Processional Crabs

A day of relatively uneventful travel was interrupted in the late afternoon when both carts came to an abrupt halt. The gafl were shuffling their feet and making unhappy snuffling noises. When we got out to see what had upset them, we found a line of crabs marching along on the ground ahead.

Each one was carrying a piece of food: a leaf, a root, an apple, a dead mouse or beetle. Several of them were carrying the dead bodies of other members of their species, but these were crabs, after all; the only unusual thing was that they hadn't already eaten them. The overall effect was similar to a line of ants, only considerably larger, and all moving sideways. Though most of their cargo was ordinary enough, one was carrying a sausage; another had somehow acquired an entire cupcake, intact and in pristine condition. A chocolate-covered coffee bean perched on top of the frosting, unmarred by even a grain of sand.

Despite their small size, the crabs evidently frightened the gafl, who resolutely refused to cross the line. We couldn't have moved the wagons forward without crushing the crabs anyway, or at the very least finding some way to halt their progress while we passed, which we found we were reluctant to do. Besides, we were curious as to where they were all going. We turned to follow them instead.

The sun was setting when we reached the top of a ridge and finally discovered the crabs' destination. The line ended at a heap of food spread across a flat area of the valley below.

Sitting behind the heap was a crab the size of a house.

Each of its eyestalks was taller than I am. Its legs were lazily spread around it, like the buttresses of a cathedral, and it was using both claws to pick through the pile of food with all the delicacy of a gourmet. The total silence of its movements was rather unsettling in so large a creature. Bits of roots and leaves were scattered on the ground around it, apparently too bland for its tastes, but every piece of meat the smaller crabs brought was quickly snatched up and stuffed into its scissoring mouthparts. A few of the smaller crabs would have been snatched up themselves if they hadn't scuttled away quickly enough.

Silently, we all backed up a little, crouching down behind the ridge until we were out of sight of the large and apparently carnivorous crab. Mogen quite sensibly attempted to pull us farther away. Curiosity got the better of us, though, and we peeked over the ridge just long enough to see the crab with the cupcake deliver its gift.

When the giant saw the smaller crab holding up the cupcake in front of it, it actually clapped its claws together in apparent delight. The clack they made was deep and unsettlingly meaty, like a collision between two wooden barrels full of steak. With exquisite care, one rowboat-sized claw came down, plucked the cupcake from the tiny claws that held it, and tucked it unharmed into the giant's chitinous maw.

A shiver ran through the giant's body. It sat perfectly still for a moment. Then, with a majestic and terrible grace, it rose to its feet and began to dance.

If it had been performed on two legs, I might perhaps have identified the step as a waltz. Both massive claws waved joyfully in the air above the crab's carapace while its legs spun it in elegant circles. Despite the lazy grace of the movements, each step of the giant's legs sent a tremor through the ground. All around it, the smaller crabs dropped their gifts and ran for their lives. (Several took the opportunity to steal a better gift from one of their fellows; these were crabs, after all.)

We probably should have run as well, but the giant crab's dance was such a bizarre surprise that we watched, enchanted, for several seconds before Mogen grabbed us (all three at once; I'm still not sure how) and dragged us bodily back from the ridgeline. She was quite right, of course, and we offered our thanks and apologies as soon as we were several valleys away and (hopefully) safely out of earshot of the giant.

We speculated about the crab in hushed tones for the rest of the evening. Was it a spirit? A mutant of some sort? Would any of the smaller crabs have eventually grown to that size, if not eaten by predators or each other? We had no way of knowing.

Still, we all agreed that we were glad it had the smaller crabs to fetch food for it. Otherwise, it might have felt the need to go hunt for itself.

Surprising Sheep

Roughly a century ago, in the town of Specklemax, a modestly successful farmer by the name of Ekestrial Floo decided to supplement the income of his farm by breeding brindled sheep. Brindled sheep were by no means new to Specklemax; the breed had been something of a local specialty for several generations, as had the attractive salt-and-pepper yarn produced from their variegated wool. Not much had changed about the breed since the brindled pattern had first been introduced some decades before.

Ekestrial Floo was at least as much an inventor as a farmer, an enthusiast in amateur engineering of both the mechanical and genetic varieties. He kept a small army of customized clockwork pipe crawlers, which plowed, seeded, and irrigated his fields, and which only occasionally attempted to upend and plant his house. Much of his success was due to his creation of a variety of pumpkin whose fruit, when left to ripen in the sun for a week or two, fermented into a moderately powerful explosive.*

Given this sort of track record, when Floo began to leave more of the day-to-day operation of his farm to his sister (who had her own, far more predictable, farm to run, but evidently never lost the habit of taking care of her baby brother) so that he could devote most of his attention to his sheep project, the people of Specklemax knew that he must be up to something interesting. Neighbors began to drop by the farm more often, partly out of curiosity, partly out of a desire to be forewarned if the lambs began to fly or breathe fire.

The results were far more mundane; journals and letters from the time report that Floo initially succeeded only in producing sheep with a greater variety of striped patterns. He was evidently dissatisfied by this development, though, intending something far more original, so the neighbors kept checking.

They were not disappointed. After four years of work, Ekestrial Floo walked into town one market day proudly leading the first of a new breed of plaid sheep.

They were twins, in fact: one had fleece with a pleasant blue and yellow plaid pattern, the other a handsome red and black. Some of the more cynical townspeople naturally accused Floo of simply dyeing the sheep, but a quick shearing of one plaid flank showed that the pattern was mirrored in the skin beneath.

Floo's triumph was lessened somewhat when he discovered that the process of spinning the plaid fleece into yarn or thread would inevitably blend all of the colors together into a muddy green or brown. He had apparently expected that the sheep would allow the production of plaid fabric - a favorite in Specklemax - without the need to dye the wool beforehand. Unfortunately, he had neglected to speak to a weaver, or anyone with an actual knowledge of textile production, before embarking on his project.

Though he was initially crushed to have wasted four years of his life on a pointless project, Floo did live long enough to see his plaid sheep become one of Specklemax's major tourist attractions, which I hope came as something of a consolation to him. The sheep are now a familiar sight in the area, scattered like brightly patterned handkerchiefs across the hills around the town.

Specklemax, incidentally, is in a relatively low-lying and swampy area of the Mountainous Plains. To the best of my knowledge, it has never been less than several months' travel from any of the more arid regions of Hamjamser.

It came as something of a surprise, therefore, when we crossed a dune on the outskirts of the Golden Desert and found a small flock of Specklemax plaid sheep grazing in the valley below.

They were unmistakably the Specklemax variety; the placement of their eyes, which are unusually protruding even for sheep, is quite distinctive. None of us could imagine how they had ended up in this remote corner of the world.

Naturally, those of us blessed with legs left the wagons and approached the flock for a closer look. Sheep are rarely the most observant creatures around, but these seemed so utterly unconcerned about their surroundings - including our approach - that we paid perhaps less attention than we should have while we walked toward them.

As a result, we were taken entirely by surprise when a giant centipede erupted out of a nearby patch of sand, hissing like a homicidal steam engine and rearing up high enough to block the sun with its outspread legs and fangs.

I don't know what species it was, but it was far larger than even crocodile centipedes ever grow. I've seen streetcars that were shorter and probably weighed less. Mogen had her crossbow out before I could do more than blink, but I doubt it would have had much effect on the creature. Even if she had managed to hit a joint in the centipede's heavily armored body, a single crossbow bolt would likely have done little more than make it angrier.

"My sheep!" The centipede hissed in a voice like a pot boiling over. "Mine! No touch! If you touch them, I will kill you and bite you until you die!"

Oddly enough, this was actually reassuring. Creatures that offer threats instead of simply attacking you can usually be reasoned with.

Being the only member of the group who'd visited Specklemax and encountered plaid sheep before, I was walking slightly ahead of the others. As a result, I found myself in the uncomfortable position of negotiating with the giant angry venomous chilopod. I've traveled by kilopede and have no particular fear of arthropods of any size, but kilopedes are essentially placid creatures. This one was quite clearly not.

Still, it was speaking Amrat, sibilantly accented but perfectly understandable, and it hadn't actually made a move toward us since we'd stopped approaching the sheep. Its sheep, apparently.

I reassured the centipede that we had no intention of touching its sheep; we merely wanted to look at them. It hissed suspiciously at me.

They were, I added, very nice sheep.

At that, the centipede's hostile attitude seemed to melt away completely. It flipped its antennae forward and rubbed its claws together.

"Yesss! Are they not beautiful?" the centipede crooned. With alarming speed for such a large creature, it dropped back to the ground and scuttled over to the sheep, where it curled its body into a circle around the entire flock. It rubbed its head lovingly against a plump red and yellow one. "I have named this one Rock because she is the prettiest." The sheep all continued to chew placidly as if this sort of thing happened all the time.

After that, conversation with the centipede went remarkably smoothly. Once reassured that we had no intention of touching, stealing, eating, bothering, or otherwise interfering with its sheep, the massive arthropod was happy to tell us all of the minutiae of its apparent occupation as a shepherd. We were treated to an exhaustive list of what the sheep did and did not like to eat, given far more information than we needed about their various ailments, and personally introduced to each sheep by name. (For reasons the centipede did not explain, a full third of the sheep in the flock, both male and female, were named Skeezel. Perhaps it simply liked the name.)

As far as we could tell, the sheep had most likely wandered off from another caravan, or perhaps a farmstead with unusual origins. The flock had already been living in the valley when the centipede had arrived "many long times ago." This could have meant months or decades, although given the size of the centipede, I suspect it was closer to the latter.

Finding the sheep too beautiful to eat, the centipede had instead made friends with them. Its method of "making friends" apparently consisted of tipping a sheep over and resting its head on top of it like a pillow. (It was happy to demonstrate the process for us using one of the older sheep, which continued to chew its cud with an expression of long-suffering patience.) Luckily, the centipede didn't seem to feel the need to repeat the process with us; whether that was because we were capable of speech, or because it wasn't interested in befriending non-sheep, I don't know.

We all introduced ourselves as well. The centipede listened politely and, as far as I could tell, forgot all of our names immediately. It certainly never seemed to feel the need to use any of them while we were there. When asked, it introduced itself as "kerlis," which is simply the Amrat word for "centipede."

The centipede insisted on serving us supper and glided off over the dunes in search of prey. Garnet followed it. After an hour or so, the two of them returned with the carcass of what, surprisingly, appeared to be a sand-dwelling variety of walrus. More surprisingly yet, they were chatting animatedly with each other, discussing local wildlife and comparing hunting techniques. I don't believe I'd heard Garnet say so many words in the entire time I'd known her.

While Mogen was roasting the walrus over a large, efficiently built fire, which the centipede found fascinating, I pulled out a small box of pepper I'd picked up in the Scalps. The smell was strong enough to immediately catch the centipede's attention, and I had the rather alarming experience of having a chitinous head with fangs the size of my leg peeking over my shoulder to sniff at it.

"Is food?" the centipede asked hopefully. I confirmed that it was, and made sure to sprinkle some pepper over the centipede's portion - roughly half of the roasted sand walrus - before we sat down to eat.

The centipede reclined like a large cat while it ate, holding its meat with a few pairs of legs. It took one bite and shot upright again with a hiss that made the rest of us jump.

"The food!" it hissed, clicking and smacking its mouthparts in what I eventually realized was enjoyment. "Hot! It is food that bites! Good good, yessss."

The sight of a centipede the size of a small dragon masticating a chunk of walrus with its mouth open is one that I sincerely hope never to see again. Still, it was rather gratifying to see my relatively minor contribution to the meal enjoyed so much. It's easy to forget what a treasure spices are in lands where they're not commonly available.

The night was once again pleasantly uneventful; most wildlife seemed to avoid the valley, for obvious reasons. We did take care to choose a campsite upwind of the centipede (which smelled like acid and carrion) and the sheep (which smelled like sheep).

The next morning, we thanked the centipede for its hospitality before setting off. I left it with a few spoonfuls of pepper in a twist of paper, which it stroked lovingly with an antenna before scurrying off to bury somewhere.

Once we'd said our goodbyes, the centipede appeared to lose interest in us entirely. When we last saw it, it was making a fuss over Rock the ewe, who chewed placidly while the centipede's fangs neatly plucked burrs and twigs from her bright plaid fleece.

---

* The pumpkin - which he dubbed the Firecrack-O-Lantern - won Floo a commission from the Fiogajas, the notoriously pyromaniac royal family of Specklemax, to grow as many as he possibly could each year. The pumpkins became the centerpiece of an annual dinner party held by the Fiogajas, during which servants launched pumpkins off of the manor roof with a homemade ballista and guests competed to detonate the fruits with flaming arrows before they hit the ground. Floo's neighbors were surprisingly pleased with this turn of events, reasoning that as long as the Fiogajas were blowing up fruit on their own land, they were less likely to wander into town and attempt to create a waterspout by dropping dynamite down the town well.

Sadly, the Fiogaja family manor no longer exists. When the family finally exhausted the town's patience, leading to their deposition and exile from Specklemax, the head of the family at the time - Baron Zamran Arketily Spork Fiogaja - ignited the manor's entire cellar full of firecrack-o-lanterns before leaving town. Residents at the time attributed the Baron's act to a fit of pique at his family's expulsion from town, but in his later years - which were evidently happy ones, despite his exile and lack of eyebrows - he admitted that he had "just wanted to see how large a bang it would make."

The pumpkin seeds not consumed by the resulting fireball were propelled, along with very small pieces of the manor, for miles across the surrounding countryside. To this day, volunteer firecrack-o-lantern vines still occasionally sprout in previously non-flammable pumpkin patches as far away as Tazramack, to the usually unpleasant surprise of gardeners. It's considered wisest in the Mountainous Plains to light one's pipe a safe distance away from the pumpkin patch.

An Abundance of Sunrise

I emerged from Nemigan's cellar the next morning feeling more refreshed than I had in weeks. Nemigan was sitting on the front steps, looking around at the valley. It was that blue time just before sunrise, when there's enough light to see by, but none of the other colors have woken up yet.* He looked up with a smile, and I saw that he was wearing an odd device on his head. It was obviously handmade: a twisted length of wire held a small, flat river pebble over his right eye, like half of a pair of stone spectacles. The pebble had a perfectly round hole worn through the center.

We didn't have enough language in common for me to ask what it was, but my curiosity must have been visible on my face. With a grin, he removed the odd assembly and handed it to me. Due to the decidedly non-crocodilian shape of my head, I couldn't actually wear it; instead, I simply held the stone up to one eye and covered the other.

The dim monochrome shade of the valley was instantly alive with color and motion. Globes of light pulsed around the fruit on the trees, full of small, scurrying specks of even brighter light. Glistening bronze creatures perched, snail-like and imperious, on the charms hanging from the branches. Giant, transparent snakes rushed between the trees, rustling the leaves and grass, splitting into smaller snakes to pass around a trunk and then joining together again, snapping playfully at the swarms of red-winged beetles that rose from rocks still warm from yesterday's sun. There were sleeping faces in the trees, old and alien, and more in the clouds, and in the spray rising from the tiny waterfalls in the stream. In the east, where the sun was about to rise, I could see - not hear, but somehow see - the thundering of distant hooves, or possibly wings, and the jubilant cry of some great beast ready to burst up over the dunes…

I awoke to find myself lying on the ground, my head spinning. Nemigan had one scaly hand on my shoulder. He looked mildly concerned, but mostly amused - as if he'd just watched a child getting itself into some distressing but ultimately harmless form of trouble. The pebble was, once more, seated firmly on his own head. A sliver of sunlight from the East was just beginning to turn the trees green. I got up, only slightly shaky, and we went inside to make breakfast.

Nemigan, Chak, and Karlishek had a brief conversation before we left. I could only pick out a word here and there, enough to tell that it was mostly thanks and goodbyes, with a few directions thrown in. Nemigan looked over at me at one point and said something with a chuckle.

When we left the valley, I asked the others if Nemigan had mentioned that morning. Chak was back in his sealed wagon for the trip across the dunes, but I could hear him laughing softly through the fabric. Karlishek gave me an amused quirk of his antennae.

"Not much," he replied. "He just asked, 'didn't anyone ever tell him not to look at the sun?'"

---

* Blue, the cousin of midnight black, never gets much sleep.

Leaving the Caravan

We reached the first valley a few days later.

It was quite unexpected. We simply came over yet another dune, the gafl puffing with the effort, and instead of yet another channel of hot golden sand, we found ourselves looking down into a small orchard.

It filled the shaded space between two dunes, and nothing more. At the crest of each dune, scrubby grass gave way to bare sand in a line as sharp as the top of a topiary hedge. The trickling of a small stream from below explained how the plants were able to survive. Compared to the fiery late-afternoon sun streaming across the dunes, the shade in the valley was a violet-blue so deep it was nearly black. It took me several minutes of squinting before I could make out more than the occasional glint of running water.

The trees were a mix of apples and Desert puddens, a dusky purple fruit like a dry-weather plum. None of the trees grew higher than the crests of the dunes around the valley. They stretched their branches out sideways instead - quite far, for the ones near the crests. Their highest leaves were brown and curled around the edges, as if the dry Desert winds had singed them.

Between the trees, in the shade of the dunes, was an enormous man with a long staff. He resembled a crocodile; his back was covered in deep green scales, as rough as bark. The shade made the paler, square scales down his front look pale blue. As I watched, he tapped a couple of branches with the staff, expertly catching the fruit that fell and tossing it into a basket strapped to his back. He turned and gave us a wave as we passed. His smile was quite friendly, considering that he had more teeth than a bear trap.

I had finished the canopy painting by then (to effusive and gratifying thanks from my host; he said the sight of fish overhead reminded him of home) and was back in my own wagon, so I had an unobstructed view. I was so captivated by the little green valley - which contained far more plants than I'd seen in one place since leaving Thrass Kaffa - that I almost missed Mogen running past me, toward the lead wagons. The whole caravan stopped a moment later.

The news spread quickly; I could hear the murmur approaching my wagon, like an oncoming wave. It was a breathless Mirenza who finally carried it to me.

"Did you hear? Fish-traveler is leaving caravan!"

It seemed that Chakramalsian, having recognized something in the small valley that was more promising than the endless sand over which we had been traveling, had decided to part ways with the caravan at last.

It didn't take long for me to decide to join him. I had enjoyed my travels through the Golden Desert, but the section the caravan was currently traveling through was hotter and more monotonous than most, and it showed every sign of continuing so. Members of the caravan had spotted signal beacons on the horizon, massive stone towers fitted with lenses and parabolic mirrors the size of small houses; these focused the rays of the sun onto chunks of volcanic glass, which absorbed sunlight during the day and released it in a handsome shade of violet all night. Those who recognized the structures said that we were most likely approaching the canyon city of Kafhipar, which is located in an especially heavily baked area of the Golden Desert. The beacon towers are both an invitation to travelers and a navigational aid to the city's own residents; as the entire city is built below ground level, where the heat is less intense and water occasionally remains liquid for more than ten seconds, the towers are all that make it visible before one stumbles into it.

As much as I would have liked to see the canyon city, the shady green valley - and the others like it that I could see speckled across the dunes beyond - were too tempting to leave behind. I had had enough sand and sun to last me quite a while.

I informed Tirakhai of my intentions first, to make sure that I owed nothing further for my passage with the caravan. "Of course not!" He boomed, giving me an affectionate pat on the back that nearly knocked me flat. "You have done your part already, and we are nearly to the city. We will not be meeting the Painted Ones again. You do not complain, but I can tell you are no Desert flower. I wish you luck in a place where the sun does not wilt you so much." He bade me a fond farewell and gave me a rib-creaking hug to go with it.

When I returned to Chak's wagon, a second wagon had pulled up alongside. As it turned out, Karlishek and Garnet felt much the same as I did.

"I've seen enough canyons to last me all year," Karlishek said. "Besides," he added to me with the flutter of his antennae that means he's teasing, "someone has to help you with your Amrat. A little work on your pronunciation, and people might actually understand you."

Garnet was silent, as usual, but her shyly smiling presence was enough to indicate that she'd decided to come along. We invited Mirenza as well, asking if she intended to continue to Kafhipar.

"Kafhipar? Keh. Barely a hundred years old." Mirenza dismissed the city with a wave of her hand. "Too new for anything of interest. But I stay with my group. We have more to see."

Though we'd met fairly recently, the four of us had grown rather close during our misadventures. Mirenza sent us off with a round of feathery hugs and strict instructions to write to her at the University of Shakrazizli, where she has a postbox that she checks once every year or two. "Be safe!" she told us with a twinkle in her black eyes. "Stay out of trouble, unless it is the interesting kind."

After saying our goodbyes to the other friends and acquaintances we've made in the caravan, and checking many times to be sure that we had all the necessary supplies, we parted ways at last. Our two wagons - one open, one veiled - stopped at the valley's edge, and we stood under one of the stunted pudden trees to wave to the caravan as the gafls and their carts trundled off toward the flashing signal towers on the horizon. We could see Mirenza's black-feathered arm waving to us until the caravan vanished among the heat-rippled gold of the dunes.

Crickets and Gargoyles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then there was the main building.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was when we decided to leave.

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

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

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

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

The Hidden Passenger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Digression on Language

The most commonly accepted theory, at present, is that languages develop with a certain type of mouth in mind.

This is obviously the case with languages such as English, with its many subtle uses of the lips and teeth; or Hmakk, which has an M in its very name. Languages such as these are difficult to speak with a beak or insectile mouthparts. Presumably, they developed in parts of the world where most people had lips, just as Kakaran originated in mountain clifftops inhabited solely by avians.

Over time, however, the various races of the world have wandered and mingled together. It is rare now to find even the smallest of villages inhabited exclusively by mammals, or avians, or reptiles. Even if they begin with different languages, those who share a common home usually come to share a common tongue. In many places, the speaking of English without lips, or Kakaran without a beak, has become only another kind of accent. Most avians cannot pronounce the lip-borne consonants so familiar to me - P, B, F, M, V - and I doubt I will ever manage the clacks and harsh demi-vowels of avian languages such as Hreet. However, despite our imperfect pronunciations, we rarely have difficulty understanding one another.

Those of the exoskeletal persuasion are somewhat more deeply separated. Many of them do not even breathe through their mouths. They have developed instead languages of chitinous clicks and hisses, or elaborate sign languages for multiple limbs. Many of these are more difficult for a person with only two soft-skinned arms to mimic. Still, we usually manage. Universal languages such as Sikelak help to fill in the most difficult gaps.

In addition, love is - and has always been - a great bridger of gaps. The marriages between vertebrates and invertebrates have created many surprising combinations. I have met many insects and arachnids who possessed, somewhere behind their scissoring mouthparts, the anatomy necessary to speak English clearer than my own. In the other direction are people such as the Hsshra tribe of the High Fields: silent, long-legged humans who breathe through elegant spiracles between their ribs.

Still, the villagers we met beyond the valley must have the most unusual language I've ever encountered.

We left the valley the night after the encounter with the saber-dingoes. We had no desire to sleep there; it would have surprised none of us if the pack had returned to attack us in our sleep. There was little we could do to keep them from tracking our scents, but we hoped that the cliffs would provide enough of an obstacle to dissuade them from following us. The climb was rather unnerving in the dark, but - largely thanks to Garnet's and Karlishek's night vision - we managed to fumble our way to the top with no more than a couple of scraped knees and elbows.

We were about to make camp at the top of the cliff when Garnet spotted a light on the horizon.

As exhausted as we were, the possibility of civilization - and of sleeping indoors, out of the chilly night wind, for the first time in weeks - was enough to get us walking again. No one said it, but I think we were all glad to put a little more distance between us and the saber-dingoes' valley as well.

As is so often the case in the Golden Desert, the light proved to be much farther away than it appeared. It must have been nearly midnight by the time we reached it. As we walked closer, we found that it was not a single light, but many - the glow of a small village full of dimly lit windows. The houses were low half-spheres of stone and clay. Only about half of them were lit, though, and we heard none of the chatter and bustle of an active village. We assumed the inhabitants were asleep for the night.

We walked into the middle of the village to find ourselves in the middle of market day - or, more correctly, market night.

The villagers were about Garnet's height, shorter than the rest of us. They were more or less humanoid. Their bodies were covered in downy white fur, except for their hands, feet, and faces; the overall effect faintly resembled mice or baboons, though their eyes were as wide as those of owls. They wore only simple skirts of pale brown cloth. If they were male and female, I never noticed any way to tell the difference.

Their most noticeable features by far, however, were the patterns on their faces. Streaks and blotches of bright colors shifted constantly across their skin, pinks and golds and emerald greens, like an endless fireworks display on every cheek and forehead. The colors glowed in the dark. There are many animals, such as angler-fish and torch-mice, that have luminescent patches on their bodies; most of them, however, can achieve only one or two colors each, like the repeated plucking of a single note. Each villager's face was a full symphony of light.

It was a silent one, though. In the entire marketplace, the only sounds were soft padding of feet in sand, the rattling of wagons, and the clinks and thumps of containers being moved. Not one of the people spoke. In the dark, with the rippling glow of all those silent faces, the effect was as eery as it was beautiful.

We had been staring for what I hope was only a few seconds when one of the villagers approached us. The body language was the same on both sides - smiling, non-threatening friendliness - but when we tried greetings in several languages, the uncomprehending smile on the villager's face didn't change. A few flashes of pink and blue passed over the smile and then went still.

It took us some time to realize that that had been the villager's greeting, or perhaps a question. The shifting colors were their language.

Eventually, we managed to convey by gesture that we had been walking in the Desert for a long time and were very tired. The villagers - we had drawn something of a crowd by then - gave us a sympathetic chorus of blue and lavender. The one who had first greeted us followed that with a flickering orange light in a green semicircle, like the cooking fires inside the dome-shaped houses, and led us to one of the larger ones. The ceiling was not quite high enough for us to stand up. Inside, we were greeted by another adult - the first one's spouse? - and a trio of tiny children as fluffy as owlets. Light flashed across their small faces as well, but they seemed to have difficulty doing more than two colors at once. Perhaps they were only just learning to speak. The whole family welcomed us in with many hugs and blue-pink greetings, and we soon found ourselves sitting on dusty cushions around a stone table, sharing slices of unfamiliar but tasty green vegetables. I looked in my bag and found a couple of slightly dusty candies from Thrass Kaffa; Mirenza rummaged through her pockets and found a motley assortment of nuts and dried fruit. All of these were enthusiastically received, especially by the children.

The name of the village, we were told, was an orange flash peppered with green spots. Our hosts' names were Expanding Blue Concentric Circles and Wavy Red Streaks On Yellow. They didn't introduce their children by name; perhaps, in a society where a person's name is an entire visual performance, children are given time to design their own. We introduced ourselves as well, but they had no more way to repeat our names than we had to repeat theirs.

The conversation around the table was quite lively. In fact, there were two conversations going on simultaneously, but since one was silent and the other was invisible, they didn't seem to interfere with each other.

Though nocturnal, the villagers must have been at least somewhat familiar with other sleep schedules - or perhaps they just accepted that we were tired, no matter the time of day. In any case, Blue Circles went out after dinner (for them, I suppose it was something like lunch) and returned with four extra blankets to spread across the sandy floor. We thanked our hosts profusely, hoping that our smiles and surreptitious yawns would convey the meaning our words couldn't. I dropped off to sleep quite quickly. All night, though, I had the strange feeling that the colored afterimages on my eyelids were trying to speak to me.

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.

Finhenge

We made camp the next day in a ring of standing stones.

In most parts of the world, standing stones fall into one of three different categories. Some mark safe places; these are usually surrounded by an aura of calm, reassuring silence. Travelers can dart between them for a sanctuary from predators, either the wild or the civilized variety. While it is impractical to stay within these rings for any length of time, unless one can live on grass and lichen,* they can save lives in emergencies.

Others mark dangerous places. These are usually placed to trap the rare malignant spirits that turn up occasionally, or to serve as locks on doorways to Other places, or to keep spots with particularly unpleasant histories from making the surrounding countryside depressed. Stones of this sort are usually marked with all sorts of written warnings. Unfortunately, these cease to warn anyone when the stones outlive the languages in which they're written. They often have a sense of foreboding to them, which many travelers also ignore.

The third kind of standing stones serve no apparent purpose and are simply weird.

The ones where we camped seemed to be of either the first or the third variety. They were carved in the shape of fish. Each one was easily twice my height. A few were stood head-down, their tails in the air, their faces hidden in the sand; the rest were head-up, with their stone mouths gaping at the sky. Many were filled with earth and had plants sprouting from them. The vines and saplings made it look as if the fish were speaking small trees.

Mirenza and Karlishek, both fairly knowledgeable in the stories and histories of the Golden Desert, were completely baffled by the fish. They had never heard of anything like them. The Golden Desert has far more history buried in its endless sand than anyone has ever bothered to write down, though; surprises of this sort are to be expected.

Plants in the Desert are usually a sign of a water source nearby. None was visible, but Karlishek - being cold-blooded and more sensitive to temperature than the rest of us - noticed that the sand around the facedown fish was cooler than usual. A little digging revealed that these fish had a steady trickle of water running from their gills. Their buried faces were cobwebbed with a pale network of roots. We tried not to disturb these as we filled our motley collection of containers with the cool water.

The water tasted faintly of fish. After a day of walking in the hot sun, it was delicious just the same.

We slept in the center of the ring of fish, surrounded by the peeping of tiny frogs. The air inside the ring was completely still for the first time in days. Our sleep was deep and peaceful, and all four of us dreamed of the ocean.



* This could explain why these types of standing stones so often have goats or sheep wandering around between them.

Cactus Flutes

Today, the road took me through stands of flute-cacti. I had never heard of these plants before this trip to the Golden Desert; in the past few months, though, I've seen them in at least three or four places. They are tall plants, but otherwise unremarkable - at least when they're alive. When a flute-cactus dies, though, it leaves a dry stalk full of holes, which blows soothing notes in the wind. Birds like to nest in them, as do the more musically inclined varieties of lizard.

I first saw flute-cacti in the desert around Teshirak. The villagers there tend the cacti and encourage the ones with the sweetest notes. Some cut the dry stalks and arrange them around their houses, so that the village is filled with music whenever the wind blows.

The village of Korfa also has flute-cacti growing nearby. There, skilled instrument-makers cut them and attach complex systems of wooden stops and levers, turning the dry stalks into lightweight, eight-foot-long flutes that are quite popular among dragons and other large creatures.

The smaller nose-cacti, which also grow near Korfa, play a high, nasal note like a whining child. These the villagers hunt down and uproot without mercy.

This grove seemed to be wild. There were several stalks lying on the ground, cracked and silent except for the occasional faint half-note, but I didn't see any of the stumps that flute harvesters leave behind. The wind was blowing, as it always does in the Golden Desert. The cacti surrounded me with a constant, airy cloud of chords; miraculously, they were almost all in the same key. I found myself whistling as I walked. It was hard to resist. I went through a few melodies that harmonized with the cacti, finally settling on a sea shanty by Rango Tress. At the end of the first verse, I paused to drink some water.

The cacti whistled the tune back at me.

My first thought was that the heat was starting to affect my brain. I'd been lucky enough to avoid that so far, but there's always a first time. I felt fine, though, aside from the fact that my mouth was dry from whistling.

I whistled the melody again. This time, the reply came from a cactus a few feet farther down the road.

As strange as this was, I wasn't particularly alarmed; musical plants are rarely dangerous.* I took another sip of water and kept walking, whistling as I went. The music followed me. It always came from a cactus nearby; I never heard it from a distance. After a few minutes of simply mimicking my whistling, the cacti started to do variations and harmonies.

I'm fairly sure the source of the music was a zephyr. They're some of the more curious wind spirits - perhaps the only ones that take any interest in people - and they often have surprising artistic tendencies. Many of them like to draw in fine dust and sand. I've heard that some have even developed ways of making sculptures, though I couldn't tell you how.

After I finished the sea shanty, I moved on to a few of Majenti Huddle's clockwork ballads, then to an operetta by Sherm Trupelo. The zephyr - if that's what it was - seemed to be hungry for new melodies. Out here in the Desert, there probably aren't a lot to choose from. It picked up tunes almost as fast as I could whistle them, filling in two- or even three-part harmonies as it went. Sometimes it whistled the melody and I harmonized. I'm not much of an improvisational musician, but I've sung in enough choruses, here and there, that I can make up a fairly decent harmony when I need one. We whistled jazz, folk music, concertos from the Caroque period, slow torch songs and rapid arzenroyds, even a few rock songs by the Poltergeists. The zephyr had some trouble with the idea of percussion until it found a way to knock two cacti against each other.

I must have whistled fifty songs over the course of the afternoon. My lips were getting dry by the time I reached the end of the flute-cacti. The Desert stretched out before me, seeming strangely empty with no sound but the hiss of sand blowing off the dunes. Behind me, I heard the first few notes of an old Desert song of farewell. I whistled the next few notes. The zephyr and I harmonized one last time, exchanging a musical goodbye, and I set off - with some reluctance - into the less musical section of road ahead.

As I left, I felt a tiny breath of air on my face - hardly enough to notice, except that it was blowing in the opposite direction from the wind. It was like the ghost of a goodbye kiss.

Long after the shimmering horizon had swallowed them from view, I could still hear the cacti singing behind me.



* A notable exception is the siren nasturtium. Fortunately, those only grow in semi-tropical areas, and most of them have been tamed for medicinal purposes, as their music provides a powerful anesthetic.

Lunch Break

I left Rikanta this morning. It was time. After stopping to say goodbye to Mr. Haggadan, who gave me a vague, absentminded reply from the depths of a machine I couldn't begin to identify, I packed up my things and returned to the road.

It was a quiet morning. The average size of the towns along the road has been decreasing over the past month or so, and the traffic on the road has done the same. I saw only two other travelers before noon. They were a pair of rat-like mammalians - twin brothers, if I had to guess - with narrow, pointed muzzles and the striped robes of Gillivan monks. They gave me a polite nod each, then went back to a vehement debate about something. Both spoke at the same time, far too fast for me to understand.

For the next few hours, I walked in silence. A lone flying hyena flew overhead at one point, but unlike the ones from previous days, it made no sound. Other than that, it was just me, the road, and the sun.

I had seen no shade since leaving Rikanta, other than the pale shadows cast by weeds and the occasional small rock, so it was a relief when I finally saw the silhouette of a tree on the simmering horizon. It was one of the giant acacias that you find occasionally in the Desert. They grow from tiny seeds that can blow for miles on the wind. The few seeds that land near some source of water, and aren't immediately eaten by a jackrabbit or Desert rat, grow into tall, elegant trees with wide canopies. This tree was in the center of a depression in the sand, ringed with boulders that suggested a bowl-shaped layer of rock near the surface - perfect for collecting rainwater underground. The tree's roots probably went all the way down to anchor themselves in the stone. Through gaps between the roots, I could see the glint of water in the dark under the tree and hear the peeping of small frogs.

It seemed like a good place to stop.

I set my bags down near the trunk and sat there for a while, just listening to the sounds of the wind in the leaves overhead, the frogs singing in their hidden pool, and the occasional cry of a bird in the distance. It was quite peaceful. It took me a while to notice another sound added to the mix - a low, steady drone, somewhere between a fly's buzz and the deeper rattle of a locust.

At first, I thought the dark shape above the horizon was yet another flying hyena. I realized my mistake fairly quickly; the sound, and the decidedly non-mammalian shape, made it clear that it was an insect of some sort. It looked fairly small at first. It got closer much more slowly than I was expecting, though. In a few minutes, it looked twice as large as before, and I could tell that it was still quite far away. The sound of its wings was deafening by the time it actually arrived. It landed under the tree with one last rattle of its wings and the thump-click of six segmented feet.

The fly was the size of a tiger, leathery black all over with vivid bronze streaks across its pointed abdomen. There were fringes of bronze-colored fur around the plates of its exoskeleton, more fringes around its clawed and padded feet, and a thick tuft like a mustache in the middle of its face. I could see my own face reflected a thousand times in its compound eyes. The six pairs of claws on its feet were quite impressive, longer than my fingers and quite sharp.

If the dagger-like mouthparts and lean, tiger-striped body hadn't made it obvious, the claws did: this was one of the predatory species of flies, and it was large enough to hunt antelopes. I got ready to run if necessary. I'm not sure if it would have done any good.

The fly stared at me for a moment, as if surprised to find me there, then made a quick series of buzzes - bvRRzfbvt - from somewhere below its chest. When that provoked no response, it tried what looked like a sort of four-clawed sign language. I shrugged to show that I didn't understand. It mimicked the gesture, shrugging the complex joints at the base of its wings, then seemed to give up on communication and settled down on the other side of the tree trunk to rest.

When the fly showed no indication of wanting to eat me, I decided it was time to eat lunch. I'd bought a few root vegetables in Rikanta. They grow them interchangeably there; instead of separating the different species, they just toss carrots and potatoes and turnips and any other interesting seeds they have into the same field and harvest whatever comes up. I had a couple of potatoes, in various colors and sizes, and a pair of purple-orange things that seemed to be a hybrid of carrots and sugar beets.

It's considered polite in nearly every part of the world to share food with strangers, but the fly showed no interest in the vegetables, nor in the loaf of bread I pulled out next. I also had most of a jug of beef stew in my bag. When I poured some of this out into my largest mug and set it on a nearby rock, the fly noticed. It reached into a large mail pouch hanging from its neck - I'd been distracted by the claws and eyes and stripes and hadn't noticed the pouch - and pulled out a metal lunch box. There was a pattern of little rabbits stamped into the lid. Those huge claws opened it with great care to reveal a selection of fruit and small cheeses wrapped in paper. The fly plucked a few out and offered them to me.

That's how I found myself eating lunch with a giant fly. We sat there in the shade, sharing food in a companionable silence broken only by the frogs under the tree. The cheese and fruit were delicious - the perfect blend of sweet and strong, with the faintest overtones of metal polish from the lunch box. The fly gripped its own food with a bewildering array of jointed mouthparts and sucked up the stew with a long, crooked proboscis.

Most of the Golden Desert's inhabitants don't travel at noon, at least not on foot. It's just too hot. When I finished eating, I sat for a while and read one of my ambiguous novels. (The story in it at the moment is Toad's Labyrinth, one of my favorites by Oswina Dennenjay.) The fly put its lunch box away and pulled a miniature concertina out of its bag. The rapid, buzzing music it played for the next few hours reminded me of the sound of its own wings. I didn't recognize any of the melodies.

Finally, when the sun was approaching the horizon and the shade of the tree had moved to fall on the rocks to the east, I shouldered my bags and got ready to move on. The fly tucked the concertina back into its own bag and did the same. It gave me a brief, friendly nod before lifting the great veined windows of its wings and taking off in a buzzing blast of sand.

The fly had arrived from the empty Desert to the left of the road. It left in the opposite direction, rattling off across the dunes at a right angle to my own route. I have no idea where it was going. I waved as it left, and I'm fairly sure that I saw it raise one claw in reply. I could hear the buzz of its wings for a long time after it was out of sight.

A Different Kind of Stone

I've spent most of the last two days walking. I've seen few people traveling and even fewer staying still. There's been the occasional hut, abandoned and overgrown, home to nothing but desert foxes and chimney swallows; one or two dried-out wells with sand spilling over their brims; a brightly colored tent with the symbol for DO NOT DISTURB painted many times over its entire surface - but nothing more permanent.

This is normal for the Golden Desert. It's rare to ever find two places less than three days' walk from each other.

Yesterday evening, just before sundown, the road wound its way into a cluster of rocky outcroppings. I hardly noticed them at first. The sky was cloudless, but the sun was managing a spectacular sunset anyway, painting the empty sky a hundred shades of gold and crimson. I walked in among the pillars of stone and suddenly felt as if I was in a forest. This has not happened in several months; I would have enjoyed it, except that the stones blocked my view of the sunset. I turned around and settled down near the base of one of the pillars near the edge, shrugging off my bags of books and clothing and art supplies, and took out a couple of pakals for dinner. (I love pakals. I'll write more about them in another letter.) I'd been walking since before dawn, and it was a relief to sit down and rest for a while. I would have sat in the shade, but I couldn't have watched the sunset that way.

It was a pleasant place to rest. There was a cool (relatively speaking) breeze off the river. A pack of winged hyenas was doing wild aerobatics overhead; I'm not sure if they were the same pack I'd been seeing all day or a different one. The sun had set where I was by then, lighting only the craggy tops of the stone pillars behind me, but the hyenas were high enough that their spotted fur shone like gold. Their laughter echoed between the stones.

When both the sunset and my dinner were gone, I got up and moved on. The best time to travel in the Desert is when the sun is just below the horizon; that way, it provides light without extreme amounts of heat.

The air was cool between the pillars of rock. Their surfaces were oddly layered, as if they'd been poured into place - quite different from the usual Desert rock formations. Their shapes didn't look as if they'd been eroded by wind and sand. Most of the smaller ones had holes in the top, which made me suspect some sort of volcanic activity; fountain volcanoes, perhaps, or some sort of geysers, dried up long ago. Several were encrusted with the tough brown lichen that grows in shady places here. I admired their rough, irregular shapes, wondering how they'd been formed, until they were reduced to silhouettes against the darkening sky.

As it turned out, I didn't have to wait long to find out. Right at the end of twilight, when the sky had gone a deep ultramarine and a few of the brightest fish-stars had come into view, a light appeared at the top of one of the nearby pillars. I couldn't tell what it was at first. Backing away, I climbed up on one of the stubbier pillars to get a better view - and watched as a frond of turquoise light rose from the stone.

It was dim at first, but more and more flecks of light appeared as it unfurled, blue and green with the occasional speck of rich violet. It was like a glowing peacock's feather. A second one unfolded from another pillar, purple and deep red, followed by a third in white and pink. I stood in amazement and watched. They shimmered with thousands of points of light, like the flecks of pigment in a pointillist painting. They were breathtaking.

They were also considerably larger than I was. As I watched, a large moth flew into one of the fronds, which snapped shut around it and made a motion that looked disturbingly like swallowing. I got off of the pillar I was standing on quite quickly after that.

The moths obviously found the shimmering light even more entrancing than I did. The night air was full of the sound of fluttering wings, cut off by the soft snaps of the fronds as they plucked one moth after another out of the air. I caught sight of the occasional bat as well, silhouetted against the lights. The gathering of moths must have been a feast for them as well. They had to fly carefully, though; more than once, I saw the fronds snatch at passing bats, though I never saw them catch one. Bats are good at dodging.

I had no idea what the fronds were. I'd heard of things like these - creatures somewhere between plant and animal, such as anemones and sea-ferns, that root themselves to stones and grow hard tubes to pull themselves into - but I'd never seen anything like them on land. For that matter, I'd never heard that they grew anywhere near this large.

I suspect I could have stood and watched this strange carnivorous rainbow all night if I hadn't dozed off eventually. When I woke up, the creatures were gone again; they'd pulled themselves back into their stones well before sunrise. That explained the holes at the tops of the smaller pillars. I looked into a few of them, but I couldn't see anything but darkness inside. The tubes must go deep into the sand.

This evening, exhausted after another whole day of walking, I finally reached a village. I limited myself to only the essential questions:

"Where is the inn?"

"How much for a room?"

"What were those feathery things in the Desert?"

According to the innkeeper, who seemed rather amused at the question, they're called samratheel - which roughly translates as "biting flowers."

The name seems to fit them.

Unexpected Arrivals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I nodded again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'll certainly do my best.



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

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

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