spires and encrustations have formed all along the banks, like half-melted candles or icicles in black metal. Salamanders perch on them like miniature mountain dragons. Rare in most parts of the world, salamanders breed like rats in Crucible. It's one of the few places above ground that's hot enough for them. It's common to see the small reptiles climbing out of the river, glowing with its heat, shaking the drops of molten iron off of their backs as they look around for edible insects or mice. Most of them don't stay out long. I don't think they'd leave the river at all if they weren't so curious. Salamanders can survive perfectly well on a diet of sunlight and charcoal, but their natural habitat is the inside of a volcano. The ones that live near the surface only leave to find food. They hunt with light and flame, roasting or dazzling their prey before they eat it. The dragons say that there are larger ones down in the depths of the earth, lurking in the sea of fire that lies under the ground, that sea that leaks through in volcanoes and molten places like Crucible. I have no idea what those eat. Perhaps there are fish of fire down there for them. For all we know, there could be creatures of all kinds, a whole bestiary of flame living below the ground as we live above it, and the salamanders are simply the only ones that travel between the two. If the dragons know, they aren't telling anyone.

My own salamander spent most of the day out on top of the lantern it lives in, looking around with wide eyes at the town full of flames and the abundance of its relatives. I let it go and say hello to several of them. It was well-trained in Cormilack, though, and always came back when I called it.

Anyone who goes outdoors anywhere near the metalworking district or the river wears thick leather coats and wide-brimmed hats. Sparks and drops of molten iron spatter and drop there like rain, and not everyone is fireproof enough to just shrug them off. Fortunately, there are stores where you can rent the outfits. Like me, most visitors would rather not buy an entire set of fireproof clothing that they won't use anywhere else, but no one wants to come to Crucible and not see the River Flare.

The surface of the river used to steam and solidify when it rained.* Parts still do so, forming a dark crust on top like the ice on water; most of the river is covered, though, with a sort of metal awning that keeps it dry and therefore liquid. It's a beautiful structure, a roof held up by slender columns and rafters of metal, like a cross between a Caroque cathedral and an oven. The townspeople call it the Flue. It was built long ago by the legendary Lady Pyrafax, whom the legends say was part salamander (some say part dragon) and could sculpt molten metal with her bare hands, like clay. The Flue certainly looks like it was made that way; a skilled metalsmith could make work that graceful with a hammer, but it would take decades. Besides, the Flue has the look of something sculpted, not beaten. It's all fluid curves and graceful twists, no two parts quite the same, and there's not a seam in sight. Some say you can find the Lady Pyrafax's fingerprints in the metal. Fire-bats roost with salamanders in the upper reaches, swooping down to catch night insects before they fly into the bright river and incinerate themselves.

Most of Crucible's best metalworkers live near the river. It's the most convenient source of metal in the town. Many of them have balconies built over the banks, so they can lower containers made of stone** over the railings and pull up metal by the bucketful. Several of the smiths have pipes installed in their smithies that lead directly to the river. They have iron on tap with the turn of a handle. This only works in smithies by the river, though, as the iron will cool and solidify if it travels more than about six feet. That's a blocked pipe no plumber can fix.

I found out all of this without the company of Mahalia Peraximander. I had been traveling with her for the past few days - or, rather, I had been traveling with my scissors, which had been traveling with her. She didn't seem particularly interested in my company except as the owner of the scissors. She did talk to me occasionally - mostly describing her plans for her Fish, which continued to be completely incomprehensible to me, or complaining of the eccentricities of the family to which she was returning. "For they are a clan of the Stubborn and Unlistening," she said, "who would not see Sense if it was written on their very Eyelids." This is, apparently, the reason she spends so much time away from Crucible, despite her fierce devotion to the town. To hear her talk, no other place in the world is worth seeing, and no other family so impossible to tolerate.

When we reached the outskirts of Crucible, she stopped and turned to me. It had taken days, but her fur was short all over, if somewhat ragged. There were rust-red highlights in the black roots. It seems rather odd to complain about the heat and then return to a place like Crucible, but perhaps it's easier to endure when it's part of home.

"You have proved yourself Useful," she said, handing my scissors back. "You have my Thanks and Gratitude, and that of my Fish. May you be warmed by the Fire and never Burned. Now go away." With that, she turned and strode away through the streets.

I doubt I will see her again. If I ever find myself back here again, though, I intend to ask about her and her Fish. I am curious to hear if her plans for him succeed.



* Thanks to its constant shroud of soot and steam, Crucible is one of the only places in the world where the clouds clear when it rains. Sporetower is another.

** These are the crucibles with which the town shares its name. No one seems to be sure which is named after the other; both are containers that hold molten metal, so it could have gone either way.

Golgoolian

One of the first places the Train stopped in October was Golgoolian, the huge and grimy city on the edge of the Great Shwamp. Nothing ever seems to stay clean there. The mist that comes off of the Shwamp oozes through the city, thick and brown, and leaves a coating of mud behind it. Smoke from chimneys goes up, curls back down again, and stains the buildings black. The whole city seems to attract dirt. The locals blame the wind.

Like Rampastula, Golgoolian is built on top of layers of itself. Each building in the city has two or three more underneath it. The mud has oozed in to fill the old rooms underground. Archaeologists have excavated some of them, digging as fast as they can while the ground sweats and sags in around them. The deepest ones they've found were little more than stone huts. Arrowheads fill the mud like fossilized fish.

Apart from the occasional archaeologist or basement spelunker, Golgoolian's underground is a blank to the people on the surface. No one goes down there. If they do, they don't talk about it. Three-quarters of the city is underground, and no one really knows what's in it. Every fantasy author in the Railway Regions has at least mentioned Golgoolian's underground; some of them seem to use it in every book they write.

Most of Golgoolian is stable now - the only buildings that still sink are the new ones at the edges and an unlucky few in the middle. No one knows why, but there are some buildings that won't stop sinking no matter how much architecture piles up underneath them. The Corkscrew Tower has at least fifty floors, probably more than that. Five of them are above ground. In the centuries since its foundations were laid, the building has never stopped or slowed its steady descent into the earth. The Earl of Mangrel and his family (one of many noble families in Golgoolian) abandon each floor when it starts to fill up with water and mushrooms, which happens about once every five years, and build another one on top to replace it. The tower tilts slightly every year. No floor is quite parallel with the one beneath it, hence the tower's name. It twists its way down into the ground like a segmented corkscrew of stone. It's anyone's guess how deep it goes.

The Corkscrew Tower is just one of many buildings that never solidified. Golgoolian is full of sinkhole gardens, little patches of ground which seem perfectly solid but eat anything built on top of them. Some are only fifteen feet wide. Buildings next to them have stood steady and even for decades; put a rock two feet from the foundations, though, and it will be swallowed up in a few years. Nothing stays in the sinkhole gardens but small plants. Even trees are too heavy. The gardens are little half-wild patches of solid bog in the middle of the city. They're filled with flowers; marsh-lilies raise their speckled blossoms above bluets and violets, crinkleweeds and moss of every kind. Crumpet creeper sprouts at the edges of the gardens, climbing the neighboring buildings and spreading its crusty orange flowers across walls and rooftops. Pitcher plants and whip-vines nibble at the legions of small flying things that spread from the Shwamp in the Summer. Venus flytraps lurk in the shade. Toads join them, one and only one in each garden. They don't multiply to fill the larger gardens; they just grow. The largest toad in Golgoolian is rumored to be the size of a cow.

Every sinkhole garden in the city once had something built on it. Most of them had several. In Golgoolian, if you give up after your first three houses sink, you're considered lacking in patience. It takes a long time to prove the existence of a sinkhole.

Even so, if it were any other building, the Mangrels would have given up on the Corkscrew Tower decades ago. Each floor only lasts about twenty years before it submerges and goes rotten. The tower has to be constantly rebuilt. It has cost the family a small fortune. They keep it, though, because it has made them a large fortune.

Purple pligma mushrooms will grow anywhere where there's more water than sunlight. They pop up in basements, caves, swamps, and places where it's just been cloudy for a week. Candy-stripe pligmas - a great delicacy in the Railway Regions - are pickier. As far as I know, they've only been found in four places in all of Hamjamser. The Corkscrew Tower is their favorite.

No one is actually allowed into the Corkscrew Tower except for the Mangrels, their servants, and a small army of pligma farmers. All I've seen are photographs of the inside. The mushrooms cover the floor of every underground room in forests of little red-and-white caps. It's like a garden of peppermints or tiny striped umbrellas. Half the candy-stripe mushrooms in Hamjamser come from the Corkscrew Tower, picked and packaged in its damp basements. The Mangrel family lives in the five floors above the ground. They've lived comfortably for generations by selling one small crate of mushrooms per week. All the basements of the tower used to be the elegant upper floors, so the dripping underground rooms are lined with floral wallpaper and carved molding. The water dripping down the walls gradually eats away at paint and varnish, eroding wood and revealing the bricks underneath, but it's obvious that the gray, dripping, fungus-coated rooms were once quite lovely. Large pieces of them still are. After all, there's no sense in letting a nice room go entirely to waste. When a floor sinks underground, its windows are removed and used in the construction of the next top floor. The holes are replaced with watertight seals. Any molding and paneling that can be pried off of the walls is used upstairs. The top floor is always a patchwork of new material and pieces of architecture from six floors down; a few murals and painted ceilings have been moved over a dozen times. The art of detachable architecture is thought to have begun with the Earls of Mangrel.

Below ground, the pligma farmers tend and pick the mushrooms from metal walkways bolted into the stone walls of the tower. Most of the old floors are still there; they're where the pligmas grow. After all these years under the soggy ground, though, the wood is about as solid as old cheese. Anyone who stepped on it would go straight to the bottom of the tower (wherever that is). Water seeps in constantly through the walls. There are holes punched in every floor for the tangles of ancient, corroded pipes that keep the rooms from filling up. Mushrooms grow from the rusty valves. Mud, water, and stranger things are pumped up from the bowels of the tower and dumped into the Shwamp. Children sit by the end of the pipe and try to catch the things that come out of it. No one bothers getting pets from outside the city. The more enthusiastic children have rows of jars and fishbowls in their bedrooms, full of strange creatures from below the ground, aquatic centipedes and spider-frogs and axolotls and amphibious eels and a hundred other things no one's bothered to name. This is the Great Shwamp, after all. Aquatic strangeness is just part of life.

Stone over Paper

Sure enough, the Train reached Scarloe this afternoon. I'm starting to wonder if Professor Flanderdrack is a Wayfinder. He's uncannily good at finding things.

I have no idea what he's doing here. He continues to explain the occasional theory; this morning, having finished whatever calculations he began last night, he explained the use of three-tower clockboard as a way of predicting the future.

(The complexity of the game, and the fact that no two boards are alike, apparently creates a mathematically unique situation that distorts time. This can be manipulated by expert players of the game, who can interpret their opponent's moves, the outcome of dice rolls, and the order of randomly shuffled cards to correctly predict the future. Experts can even use their own moves to pose questions. Unfortunately, any expert player of three-tower clockboard is, by definition, interested in only one thing: three-tower clockboard. Anyone skilled enough to use oracular strategy will inevitably ask the game a question about the game itself. The resulting paradox distorts time and can have almost any result; it often did two hundred years ago, during the height of clockboard's popularity. The almost daily transformation of overly curious clockboard players - and their opponents - into newts, trees, and small hills was what caused the game to go quickly and severely out of fashion for the next century, and also led to the loss of more or less all the players who really knew what they were doing. The art of oracular clockboard-playing has been lost for nearly two hundred years. This is probably for the best.)

Professor Flanderdrack remains completely silent, though, about what he's doing at the moment. He disappeared into the page mines of Scarloe today without a word of explanation.

No one really knows where the page mines came from.

To be specific, no one knows where the geological layer came from that led to the creation of the mines. (The mines are there because people dug them.) Several hundred feet below the surface of the Dustbowl, a dome-shaped mountain that rainclouds inexplicably avoid like a gardener avoids kudzu, is the Scriptorial Layer, a sedimentary layer made entirely of tightly pressed paper. The Layer was discovered almost a hundred years ago, when one of the many futile attempts to dig a well in the Dustbowl turned up something even better.

Practically every language on Hamjamser appears on the paper dug out of the mines. English, Sikelak, Carvendrone, Common Vreen, ancient Tetravanian, Aggali runes and Rampastulan hieroglyphs, all the variations on Shasta script... To date, the miners have only found eight pages that didn't have writing on them. They've held on to most of these. They're rarer than diamonds, after all; Scarloe is probably the only place on Hamjamser where you can make your fortune by finding a blank piece of paper.

The written pages, though, are what keep the village going. There's not much else on the Dustbowl - no water, no plants, and no animals, except what people have brought with them. All the water in the village comes from a pump that stretches up the side of the mountain from the nearest river. Before the pump and the page mines were built, no one remembers how anyone was able to live in Scarloe at all.

It's strange to visit the village in late Autumn. The weather is normal for November in the Railway Regions - the pump stops at night to avoid freezing - but Scarloe looks like a small piece of the Golden Desert (or would if everything wasn't gray). A place that looks like this ought to be baking under the sun. Instead, the weather is cool and breezy. There's even fog now and then.

In every way but one, the Dustbowl is a perfectly ordinary mountain. It's just that rain never falls on it.

Over the curve of the mountain, the mountains of the Railway Regions stretch away in every direction, looking perfectly normal: green from hemlock and fir and bottle-brush pine, with the occasional stubborn patch of orange. On top of the mountain is nothing but a blank expanse of gray stone. No normal drought ever dried a place out this much. Scarloe's drought has lasted for centuries.

There's not really much to do in Scarloe except mining. There are a few small farms, startling patches of green that wouldn't last a day without the pump; even with the pump, though, there's only enough water for six or seven of them. Most of Scarloe's food comes from outside. Plants spring up around leaks in the pipeline when birds or people drop their seeds in the right place. A strip of greenery and rust stains follows the pipe all the way to the peak, a tilted temperate oasis two feet wide.

The lack of water is generally thought to be why the pages are so well preserved. The mines are as dry as a bank vault. Rot, mildew, and bookworms are completely unheard of in Scarloe; they'd die of thirst before getting within a mile of the mines. Even so, after spending who knows how many centuries under a mountain, the pages are in amazingly good shape. The miners hardly ever find one that's too damaged to read. Most are slightly ripped, or stained, or missing a corner, but it's rare to find a page missing even a quarter of its words. Whatever left them there was surprisingly careful about it.

The miners spend every day digging pages out of the ground, then sell them to the village bookbinders, who stack them neatly and completely at random and sew them into books. The largest building in the village, besides the bindery, is the store that sells books from underground.

Unfortunately, none of the books make any sense. Most of the linguists and literary experts in the Railway Regions have tried to decipher the meaning of one page, even one sentence, but none of them have come up with any likely explanations for the writing. It's nonsense - neatly written, grammatically perfect nonsense, but nonsense all the same. The theories on the origin of the pages are as numerous as they are unlikely. I'm sure Professor Flanderdrack has one. A surprisingly widespread theory is that the pages were left by one or more giant bookworms, despite the complete lack of any tunnel shapes in the layers. Unfortunately, no one has ever actually seen a giant bookworm; the only indication of their existence is the fact that people believe they exist.

Of course, the fact that the mined books are incomprehensible doesn't stop people from trying. A group of authors and linguists called the Refinery has spent the last few decades buying as many mined books as possible. They insist that the books will all make sense if they can just get enough of them together.

If that's true, they've got a long way to go. No one's reached the edge of the Scriptorial Layer yet.

Rats

I was sitting in the Train station in Jiligamant today, having visited the clockwork market that shows up in the town's main square every so often. Jiligamant is inhabited nearly entirely by mice and rats, who make some of the best clockwork in existence. No one else is better at tiny details.

Of course, having been a center of rodent culture for generations, it's not just the small mice and rats that live in Jiligamant. There are rodents of all kinds - squirrels, capybaras, chinchillas, three-legged gerboas, and probably a lot more that I don't know about. Even the town's humanoid inhabitants look rather rodent-like. There are winged mice the size of bumblebees and a clan of rats the size of hippopotami, who live in what used to be the town's sewers. Jiligamant has six or seven layers of sewers altogether; being a town of rodents, the pipes always have rats living in them, even when they're in use. The rats in the working sewers gradually dry out and brick up parts of them to make houses. This inevitably causes the whole sewer system to back up and stop working, at which point the town builds another one underneath it. Only a sixth of Jiligamant is above ground. The giant rats, who are as close to nobility as you'll find in Jiligamant, have the whole top level - the original sewers - more or less to themselves.

Anyway. I was sitting in the Train station, eating my lunch (some sort of grain thing from a food stall in the market) and waiting for the Train to finish exchanging a boxcar of seeds for a boxcar of clockwork pipe crawlers. A crate of pipe crawlers had, apparently, not been switched off or properly sealed; they were making things rather interesting for the loading crews when a tall gray rat in a blue frock coat came and sat down next to me.

"Morning," he said. It was four in the afternoon. "You ever been to Pickerell's Peak?"

I hadn't, and said so.

"Well, don't." He was quite emphatic. "Nothing there but fir trees and loonies. I was sitting at the Train station there, that little one that looks like an umbrella and never has anyone in it, just sitting there and minding my own business when a lizard in a tuxedo comes along the tracks and says to me, 'have you seen a house around here?' Now, if you'd been to Pickerell you'd know there's not a house within six miles of the station, not even a lean-to, so I gave him the look I give ceiling salesmen and said that if there'd been a house then I'd missed it. So he said fine, he'd wait, and I'll be flanneled if he didn't sit down there and wait! For a house!

"So I sat there with him and ate my lunch, and asked him if he wanted any, but he said he was allergic to cheese, said it made him grow fur, so I said what's wrong with a bit of fur then, and he said that he had nothing against fur but only in the Wintertime. In the Wintertime, he said, he ate cheese until he was so fluffy you could hardly see him.

"Well, I couldn't think of anything to say after that, so I just sat there and ate my lunch. Me waiting for my Train and him waiting for his house. And I'd just said to myself, well, he'll be waiting here a lot longer than I will, when there's a clattering noise off along the tracks, and around the corner comes a house. A house. Perfectly ordinary, the kind you see in Tazramack or anywhere, four stories high and one room wide. It was blue with dormer windows. Had those little fiddly bricks on the chimney. And it was walking, I tell you, just walking along on four great planking feet made all of boards. I could see the nails sticking out of the knees. And it walked right along the tracks, making a racket like you wouldn't believe, and settled down right in front of the station like a big dog, so that its little front porch was level with the platform. And you know what that lizard said? He said, 'my house appears to have arrived at me. Good day to you.' And his house stood there, calm as a horse, while he walked up to the front door and went right in. And then it stood up again on its feet - it had knobs on its toes like on a banister - and it clattered off along the tracks until I couldn't see it anymore. And what I say is, anyone who lives in a house that bounces like that can't have many dishes left by now. I mean, honestly, is it too much to ask for a man to sit and eat his lunch in peace? Why does every loony in the Railway Regions have to come and sit next to me?"

I nodded sympathetically. He gave me a suspicious look at that, stood up, and hurried away without another word.

I could have asked him the same question. Somehow, though, I doubt he'd have taken it well.

The Palace of Madmen

Interestingly enough, I visited the Palace of Madmen once (or the Changing Maze, the Sanctuary of Dreams, the Labyrinth of Many Names, the Heap, or whatever else you care to call it). I stumbled across one of the back doors. There are no front doors. I suppose you could say that I didn't actually go in - I only took one or two steps into the first room, keeping a tight grip on the knob of the door so that it couldn't get away. I'd heard about the place before. It's almost as hard to leave as it is to enter.

The one room I saw was roughly round, like the bottom floor of a tower, with an assortment of spoons and egg whisks branching like trees out of the ceiling. Mice fluttered through them and hung from prehensile tails. The floor was covered with mushrooms in every imaginable color, from amethyst and aquamarine to copper and cinnabar. A family of six-legged toads appeared to be eating spaghetti and jam on a checkered blanket on the largest one. Upon seeing me, they squeaked, turned immediately into bright green spiders, and attempted to hide against the tomato-red cap of their mushroom.

Of course, they were probably really hiding from the hooded burreler who walked into the room a second later, swinging a large pair of hedge shears on the end of his impossibly long tail. The hood on his head flowed seamlessly into a pair of chain-mail overalls festooned with buttons and elaborately braided green onions. Upon entering the room, he proceeded to shave the fluff off of a small mushroom-patterned carpet, the bristles off of a hairbrush growing among the spoons and egg whisks, and the fringe off of a large mushroom shaped like a lampshade. He was quite efficient. It took him roughly five seconds. All the mushrooms promptly crawled into the floor, spider-toads, picnic blankets, and all, shutting the stonework neatly behind them.

The Palace of Madmen takes in all types of lunatics, and - as far as I've heard - makes more sense to them than the outside world. Like most people on Hamjamser, the vast majority of them are friendly and perfectly harmless. Unfortunately, not all of them are. The maze welcomes the dangerous ones just as readily; it simply keeps the rest of its inhabitants safely away from them.

With the mushrooms gone, the burreler turned a pair of wild, sea-green eyes to me, which was when I noticed that he himself had no fur whatsoever, and his typical black-and-white burreler stripes were actually made up of tiny ceramic tiles stuck to his bare skin. He eyed my hair angrily, swinging his shears and muttering something about flagellated herring.

That was when I left. I didn't know whether or not the maze's protection applied to casual observers. I wasn't particularly eager to find out. The door made a faint ringing noise when I closed it hastily, and the knob folded itself into the faded purple wood with a sound like a silver crab retreating into its shell, leaving no trace in the seamless wood of the door.

When I stepped back, the door frame had gone as well. Only a rectangle of faint purple remained, no more than a stain on the plain wooden boards of the wall where it had been. The window next to it looked out onto the fog-draped fields around the little abandoned cabin.

There had been nothing in the sad little one-room building except the purple door, and now there wasn't even that. Wisps of fog drifted in through the window, split by the few remaining shards of glass. The floor and walls held nothing but shadows and a faint rectangle of purple. There was nothing to see. I left.

The Northern wall of the cabin, where the purple door had been, held only the blank, empty window on the outside. I hadn't noticed it on the way in. There was nothing particularly noticeable about it now. The boards were gray and warped in place. They had obviously stood there for decades, never disturbed by even the hint of a door, much less a purple one to a building out of a dream.

The cabin might have only existed to have the door in it, the one that had opened, shut, and vanished completely. I don't know why. Probably, there was no reason. It just was. That's how the maze works.

There was nothing to see, and there were quite a lot of hills between me and the town of Skither, and the thought of spending the night on the fog-smothered grass by (or in) the empty cabin with the door that wasn't was not particularly appealing, so I set out across the bedeweled grass without much hesitation. The cabin was lost in the mist when I looked back.

I've never found it again. And believe me, it hasn't been for lack of looking.

Anyway. This drawing is based on other stories I've heard of the Palace - from scholars who have spent their life writing in great detail about their few, cherished glimpses of it, from travelers like me who have stumbled across a door or two, and - very rarely - from a few of those who have lived there. There are not many of them. There are even fewer who ever leave. Most of them would rather die. Their descriptions are strange and ambiguous; real words, in the real world, are the wrong shape to hold stories of the Sanctuary of Dreams. This is the closest I can come to making sense of the least senseless accounts. I doubt I will ever attempt to draw my own glimpse of the Palace.

This is not a picture of the Labyrinth of Many Names. It is only as close - I hope - as a sane mind can come to it.

(Dedicated to Colin Thompson, Ursula Vernon, Tanith Lee, and James Blaylock.)

(Image copyright Nigel Tangelo / Ross Emery.)

Cafe )S:))~

I just realized that I drew a picture of Cafe ):S))~ while I was there. The cook, seeing what I was doing, was kind enough to pose with one of her steamed sump squids. After some digging through my old drawings, I managed to unearth this one. Here it is.

Nigel

Breakfast in Baconeg

I actually visited Baconeg (a Baconeg; I think it's a fairly common name) a few years after I read "Breakfast in Baconeg." The smell is better in the underground marketplace; it sort of becomes a second atmosphere. You don't notice it at all after a while. The underground marketplace is full of people trying to sell tuber fish and clockwork pipe crawlers and whatnot, though, so I don't know if it's actually an improvement.

I never was able to find the cafe where "Breakfast in Baconeg" takes place. I searched through the plumbing district for two days. There were pipework shops and moss grottoes and tank crab vendors by the hundreds, but no Cafe Kurgleglump. The only cafe I found was a tiny, dripping little hole in a gap between two pipes. The sign outside it read ")S:))~," and it served steamed sump squid. Nothing else. Three different varieties of steamed sump squid, but nothing else. If you were feeling adventurous, you could have steamed sump squid with pepper on top. The squid steamer occupied half the cafe. I sat at the little three-legged table that occupied the other half and watched while the cook took the squid from the ceiling (the only place there was room to store anything), steamed it, arranged it neatly on a saucer, and served it to me.

I was feeling adventurous after spelunking through the pipe district for three hours, so I had the squid with pepper. It was the best sump squid, steamed or otherwise, that I've ever eaten. I told the cook so, and she smiled from eyestalk to eyestalk and said "squee mur burgle twergilly." Or something to that effect.

As cozy as the )S:))~ Cafe was, though, it wasn't the Cafe Kurgleglump. For one thing, it wasn't nearly large enough, and the Cafe Kurgleglump served a lot more than steamed sump squid - that is, if the book is at all accurate. I never did find the Cafe Kurgleglump. I didn't search through every alley and back drain, but it probably doesn't matter. If it ever existed, I think it's quite Remembered by now.