Umbrella Crystals

Another caravan came through Thrass Kaffa today. They had heavy cargo and were moving very slowly. In wetter parts of the world, wagons this heavy would be driven by oxen or pushpigs; in the Golden Desert, they're pulled by tortoises. Tortoises, in fact, are the favorite slow animal in the Desert. They're slightly less stubborn than mules and far less vulnerable to heatstroke. They pull carts and carry people who don't need to get anywhere quickly. (Camels are faster, but a little too unpredictable for day-to-day use.) Nothing speeds them up, and nothing slows them down. A tortoise might take hours to get to town, but it will move just as quickly - or just as slowly, rather - whether it's carrying tiny children or pulling three tons of umbrella crystal in a cart.

That's exactly what these had. Behind the tortoises, sturdy wagons braced with steel rumbled along under the weight of at least thirty umbrella crystals. They were rolling mountains of honey-colored stone; even the smallest crystals were taller than I am. The smoothest ones distorted everything on the other side, squashing houses into narrow towers or inflating them to bloated yellow mansions. Children walked alongside the caravan and made hideous faces at each other through the stone. So did quite a few adults. Umbrella crystals are rare in the Golden Desert, and practically nonexistent everywhere else. They're some of the only stones in the world to be created by plants.

Umbrella palm trees get their name from their leaves, which are the same shape and just as watertight as an umbrella. The divert the water of the Desert's infrequent rainstorms directly onto the ends of a tree's outer roots - which are often nowhere near the trunk - and keep the base of the trunk dry. That's where the trees grow their crystals. The inner roots absorb sand and cement it together into massive stones, anchors against the relentless winds of the Golden Desert.

Nor surprisingly, the crystals have become incredibly valuable all across Hamjamser. They grow at the same speed as their trees, which - while still slow - is still much faster than any crystals that form by ordinary geology. Most of all, though, they're valued for their size. No gemstone on the planet can rival the size of even an average umbrella crystal. Queens and Emperors have had entire sets of dining room furniture - chairs, tables, dishes, even the knives and forks - carved out of a single crystal. The Sultana of Fasra Koum, according to legend, lived in a palace carved from a single stone. It's not hard to believe. The oldest crystals in the Desert, the ones that no one found or harvested before they grew too large to move, are at least large enough to make a respectable mansion. The wind and rain have eroded them into strange, fluid shapes. On some, they've eaten away at the hieroglyphs of long-dead civilizations. Archaeologists make pilgrimages to them with rock-climbing gear or lifter giraffes. They've found whole mythologies carved into a single stone.

Most of the time, though, the trees are cut down when their crystals are still small enough - just barely - to be moved. Most of them don't live that long anyway. Being the only tall things in many parts of the Golden Desert, umbrella palms are frequently struck by lightning. The branching twists of fused sand left by Desert lightning end up stuck to the bottoms of the crystals when that happens, as if the crystal had grown roots. Until only a few centuries ago, most scientists believed that the crystals grew by themselves, like giant stone turnips.

It doesn't matter much when they're harvested, though; the sale of even a relatively small crystal can keep a small village supplied with everything it needs for a whole year. The keepers of umbrella groves guard their locations as fiercely as compass makers guard their twigs. Stone farmers take their jobs quite seriously.

Healthy umbrella palms grow clear, egg-shaped crystals the color of honey; unhealthy ones (much more common in the harsh Desert weather) produce stones full of bubbles and the elegant black traceries of dead roots. In one particularly old and enormous crystal, a group of explorers found the skeleton of a dragon. It had been preserved like an insect in amber, the bones covered layer by slow layer over the course of decades. It's currently in the Museum of Antiquities in Karkafel, where I saw it on my last visit. The skeleton looks like it's sleeping.

I have yet to find a way into Karkafel on this visit. I've caught a few glimpses of it - vague, shimmering towers in the distance - but all the alleys I've tried have simply led me back into Thrass Kaffa. I'll try again tomorrow. I'd rather not have to find my way there through the catacombs again.

The Hley

The dry stream eventually joined another dry stream, forming a somewhat wider dry stream that still had no water in it. This continued for a day or so before reaching the river.

The river is called the HleyPakkPakkKa. (Yes, that's a triple K, though it's technically a double K followed by a single. Hmakk is not meant to be written in this alphabet.) When someone pronounces the name correctly, it sounds like fireworks are going off inside their mouth. This is how you identify people who grew up in the Scalps. When I try to talk about the river, it sounds more like someone pulling their boot out of a swamp.

Fortunately, many people simply call it the Hley. I can manage that.

The Hley isn't particularly wide or deep; only the middle is over my head, as I found out a few times when the heat got to be too much for me. It's still the largest - possibly the only - body of water I've seen in months. Since the highest hills in the Scalps are about as tall as I am, the river doesn't flow particularly quickly either. You can use its surface as a mirror. It meanders so crookedly over the plains that the banks are made up entirely of peninsulas. Nearly every one of them had someone fishing on it as I walked by. I said hello to a few of them, but they told me - rather irritably - to shut up before I scared away the fish. I stopped after that.

One woman had a pole as thick as my arm, strung with rope and what looked like a grappling hook. She was baiting it with pickles. I don't know what she was fishing for, but the teeth hanging from her hat would have put a smilodon to shame. A few were longer than my fingers.

I didn't ask. From the way she was frowning, I got the impression she would have broken me in half if I'd scared off the fish - though what could scare off something with teeth like that, I have no idea.

I tried to stay out of the deep sections after that.

There are very few boats on the river, but a great many other things. I suppose you could call most of them rafts. Many are made of sticks - the kind you get from the little bushes of the Scalps - tied into bundles and lashed together with string. Others are floating collections of bottles, or barrels, or empty pots. One raft I saw floated on empty snail shells the size of pumpkins. Their openings were sealed with wax. Other people poled by in enormous baskets, either sealed with tar or simply woven well enough to be watertight. A few people were in coracles of oiled cloth stretched umbrella-style over a thin frame. They folded them up at the dock and carried them away on their shoulders.

Then, of course, there are those who don't need boats. There seem to be almost as many people in the water as on it. This is the case in most of the highly populated parts of Hamjamser, but it still surprises me occasionally. Maybe I just haven't spent enough time underwater. Everyone here is quite used to it, of course; it's fairly common to see people stick their heads up out of the water and start conversations with people in boats. Some seemed to be dropping their children off with friends for the day. A group of small mammalian girls - sisters, I'd guess - jumped off a raft at one point to join an otter-like family that looked like they might be cousins. A bit later in the day, a pair of small frogs in straw hats climbed up onto a raft to eat lunch with a family of avians. Everyone seems to know everyone, in and on the river, or to simply not care if they don't.

At around noon, I passed a raft that had stopped on the bank. Everyone on it had gotten off and was doing something in the grass. When I got closer, I found that they were picking strawberries.

Patches of wild strawberries turn up here and there along the banks of the Hley. I'd found a few of them already, but this was by far the largest yet. The people from the raft turned out to be a family - HeMiKa (a reptile), HmoTan (a mammal), and their children (various combinations of the two). Their last name was TiLeKraNa, and they were a family of glassblowers. The raft (which was made of corncobs) was piled high with glass bottles and fishing floats. It clinked every time anyone moved. The family lives somewhere upstream, near a convenient sand pit, but they come down the river every few weeks to sell their wares in the city.

They told me all of this over lunch. After I helped them gather up the last of the strawberries, they invited me to come the rest of the way downstream with them, and I was happy to accept. There's only so much walking I can do in one day when it's this hot. The little awning on the raft was the only shade I'd seen since sunrise.

As is traditional, I contributed the most exotic bits of food I had left. Most of my current supplies are plain food from the plains - bread, dried clackrabbit, and various things made of locusts - but I still had a few of those little sugar things I picked up in Mollogou. The children loved these, though their parents limited them to one each.

While we ate, the family told me all about the city, though the two smallest children kept interrupting to show me various blobs of glass they'd made. Their names are TiLi and HnerKipPeLo. (HnerKipPeLo is at a stubborn age and refuses to let anyone shorten his name.) They've started learning the trade already, apparently, and they seem quite good at it; TiLi had made a bottle large enough to hold a grape, which she showed me several times, and even the blobs were quite beautiful. There were streaks of blue and green in them. (The source of this color is a family secret.) The oldest son, MetTeyy, has started making some of the precision glassware used by the alchemists and apothecaries in the city. He doesn't talk quite as much as his two siblings. I'm not sure anyone does.

Once they found out that I'd never visited SuyMaTmakk, the city became the main topic of conversation. I'd been interested before; now that I've heard a bit more about the place, I can't wait to get there. The raft arrives (probably) tomorrow. I'll write more then, but I want to see this place with my own eyes first.

Rain-Walkers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quests, Clutter, and Freshly Picked Umbrellas

I spent most of today wandering through the Vanister Museum. Most of the passengers on the Train did the same thing, flooding through the entrance hall under the coldly bespectacled eye of Miss Corverly, who runs the Museum with a claw of steel and a mind like a dictionary. (She's rumored to have a dungeon full of badly behaved visitors underneath the Museum, but no one's ever found it.) There must have been nearly a hundred people in the Museum today. Beyond the entrance hall, I saw exactly three of them. It's a large place.

One of the other visitors today was Professor Flanderdrack, who claims to have incontrovertible evidence that the fabled Omnipresent Telescope is hidden in the Vanister Museum. As far as most people know, it was lost forever when Parrafan Loofra, the great aeronautical otter, crashed his airship in Gira Gira. Professor Flanderdrack disagrees. There is a clear and unbroken trail, he says, for those who know how to follow it, and it leads directly to Henrijohn Ignitius Creemer. (Everything Mister Creemer owned, of course, is now in the Vanister Museum. There is an entire room devoted to the contents of his bathroom. His nose-hair-clipper collection, I am told, was quite impressive.) Professor Flanderdrack intends to find the Telescope before the Train leaves Vanister. He seems quite confident. I don't know how he's planning to find one thing (not even a very large thing, according to legend) in the towering archival chaos of the Museum; he hinted at plans and methods, navigational strategies and clues in historical records, but refused to go into detail. I gave up eventually and simply wished him luck.

Most of the rooms I found today were in the Gormless Wing,* judging by the lavender bricks and the fact that most of the rooms' names began with Q. The first few were full of statues of geese. They grew in size as I went - the first room had silver ganders the size of midges and barnacle geese carved out of barnacles, while the last one had room for only a single statue, a reptilian-looking thing carved from a giant palm-tree crystal. The card next to it said that it had been found in a ruin in the Golden Desert, and that the creature it portrayed was widely believed to be extinct. That probably comes as a relief to the Desert-dwellers.

I wandered through rooms full of upholstered armchairs and speckled glassware, galleries of steam- and hamster-powered pipe organs, halls of paintings by legends like Tina Tharschryman and complete unknowns like Thoggerell T. HeFeffenaff, whoever he was. There were collections of thimbles, ear trumpets, mechanical antlers, dried gourds, oracular typewriters (all frauds, of course), fishbowls, tentacle socks, silverware, left-handed scissors, ceremonial spatulae, enameled fish, doorknobs previously inhabited by gremlins, teacups, coffeepots, stringed instruments from miniature feefelos to a six-handed garobassum. A broom closet was sealed behind glass, with a sign explaining that it contained Mister Creemer's collection of antique air. Two Museum visitors were debating the meaning of a copy of the Recursive Sonnet (which shows up all over Hamjamser, carved and written on everything from temple walls to handkerchiefs, and seems to have no purpose except to make people debate its meaning. This one was on a chunk of bluestone from a granary in the Blue Desert). One room was full of clocks shaped like the moon, which someone had recently wound. The ticking of mismatched clockwork was nearly deafening. (Tick tockle tick plink tackatacka PING, tick tockle tick plink tackatacka PING...) They were not all running at the same speed. I think some of them may have been using the Phelodean Interval instead of the standard second.

I've been to the Vanister Museum almost twenty times now. With the exception of the entrance hall, I don't think I've ever found the same room twice.

When I got back to the station, I found Flishel selling his umbrellas. He had set up a little stall on the platform (where he got it, I have no idea - maybe it was in his suitcase) and had umbrella leaves in all sizes standing in neat rows. He'd stuck a few unfolded ones on the top of the stall, where they stood like enormous flowers.

He's been painting the leaves for the last few days. The paint smells faintly of hazelnuts. The green has gradually disappeared under lovely abstract patterns, swirls and speckles and hexagons, like easter eggs or soap-bubble rainbows or Karkafelian tilework. I wasn't sure why - as the leaves were still on the plant, I couldn't imagine it was healthy for them. Watching customers eagerly open and close the fresh umbrellas, I understood. He's been planning to sell them all along.

Normally, umbrella leaves aren't unusually strong - they're stiffer than other leaves, certainly, but nowhere near as strong as the waxed cloth used for most umbrellas. They tear easily. Once they die and dry out, they stop being completely waterproof, and they eventually rot and fall apart. They are leaves, after all.

The paint must do something to the leaves to strengthen them - and preserve them as well, I assume. Several of the customers weren't any gentler with them than with normal umbrellas. They folded and unfolded them roughly, dropped a few on the ground, and tapped at the taut surfaces with claws that would have gone straight through an ordinary umbrella leaf. The umbrellas were not harmed in the slightest.

For a minute or two, I simply stood and stared at the bright little stall. The umbrella stems were tipped with the little wooden things that Flishel has been carving since August: shoes, seashells, fruit and little animals of all kinds - even a small model of the Train engine. Flishel put each customer's favorite handle on their favorite umbrella before selling it to them.

Eventually, of course, I had to buy one. I needed a new umbrella anyway; I lost my old one earlier this year, in Tazramack, when a large green thing (possibly a dragon with unusual taste in treasure) came down out of the rain and flew away with it. I hadn't found another one I liked since then. There were several I liked in Flishel's stall - I'd already been admiring them, without knowing what they were, for weeks - and I eventually chose one painted a rich blue (cockleworm dye, I think) with orange sunbursts. The handle is a little mountain sheep with enormous curving horns.

There's nothing left of the umbrella plants now but the stubby trunks - which, as usual, are hollow inside and resemble umbrella stands. Without their leaves, they seem to have finally gone dormant for the Winter. Flishel packed them all into his suitcase this evening. This is rather a relief, really; the umbrella plants had grown so large recently that there was hardly any room in the compartment.

From what I can tell, Flishel sold almost half his umbrellas today. They were a huge success with both Train passengers and Vanister townspeople. As pretty as metal-and-cloth umbrellas are, they're still mechanical things; some people prefer their umbrellas grown.

As I write this letter, which I will give in about two minutes to one of the Train's flock of postbirds, Professor Flanderdrack has still not returned. I hope he's all right.



* Other wings include the Northless, Salient, Spectacular, External, Superterranean, Ghastly, and Flightless. The rooms in them were named by the curators, but the wings were named by Mister Creemer himself.

A Very Long Explanation for the Curious

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It's raining," she said simply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I haven't eaten any.