Thrass Kaffa

We felt Thrass Kaffa before we saw it. After days in the dry air of the Golden Desert, the breeze this morning carried tiny droplets of water, which collected on every surface in the caravan. People walked along with their mouths open, drinking the water that condensed on their tongues. We were soaked by the time we reached the city.

The city of Thrass Kaffa is built beneath the Neverending Waterfall. The Waterfall comes straight out of the sky; if there were ever any clouds, it could almost be an exceptionally precise rain shower. Most of it has spread into a fine mist of spray by the time it reaches the ground. The constant wind of the Golden Desert blows the spray over the entire town, so everything is constantly wet. Rainbows appear at random in the air. Somehow, a whole collection of jungle plants ended up here many years ago; they've thrived in the dripping heat, growing over and through the entire city. Thrass Kaffa is a tiny patch of rainforest in the middle of the Desert. It's like being back on the Greenhouse Cliff. The buildings are draped with vines; orchids and bromeliads sprout from sandstone gutters. The streets are full of sunlit mist and the dripping green explosions of tropical plants.

There used to be a lake in the middle of the city, but by now, the jungle and the surrounding farmland drink up all the water that reaches the ground. The fish have taken to the trees instead, since there's nearly as much water in the air as on the ground. You can see them occasionally, wriggling up and down the trunks. Groups of Kaffans gather occasionally to race them.

Surprisingly, the city's aquifrax has never complained about the disappearance of its lake; it only seems to care about the Waterfall. The water that reaches the ground is no longer important. The aquifrax refuses solid gifts, disdainful of anything coarse enough to be affected by gravity, but it happily accepts offerings of music and poetry. It's said to have exceptional taste. When walking through Thrass Kaffa, it's common to find writers and musicians with their heads raised, blinking, singing or reciting their work to the rain. Every so often, the rain gives them an answer.

No one knows where the Waterfall comes from. Several of the city's avians have flown as high as they could, trying to find its top, but they all ran out of strength before they ran out of water.

Of course, not many avians live in the Golden Desert; most avians capable of flight need to eat nearly half their weight every day, and food is not quite that plentiful here. There are far more avians in the comparatively lush Blue Desert. In Thrass Kaffa, there are actually a surprising number of amphibian people - nearly all of the ones in the Golden Desert, I believe. Men and women with glistening, speckled skin pass by with perpetually damp clothes and brightly colored lap-frogs, only a few streets away from the waterless dunes.

The city of Karkafel often connects to Thrass Kaffa, though you can only travel between the two through catacombs and obscure back alleys. The cities are only visible to each other in the occasional mirage. Thrass Kaffa is built around the Waterfall, Karkafel around its famous Library; the cities trade life for information, nature for culture. Farmers pick fruit in Thrass Kaffa and bring it to Karkafel to trade for music. Archivists from Karkafel sneak into Thrass Kaffa when they've had enough of dust and dry paper and need someplace green. It's an unusual relationship, but the people of the two cities seem happy with it.

About half of the caravan is staying here; the rest is moving on, taking the jazz birds off to who knows where. I'll miss traveling with their constant warbling improvisations. I have friends in Karkafel, though, and I want to at least stay long enough to try to find them before I leave.

Fish of the Drought Land

Most signs of the rain are gone by now. The grass is dry again, except for half an hour of dew each morning; the sogginess of the ground has turned to steam and vanished in the sky. The only water left is in the streams.

To most of the rest of the world, the streams of the Scalps would barely be worthy of the name. They only hold water for a few weeks in every year. The rest of the time, they are simply dry channels, wrinkles in the Scalps, empty except for dust and cracked earth.

One of these streams runs beside the road I'm on. The water was low this morning, barely halfway to the grassy edge of the stream bed, but it was still there. The sound of it woke me up in the morning. It's been a while since I last heard running water.

There were little fish in the stream.

I have no idea how they survive in such a temporary place. Three days ago, the silt they were swimming over was a cracked desert. There has been no water here for months. Where did they come from?

It's different for other creatures. Periodic frogs and lungfish, for example, spend most of their lives waiting underground, sealed in the thin layer of moisture under dry stream beds. They emerge only in the floods after rain, released from their dark confinement for a few days, briefly free to swim and mate and eat ravenously. Unlike their cousins in more permanent waters, they don't lay eggs; their children are born fully mobile. They have to be. Before they're three days old, they have to burrow down into the mud with their parents to await the next rain.

These were not lungfish. They moved more like tiny salmon. It was hard to make out their shapes; the surface of the stream was shattered with the ripples of water going somewhere in a hurry, and the fish never stopped moving. They were like flames in the water, quick flashes of bronze and scarlet and electric blue. They were mesmerizing. These were not the kind of fish who burrow and spend months sitting in the mud.

I had no idea what they did plan to do. I sat and watched them while I ate breakfast. By the time I finished, the water was barely half as high as it was when I started. Mist rose around me as the dew on the grass returned to the air.

The water kept sinking over the morning. I watched it as I walked. The fish grew fewer as the stream shrank; every few minutes, there were fewer flashes of color beneath the surface. They must have been following the water downstream to wherever it was going.

There were still far too many when the stream dried up at noon.

I missed the exact moment when it dried up. I had gotten distracted for a few minutes, trying to remember the third verse of a song by Chellery Hewer. (It still hasn't come to me.) When I looked back at the stream, the water was gone. Only a few puddles remained. The bright fish were flopping in them, gasping as the water drained away into the ground.

I don't believe I was really thinking when I picked up the nearest one. When something is dying, the instant, automatic response is to do something - anything - to try to save it. It's a reflex. It keeps working even when there's nothing you can actually do. The fish continued to flop in my hand, just as doomed there as in the puddle I'd taken it from, a puddle that was gone already. The fish's mouth worked uselessly in the dry air. It was one of the red ones. There were tiny freckles of yellow down its side.

Still running mostly on reflex, I dropped my bags and fumbled one open with my free hand. The small glass jars I use for painting were on the top. With my feet sliding in the mud, I half-stepped, half-slithered to the bottom of the stream bed and filled a jar with as much muddy water as I could take from the largest remaining puddle. Two fish came along with it, blue with pale green spots. I dropped the red one in with them.

As the brown water cleared, I realized that half of it was mud. The fish swam in tiny circles in the inch or two that was left. There was barely room in the jar for them to turn around.

I stood there, looking down at the tiny, fragile lives in the little jar, and wondered what exactly I thought I was doing. Water is not abundant on the plains; only the very wealthy can afford to keep fish. It could be days before I found more water. I didn't even know what kind of fish these were, or what they ate, or how big they were going to get.

There were still dozens of them flopping desperately in the mud.

The sheer impossible hopelessness of the whole situation overwhelmed me a little at that point. There was really nothing I could do for most of the fish. They had fallen behind, unable to keep up with the water and their faster siblings, and they were doomed for it. Things die in nature all the time. It wouldn't work otherwise. I was probably crazy to try to intervene with something like this, but those three little fish were still swimming in the pathetic amount of water I'd managed to save. I couldn't just let them die.

I was standing there, staring blankly at the confused little circles of the fish and feeling like much the same thing was happening in my head, when I noticed something sparkling at the corner of my eye. I looked up. A sinuous, glittering shape was coming down the drying stream bed. As it got closer, I could make out a long body with a flat-topped head - a great snake, or possibly an eel. It must have been ten times as long as I was.

It was made of water. I could see the ground through it.

The snake meandered back and forth across the stream bed. I couldn't tell what it was doing until it got closer. It glided from fish to fish, sliding over the sad little flopping shapes and gathering them up into itself. I don't think it missed a single one. Its back was covered with the crossed ripples of a stream; on the snake, the pattern looked surprisingly like scales. When it reached the spot where I was, standing in mud halfway down the bank, it turned to look at me.

Its eyes were pools of liquid black, the color of cave pools or the ocean at night. Small fish swam in its face. Its whole body was full of them, a flashing rainbow of rescued colors, but all I could look at were those eyes.

I've only seen two other river spirits in my life. They don't often show themselves. The rest of the world seems to fade when they're around; everything else is simultaneously too solid and yet not real enough, depressingly static and ridiculously transient, too old to care and too new to understand. Nothing changes so constantly as a river. Nothing is so utterly unchanging. Nothing except, perhaps, the ocean.

This was only the spirit of a small stream. If there's a spirit for the ocean, I hope I never see its face. I would drown from looking.

The snake made an impatient gesture with its head, somehow managing to indicate the jar I held, and the spell was broken. My brain started working again. Quickly - there were fish still waiting in the mud - I held out the jar and upended it over the snake's transparent body. The surface absorbed the water with a small plop, sending ripples over the shining back, and the fish darted away to join the rest. I lost them immediately in the bright school of colors. The snake gave me a nod that seemed approving, somehow, then turned and continued down the stream. The wet trail behind it steamed in the sun.

I didn't try to follow it. There was no help I could give to a being like that, not beyond the well-meaning but useless little bit I'd already done, and I'm not sure I could have handled another sight of its face. I'm used to looking at rivers. I'm not used to them looking back at me.

Instead, I just watched until the shimmering tail had vanished in the glare of the sun. The mud in the jar had already dried to a thin, flaky crust when I put it away and picked up my bags. The road stretched into the distance. Cracks were appearing in the empty stream bed beside it.

I wonder where the spirit was going. I suppose I'll find out soon enough.

Rain-Walkers

It's been raining for two days now. Today, the rain-walkers arrived.

In Hmakk, they're called takahreel. It means the same thing. I'd never heard of them before, but apparently, they're fairly common on the plains. They follow storms.

They arrived at what the clocks said was noon, though the sun was nowhere in sight. One moment, there was nothing but gray sheets of water, thick enough to turn distant buildings to dim gray silhouettes; the next, tall shapes strode out of the rain, and there they were.

Their heads were level with second-story windows. They looked like frogs, but huge ones - plump, green-speckled bodies walking on two long legs, their waists eight feet off the ground. Their feet were the size of sleds. I counted nine of them, striding along with slow, careful steps, as if they were walking across snow. People came out of their houses as they passed. We stood there - under umbrellas, in rain coats, or simply getting wet - and watched the rain-walkers go by, a slow, silent parade in green and gray.

Their skin was shiny in the rain, but no water dripped off of them; somehow, they were absorbing the rain as fast as it could fall. They left dry footprints in the wet mud of the street.

They had tiny arms with delicate, long-fingered hands, which they kept tucked against their chests. Each walker held something. One had a trumpet; another, a carpet brush. A third clicked the beads of an abacus as it walked. Some had things from nature - a coconut, mostly bald; a lump of rock covered in pyrite crystals; a sun-bleached rabbit's skull. One held a mariner's clock covered in what I'm certain were barnacles. I don't know how far that must have come - it's hundreds of miles from here to the sea. I could still hear it ticking.

I watched this strange procession of objects, each one unique, as if it was the name of the rain-walker holding it. A found name.

Later, after the walkers had gone, I asked the whittler from yesterday about this. She had watched the walkers too, still gnawing at that lump of wood in her mouth. It was starting to look like something. I couldn't tell what.

"Hm," she said. "Might be names. Makes as much sense as anything else I've heard. I don't know - they never say anything. I can't tell them apart, but I recognize some of the things they're carrying. The one with the abacus was just a baby when they came through last year. Barely old enough to walk. Probably the same one, unless they trade their things when no one's looking. Somehow, I doubt that."

No one spoke while the walkers were here. It didn't seem right.

One walker had babies on its back.* They looked like fat tadpoles. Their tails were small and stubby - there aren't many opportunities for swimming on the plains - but they clung to the adult with webbed feet that were already as big as my hands. Not surprisingly, none of the tadpoles were carrying anything. Maybe they only get something when they grow hands to carry it.

One of the full-grown walkers held nothing at all. It clutched at the air as it walked, wringing its empty hands as if unsure what to do with them. Perhaps it had lost what it carried - lost its name. A little girl was standing in the rain nearby, watching the walkers underneath an umbrella bigger than herself. As the empty-handed one walked by, she put down the umbrella and tapped it on the foot. It stopped and stared at her. She stretched out - on tiptoe, she could almost reach the walker's knee - and held up a little wooden horse.

The walker stared at her for a moment, its eyes round and unblinking. I almost didn't notice when it started to sink. It was like watching a tree fall. The great knees bent impossibly slowly until it was squatting on the ground, looking more frog-like than ever. One arm reached out - slowly, carefully - and the long fingers gently plucked the little horse from the girl's hand. With the same slowness, the walker lifted it up to those huge golden eyes.

It stared at the horse for what seemed like forever. Finally, it turned back to the girl and nodded its head. The great legs unfolded, as slow as a sunrise, and the walker strode away to rejoin its companions. It clasped the wooden horse tightly against its chest.

Most of us followed the rain-walkers as they made their gradual parade down the street. They don't come into towns very often. There are a lot of them on the plains, walking in groups or alone, but there's also a lot of space on the plains. For every walker that comes within sight of a town, there are probably hundreds that walk past it, hidden and silent in the rain.

They had reached the outskirts of town (not a long walk) when the rain grew gentler, then stopped altogether. The air turned dry almost immediately. The walkers paused and stood there for a moment, blinking, then changed to match it. Clear membranes - some sort of second eyelid - slid over their eyes. Their skin turned from slick green to a dusty gray. I could almost see the pores closing up. The one with the tadpoles opened its mouth, and they all climbed inside. I suppose that's one way to keep them wet between storms.

The whole group stood there for a minute or two, swaying slightly. Their heads were tilted as if they were listening for something. Mist rose from the hot ground around them. There was no signal I could see, but they all turned in unison and strode away over the wet grass. On their way to the next storm, I suppose.

The little girl watched them go. When they had almost vanished in the mist, she dropped her umbrella and waved. It was hard to tell, but I thought I saw one of the tall shapes wave back.

* I would say on her back, but there are plenty of amphibians that let the father carry the babies. All the walkers looked more or less the same to me.

The Burning Man

Today, I was woken at sunrise by horrific screaming. I stumbled to the window, certain that someone was being murdered outside.

The street proved to have a distinct shortage of death. People were walking around and nodding to each other. No one seemed to notice the screaming, though I didn't see them trying to talk either. I doubt anyone could have heard.

The flames I'd glimpsed last night came to mind. Maybe this was just one of those towns where fire and screaming were considered unremarkable. I usually try to avoid those. They're quite rare, fortunately, but it's not always easy to tell when you've found one. I had nearly made up my mind to sneak out quietly, before anyone noticed me, when I happened to see the source of the screaming. It was a little gray bird, about the size and color of a mouse, which sat on a fence post and screamed as if it was being eaten alive. It seemed far too small to have a voice like that. Occasionally, it stopped to sneeze or preen its feathers.

I gave up trying to sleep and went outside instead.

Twokk is a fairly small town, so it was easy to find my way to the center (which was lucky, as I couldn't have heard anyone if I'd asked for directions). There was a man there. He was sitting in the middle of the town square, and he was on fire.

This seemed like the sort of situation that might warrant screaming, but everyone in sight seemed as unconcerned as ever. Several people stood with buckets next to a trough of water. I assumed there were there in case anything else caught fire. They watched the burning man idly, looking almost bored.

"Er… does this happen often?" I asked one of them.

She shrugged. "Usually he only does it once every few months, but there's been a drought lately."

I had been under the impression that droughts were normally a reason not to light fires in the middle of town.

"Normally, yes." The woman took the piece of wood she'd been whittling, eyed it critically, turned it around, and stuck it back in her mouth. I tried not to stare. I can't recall ever meeting someone who could carve wood with her teeth and talk at the same time. "Not in his case. He does this to end droughts, apparently. Something about taking the dry thoughts and burning them away. When he wakes up, he won't even remember there was a drought unless we tell him. I don't pretend to understand it myself, but I've seen it rain after his little bonfires often enough. Whatever he's doing, it works. Besides, the salamanders like it."

I looked closer then, trying to see through the flames. The man was sitting in what looked like meditation - one of those poses that requires minimal use of muscles to maintain. The flames rose from every inch of his body, bright and roaring, as if he was made of dry wood. I could feel the waves of heat blowing from him.* His eyes were closed; his face was peaceful, completely unmarked by the fire.

He was also covered with salamanders. They perched on his head and shoulders, sat around his feet, and clung gecko-style to his bare chest. My own salamander seemed agitated, so I let it join them. It climbed into the flames and settled down on a heap of other salamanders on the man's foot.

Maybe salamanders like the taste of dry thoughts.

One of the other bucket-holders checked a pocket watch. "You showed up just in time. He's been going for almost a whole day now. Can't be much longer."

"Usually, he remembers to take his clothes off first." The whittler pointed to the ground around the man. It was covered with a thin layer of ash and a few half-melted buttons. "Not this time."

"Hmm." The man with the watch put it back in his pocket. "Pity. That was a nice shirt."

We talked for maybe ten minutes or so. The screaming had stopped by then. The bird, I found out, is called a throkelit skeee, which literally means "shriek of death." They're found only in a very small region of the Scalps. Thank goodness. Apparently, the shrieking is a mating call; females are attracted to the males with the most bloodcurdling screams. They occasionally get confused and mob the heroines (sometimes the heros) of particularly melodramatic traveling plays.

We were comparing the plot of "Death in a handbag" (the dialogue in the Hmakk translation is apparently a bit more… explicit… than Trachia Ghastie's original script) to that of "The Perils of Pulgreen" (one of the few plays with an ogre as the heroine) when the burning man woke up. His eyes were wide and golden. Steam hissed as the fire vaporized the water on them. He didn't seem to care.

The fire died down gradually as he sat there, as did the conversation. He looked strangely naked without the coat of flames. (Technically, he was, but since he was a reptile, no one cared.) His scales were orange and yellow, speckled here and there with the intense blue of a fire's heart. I could just make out the shape of clothing silhouetted on him in soot. Other than the ash on the ground, that was all that was left. He got up, stretched, and gave everyone a vague smile.

"My, it's hot out here, isn't it?" he said.

No one seemed to have an answer to this.

A cool breeze wafted in as he spoke, carrying the scent of rain. His smile widened. "Oh. Never mind."

With that, he turned and walked away, shedding salamanders as he went. The rain swept in a few minutes later. Everyone ran to gather their own salamanders, or their children who had been watching the show, and disappeared into various houses. The extinguished man disappeared in a cloud of his own steam. The raindrops sizzled and vanished when they touched his skin. It rained until nightfall, and I spent the rest of the day inside, illustrating the inn's menus.

I never did find out his name.

* It was early, after all. The morning air was barely hot enough to melt candles.

A Piece of Summer

Today, I found someone's afternoon. They had lost it. It was a beautiful one, one of those long August days when you can lie in the shade and watch the sunlight pour down on the world.* There was water in a glass, or possibly lemonade, dripping with cold and drops of condensation. There was a book. I couldn't tell what was in it, but the cover was scuffed, and the pages were yellow and bent at the corners from being turned many times. It was obviously well-read and loved. Overhead, the leaves rustled and leaked tiny spots of sunlight onto the ground. Dragonflies flew past like miniature carnivorous biplanes. Lizards basked on lichen-encrusted fenceposts. The air was filled with the antiphonal chanting of cicadas and the fading rattle of painted locusts.

It's not every day that you find a lost afternoon. I put it safely away in my suitcase, wrapped in a scarf I won't need for a while yet. Some things ought to be kept safe. If I ever find a place with oak trees and fencepost lizards and an old brown book that someone has loved, I'll know where the afternoon came from, and then I can give it back.



* Sunlight and rain are strangely similar in large amounts. A hot day and a pounding rain have almost the same feeling - the world is swamped, pounded with too much weather, flooded and filled to overflowing with shining water or torrents of sunlight. The dry or the dark afterwards is clear and quiet, resting, as if after a thoroughly satisfying meal. The world lives on water and light. When it drinks them, it does so not in sips, but in great booming gulps.

Spring in the Railway Regions

Once again, I apologize for the prolonged silence. If someone exists who is a less consistent correspondent than myself, I have yet to meet them. However, while several months of the delay (December, January, and February, namely) were entirely my own fault, most of March and April were not.

Spring has come to the Railway Regions (the lower parts, anyway. It won't reach Milldacken for another two months). The snow has melted, bringing the worlds of the snowflies to an end in a blaze of molten water. Rain is a daily occurrence. Mist-wolves pad through the towns and forests on silent cloud paws, passing like fog-furred ghosts over the rooftops. After spending the Winter as sleeping layers of frost, they seem happy to be moving again. It's considered good luck if one of their intangible paws lands on you.

In short, it's no longer Winter; the snow is gone, and it's possible to travel on foot again. I can't stay on the Train any longer. I rarely stay in one place for even a month. The longer I stay, the harder it is to leave. I left the Train three weeks ago, bidding farewell to Norrel Hepsidine, Flishel, and the sleeping passenger (and receiving one reply in English, one in some other language, and one snore). Flishel gave me a little wooden... thing, presumably as a goodbye present. It looks a bit like a snail, or possibly a very round trantelope. A string goes through holes in the spiral bits so that it can be worn around the neck. Over my years of traveling, I've gathered quite a collection of little charms and trinkets hanging there.

There has still been no sign of Professor Flanderdrack.

My fur has gotten steadily shaggier all Winter; I haven't worn a coat since before Christmas. It's white this time, with black markings around my eyes and the tip of my tail. I'll be sad to see it go. (Actually, when the weather gets ten degrees warmer, I'll probably be quite happy.) With any luck, it will come off in one piece like it did last year, and someone will make a coat out of it.

I left the Train in Findlebar, a small town built around a small and highly specialized library. It is, apparently, Hamjamser's largest collection of books on the Gastropod Conspiracy.* The townspeople make a point of bowing to any snail they see (just in case). As a traveler who lives largely on slug meat and smoked sump squid, I was rather uncomfortable there and only stayed overnight.

From Findlebar, I set out by road; there are a few in the Railway Regions, though they tend to be small and precarious. They only exist where there are no Train stations. Several sections were washed out entirely, forcing me into detours that involved more climbing than walking, and the road was so narrow that I had to climb over fruit carts coming the other way. (I have no idea how they got past the washed-out sections.) At least there were no troll booths.

I don't know the name of the part of the Regions I've been in for the last three weeks, though it's quite clearly separate from the rest. I'm not sure it has a name. It's only a cluster of villages, four or five at the most, but it might as well be a separate country. Postbirds don't go there, as the villagers speak a language completely unknown to the rest of the world. Anyone they could write to is within a few hours' walking distance. Fortunately, each village has a few people who speak English as well.

I'm finally writing from the village of Rampal's Pleek, the first place I've seen a postbird in weeks. I think it may be in Tetravania.** The villagers won't tell me. When I ask, they say Rampal's Pleek is "in the four-cornered land," or "below that which is above," or "it's right here. Can't you see it?"

This, of course, is why I'm almost certain I'm in Tetravania. No one else in Hamjamser talks like that.



*I refuse to comment or respond to comments about the Gastropod Conspiracy. It only leads to trouble. If you want trouble, get in touch with Commander Squish.

**I don't know which Tetravania yet, or how many. I'll let you know when I find out.

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.

Found in the Rain

The Train left Vanister today.

It's unusual that we stayed as long as we did. The Train rarely stops for more than a day or two in any one place, and Vanister is a fairly small town. If you added up all the other buildings, they'd be about the size of three wings of the Museum.

For the last day, though, the staff of the Train (and several random passersby lured by the promise of free tickets) have been shoveling mud off the tracks. The station has been nearly surrounded by it. That's the problem with building a town on a diagonal slope. Vanister is a town of terraces, and every so often, one of them decides to just shuffle away down the hill. This morning, the tracks vanished into a detached piece of hillside, complete with several small trees and someone's mailbox. (A woman in a purple scarf came to fetch the mailbox in the afternoon, which I assume means it was hers. A large samoval came to fetch the trees a few hours later.)

I did a bit of digging myself, actually - I'm not one to say no to a free Train ticket. I found a bracelet of blue glass beads in the mud, miraculously unbroken by any of the shovels that had been chipping themselves on rocks and Train tracks all around it. Each bead was a tiny snail. A few feet beyond that was an antique adding machine, one of the ones designed to be run by a trio of dung beetles. It was rusted almost beyond recognition.

A bit farther on was a molar half the size of my fist. Three sides were covered with intricate markings that looked like runes; on the fourth was a carving of a frog. It appeared to be wearing mittens.

Vanister is built on old ground. The standing stones above the town are only the most obvious signs. The things beneath the surface have been there (or possibly slightly farther uphill) for a long time.

I have no idea, however, which ancient civilization was in the habit of putting mittens on frogs.

Having been out in the rain for most of the morning, I was completely soaked, so I curled up in the Train compartment with about five blankets and another Machinel novel. I love reading inside when it's raining outside. My salamander sat on top of my head and looked for umbrella plants. (It knows they're hiding somewhere. They can't fool it that easily.)

I was starting to worry by sunset. Professor Flanderdrack's luggage was still sitting comfortably in our compartment in the Train, but there was still no sign of the Professor himself. The sleeping passenger had somehow ended up on top of the pile of suitcases and was snoring into the leather. I wasn't sure what to do with the bags - leave them in the Train, or give them to someone in Vanister to keep until the professor reappeared? Fortunately, that was when he did reappear, hurrying over the platform and shedding notepaper like a rather short tree.

"Found it!" he said, breathlessly, when he reached the compartment. Water dripped from his coat and braided fur. "It was well hidden, oh yes indeed, and that frightening woman at the front desk nearly caught me, but I found it! Success! Huzzah! Now, on to Scarloe!"

With that, he sat down and began scribbling. He hasn't said another word all evening. The Train pulled out of the Vanister station on newly revealed tracks, raindrops hissing from the black metal bulk of the engine, passengers bustling around looking for empty seats, and the Professor didn't even seem to notice. He stopped only to take his coat off and dig an abacus out of one of his suitcases. Pages full of calculations and diagrams and illegible scribbles cover one seat and most of the floor of the compartment; a few of the soggier ones are stuck to the walls and the sleeping passenger's fur.

I don't know what Professor Flanderdrack is looking for, but it seems to be a bit more than a theory this time.

Leviathump and Thing

It rained today, all day, and the streets of Vanister became little more than rivers of mud. The children of the town had a marvelous time playing in them. Their parents were not quite so happy.

I spent the day in the Museum again. There has still been no sign of Professor Flanderdrack since he disappeared into the building two days ago; as slim as the chances of finding anything in the Vanister Museum are, I was still hoping I might run into him. I didn't.

What I did find was a small room, probably a former washroom or the bottom of a stairwell, with only one thing in it. On a crate in the middle of the room sat a complex little clockwork thing, a bit like a cross between a typewriter and a crab. Its label said simply, "Thing." That was all. The room was otherwise empty except for a little bowl for the dust-mice, which was filling up with the rain that dripped down the narrow window.

(As huge a building as it is, it would be impossible for the curators to keep the Museum clean. They can't even find all the rooms in it. Instead, it's swept and dusted by omnivorous dust-mice (some of the only wild rodents in Hamjamser that people actually encourage to live in their houses). They come out every night to sweep up dust with their tails - which are so fluffy that they look bigger than the mice themselves - and eat it. They live on nothing else; dust and water are all they need. The downspouts on the Museum's many roofs are linked to small basins in each room to provide water for them.)

The room had the usual little brass nameplate, which proclaimed it the "Leviathump," so it wasn't undiscovered. The curator who discovered it simply hadn't done much with it. I still don't know whether the Thing was called that because no one knew what it was, or because no one had bothered to find out, or because that was actually its name. I probably never will know.

I assume it was my footsteps on the floor that woke it up. When I looked later, mine were the only footprints in the dust on the floor - the dust-mice apparently avoided the room, which made the forlorn little water-basin seem rather sad - so no one else had entered it in quite a while. For whatever reason, when I got within three feet of the Thing, it started moving. There was a click, then a tight little chorus of clinking gears, and it raised itself on eight metal legs (made, I think, of dismantled scissors) and began to dig its way through the crate.

I can't think of another word for it. It simply dug into the wooden slats, using three or four little brass shovel attachments, and scooped out slivers of wood. They clattered on the floorboards on either side. Within a few seconds, it had dug straight through the top of the crate and climbed inside.

Cautiously, in case the Thing climbed back out, I leaned over and looked through the hole in the crate. A few slivers of rain-soaked light leaked through the spaces in the side. I could see small flashes of polished metal pieces moving in the darkness. The sound of wood being scooped away like ice cream filled the little box, then suddenly stopped; the glints of light folded themselves downward and vanished.

I waited for a good two minutes before I moved the crate.

Below it, there was a neat, round hole in the floorboards. For some reason known probably only to Mister Creemer, the space beneath them was filled with layers of embroidered carpet. These had been cut neatly away as well. Below them was empty space. The darkness was filled with the muffled clicking of a multitude of surreptitious clockwork.

I backed away from the hole then, wondering where exactly there was an unlit room full of moving machinery in the Vanister Museum, and went to the window to see if there was another one below it. I was surprised to find that the room was now on the ground floor. It had been on the third when I found it. When I went back to the hole, there was nothing below it but dirt. The room had moved.

I'm still not sure what the Thing was. Perhaps it was some sort of sentry, posted to warn the other Things when someone found the room above theirs. That seems rather pointless, though, as I would never have found the dark room if the Thing hadn't burrowed into it. Perhaps something in it had jammed, and it took just the vibration of my feet on the floor to loosen it and let it make its way home. Perhaps it just wanted to be alone, and I interrupted it, or frightened it, or woke it up. I doubt I'll ever know.

I put the crate back before I left. The label saying "Thing" now appears to refer to a hole in the floor. If future visitors to the Leviathump find that confusing, they won't be the first.

Dancing with Centipedes

I've gotten several letters from relatives (delayed a few months while the postbirds tried to find the Train) asking who Chiliska is. Since she's the only person I mentioned by name on my departure from Cormilack - aside from Lady Akistria Xeredile, of course - I suppose this is reasonable.

The New Year's Ball in Cormilack is always held on the first of April. (Don't ask me why it's called the New Year's Ball. I don't know.) The rainy season has been going for almost a month by then, and the people of Cormilack are starting to get sick of it. The Ball is a way to distract them from the endless rain and let them do more than sit around and drip all day.

I don't really mind that - I usually sit around and write or draw anyway, when I'm not traveling. While the rain made that harder than usual, it didn't keep me from exploring Cormilack and the Earthmover. I was perfectly happy. Also, I usually try to avoid dancing; I have two left feet, sometimes literally.

Lady Xeredile made it very clear, though, that the Ball was not optional for residents of the Palace. She didn't want the people she had to live with sitting around like lumps until May. Since I was staying in the Palace at the time, working on her portrait, that meant that I and my two left feet had to be there.

Everyone who didn't already have a partner (including foreigners like me who didn't know anyone in town) had partners chosen for them at random. All the men and all the women drew numbers and milled around on the floor for several minutes, trying to find whichever person of the opposite gender had the same one. (There were more women than men, so the few hermaphrodites and one mobile plant in attendance joined the men's group to even things out.) I wandered around with everyone else, holding the number 36 (which seems to follow me around) and looking for its twin. I was rather startled to find it in the claw of a giant centipede.




If you think I was nervous about dancing before then, just imagine how I felt when I found I wouldn't even be dancing with someone with the same number of feet. I couldn't think how we'd even dance at the same time - how does a centipede do a dance designed for bipeds, or vice versa? I was about to ruin her evening. I was sure of it.

She had about half of her legs off the ground when we met, rearing up to search the crowd with her head eight feet above the floor. When she found me, she dropped down politely so that our eyes were level. Centipedes can be any height they want. She was wearing one of the long, ruffled things that centipedes sometimes wear instead of dresses. Normally, arthropods don't wear anything at all - there's not really much point - but this was a special occasion. There were bows on her antennae.

One of the musicians told me later that she was a dressmaker for the Palace - had, in fact, made the purple dress with the screws on it that Lady Xeredile wore for her portrait - and that she lived (during the non-rainy season) in a hole under the Earthmover. I suppose that explains why she didn't have a partner already.

We introduced ourselves, and that was the extent of our communication for the rest of the evening. We couldn't understand each other. I don't know more than five words of any of the chitinous languages - even the few I can pronounce - and she seemed more amused than anything when I tried to say "pleased to meet you" in Sikelak (psarkl kssh k'klrga). She didn't seem to understand English either. The most we could manage was each other's names. Hers was Chiliska (at least, that's the closest I could come to it - it was really more like "Tch'lsskhhh," but I couldn't pronounce it correctly). She called me "N'shll."

Lady Xeredile's Palace is built on top of one of the Earthmover's giant drills, high above most of the town. The ballroom windows look out on a gently sloping hillside with ten-foot rivets sticking out of it. It's a good thing I'd already been staying in the Palace for a week at that point; the last thing I needed was to be distracted by the view.

The few dances I recognized were a waltz, a fast calacara (most of which I spent tripping over my own feet), and something that may have been a spangle hop. The rest were unfamiliar. I may have gotten a few of them almost right. It turns out that most dances have multilegged variations - which makes sense, when you think about it - or maybe Chiliska just made them up as she went along. She was certainly a much better dancer than I am. She glided around the ballroom, claws clicking softly on the floor, and I stumbled along with her as well as I could. I think we both enjoyed the Ball, though, and she made up for my two left feet by having about thirty right ones of her own. I don't think she even noticed when I stepped on her claws.

After the Ball was over, we had dinner. I think everyone in Cormilack had brought something. I had pasta, a bit of every dessert I could find, and a lot of things I couldn't identify. Quite a lot of them had been caught in the caves under the Earthmover; as far as I know, maybe no one else could identify them either. Chiliska ate about seven steaks. Centipedes need a lot of meat. After dinner, I walked her to the front door of the Palace (actually, she walked me, as I couldn't find it), we said what I assume was goodnight, and she left.

Somehow, we ended up being friends after that. We never learned any more of each other's languages; there's no way we could have pronounced them. She'd come and find me every time she visited the Palace, though, and we'd have lunch together and talk about what were probably completely different things. During my time in Cormilack, I probably talked more to Chiliska than to most of the people who lived in the Palace and actually understood me. I drew this picture as a farewell present when I left.

The problem with traveling is that, every now and then, you meet people you miss after you leave. I hope I find my way back to Cormilack someday.

The Spring Thaw

The thaw, when it came, was more spectacular than I could have imagined. What looked like whole icebergs came jostling down the unidentified river from the mountains above. Water fizzed around them and splashed in sparkling waves over the ice in their path. The river shrieked like a dragon with its tail stepped on when the icebergs reached it, leaping up in house-sized shards to join them. Spray and slivers of ice came down like rain from the empty blue sky. It was like a rockslide in crystal.

Every Milldackener strong enough to hold a pole was out on the banks of the river, fending off chunks of ice when they got too near the fragile houses and mill wheels. The prayers at the end of the Festival must have been answered; everyone agreed that this thaw was less destructive than any previous one. Only one building in the entire town was harmed. It lost its cupola to a tall chunk of ice that swooped over and snatched it on the way by. We watched the chunk all the way down the river, the cupola perched jauntily on its peak like a slate-shingled hat.

Once the main rush of ice was over, the pole-wielders followed the tail end of it down the river, gradually accumulating as we went. We crowded together on the cliff terraces to watch the last pieces of ice go over the falls. Each one seemed to hang in midair for a moment, like a breaching white whale with waves breaking over its back, before slowly starting to fall. Several of them hit outcroppings of rock on the way down and burst into spinning crystal fragments. There was a muffled boom whenever an intact one hit the riverbed (far below and still mostly dry) and exploded, bursting into chunks and sending spray and splinters of ice in every direction. It took a second or two for the sound to reach us at the top; it's a very high cliff.

There was a moment of silence after the echoes of the last explosion had died down. It was broken by a chorus of creaks and groans from above as all the mill wheels started turning again, shrugging off the last remnants of the ice that had held them since Autumn. A huge cheer went up from the crowds on the cliff. Laughing and talking over one another, they all hurried up the stairs and back to their individual mills; the machinery has a tendency to warp and rust over the Winter (not to mention rot, freezing, and hypothermiac woodworms), and newly-thawed mills have been known to tear themselves apart if no one's there to stop them. Eventually, I made my way back to the hotel, and the terraces were deserted.

It could have been just a trick of the mist and sunlight, but I could have sworn I saw the ice peacock from the caverns spread its wings at the edge of the waterfall and take off across the foothills. Perhaps it had just been waiting for its cage to be broken.

The Galleria of Jijangola

(This just happens to be my thirtieth post since I started NaBloPoMo (well, thirty-first, but that one on Monday really doesn't count). I have now officially made up for that week I missed. As a result, I will not necessarily be posting every day, but I'll try to keep writing all the same.)

It's Winter in Jijangola. The harvest is over; the fields are empty; the light is fading fast. It's cold outside. The children have nothing to do until the first snow coats the spires and turrets of the Galleria like icing on a wedding cake. Their parents have nothing to do until the Spring planting.

This is when most of the work is done.

The Galleria is Jijangola's center and its people's obsession. Every single one of them spends every spare moment they have working on it, quarrying stone, lifting, cementing, carving, painting, polishing, decorating... It takes up more space now than the village used to. It's been a long time since there was a village. Now, there's only the Galleria.

The whole thing started with someone's nine-times-great grandparent - or everyone's, possibly. It depends on who you ask. Spindle beetles and burrellers and even a few pygmy land-eels all claim the foundations of the Galleria were laid by their own nine-times-great grandmother or grandfather.

It's grown since then. It's large enough by now to start shifting. Rooms and passages move when you take your eyes off them. Murals connect with each other, often - usually - in surprising ways. A stone knight in a winding passage is, quite literally, standing in a forest. The painted trees on the wall continue straight across his chest. Birds and rabbits peer out of gaps in his armor, and roots twine around his segmented feet. There are apples growing on his left shoulder. Farther on, a gray statue of a man is kissing a painting of a woman; her two-dimensional sleeves are painted around his gray neck like an embroidered scarf. A necklace of tiny round windows around her neck lets in tiny needles of sunlight from outside.

Of course, as far as I know, this is how the paintings and statues were made in the first place. It wouldn't be any stranger than a lot of the rest of the Galleria. It's hard to tell, though, because the artists are never around to ask. There are hardly more than a hundred people in all of Jijangola (as much as anyone can keep count); even so, I've never been able to find out who created any particular part of the Galleria unless I found them still working on it. No one ever seems to know who built or carved or painted anything that's been finished.

Perhaps they've taken on a life of their own.

Whoever started the Galleria, they seem to have begun it as a rather small chapel. At least, that's what the Jijangolans say - most of them agree that the little stone chapel, buried now under a labyrinth of walls and passages, is the oldest part of the building. They can still all fit into it when they remember. Jijangola is not a large village, at least not in terms of inhabitants; stones outnumber people several hundred thousand to one.

About a third of the stone in the Galleria is quarried out of its equally labyrinthine basements and catacombs; the rest, according to the people who bring it, comes from something called the Rubble Heap. I'll have to try to find that when we move on - almost half the stone comes already carved. A lot of it looks very old. In a dusty dead-end hallway lit by Gothic arched windows, I found that someone had assembled mismatched carved words and letters into a rhyme:

And hence with LIBRARY buILT beside
THE amber founded northw st side
TOLL BO TH permit INQUIRE INSIDE
and VANisHED To the EXIT

Walking back down the hallway, I realized that the rhyme was only one of many. What I had thought were random assortments of carved fragments in the walls were actually writing, each one assembled the same way. The hallway was built entirely out of rhymes. The one at the end was simply the only one I could understand.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was an entrance to the Palace of Madmen in here somewhere. It might be hard to tell the difference.

Most people in the Galleria seem to spend all their time lost in it. They farm and hunt just like anyone else, but they generally just leave the food laying around the Galleria for anyone who wants it. You never have to look far to find a meal (though exactly what you might find is anyone's guess). Stone and paint are left, when people deliver them, in heaps by the outside doors; the shifting rooms and passages spread them all over the building. It's perfectly normal to walk through a twisting hallway or lofty chamber and find people rummaging through the clutter on the floor, searching for just the right shade of red or the perfect block of marble.

Visitors to the village are expected to either leave money (someone has to pay the people who bring stone and paint and cloth) or help with the Galleria. I, of course, chose the latter. They kindly let me work on part of a massive mural that twists along two hundred feet (so far) of tall passageway and stairwell. A black beetle next to me was working on an entire forest of intricately painted knots. I spent most of this morning continuing the loose ends to a grass-green spider, covered with a field of Summer flowers, hanging from one of a flock of hot-air balloons below the same sunset that greeted our arrival in Jijangola. It seemed fitting.

One tower, the place where I spent the most time yesterday evening, is completely hollow inside; the only way to reach the top is to climb the downspout gargoyles that line the inside in evenly spaced rings. The water from all the nearby rooftops (which have gradually grown almost as high as the tower itself) flows through a maze of pipes and gutters to the outside of the tower, where it pours in through the gargoyles. A thousand and fifty-seven spouts of water (I counted) pour from their mouths, forming a huge waterfall in the center of the tower that falls straight into the well built into the floor. It's like the inside of a sea dragon's throat.

The edges of the tower, between the gargoyles, stay completely dry except for the occasional leak. It's fairly easy to climb to the top.

At the top of the tower is a round room with no openings except a hole in the floor and another in the ceiling. The walls are completely made of stained glass. It's like the top of a lighthouse, except that where the light should be, there's a smaller waterfall that pours down through the hole in the ceiling.

I got soaked climbing up through the hole, but it was worth it.

The roof is a shallow, copper-shingled bowl. The rain swirled down into the hole like dishwater into a drain. Looking down through it, the light of my salamander lantern just reached the converging waterspouts at the top of the tower waterfall. They looked like the petals of a white flower in the darkness. Looking over the outside edge of the roof-bowl, I could see the rooftops of the Galleria spread out below me, a labyrinth of peaks and gables and spires and turrets lit by the moon and hundreds of candlelit windows. Someone with wings was flying around and around a tower, wrapping it in loops of silver chain. The links sparkled every time they passed a window.

It was beautiful. I was getting soaked, though, which is an especially bad idea in December, so I came back down after only a minute or two.

There was a postbird in the room when I got there. How it got in, I had no idea; its wings would never have fit through either of the holes. We sat there for a while in companionable silence. The postbird dozed quietly as I wrote by salamander light. I left last night's letter on the floor when I went to sleep, and it and the bird were gone this morning.

I slept in the stained-glass room all night; it's not every day I find a nice high place like that. I love high places. Climbing down was much easier this morning. The sunlight that comes in through the gargoyles' mouths is still very faint, and the tower has no windows except at the top, but the candles melting on the stone heads weren't drenched by rain this time. Someone had lit all of them. Maybe they had lit themselves. I don't know.

I could spend a year just exploring this place. I have a feeling that I still wouldn't see all of it. I may have a chance to do just that, at least for some time; Plack and I wandered off in different awestruck directions when we entered the Galleria, and I haven't seen him since. Oh well. We'll find each other (and the exit) eventually.

Still, I think we'll be staying here for a while.

On the Road Again, Except Without the Road

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moving On

Well, I've enjoyed my time in Cormilack, but I think it's time to leave. It won't be long before the rainy season starts again, and one rainy season in Cormilack was nice, but I'd rather spend this Winter in a place with less water than air. I think I'll head up to the Railway Regions next. It's been a while since I've ridden the Train and seen the Trenchcoat Guy. If I can't find the Railway Regions, I'll just go wherever I end up instead. It's bound to be interesting, wherever it is. I'm leaving tomorrow; once the rain starts, it won't be long before the roads dissolve.

I spent today at the palace, saying goodbye to all the other artists there at the moment and exchanging parting presents (sketches, cards, chocolate, carved snail shells, engine fish bacon, et cetera). When she heard I didn't have one, Lady Xeredile even gave me a small salamander from her own furnaces, on the condition that I buy a good lantern for it (it is a palace-bred salamander, after all; a common jar wouldn't do).

I'll be writing quite a lot more about Cormilack, of course. I haven't written down even half of what I've been doing here this year, much less posted it anywhere. I'm not that organized. In addition, I've still got that very large picture of the Earthmover to finish. I've been carrying it around rolled up, weighting the edges with luggage or rocks when I want to work on it. It will be quite a while before it's finished.

I can't believe I'd never heard of Cormilack before I saw the Earthmover from the Kilopede. I hope I can find my way back next year. Maybe I can find the same Kilopede. I can't remember its full name (most Kilopede's names take several minutes to say, if you can pronounce them at all), but I think it started with Itsropleklcanramplikia. Something like that. I've probably got it written down somewhere in my scribble-heap of a journal.

I love this place. I'll certainly be back when it's dry again.

A Very Long Explanation for the Curious

Though the incessant rain and occasional hail have stopped (for the most part), the hills around Cormilack are still too sodden from rain and thawed snow to travel safely. Bits of road have a tendency to wander off downhill to explore. Even the Kilopedes are staying away; I haven't seen a single one since I left the one that brought me here.

I suppose you've probably been wondering where I've been these last few months.

After leaving the Kilopede, I stumbled through the hills in the dark for quite some time. Moonlit walks in the dark are much less pleasant when the moons are absent and the hills keep sticking rocks in front of your feet. I must try to get a good salamander someday. They're expensive, but the light would be worth it if wandering through mountains in the dark becomes a habit.

Anyway. Eventually, somewhat scratched, bruised, and muddy, I staggered into the outskirts of Cormilack, watching the stars swallowed up by the shadow of the mechanical mountain that looms over the town. I had no idea what it was then; I only knew that it was interesting, and that I had to draw it as soon as it was light outside.

Unfortunately, I had no idea then that I had arrived right at the beginning of the rainy season.

While most of Hamjamser spends the winter under varying amounts of snow, Cormilack spends it largely underwater; the only snow is on the mountaintops. The weather stays warmer here. The townspeople blame it on the giant machine, saying that it reflects the heat of the sun into the rest of the valley, that it stores heat all Summer and releases it in the Winter, that the mysterious, ice-encrusted mechanisms and antennae sticking up from its roof (peak?) disrupt the weather around Cormilack - there are as many explanations as there are people to make them. Some say that the Sun Dragon likes to wheel overhead and admire the digging machine. That may be true, but if so, I've never seen him. On each of the fifteen days - I've counted - that the sun shone during the winter, there was not a Dragon in sight.

Some say that the machine's engine is still going, and that its heat is what warms the valley.

The people of Cormilack call the machine the Earthmover, sensibly, as that is what it is. The highest hills in the town seem to have been plowed up by its immense blades and wheels - the tallest earthen hills, anyway. The Earthmover itself is the tallest hill in sight. Much of the town is built on it. According to local legends, the Earthmover was used thousands of years ago by the Hill Builders to build the Mountainous Plains. This is why the Earthmover and the Hill Builders are called what they are. Most people in Cormilack agree that the Earthmover was last used to make the perfect spiral of mountain ranges that surrounds the valley (I've only seen the inner mountains, but they say you can see the spiral, as perfect as a snail's shell, if you fly high enough). Upon reaching the center, several important parts broke, most the size of small foothills, at the same time that the Earthmover reached the soft, rich soil in the center of the valley and sank immovably into it. The Hill Builders, having finished sculpting the topography of this particular part of Hamjamser, decided that they had no further use for the thing anyway and left it here.

This is a typical Cormilack legend. The townspeople don't disapprove of romance and mysticism - not exactly - but they don't have much use for them either. When it comes to speculation, they're experts, but they'll take the most sensible explanation whenever they can find it.

However and whyever it's here, the Earthmover has obviously been in bad shape for a long time. Every piece of metal on it is worn and rusted. Even the digging blades at the front - which, according to local mechanics, are at least partially made of hypersteel - have their fair share of chips and scratches. One mechanical arm lies limply over a front wheel with tree-sized wires and pistons hanging from its mangled end. The drill it used to hold lies a mile or so away. Segments have fallen off the tire tread. Struts hang crookedly without their counterweights. One end of a massive snapped cable rises above the village, a crazed column of twisted metal as big around as a house and taller than most of the nearby mountains. The other end is frequently obscured by clouds. The whole mountain of ancient machinery is sunk deeper than the height of six houses into the soft soil of the valley, and grass grows in the gaps between peeling metal plates. The flatter parts are covered with trees and houses as well. It's a magnificent wreck.

As eager as I was to begin drawing the Earthmover, the weather made it completely impossible on the very first night I stayed here. Having found a reasonably good inn - it was sheltered, affordable, and warm, and that was enough for me - I was trying to nurse my fingers back to life with a bowl of soup when the rainy season hit Cormilack.

There's no other way to put it. At first, I thought something had exploded. The sound was a bit like the sound of a wet fish hitting a dock - a fish about the size of an average whale. The entire building shook.

No one inside it seemed particularly concerned. A group of people who had been celebrating a birthday party in most of the room, laughing and shouting and working their way steadily through a cake shaped like a large gear, all calmed down slightly. Still talking, they stood up, opened their umbrellas with a chorus of FLOOMPs (except the more amphibious of them, who didn't seem to care about umbrellas), and walked briskly out the door to disperse, still talking, into the ocean that was falling outside.

"Er - what exactly is happening?" I asked the innkeeper. She paused, heading towards the door with an armful of sandbags for the threshold.

"It's raining," she said simply.

I spent the next few months occasionally sketching the Earthmover, on the rare occasions when the rain stopped, but mostly just trying to keep everything dry. This is nearly impossible during a Cormilack winter. The villagers don't even try to keep their houses from flooding; whenever one floor fills with water, they just move all the furniture to the next one up. This explains why, in the middle of the valley, a house for a family of three can be six or seven stories high. It also explains the faint odor of must and pondweed that lingers around even the cleanest houses.

There is no way to describe how wet Cormilack is in the winter. Nowhere else comes close. The water on the ground is only the least of it. Even when it reaches the fifth floors of the houses, it still answers to gravity.

It's the water everywhere else that's the problem. The air is full of fog AND rain, at the same time, which I hadn't even known was possible. On especially wet days, it's hard to tell whether you're above or below the water. There isn't much difference. The fog creeps into the houses through every crack, filling the rooms inside with thick, opaque gray. Anything more than two feet away is invisible. Water trickles down the walls and drips from the ceiling. Rain comes in through every possible opening. Puddles collect in corners. Cups and bowls left in the open fill and overflow. Carpets squish when stepped on. Most people in Cormilack, in fact, don't even bother to have carpets, as the moss in their houses is thicker and doesn't rot. The air barely deserves the name. There's more water in it than air.

Nothing made of metal, paper, or wood is left out in the winter unless it's well covered in something waterproof - oil, wax, varnish, et cetera. Everything else is wrapped up until the spring. The houses are wooden, but far too big to waterproof, so the villagers just add more boards in strategic places when the old ones rot. It wasn't long before I gave up trying to draw. I kept my paper, pens, and pencils in a watertight oilskin package for most of the winter, the same way everyone else does, and got used to being constantly wet.

The floods receded over a few weeks in March, but - as I mentioned - the rest of the valley is still far from solid. The sun shines more often than not now, though, so I've been able to return to sketching the Earthmover. It will still probably be quite a while before I've got a finished drawing of it.

Unlike the migrant floods, the water that collects under the Earthmover stays there all year; the pools down there are the deepest in the whole valley, and the sun never reaches them. They stay dark and cold. Fishermen go down there occasionally, finding their way with candles, tame salamanders, or (in some cases) echolocation. They wade through rust silt to catch the blind crimson fish that swim through corroding wheels and pylons in the black water. Some say the fish have so much metal in them, you can catch them with a magnet.

I haven't eaten any.