Hanagrishel

It was nearly a week before we reached the next inhabited valley.

When we first spotted a narrow peaked roof and chimney over the ridge of the next dune, we were expecting another abandoned (or mostly abandoned) building, like the Blue Hyacinth Tea House. We were surprised when we came over the dune and found the small house on the other side perfectly intact. A neatly tended bed of flowers lay in front of it, and a string of washing was swaying on a line between two trees.

Not wanting to disturb the tidy front yard, we left the gafl happily munching grass on the other side of the valley and crossed a small stone bridge over the stream that ran in front of the house. Garnet sniffed the air as we went. As curious as the rest of us were, she seemed even more so; usually the most shy and retiring of our group, she ended up in front this time. We were surprised yet again when she stepped up and knocked on the door of the house.

There was the sound of slow, shuffling footsteps inside, and the door opened to reveal the oldest werewolf I've ever seen.

She squinted at Garnet, sniffing the air and blinking eyes that were almost lost under a pair of shaggy eyebrows. When she got a good look (or perhaps smell) at the younger woman, her face pleated itself into a maze of smile lines, and she ushered her inside with a delighted "kirim, kiriiim!" Welcome, welcome! Her voice was gravely and surprisingly deep.

Her name, we found out eventually, was Hanagrishel. Whether that was her first or last - or only - name, we were never sure. She spoke an old-fashioned and heavily accented dialect of Halsi, of which I could only make out about one word in five. Garnet seemed to have no trouble understanding her. The two of them kept up a lively conversation all afternoon, though Garnet's side of it was limited to about one sentence every minute or two. Hanagrishel seemed to be trying to make up for several decades' worth of missed conversation in a few hours. Garnet didn't seem to mind; like me, she seems to be the sort of person who prefers listening to talking.

Next to the house, Hanagrishel had a small vegetable garden and a coop of the most evil-looking chickens I've ever seen. As far as we could tell, their eggs were most of what she lived on. She made a great fuss over the chickens while we were there, cooing and stroking their feathers lovingly while they glared beady-eyed murder at the rest of us. A few of them pecked at Garnet's ankles, but she gave them one soft growl, and they stayed politely away from then on.

For our entire visit, I was never entirely sure whether our host actually noticed that the rest of us were there. She set out six plates for lunch (hard-boiled eggs and magnificently purple potatoes, plus a brace of jackalopes that Garnet had caught early that morning). Otherwise, she paid attention only to Garnet. Since she seemed to be somewhat nearsighted and hard of hearing, I got the distinct impression that she navigated the world mainly by smell; perhaps, as the only other werewolf (debatably the only other mammal) around, Garnet was the one she could perceive the most clearly.

After lunch, we offered (through Garnet) to help with any work that might need to be done around the place. To our surprise, there wasn't any. Despite her advanced age, Hanagrishel was apparently perfectly capable of handling all the digging, carpentry, and stonework necessary to maintain the house and garden. Even the house's paint was in pristine condition. "She built her house herself," Garnet informed us. Hanagrishel interjected a few proud sentences. "Three times. There was a tornado and a very large crab. She says it was delicious."

Without any obvious way to repay our host's hospitality (Garnet was already supplying all the socialization she seemed to want), the other four of us gave the two of them some space and walked off to explore the rest of the valley instead. As it wasn't a large one, this only took about half an hour. The ground was too steep and uneven for Chak's tub-barrow, and the stream was too small and rocky for him to swim in, so Mogen just carried him in her arms instead. Karlishek and I offered to take a turn, but she shook her head.

"It's my job," she said matter-of-factly. "Besides, you two would get tired in ten minutes." We had to admit that she was right.

The valley's shrine had a carving of a mother wolf nursing a few small pups and looking on fondly while several older ones played with a bone. Behind the mother wolf was a half-skeletonized deer carcass. Given the carnivorous subject matter, we took this to be the wolf version of an idyllic family dinner, rather than a sign of anything more ominous. The shrine's offering slab had several impressively large bones arranged on it in an artistic fashion.

The talismans hanging from the trees in the valley were similar to the ones in Nemigan's. However, instead of a bowl of honey at the bottom, each one had a glass globe of water containing a single dragonfly nymph. There didn't seem to be any way for them to get out of the globes, or anything inside for them to eat, but each one was the picture of robust, snap-jawed, malevolent health. Perhaps they weren't ordinary nymphs. We asked about them, through Garnet, when we returned. Hanagrishel called them "Prangino gili," a Jingli phrase that Chak said meant "children of the Biter." None of us knew what that meant.

Supper was much the same as lunch, with the addition of another sand walrus that Garnet caught a few valleys over. Hanagrishel clapped her hands when the younger woman returned with it - even more so since Garnet had shifted to her larger, more canine form in order to carry the beast. She seemed shy about it at first, but Hanagrishel made a fuss over her as if she were an adolescent grandchild dressing up in fancy clothes for the first time. I could almost have sworn she actually said "oh, how you've grown," which would have been true enough. The two of them carved up the meat to cook with great enjoyment.

By the goodwill of chance or geography, the moons happened to be full the night we stayed there. Mogen was on watch at midnight when the rest of us were woken by the howling of wolves in the distance. One voice was higher and softer, the other earth-rumblingly low, but they harmonized beautifully while the moons shone overhead.

The next morning, there were two sets of canine paw prints in the soft earth by the banks of the stream. The larger set of prints were roughly the size of my chest; the creature that left them must have been taller than Hanagrishel's house.

We had a pleasant breakfast (more eggs, seasoned with some of our dwindling supply of spices), leaving most of the conversation to Hanagrishel and Garnet. They talked a little less, but seemed to enjoy each other's company more, like two friends or relatives who know each other well enough to do without words now and then.

We had nearly finished packing up to leave when Garnet, after a long hesitation, told us that she was staying in the valley. None of us were entirely surprised. Though we'd enjoyed traveling with her, and hopefully she with us, she'd never seemed entirely at home in either the caravan or our smaller group of travelers - or, from what she'd told us, in most of the other places she'd lived - the way she did in this valley.

"I've been looking for a… for a place where I'm needed. I think I've found it." She smiled across the yard at Hanagrishel, who had pulled out some logs and was busy splitting them into usefully sized sections without the aid of a hatchet. The older woman waved cheerfully and picked a splinter out of her teeth. "Besides, there aren't any other werewolves in my family. I want to learn to be like her."

We parted with a round of hugs and well-wishes. I sketched out a quick portrait of the six of us (Mirenza included, from memory) for Garnet to remember us by. We left her with promises to write and most of the basil and snickleweed remaining in our supply of spices, which she and Hanagrishel had particularly enjoyed the previous night.

When we left the valley, Garnet had taken her claws and fangs out again, and Hanagrishel was showing her how to bite logs in half. Both of them looked happier than I'd ever seen them before.

Unexpected Canines

A few days later, the desert had lowered into a slightly more fertile valley lined with rocky cliffs. It was probably too dry for agriculture - there was a sluggish trail of muddy water down the middle of the valley, no more - but the sand was sprinkled with grass and wiry little bushes. We even caught sight of the occasional goat, though they were always darting out of sight behind rocks by the time we noticed them. They were far warier than we were.

In hindsight, that probably should have told us something.

We walked downstream ("stream" being a generous term) for another day or two. Running water tends to lead to more running water, and enough running water will eventually have people living by it. This is true nearly anywhere in the world. The food - animal and vegetable - was far more plentiful in the valley, and there were occasional clear pools where we stopped to refill our water. Occasionally, there were even trees with enough shade to sit in. Rattlebirds and orange-furred marmlets stared at us from high in the rocks. They scuttled away when we looked at them.

On the third day, we found out why all the animals were so skittish. The valley had gotten deeper, winding in sharp zigzags beneath the sandstone cliffs. There were occasional spots where the water actually trickled instead of oozed. We were in much higher spirits than before. We were walking beside the stream, debating whether marmlets were edible or poisonous like their cousin the nightshade gopher, when we came around a rock and found a pack of saber-dingoes staring at us.

Everyone froze.

Saber-dingoes have gained something of a bad reputation in the Golden Desert; unfortunately, they have earned most of it quite honestly. The most common theory is that they are descended from only the nastiest bits of wild dogs, lions, and wolverines. In most parts of the world, the wild canines - wolves, jackals, thylacines* - will leave people alone, correctly judging that these bizarre upright creatures with their fire and metal are much more dangerous than any wild predator. Saber-dingoes are different. They will not attack large groups of animals - hence the use of caravans for desert travel - but they will not hesitate to attack anything, no matter how large or well-armed, as long as they outnumber it.

There were four of us. There were eight dingoes. The smallest of them probably weighed more than Garnet. We had a few knives between us, ranging from bread knives to potato peelers; the dingoes had claws and teeth. They also had the fangs for which they are named, two each, serrated blades as long as my forearm that hung down to either side of their chins. If anyone had been placing bets, they would not have been on us.

We had been downwind of the dingoes, and they had been busy dividing up a dead goat, so they were as surprised as we were - but considerably more pleased. In moments, they had left the goat behind and were slinking toward us with the casual, eager grace of a predator who has just spotted much larger and better-fed prey.

We raised such pathetic excuses for weapons as bread knives and backpacks and tried not to panic. The goat did not look as if it had had a chance to run very far.

That was when Garnet came out from behind us. We tried to stop her - pointlessly, as a few feet more or less of distance was clearly not going to make much difference to the dingoes - but she shrugged us away and kept going.

She stopped, facing the ranks of saber-toothed grins, and began to grow.

Thick, black fur sprouted along her arms and neck, and her loose clothes rustled and shifted as muscles and limbs expanded beneath them. We could hear her bones creaking. In what seemed like an eternity but was probably less than twenty seconds, there was a nine-foot-tall black werewolf with claws like a velociraptor standing where the small woman had been. She was still wearing the same delicate pink sari she'd had since leaving the caravan. It looked positively tiny on her now.

Wordless, she pulled back her lips and growled at the pack, giving them (and us) a clear view of fangs that would have put a crocodile to shame.

The pack held very still for a second. Then, without the slightest twitch as a warning, the largest saber-dingo - a male with a ragged mane - sprang for her throat.

She met him halfway. There was a brief scuffle, full of flying sand and snarls like ripping cloth. The two of them paused just long enough for us to see that she had somehow gotten her teeth around his throat - he probably would have lost it if not for his mane - and then she flexed the muscles of her neck and shoulders and threw him fifteen feet into a sand dune. She was on him again before he could get back on his paws.

The other dingoes tried to leap at Garnet as soon as her back was turned. After all, the point of a pack is not to attack things alone. The rest of us shouted warnings, and she backhanded them across the sand before they could get near her. They gave up after only a few tries.

The largest one was far more stubborn. I won't go into detail about the rest of the fight, except to say that he was bleeding from a dozen wounds - none of them fatal; she seemed uninterested in killing him - and was missing most of his left ear by the time he finally gave up, crawling away with what remained of his tail between his legs. The rest of the pack followed him without a sound.

Garnet stood there, panting, and watched them go until they were out of sight behind the next bend in the valley. She turned and gave us an apologetic grin with too much red in it.

"Sorry if I frightened you," she said, and collapsed.

It took all three of us to drag her over to the stream. We had cleaned her wounds, as well as we could, and were just starting to bandage them when she shifted back to human. Every cut promptly healed on its own. This is fairly normal for shapeshifters; they never stay wounded for long. When you're reshaping your entire body, there's no reason to leave holes in it.

Garnet remained unconscious until after sundown. When she woke up, she emptied the nearest pool of water, ate our entire supply of dried meat, and followed it with everything that remained of the dingoes' goat. If she hadn't been so exhausted, I suspect she would have gone out into the dark to catch another one.

When she had finished, she apologized again for frightening us and for not telling us sooner. We assured her that no apologies were necessary. After all, if she hadn't been there, we would have been not only frightened, but rather unpleasantly dead as well.

We had to admit, though, that we were rather curious.

Garnet had come from a part of the Desert where werewolves were rumored to live, she said, but none of her relatives could remember there being one in the family before. Apparently, it's a trait that can skip many generations before it shows up again, like blue eyes in a dark-eyed family, or carnivorism in a family of herbivores. She confused her parents to no end as a teenager. She was always hungry - she could out-eat everyone in her family - but she never seemed to actually grow any larger. No one was sure where she was putting it all.

They found out when she changed for the first time, at age fifteen. She had been growing - but not in her normal body. Instead, it had all been going into that mysterious little side pocket of existence where werewolves keep their extra mass. The first time she changed, she destroyed her dress and half of the room she was in, mostly due to panicking and exiting through the nearest wall.

She's been careful to wear loose clothing ever since, just in case.

She stays human nearly all the time because it's easier, she said; she weighs less, eats less, hits her head on fewer doorways, and is far less hot without all that black fur. Also, walking around as a nine-foot pillar of muscle and sharp ends tends to frighten people.

"Actually," she said with a rueful laugh, "it frightens me a little too. It's too big, too strong, too pointy. Most of the time, I just try to forget the wolf is there." She paused for a moment, then smiled. "I guess it was good to have it today, though."

We all quite emphatically agreed.



* Yes, I know that thylacines are not technically canines, but they take much the same role in the parts of the world where they live. The same is true for houndworms, cerulean monitor lizards, and the feral candroids in a few of the wrecked floating cities.

The Desert Road

Now that the word-plague is cured and the town is no longer under linguistic quarantine, I packed up my things and left Arkit this morning. I made sure to leave before dawn. Travel in the Golden Desert is much more pleasant if you can reach someplace shady by noon.

Arkit is on one of the few permanent roads in the Desert. Elsewhere, there would be little point in roads; an unpaved one would just be sand on sand, and anything more solid would be buried by the sand instead. It would be like building a road on the ocean.*

However, being near the river, there are enough grasses and weeds here (Desert weeds are tough and brown and dead-looking) that the absence of them qualifies as a path. Or, if you're feeling generous, a road.

I'm traveling the Golden Desert on foot, as usual. I've acquired a wide-brimmed hat and some of the loose, blindingly white clothing worn by Desert nomads. These protect me from most of the sun. That only leaves the heat radiating up from the sand, the hot, gritty breeze that smells of dryness and baked stone, and the times - even worse - when the breeze doesn't blow. The air congeals then into something thick and unbreathable, like syrup poured over a pancake sizzling on the endless frying pan that is the Golden Desert.

It has taken me some time to become accustomed to the heat.

Fortunately, my body and the Shapeshifter's Curse I inherited have been as resourceful as ever. My toes have become quite long and thin, spreading my weight across the sand while exposing a minimum of skin to it. My skin, in turn, has developed a coat of scales even whiter than my clothing, with a collection of heat-shedding frills where my hair would be in colder weather. Several people have noted my resemblance to various Desert lizards. This seems like a good sign. The lizards, after all, have had quite a lot of time to adapt to this place; if I can become half as comfortable as them in little more than a year, I count myself quite lucky.

I have become surprisingly comfortable here, in fact. The heat has ceased to bother me much. I enjoy the silence of the long spaces between towns. The settlements of the Golden Desert tend to be bustling, exuberant places, communities of people who will gather around any source of water to build their houses and plant their crops and celebrate the miracle of life existing in the middle of such desolation. I love staying in Desert towns. After a week, though - sometimes two or three - I start to long for the desolation again, for a place where there are no voices to drown out my thoughts. I like people, but in moderation.

I have had many companions on my travels, but silence and solitude are by far the oldest and fondest of them.

They have been good company today. I spent the morning and parts of the afternoon traveling solo, wading through the rippling heat haze over the hard-packed road. My feet fell easily into the familiar rhythm of walking. I passed few travelers. One or two people passed me, traveling in the opposite direction on foot or on faded wooden wagons full of sand-tubers. One woman rode by on a flightless bird, somewhere between ostrich and roadrunner; there were message tubes strapped to both its legs, like a carrier pigeon. Each one must have held a scroll longer than my arm. The woman gave me a crisp salute with one white-gloved hand and shouted a greeting as she passed by. I didn't recognize the language.

Other than that, I spent the day alone. The silence stretched on long enough that started to notice the details of the Desert around me. Even here, there's always something moving. Occasional clouds wandered up over the horizon and burned up in the mid-afternoon sun. The darker shapes of vultures and winged hyenas passed overhead, dismissing me as too mobile for food. The hyenas called to each other with crow-like bursts of cackling that echoed for miles across the sand. Small, unseen creatures rustled in the weeds. Fine sprays of sand sifted from the tops of the nearby dunes. The wind blew dry notes across the brim of my hat.

I walked.

I have no particular destination in mind, and therefore little reason to care when I arrive. It wouldn't much matter if I did. The Golden Desert is a place of vast and changeable distances, impossible to predict; as the saying goes, you'll get there when you get there. People rarely hurry here.

Besides, it's just too hot.



*This has, of course, been attempted in many parts of the world, with varying degrees of success. Notable examples include the Serpent's Backbone, a floating bridge made of giant vertebrae that links a few dozen of the islands of Kennyrubin; Trifrost, an ice causeway kept frozen by imported glacier snails in the tropical waters of Barbaleel; and Skimmer's Path, a road built by the Great Acrobat, who somehow convinced a fifty-mile stretch of ocean to increase its surface tension to the consistency of ankylosaur leather. To this day, no one is sure how he did it.

Shapeshifters

Twokk, as it turns out, is mostly surrounded by farmland. I suppose most towns are. They had run out of things to paint - the need for artists tends to be limited in places this small - so I moved on this morning. The cook of the Moons and Magpie gave me half a dozen different kinds of food when I left, all of them made of locusts.* She says they'll last for months. I believe her.

The road out of town (an actual road, not one of the treacherous paths of the Scalps) winds through fields of cotton. The vegetable lambs are still young at this time of year. They sit curled on top of their stalks, cradled by leaves, pink skin still showing through their first layer of cotton wool. The fields are full of the sound of tiny bleating.

Most people are fairly sure that the vegetable lambs were created by shapeshifters. Not all hybrids of plants and animals were shifter-made, of course. Though no one can be entirely sure, tubermoles probably came into existence the normal way (whatever that happens to be), as did the enigmatic Greenlings and the trapper vines with their subterranean stomachs. Most of them are closer to one side or the other, though. Greenlings and trapper vines are mostly animal; they just happen to be capable of photosynthesis. Tubermoles are basically roots with digging claws.

The vegetable lamb, though, is an even division of plant and animal: a little sheep on a stalk. That rarely happens when shapeshifters aren't involved. No one is sure how many of the living things in Hamjamser were originally created by shapeshifters. The meatroots that feed the floating cities** certainly were; their creator's name was Sashrem. Tesra Sashrem, some call her - a craftswoman who worked in flesh and bone. There are statues to her on most of the floating cities, depicted as whatever species she happened to look like at the time each sculptor met her. She also created coal-nuts and the dirigible octopus. She supposedly said that sea-spackle, silt-crabs, and the surprisingly popular memory leeches were also created by shapeshifters, though she respected their privacy too much to mention their names.

She was unusual. It's rare to meet a shapeshifter and know it. Nearly all of them stay hidden, anonymous, using their extraordinary abilities to appear completely ordinary.

Most of Hamjamser's disguised people have a perfectly innocent reason to hide themselves, of course. Vancians consider faces to be private. Visitors to Samrath Kazi used to be required to wear a mask if they didn't meet the town's standards of beauty.*** Cloisterers hide their faces for religious reasons. Aggravarns (sometimes called the Worms that Walk) occasionally cause vomiting in people who are scared of worms; they usually feel just awful about this, so they wear coats over their collective bodies when they go outside, recognizable only by the faint squishing noise when they walk. Some troglodytes simply sunburn easily. Shapeshifters have a similar but different reason: they don't want the attention.

Like anyone with rare and exceptional abilities, shapeshifters tend to become instantly famous whenever and wherever they reveal themselves. Everyone is curious about them. Everyone wants to find out more about them, to understand how they work, often to ask them for help. Even ordinary conversations with shapeshifters can be awkward; no matter how good your intentions, it's almost impossible to forget that they've built themselves from scratch. The mind has a tendency to dwell on how they must have sculpted their bones, strung their muscles, tailored their skin, wired their nerves... If, that is, they even need nerves. People with near-perfect control of every cell of their bodies (or whatever they prefer to use instead of cells) have little need for anything as inefficient as a nervous system.

This is why many people are somewhat uncomfortable around shapeshifters. Of course, being basically sensible, most inhabitants of Hamjamser think nothing of it after a few days; they have no qualms about eating dinner with someone who uses a homemade stomach and could grow their own silverware from their fingernails. The shapeshifters answer the same questions that everyone asks them constantly over the years of their unending lives, smiling patiently, and all is well.

Still, there are always a few people who can't get used to shapeshifters, and even more who are just annoyingly curious. This is why most shapeshifters have stayed in disguise for the last few centuries. Their existence is fairly common knowledge; most people have heard of them, if only as a myth. Individual shapeshifters, though, prefer to stay anonymous. All we see is their handiwork.

Many village healers are actually shapeshifters. (The villagers are usually polite enough to avoid finding out.) Being able to manipulate individual cells - their own and, with far more difficulty, those of others - shapeshifters have healing abilities far beyond anyone else's. Most of what we know about biology was discovered by shapeshifters; they've seen it, or sensed it, firsthand. They build their own cells, defend themselves against diseases, puzzle out the complex mechanics of reproduction (and often design more convenient systems of their own). Medicine would be very different without their vast and microscopic experience.

Their creations have changed the world just as much. Life on the floating cities would be impossible without the meatroot; even if there was room for pastures in the vast machinery of the cities, the weight of a whole city's livestock would make them too heavy to float. Without memory leeches, who provide brains in exchange for blood, the mental abilities of abacus thinkers and omniglots would be equally impossible.

Then, of course, there are their descendants. About one person in sixteen has some sort of obvious quirk inherited from a shapeshifting ancestor, however distant. Some call it the Shapeshifter's Curse. Many of its apparently random manifestations certainly seem like curses - there are tails that never stop growing, hearts that play hide-and-seek with doctors, and a bizarrely common variation that causes the random growth of extra teeth.**** It's harmless most of the time, though. Many people even consider it a gift. It also shows itself in unexpected wings, in perfect immune systems, in shifting kaleidoscope skin, in bodies that heal without scars when anyone else would die - sometimes even in immortality. Many inheritors of the Shapeshifter's Curse never age past a certain point. I've met people who have been thirty (physically, at least) for hundreds of years.*****

My own variation of the Curse has been useful, however slow and uncontrolled - a constant, gradual change that always seems to know what I'm going to need, wherever I find myself. In the Winter, I grow fur; in the swamp, I once grew gills. It's possible that the legends about the wandering of the Cursed are true, and I might have settled down in one place if I had a body that could settle down in one shape. I don't know. Without shapeshifters, though, I'm sure I'd be quite a different person.

Without shapeshifters, you probably wouldn't be reading this letter.

* Swarms of locusts come through Twokk occasionally, though it might be more correct to say that the town comes through them. The insatiable insects normally eat everything in sight. They're probably surprised when Twokk eats them instead.

** Another combination of plant and animal, by the way. The meatroots are enormous, turnips the size of mountains with roots of solid steak.

*** This is not the case now, of course, as the town no longer exists.

**** I have several myself. There are rumors of people who have even grown teeth on their eyeballs, but I suspect that this is hyperbole.

***** Whether they see it as a blessing or a curse after all that time depends heavily on the person.

Hollowane

This October, I happened to be in Golgoolian on Hollowane Night. I'm glad I was. The city throws itself into the holiday with more enthusiasm than anywhere else I've ever been.

Hollowane is the night of illusions, when everyone tries to look as strange as possible in the hopes of getting candy. Half the people in the city dress up and go out onto the streets; the other half dress up and stay home to feed the random strangers at their door. There are chocolates and candied fruit and muffins wherever you look, lollipops and peppermints and sugar beetles, berries and bonbons, fruit jewels and candymoss and the little spiral pastries called Shwamp shnails. The bakeries, fruit stalls, and sweet shops of Golgoolian are nearly emptied for Hollowane.

I wasn't out to get candy (I took what people in the crowd gave me, but that's all I want to carry), and I didn't have anywhere to give it out from, so I mostly just walked around the city. I wandered through Golgoolian all night. There were people and things everywhere, walking and eating and singing at the slightest provocation.

Practically everyone in Golgoolian is in costume on Hollowane. They mismatch their clothes, paint their skin and scales and fur, and hang curtains from their antlers. Groups of courtiers trade masks of their own faces and become each other for the night. Acrobats walk on their hands and put sock puppets on their feet. A few of the people in the crowd actually had two heads; others were two people sharing a costume. A spiny reptile had stuck fruit and vegetables on every spike - onions, turnips, squash, and a small cherry on the tip of his nose. A large samoval had rubbed something into his fur that made him glow pale blue all over. One... something... seemed to have covered itself with most of a hillside. It shed dirt in clumps as it walked. Grass covered its back and shoulders, pebbles dotted it like scales, and a small tree was growing out of its head. Someone else was wearing an outfit of creased leather that, in the dark, looked exactly like the wooden skin of a Drae. There were blue eyes behind the dark knotholes.

Golgoolian has more costume makers than anywhere else in the Railway Regions. They spend all year getting ready for that one night. The makers of wigs and artificial tails (a common sight in any city or medium-sized town) serve a steady stream of the bald and unentailed all year, but they still do more business in October than in all the other months together.

All over the city, the toads were dancing in the sinkhole gardens. It was like...

Well...

I can't explain it. If you've never seen a toad dancing, no amount of description can possibly tell you what it's like.

The moons were full. The moons are always full on Hollowane. It's a tradition. A group from the Lupine Astronomers' Guild had decided to come to Golgoolian for the celebrations, and the streets were full of grinning, hairy shapes. Some looked like ordinary people of canine ancestry; others looked like wolves, or large dogs, or massive hulks of teeth and bristles half-glimpsed in the darkness. The crowds of big furry stargazers added something to the celebration, a sort of intense canine happiness that seems to follow them wherever they go. Everything's more fun with werewolves.

They would stop every now and then, as if on cue, to howl hauntingly at the moons. Several of them had started doing four-part harmony and jazz improvisations by the end of the night.

Hollowane is the one night when shapeshifters all over Hamjamser (full shapeshifters, not their half-malleable descendants, like the werewolves or myself) get to show what they're really capable of doing. They can walk the streets undisguised, in all their frilled, multicolored, glittering glory, each one completely different from the others and many different from one moment to the next. If anyone recognizes them, they can always say that it was just a costume.

The people of Golgoolian also believe that on Hollowane, the things that live under the city come out to join the celebration. No one is sure exactly what the things under the city are, but almost everyone is sure that they're there. All that space has to have something in it. There are tales of mole-people, of albino alligators, of earthworms bigger than the Train and mud that writes poetry. You can find all of those on the streets during Hollowane. They're part of the city's mythology. It's anyone's guess how many of them are people in costumes.

As if that weren't enough, every ghost in Hamjamser gets stronger on Hollowane night. They refuse to be overshadowed by real people. No one is sure why. Some ghosts have even been known to leave their usual routines for the night, doing something new instead of the one thing they've been echoing for years or centuries. Three years ago, the ghostly actors in Tazramack stopped halfway through "Without the Dragon," the show they've been repeating since their deaths, and instead launched into an impromptu performance of "The Importance of Being Hairy," a comedy by the brilliant Worsel Acid. According to the audience (the theater allows a larger one than usual on Hollowane, due to the temporary amplification of the ghosts), they put on a splendid show. Scofferell Flint and Giacomo Cargellini even managed to acquire a plate of ghostly muffins for one scene. It's never happened again.

There are a lot of ghosts in a city as large as Golgoolian. In the dark, it's hard to tell them apart from real people.

For quite a lot of people, including me, that's the most exciting thing about Hollowane: the people out on the streets could be anyone or anything. There are a lot of strange and wonderful things in Hamjamser that stay hidden all year. Some of them are frightening; others, like shapeshifters, are just a little too interesting for their own good. Hollowane is a chance for them all to come out of hiding. By the next day, the shapeshifters have returned to their disguises; the troglodytes have gone back underground; the werewolves have returned to their observatory on Mount Moler. The ghosts fade. The clandestine androids cover themselves once again with artificial skin and rubber muscles. The world goes back to normal, or at least a very convincing imitation of it.

For many people, Hollowane is a chance to dress up as something else. For others, it's a chance to be entirely themselves, if only for a single night.

Town of Fossils

I spent most of a week this Summer in Tazramack, a cold town high in the mountains, where things keep for a long time. Everything there has a strange, fossilized quality, as if the town exists inside an old photograph. I couldn't escape the feeling that if I had visited a hundred years ago, I wouldn't have been able to tell the difference.

Nothing ever dies in Tazramack. Not permanently. If it does, it is promptly stuffed and put in the nearest museum. A third of the people are taxidermists, and half the buildings are museums. They are dark and dusty and vaguely creepy. The narrow halls and dimly lit rooms are stuffed with stuffed animals - deer, horses, trantelopes, thugrofflers, cats and canines of all sizes, tortoises, seals and dolphins, even fish. There's an entire museum devoted to the art of preserving dead frogs. Another is basically a three-story filing cabinet full of drawers of dried insects. A third specializes in teeth, from micro-shrew bicuspids to a havernack's tusk that required the construction of a second tower, as it is taller than the museum itself. For some reason I could never understand, every museum in the town - no matter what else is in it - has a stuffed alligator hanging from the ceiling somewhere. Just one. It might be in an entrance hall, a dusty back room, or even hanging nose-down in a broom closet, but it will be there somewhere. No one seems to know where the alligators came from originally. People in Tazramack don't ask questions about the past; they just preserve it.

When the town was built, it seems to have been dug out as much as it was built up. The streets are narrow trenches cut into the stone of the mountain. The first floor of every building is hollowed out, rooms carved in the blocks left between streets, and the wooden upper floors were built on top of them later. Some buildings even have stone furniture sprouting like mushrooms out of the floor. Fossils coat every piece of stone in the town. Only the most delicate have ended up in museums; there isn't room for the rest. Half of the mountain seems to be made of fossilized creatures. The streets are paved with stone clams instead of cobblestones. Every wall is lined with trilobites, ammonites, reticulated sea-nullipedes, and hundreds of other things I'd never even seen before. There are shells smaller than grains of sand and sea-serpents so long that they stretch through the foundations of five or six buildings. Scaly coils form arches above alleyways. The central square of the town was hollowed out around the three biggest fossils: a prehistoric shark, a giant squid, and an enormous eurypterid, circling each other on pedestals of stone above the ground. It's impossible to tell whether they're preparing to fight or taking part in some ancient aquatic dance. On market days, the townspeople set up stalls in the spaces between the eurypterid's legs. Pigeons perch on tentacles the size of trees and make their nests between the teeth of the giant shark. People count their sharks' teeth (the main form of currency in Tazramack) and haggle over the price of sump squid in the shadow of creatures that could have eaten them without bothering to chew. No one seems to think anything of it.

I'm still not sure whether I'm glad or not to have shed my skin in Tazramack. It came off in late July this year, when the Train had stopped in the town to pick up a few boxes of coal. (They use it to train the salamanders, the way dog trainers use biscuits.) As I've said before, I enjoy most of the effects of my particular example of the Shapeshifter's Curse; the changes I go through all year mostly seem to be adaptations to make me more comfortable. When the weather changes, I usually have to endure only a few weeks of discomfort before I change to match. If I spent long enough in the water, I'd probably grow gills. (I haven't had much interest in trying that yet.)

I've had fur in the Summer a few times. I don't know how full-time mammals can stand it.

Even when my fur falls out, the way it does almost every Spring, I try to spend the Summer in cold places. the Mountainous Plains practically roast themselves at this time of year. The same heat that keeps Cormilack thawed and soggy all Winter boils it like a squid steamer in July (another reason so few mammals live in Cormilack.) Normally, I shed in the Spring the way most mammals do, except that I don't grow a Summer coat to replace the Winter one. I just stay bald until Autumn. This year, for some reason, it was different - I lost not just the fur, but the top few layers of skin with it, so it all came off in one piece. (I'm used to shedding my skin, but not when there's fur on it.) Underneath was a layer of scales in a rather nice shade of orange. I think my salamander approved.

I was lucky to be in Tazramack at the time, I suppose; skins shed by reptiles are common enough, but there may not be another place on Hamjamser where people would be interested in a skin shed by a mammal. I had half a dozen taxidermists offering to buy it by the next day. I eventually sold it to the Tazramack Museum of Taxidermy (one of over thirty museums of taxidermy in Tazramack - it gets to use the town's name because it's the biggest), which had exactly eighteen of the thirty-six furs shed by shapeshifter's descendants in the Railway Regions. The other eighteen are in a museum in Tetravania. The Tazramack Museum was delighted to have mine and take the lead.

In short, there is now a stuffed Nigel Tangelo at the Tazramack Museum of Taxidermy. They have it dressed up very nicely. They wanted to buy some of my clothes as well, for perfect accuracy, but I refused.

It's a strange town.

Molting

I'm finally growing my winter coat. It took longer than usual this year - usually, the fur starts coming in soon after the first freeze. Maybe being in the Train confused it. It's warm inside, between the people and the salamanders, though I've had to wear three coats whenever I go out. I can see why so many reptiles hibernate through the Winter.

Unfortunately, this means I'll have to shed the scales I've had over the Summer. That's never fun. Anyone who thinks shedding fur is bad has never had scales. Actually, shedding skins normally is fine - it's a strange feeling when they're loose but not off yet, and the eyelids aren't much fun, but you get used to it after a while. I've done it three or four times already this year. Last year, I found out that shed skins - intact ones - are worth a good bit at the Cormilack cloth market. There are more reptiles in Cormilack than average; most mammals don't like having wet fur for half the year. As a result of that, and of Lady Xeredile's usual eye for opportunities, Cormilack is one of Hamjamser's main sources of shed skins (or "scale silk," as people prefer to call them). Scale silk raincoats are very popular among people who can afford them and don't mind wearing secondhand skin. They're completely waterproof, and the scale patterns make each one different. (Oddly enough, even people who like wearing leather often find the idea creepy. Don't ask me why.)

It seemed a bit strange at first to be selling my own skin (ex-skin?), but I wasn't about to turn down five gold Loundas because of that. I'm quite used to it by now. I've been keeping my shed skins since then, when I have room in my suitcases. There's no telling when I might pass through Cormilack again - or, for that matter, somewhere else where people are interested in scale silk. I'll have to see if anyone uses it in Tetravania. My scales this summer have been pale green with blue spots. I'll be rather sad to see them go.

Usually, though, I only shed the outer layer of whatever scales I have; they just sort of fade when something else replaces them. This time, for whatever reason, the scales are coming off whole, all at once - and the new fur has already started growing between them. This has happened once or twice before. It itches.

Most of the time, I enjoy the effects of having Shapeshifter ancestry, but I prefer the more gradual changes.

Oh well. With any luck, I'll find someone who's interested in buying an unusually thick shed skin covered with whole scales and lots of little holes from fur growing through it. It'll certainly be unusual.

Seven Random Facts

Since it's an odd, random thing, I've decided to reply to Moominlight's open invitation to the Seven Random Facts meme. I'm sure everyone knows by now that I am a traveling artist, have been (briefly) inside the Palace of Madmen, have a habit of getting into tight spots with unusual menus, and use parentheses and semicolons more than is healthy, so here are seven other random facts:

1. I have never eaten chocolate I didn't like. (Perfectly good chocolate that happens to have things I don't like in it, such as licqeurs and peanut butter, doesn't count. It's not the chocolate's fault.)

2. I inherited the Shapeshifter's Curse from some extremely distant ancestor, but I enjoy it most of the time.

3. Many people make chains out of paper clips. Since many people do that, I make chains out of used staples.

4. I pick up a rock everywhere I go (everywhere that has rocks, anyway. Not swamps). A pretty rock. I can't resist. Unfortunately, I can't carry them all with me, so I have to leave the least pretty ones behind every so often. This is very sad and will probably drive geologists mad in a few thousand years.

5. I have actually received an actual real compliment from one of my two favorite artists* (the one who's still alive).

6. I am currently reading 23 comic series (comic books, graphic novels, webcomics, whatever you want to call them).

7. I draw a map of every place I stay, even if it's only for one night. I know, drawing maps is a sign of insanity and futile as well, but I like doing it.

Like Moominlight, I'm not tagging anyone with this; all the bloggers I know well enough have already done it. I also simply leave this open to anyone who would like to try.


*(Or, at least, the two artists who come to mind first when someone asks me who my favorite artist is. That's as close as I can get. I have dozens of favorite artists; asking me to narrow them down by actually thinking about it would be useless. It's almost as bad as trying to pick a favorite author. Almost, but not quite.)