A message from the Postbird Service

Postbird's note:

The Postbird Service wishes to express its regrets for the delayed delivery of the following parcel of letters. Please note that this delay did not occur due to an error by the Postbird Service. The sender of the letters, a Mr. Nigel Tangelo, evidently purchased an economy-sized book of stamps from a print run that was later found to have an inverted instance of the Traveler's Seal cunningly worked into the design. While the true version of the Traveler's Seal ensures that a letter reaches its intended recipient, regardless of  incorrect addresses, illegible handwriting, and other crimes against the postal arts (but not, the Postbird Service wishes to stress, insufficient postage), this particular version of the Seal invoked every possible mischance upon letters to which it was affixed, causing them to be misfiled, damaged, stolen, and - in a statistically unlikely number of cases - eaten by frogs. The Postbird Service has recalled all unused books of the offending stamps and devoted countless bird-hours to tracking down, wherever possible, all letters and packages unfortunate enough to have been led astray by them.

In the case of Mr. Tangelo's post, unusually, several dozen letters mailed over a considerable span of time (all, unfortunately, using the aforementioned malengraved postage) had all come into the possession of a stalagmite farmer in the subterranean Queendom of Hxgnnnsplik. Though the farmer did not speak English, some of the letters, fortunately, contained illustrations that she found amusing; she had thus kept the entire bundle rather than feeding them to her stalagmites. The Postbird Service purchased the letters from the farmer for the price of a new hextet of boots and re-sealed them with uncorrupted postage before delivering them. Though it is possible that a small number of letters might not have been recovered, we are confident that the majority will reach you in good condition.

As an unrelated matter, the Postbird Service is currently offering a reward of 2700 Lint for information leading to the location of a Ms. Rubilious Herring, formerly employed as an engraver by the Postbird Service. Ms. Herring is likely to be using a pseudonym, as, in retrospect, she most likely was during her time with the Service. She has been described, by various and contradictory witnesses, as a woman somewhere between four and seven feet tall, characterized by an unusually large and elaborate mustache, an eyepatch in the shape of a nautilus, and/or uniformly terrible taste in hats. If you observe any unfamiliar persons matching any one of these descriptions, please contact your local postbird immediately.

The Postbird Service wishes to stress, again, that the unfortunate situation here described does not in any way reflect upon the ability of the Service to deliver mail in a timely and reliable fashion under any but the most abnormal conditions, and that steps are being taken to ensure that future mail cannot be similarly misdirected by malicious graphic design. We hope that you will continue to grant us the honor and privilege of delivering your mail.

With regrets and thanks,
The Postbirds

On the Advisability of Obeying Signs

I suppose you must be wondering where I've been for the past few weeks.

I apologize for the prolonged silence. It's far from the first time, and I'm sure it won't be the last - but once again, I have been beyond the reach of postbirds.

The caravan had been traveling for a week or two when we first saw the stones. They were small enough at first - just the occasional spire and pillar of wind-sculpted sandstone, striped in layers of brown and gold, protruding from the sand. Desert gargoyles crouched on top of some of them. The stone-skinned beasts sat perfectly still, blending in so well that none of us noticed them at first. It wasn't until one of the vultures trailing the caravan stopped to rest on top of a rock, and the rock shot out a long, frog-like tongue and snapped it up with a squawk and a puff of black feathers, that we even realized the gargoyles were there.

We never saw any gargoyles that were even close to large enough to eat people. All the same, we watched the rocks much more carefully after that.

The farther we went, the larger the stones were. After a day or two of travel, they had become wider than the spaces between them, and we found ourselves wandering through a system of canyons. Like the spires, they were banded in layers of yellow and golden brown, with the occasional vein of deep black running through. Some stream or river - long gone now - must have taken centuries to carve the canyons, digging grain by grain through the layers of sandstone.

Among the group of scientists traveling with the caravan, the favored theory is that the canyons must have been home to an unusually active aquifrax, or some other type of water spirit. Perhaps more than one. The regular flow of water could never have produced anything as complex as this labyrinth of canyons.

I'm still not sure of the exact nature of the scientists' work. Are they geologists? Archaeologists? Historians? Experts in unusual vision? Some combination of all of these? I can only guess.

Mirenza, the avian in the group, has tried once or twice to explain their work to me, but we don't share quite enough words yet to convey something that complex. Geolarchaeolinguistic terminology is still beyond my ability to comprehend in English, much less in Amrat.

Still, I'm learning. Between Mirenza and Karlishek, I know enough Amrat by now to be, if not fluent, at least coherent.

Karlishek, as it happens, shares my love of comparative mythology. We've spent many hours discussing the myths and folk tales of various lands. We've talked about the daisy-chained strings of stories that form the Book of a Thousand Mirrors, which I've only read in translation; the Epic of Orbadon, which Karlishek has only read in translation; the tall tales of the Railway Regions, which seem to make a habit of pushing the boundaries of credibility, so that no matter how far-fetched they are, you can never be entirely certain that they're not true; the strange, unresolved half-stories of Mollogou, which seem to consider endings optional and questions best left unanswered…

Being an insect, Karlishek's face is not flexible in the same way a vertebrate's is, but I'm beginning to be able to read his expression in the way he holds his antennae. I'm not sure where his voice comes from. It's not from his mouth; unlike me, he's capable of speaking perfectly clearly with his mouth full.

On the day after I sent my last letter, Karlishek and I were sitting beneath the canopy of one of the wagons, comparing the English and the Amrat variations of the Tale of the Three Brothers. There are an almost endless number of these - stories in which the third brother succeeds where the older two fail, often due to their foolishness or arrogance. To the best of my knowledge, these stories show up in every culture and every language. In comparison, similar stories about sisters usually only have two. Quite often, they are stepsisters: one good or clever, the other wicked or foolish.

Karlishek sees this as an indication that there are twice as many foolish men as foolish women. He says that his experience has generally proved this to be correct. We were debating this when a woman peered around the frame of the wagon.

"Are you Mirenza's friends?" she asked, in a voice so soft it was barely audible. "She said to find a beetle and a reptile talking about stories."

That sounded like us. My current reptilian appearance has persisted for over a year now, which has been quite convenient in the Desert.

"She needs you," the woman continued, pointing back the way we'd come. "Back there. She says it's an emergency."

It was unclear, if it was an emergency, why Mirenza had sent for us in particular instead of simply shouting to whoever was nearby. We went anyway.

We arrived, somewhat out of breath, at the end of a small side canyon. Mirenza was standing in front of a circular slab of sandstone leaning against the wall, tracing a series of worn symbols carved in the center.

"Finally!" She gave us a quick, excited smile before turning back to the stone. "I thought you'd never get here. Look at this!"

"It's a rock." Karlishek's voice was flat.

"What's the emergency?" I panted. If there was one, it had yet to show itself.

"You see this?" Mirenza pointed to the glyphs on the stone. "It says, 'keep out.' Come on, help me open it."

This, I suppose, is the reasoning of an archaeologist. We've known Mirenza long enough by now to know that it was pointless to argue.

The base of the stone was covered in sand, which we had to dig out of the way before it would move at all. The woman who had fetched us - she hadn't mentioned her name - helped as well. Oddly, she wasn't out of breath at all. I didn't give this much thought at the time. With the sand out of the way, Karlishek and I put our shoulders to the stone and shoved, while Mirenza - light and agile with her hollow avian bones - leaped up onto a nearby ledge and pushed it from the top.

Fortunately, the sandstone was relatively light; if it had been a slab of granite, I doubt the four of us together could have budged it at all. As it was, we only managed to open a narrow gap before the stone ground to a halt and stubbornly refused to move any further.

Even that small gap was enough to get a glimpse of what was beyond. The stone had been covering a natural archway in the stone. Another canyon wall continued on the other side, smooth and banded with the same golden brown.

There was a window carved into it.

Distracted by this, we were foolish enough to take our eyes off of the wagons going by behind us, and it took us some time to notice that we could no longer hear the sound of the runners sliding over the sand. When we turned around, the caravan was gone. Not only that, but when we ventured down several of the nearby passages, they all led to dead ends. The canyons had shifted position, as mazes do.

There was nowhere to go but through the door we'd opened.

Message in a Monolith

The stone stood in the sand directly ahead of us. We saw it long before we actually reached it; the vague dark shape had been rippling on the horizon for hours, motionless except for the heat that makes everything in the Golden Desert shimmer at a distance.

When we reached it, it turned out to be a rather unremarkable standing stone. It looked like sandstone of some kind. It also looked old, though - I didn't even recognize the characters that were carved into its single flat side - and nothing made of sandstone keeps its details for long in the gritty wind of the Desert. The writing was still legible.

There are far too many things hidden beneath the sands of the Golden Desert for anyone to even dream of counting them. The dunes roll back occasionally and uncover ruins, tombs, monuments from civilizations long forgotten. They might stay visible for a week, a day, or only a few hours before the dunes swallow them up again. Most travelers (especially if they're of the scientific persuasion) will stop to at least look at things like this stone. The common opinion is that if the Desert has unveiled something for you to see, it's probably worth taking a good look. You'll probably never see the thing again, after all - and even if it holds no meaning for you, who knows? There could be an archaeologist in the next town who's been looking for it for years.

This is the Golden Desert, where the history is deeper than the sand. People stop here for interesting rocks.

Predictably, everyone in the caravan took this as an excuse to take a break. The gafl were unhitched from the wagons, free to go snuffling around in the nearby sand; everyone else got out food or books or pillows and sat down to eat or read or snore for a while.

The team of scientists (I'm still not sure whether they're geologists, archaeologists, something more obscure, or perhaps a combination of all three) piled out of their wagon and gathered around the stone. They tested and measured it with various instruments, taking notes and chattering among themselves. One fished a dilapidated box camera out of her luggage and took a careful photograph or two.

Mirenza, the avian woman I spoke to earlier, stood back a bit from the others. She seemed to be focusing on the writing on the stone. I could hear her muttering under her breath. She squinted at the barely legible hieroglyphs for a few minutes, then turned back to the others with a funny half-smile on her face. I could only pick out a few words of what she said next. The other scientists' reactions ranged from chuckles to confused frowns.

Karlishek told me later that the inscription on the stone roughly translates as follows:

"You have seen the stone I carved, and read the words I wrote. That is all I really wanted. May your travels be happy and your path even."

The signature had been worn away by the sand.

Creeping Hieroglyphs

After I wrote last night's letter and handed it off to the postbird, the innkeeper led me upstairs to a narrow stone room roughly the size of a coat closet, which I am sharing with an elderly tortoise.

At least, I'm fairly sure it's a tortoise. It hasn't actually come out of its shell yet. I'm certain there's something in there, though, if only because of the snoring.

Exhausted as I was, I collapsed into the heap of mismatched cushions that serves as a bed and fell asleep almost instantly. I dreamed that I had become a creature of living flame. Every time I tried to write a letter, the paper would burn up in my hands, and the words I'd written would speak themselves in the crackling of the flames.

I woke to find that I had left the curtains open last night and was now lying in direct sunlight. This explained the dream. Even early-morning sunlight is hot in the Desert. The room was far too hot to stay in at that point, so I left the tortoise shell to its nap and went out to look at the village. I'd only seen it in the dark last night.

Rikanta is a small town, perhaps two or three dozen houses, centered around an old sandstone castle. These are fairly common in this region. Like most of them, this one was built when the Locust Marauders were at their peak and had started making forays into the Golden Desert. You can still see the tooth marks in the stone. The Marauders are long gone, though, and the castle has been empty for nearly as long. It hasn't had an enemy to keep out in decades. The town's Chooser* lives in a house now, and the castle's few intact rooms are home only to sand-colored day bats and the occasional night wanderer. Swallows and potter wasps build neat clay nests under the crumbling battlements. The outer walls shrink just a little every year as people take the old, elegantly cut stone blocks to build new houses. They're not about to let good stone just sit around.

Most of Rikanta's buildings have a thick, chunky look as a result; they are small houses built with castle-sized blocks of stone. Many of the walls are thicker than the width of the doorways. As well as looking funny, this is actually a good design, keeping the houses cool during the day and warm during the night. There is very little that insulates as well as two feet of solid stone.

The architecture, however, wasn't the first thing I noticed in Rikanta. The town is overgrown with creeping hieroglyphs, a form of two-dimensional life adapted to live on dry stone. They look like letters, neatly painted in faded brown dye, a growth of random symbols that never quite resolve themselves into a readable alphabet. Their seeds are windborne and look like commas. The glyphs alarmed me at first - had the word-plague spread here from Arkit? Fortunately, a few townspeople assured me that the glyphs had been around for decades and had never shown any sign of interfering with the town's actual writing - though the appearance of the occasional Halsi character in the otherwise random symbols suggests that the two might be interbreeding.

Neat, geometric, and completely incomprehensible (though many linguists have tried), the glyphs apparently started at ground level and simply worked their way up. The popular theory in Rikanta is that they started on an old vase or pot buried in someone's basement. Craftsmen in several of the old Desert civilizations used creeping hieroglyphs as decoration, encouraging them to grow on pottery and carvings. No one is sure whether these craftsmen liked the nearly-legible patterns or if they were just too lazy to add their own decorations.

Wherever they came from, the glyphs have spread by now to nearly every (previously) unmarked surface in sight. They seem to fill the role that ivy or tambourine wisteria might in a wetter place. Lines of elegant symbols twist their way up stone blocks and wooden posts, along walls and across rooftops, curling around corners and tracing the most minute imperfections in any surface. On occasion, they will even spread to the skin of a person who sits too long in one place.

Mammals usually don't care; the glyphs are hidden beneath their fur, and being two-dimensional, cause no actual physical change. Some say that they even keep fleas and bedbugs away. The town's furless inhabitants are somewhat more likely to object. Many of the reptilian townspeople have rather dramatic scale patterns of their own, and they don't want to add a layer of meaningless symbols on top of them.

Fortunately, the glyphs can be killed by sufficiently heated debate. Inscripted people often go to the town hall, a stone building completely devoid of glyphs, and attend meetings of the elders' council for a dose of remedial bickering.



* Chooser is a position somewhere between mayor and magistrate; most towns of any size at all have a council of elders and a Chooser. The relationship between them is a complex one, and I don't fully understand it yet, but I suspect that the Chooser's job is to step in when the council finally becomes too exhausted to argue anymore.

First of July

If the postbird's message reached you - and their messages rarely fail to reach their recipients - then you already know why I've been unable to write for the past month. Everyone in the town of Arkit has been unable to write for the past month, or at least to write anything that makes sense. Words fractured and scrambled the instant they went onto the page. Letters wandered off to visit other sentences, or twisted and became the characters of other alphabets, shifting as wildly and unpredictably as geography does.

I'll write more about this in my next letter.

The geography of the Golden Desert, in contrast, has been surprisingly unsurprising during my time here. Perhaps it's only that there is so much and so little of it. The Desert is full of vast, empty spaces: plains of dust and rock, hard-baked earth broken by the occasional cactus or scrubby bush, seas of sand dunes with a fine spray of golden grains blowing from their crests. All the geography shifts - with the wind, if nothing else - but most of it is so much the same that it makes no difference. Sand is sand wherever it blows.

The towns and cities are somewhat different. Each one is unique - the more isolated ones especially so - but they are tiny in relation to the Desert. Even the largest cities are needles in a haystack, corks in an ocean, periods on a vast blank page. They rarely come within sight of each other. There are few landmarks in the Golden Desert, and those there are are so distant from any others that they are nearly useless. Travelers in the Desert use a hundred different methods of navigation, some more reliable than others. Many simply rely on luck.

One of the few reliable landmarks is the one I've been following for the past year: the river Lahra. Travel along the Lahra is one of the few methods of travel in the Desert that guarantees water and inhabited lands along the way, and as a result, the area around the river is one of the Desert's major centers of civilization.

This is where I've been traveling. There are many settlements along the river, ranging from tiny villages to cities like Hemrikath and Shast. Like nearly every part of Hamjamser, most of them welcome traveling artists, eager for exotic styles and techniques. My own work has been well received here. A naturalist in Hemrikath was delighted to see my sketches and notes from the Gray Coast, as they included several varieties of seal and saltwater kappa that no one in Hemrikath had ever seen in person. A temple in Hark let me contribute designs for half a dozen gargoyles; a tiny village with the disproportionately long name of Kata-Mata-Hamarini-Kishtarak asked me to paint the railings of their new funerary arena. Other than the disaster in Arkit, it has been a good year.

But again, more on that in the next letter.

Postbird's Note

Mr. Tangelo has asked the Postbird service to extend his deepest apologies for his lack of correspondence this month. He is currently traveling through a region of the Golden Desert where the pipe crawlers have caught some sort of rare electrical disease, causing the normally tidy workings of their crystal brains to degenerate into self-replicating gibberish. Due to the nature of the area, this disease has spread to the town's writing as well. Anyone attempting to read there at the moment will find only a constantly shifting soup of random symbols. A team of expert linguist-philosophers has been dispatched from Karkafel, but it will likely take them several weeks to find their way to the town and get its words back in order; due to the impossibility of writing anything until then, Mr. Tangelo plans to pick up his pen and begin his annual month of correspondence in July, rather than in June. He apologizes for any inconvenience and wishes everyone the best.

A Place to Stop

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nigel



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

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

Pieces of Mollogou

The Truckle road ended today.

It wasn't completely unexpected. I'd been following it since I left the Great Shwamp, and it had been getting smaller since I left Crucible. I have a feeling that Sedge doesn't have many more towns that size. I said goodbye to Mr. Radish and his typewriter this morning, after sharing breakfast with him and Rumbulligan and reading the typewriter's latest poem. A few hours later, when the road had shrunk to half of yesterday's width, Rumbulligan turned off into what looked like a village made of origami lily pads in a water meadow near the road. He apologized for not being able to invite me. Weight is apparently a great concern in a floating village; they can't allow anyone in who's a great deal larger than they are, for fear of sinking. Rumbulligan is, he said, one of the largest people in the entire village. He is possibly a little over three feet tall. I assured him that I wasn't offended, and he splashed off over a bridge made of half-submerged leaves, looking relieved.

I wonder if his book of earthquake words has anything to do with this. Shaking earth, sinking villages - it's all just a matter of stability. I hope he succeeds in whatever he's doing.

In any case, I was traveling alone once again. The road continued to shrink all day, getting lumpier and narrower and more full of puddles. At around noon, I came to a branch in the river and had to take another detour. The road quickly became little more than a footpath on the bank. I could only tell where it was because the grass was shorter. The branch meandered for a while, looping its way through a jumble of low hills, though even ones that small were surprising after the flatness of Sedge and the Shwamp. I'd been following the branch for maybe five miles when it disintegrated. In the space of a few hundred feet, the water split away into handful after handful of little streams, each of which broke up into even smaller streams trickling down from the hills. Seen from the air, the whole thing probably would have looked like a tree. I've never seen a river branch that way. I counted thirty-six separate streams before I gave up.

Farewell, then, to the River Truckle.

The longer I walked, the stranger the landscape became. The sky here is full of odd, fractured clouds, each one moving in a different direction with no regard for the wind. They collide occasionally. The hills are full of little stone shrines; I must have passed one or two every ten minutes. There are stone animals inside them. Most are ordinary, birds and badgers and giant isopods, but a few rival the gargoyles of Crucible for strangeness. The shrines - and the hills, and the trees, and everything else - have a tendency to move around while I'm not looking. (Geography does that everywhere, of course, but not usually every time I blink.) It finally became truly ridiculous when I realized that I had been walking around the same hill for half an hour. There had been no turns, no forks in the road, but I had passed the same shrine four times. The statue inside was an otter-like thing with scales and a necklace of snail shells. Someone had left half a fish on the little shelf in front of it. I would be surprised if there are four different shrines with statues exactly like that. Just to be sure, I climbed up on top of the hill and looked around. It was quite clear from up there: at some point, the road I'd been following had turned into a closed loop. There was no sign that it had ever gone anywhere - including back to the river. Wherever I had ended up, retracing my steps was out of the question. There were no steps to retrace.

Farewell, then, to Sedge.

I gave up on the road and set off across the hills. As long as I came up on top of one and looked around occasionally, I seemed to actually be getting somewhere. Perhaps it's only the valleys that lead you in circles. I stopped for lunch in front of one of the valley shrines. It had a round, heavy roof that made it look a bit like a mushroom. A man with a vague resemblance to a raccoon was sitting in front of it. I thought at first he was making some sort of offering; you can see them in most of the shrines, little gifts that vary depending on the tastes of the spirit inside. People leave them to thank the good spirits and placate the bad. Some like flowers, others sausages or pretty stones. One particularly reliable one apparently brings rain every time anyone gives it a boiled egg. I couldn't see the statue in this shrine with the raccoon in front of it, and I couldn't see what he was putting in it either. It seemed to be taking rather a long time.

We ended up talking for perhaps half an hour while I ate and he continued to work. He was quite intent on whatever he was doing. I don't think he looked at me even once. I am, apparently, in a country called Mollogou. It's frequently near Sedge and the Great Shwamp, as it's slightly drier and hillier than either of them, but lower and wetter than anywhere else.

According to the raccoon (his name was Num, he said, and left it at that), every hill and valley has a shrine for its guardian spirit. You can tell how friendly a place is by the statue in its shrine. The smiling ones can be trusted; the ones with huge, staring eyes are disconcerting, but safe. The best places have mother animals with children in their shrines. The ones with masks or too many teeth should be avoided. No one seems sure whether the statues change to match the spirits, or whether the stone-carvers can somehow tell what the spirits look like, but no one seems to doubt their accuracy. I assume people carve the statues - though I can't actually be sure; I haven't seen many people here. Perhaps they're self-portraits.

Apparently, no other country could have nearly so many shrines. The spirits' domains never overlap; I don't know whether they're territorial or if it would simply be impossible for two spirits to guard the same place, like two people sharing the same body. Either way, there's still a shrine on every hilltop and another in each valley. Territorial creatures wouldn't put up with an arrangement like that anywhere else.

Mollogou isn't a particularly large country. It's just more fragmented than most. Places tend to be much smaller here. In the Mountainous Plains or the Railway Regions, places at least stay connected; the layout of each city changes from day to day, but it remains a city, with the same buildings and the same skirt of farmland spread around it. People know where they live.

There are no cities in Mollogou. They don't stay together. About the best anyone can hope for is that their house won't have misplaced any of its rooms when they wake up in the morning.

The same goes for everything else in the country. There are no mountains, but many hills; no rivers, but many streams; no forests, but an abundance of copses. Mollogou has just as much of everything as any other country. It's just divided into much smaller pieces. The shrines are content with a single hill or valley because it's impossible to hold on to anything larger.

I was getting ready to leave when Num finished what he had been doing and stood up. On the shelf in front of the shrine was a collection of tiny white eggshells, cut neatly in half across the middle and laid out in a spiral pattern like the seeds in a sunflower. They were arranged with such geometric precision that you could have cut yourself on the angles. The statue receiving them was a somewhat manic-looking owl clutching a ruler and compass (the geometric variety, not the navigational). It's a benign spirit, Num said, but a somewhat obsessive one. It cares more about the precision of its offerings than the substance. When I left, he was beginning a second spiral in what looked like grains of rice. He was using a ruler the size of a toothpick.

I think I'm going to like Mollogou.

This is the last day of June, and therefore the last of my daily letters for this year. Perhaps it's just as well. Even postbirds have trouble finding people in Mollogou. I will do my best to write during the rest of the year, but you should know by now how rarely I succeed in that. Somehow, there's always something to distract me.

Farewell, then, to you. I'll be back next June.

Nigel

A New Type of Writer

I left Crucible yesterday, having run out of every color of paint except red and black. I haven't met people so starved for color since I left the Gray Coast. I hope I find a place to buy more soon. I spent this afternoon walking along the banks of the Truckle, trying to stay in the shade, watching frogs and lungfish jump into the water as I passed them. I'm always surprised at how high lungfish can jump. It's not what one expects from creatures with no legs.

The first traveler I met on the road was an amphibious man carrying an enormous book. It was written in a hieroglyphic language I didn't recognize; he said it was Tectograma, the Language of Earthquakes. He was sweating rather violently in the heat. Huge drops of greenish liquid formed on his face and arms and rolled down into his shirt, which would have been stained quite badly if it hadn't already been green. He left a damp trail in the dust of the road. I asked him several times if he would like me to watch his book while he took a dip in the river; I was afraid he was going to melt away to nothing as we walked. He said no the first few times, clinging tightly to the book with long-fingered hands. (He was wearing gloves, presumably to keep the book dry.) Eventually, he relented, handing the book to me and leaping into the water. He was noticeably larger when he came out again. Maybe he really had been gradually shriveling away. I don't think full-time air-breathers completely understand how important water is to amphibians. As we continued walking, his stops for water got more and more frequent; by sunset, I ended up carrying the book on the road while he swam along beside me. That seemed a more sensible arrangement. If he hadn't had the book to keep dry, I doubt he would have come out of the water at all.

He said his name was Rumbulligan. That was more or less all he said all day. Before he let me carry the book, he was in no state for conversation; after he let me carry it, he was mostly underwater. We traveled in a companionable silence.

There were few other travelers on the road today. Perhaps it was the heat.* We passed a few people on foot, a group of crow-feathered avians panting in their black plumage, a two-headed musician practicing counterpoint with himself as he walked, and a coggerel fruit vendor who was quite happy to sell us as much as we wanted. (It was plump, juicy coggerel fruit, glistening in buckets of cold water. Drops of condensation had formed on it in the humid air. No one can be expected to resist this sort of thing in June.)

The sun was getting low, dripping light as thick as honey sideways through the trees, when we met the final traveler of the day. We had stopped just before a bend in the road, resting in a small clearing under the trees. I had had more than enough heat for one day and was ready to stop for the night. I don't know what Rumbulligan thought. I'm not sure he was awake. His eyes were open, but I'm fairly certain he doesn't have eyelids, so that didn't mean much. The other traveler came around the corner while we sat there. He was human - the first one I've seen in nearly a month now. I like to see other humans occasionally. I haven't looked like one in so long that I sometimes forget what they do look like. He seemed fairly ordinary: perhaps a foot shorter than me, with brown skin, purple eyes, and zebra-striped hair. Nothing particularly unusual. He stopped at the clearing and we exchanged the usual courtesies - good afternoon, mind if I stop here, not at all, I have interesting food, perhaps we can trade, and so on.**

There was a clicking noise farther down the road. As the man began setting down his luggage, a typewriter came around the corner, walking along on spidery metal legs.

The man's name is Alister Radish. He's a traveling accountant and transcriptionist. The typewriter is named Selio, after the legendary poet T. T. Selio. It appears to have once been an ordinary typewriter, but it's been altered quite a lot since then. The legs are only the most obvious additions. On top of it are two mechanical eyes, those little black glass lenses that people dig up with other Hill Builder technology that no one understands. While Mr. Radish was unpacking his dinner, the machine folded itself into a sitting position, extended two slender metal arms, and began cleaning its roller with a small dustcloth.

I was not surprised when Mr. Radish told me that the typewriter runs on a crystal brain, like a clockwork pipe crawler. He says he gave it the brain so it could refill its own ink and check his spelling. It does a lot more than that by now.

It writes poetry.

Pipe crawlers are intelligent in a simple way, like trained animals, but they've never shown any gift for language. They work by imitating the plumbers and mechanics who own them. The mechanical Guardians of the floating cities have written poetry - they've done practically everything at some point in their dedicated, millennia-long lives - but their crystal brains are far more advanced than those of humans, much less pipe crawlers. I've never heard of one of the small brains doing anything like this before.

Of course, I've never heard of anyone linking one to a typewriter. Perhaps it simply picked up language like the ordinary ones pick up mechanics; perhaps any of them could communicate if given the words. If you teach a creature nothing but good plumbing, it's likely to give you nothing but good plumbing in return.

Mr. Radish has sheets and sheets of the typewriter's poetry in the basket of neatly filed papers he carries on his back. He pulled out a few to show us.

At the first was only darkness
And the world was only letters
As those letters came together
In the wrong ways or the right
Then the eyes were given to it
And filled the dark with light
But still in words and letters
It hears pictures in the night

I don't know if it's particularly good poetry or not. It's certainly the best I've heard from a machine. The typewriter seems to have a vague grasp of rhyme and rhythm, though I don't know how it picked those up with no ears. Perhaps syllables are syllables whether they're heard or not. The typewriter seems more concerned, though, with the number of letters in each line. The syllables may vary, but the lines always match. It sits there every night, clicking away to itself, and in the morning, there's a new poem. Some are short:

Ink on paper
Black, white
Two becoming
All there is

Some are long, and some are continuations of other poems. One of the longest - it took the typewriter two months - seems to be a sort of epic about a grain of light traveling through glass tunnels. Neither Rumbulligan nor I could make any sense of it. The poems are put on paper complete and never rewritten; the typewriter makes only one copy of each. If there's any editing, it occurs entirely within the crystal brain.

The typewriter has never written anything but poetry. There are rare occasions when it seems to be trying to communicate something practical, but even those are in poetry:

In the joints
Of right foot
Is a grinding
Is a catching
Needs the oil
Make it loose
And a sliding
Of two pieces
Out of jammed
Set them free

If it weren't for the poetry, it wouldn't seem any more intelligent than any other small crystal brain. It follows Mr. Radish around like a large mechanical dog or mule-crab. It had to be taught to walk; it damaged itself several times at first by walking off ledges or into trees. Even the poetry isn't always understandable. Some seem to be simply playing with words:

Pocket Watch
Pocket Watch
Patch Socket
Pocket Watch
Shack Rocket
Packet Shock
Snatch Hatch
Catch Pocket
Pocket Watch

Others are complete nonsense, at least as far as anyone who's read them can tell.

Parrot the Milky Way
On an enviable swing
The toad on the moon
Shall give it a ring
Try all of it oncely
And hear it all sing
The seconds are over
And minutes the King

The three of us slept on the ground, not bothering to put up a tent or umbrella. After the last few days, no one cares if we get rained on; it would cool us off. As I write, I can hear the typewriter clicking away, its keys going up and down by themselves like the keys of a player piano. (I wonder if anyone's ever hooked a crystal brain up to one of those.) It's a surprisingly relaxing sound, somewhat like rain on a roof.

The postbird has been waiting very patiently for me; I'll stop writing now so that it can take this letter and leave. I don't expect to be awake for long after that.



* My most recent round of molting left me covered with fine golden-brown scales, spotted with dark blue like a gecko, and quite hairless. It's a good combination for the Summer. I don't know how full-time mammals endure it.

** Most countries have courtesies of this sort, but in Sedge, they have an almost ceremonial rhythm to them. Everyone knows the same set of greetings and responses. I've heard older travelers speed through the entire introductory conversation in five seconds, reciting the familiar sentences too quickly for me to make out the individual words.

Bestiary of Nowhere

Like practically every town of any size in Sedge, Crucible is built by the River Truckle. As the town is also the source of the molten River Flare, it contains one of the strangest river-meets in the world. Water and iron do not mix well. For the length of the town, the Truckle flows underground.

Before Crucible was built, the molten metal of the Flare simply flowed into the Truckle, solidifying as soon as it hit the water. More metal then flowed across the solid part and solidified farther out. Over the course of centuries, a thick shelf of iron gradually formed across the Truckle, spreading horizontally but never coming more than a few inches below the surface. The farthest edge is just over halfway to the far bank. Boats on the river are careful to skirt around it, or they risk having their hulls sliced in half at the waterline.

Most of the iron doesn't reach the Shelf these days, of course; the Flare has always flown sluggishly, and the smiths now siphon off nearly all of it before it reaches the Truckle. People have settled on the Shelf. They've built houses on the foot-thick sheet of iron and drilled holes to pull up water and fish. Crucible may be the only place in Hamjamser where people can live on top of a river and still have to dig wells.

I spent most of the day wandering through the streets of the Shelf. The heat on Crucible's central hill is a bit much to endure for more than a day at a time. The Shelf is much quieter than the hill. The edges are full of docks, some wooden, some iron. Like the docks in any town, they're backed by a forest of cranes for the loading and unloading of ships. The cranes are all anchored in the riverbed, of course. The Shelf wouldn't hold that much weight. There are rust-colored fish in the water, possibly relatives of the ones that live beneath the Earthmover in Cormilack. They eat the rust that flakes from the bottom of the Shelf. If they didn't, half the length of the Truckle would be red by now.

Now that it's no longer being replenished from above, the Shelf will probably rust away to nothing someday and drop its load of docks and buildings into the river. No one seems particularly concerned about it.

The buildings of the Shelf are covered with carved plants and animals. There seemed to be at least one on every wall. I had noticed a few of them up on the hill, but the thickness of the cloud and the dim firelight make them all look like soot-clad gargoyles. (If there were any real gargoyles, they were remarkably well-camouflaged.) The ones here were clean; in the slanting morning light, some of them were even lit by the sun. It should have been easy to identify them. I didn't recognize a single one. There were serpent-birds with eleven wings, skeleton fish with lanterns hung in their empty ribcages, tortoises with the legs of crabs beneath their spiny shells, creatures with all manner of multiple heads and mismatched limbs. Several seemed to be strange combinations of animal and plant. Even among those, there were none I recognized - not a single ordinary trapper vine or vegetable lamb in sight. These were fanged lilies and web-footed potatoes and cats with flowering whiskers.

As I was puzzling over this, I was stopped by a smith near the docks; he could tell, apparently, that I was an artist. He asked me what colors I had. As it happened, I still had some blue paint from the Gray Coast, where the villagers gave me a whole bucket of cockleworms before I left. Blue is apparently quite a novelty here. It's hard to find any color but red. Farmers bring the inedible stalks of corn and carrots into town along with their crops; leaves and stems don't pick up so much color from the rusty soil. People buy them for the green, keeping them in buckets of water as if they were flowers. All the flowers here are red.

When I told the smith I had blue, he was delighted. He asked me to paint his sign for him. Aside from portraiture, this is one of the jobs I get most often; I've painted one sign or another in half the towns I've visited. Many of them weren't even in languages I could read. I accepted, of course, and prepared to use up most of my remaining blue.

The smith's name was Dinbar Hammergavel. It was printed on his sign in peeling red paint, and he was polite enough to introduce himself as well. He was a thickset reptile with scales like river pebbles. His arms and chest were covered with shiny spots of metal, spatters that had cooled and fused to his body. He seemed to have a second coat of black and silver scales over his natural red ones. Apparently, his scales are thick enough to keep the hot metal from burning him, as it would anyone less armored.

He didn't seem to think much of the smiths by the Flare. Anyone, he said, could work metal that kept itself hot and let you shape it like wax. It took a true smith, one who worked with hammer and bellows, to heat it just enough and no further.

I was lucky enough to get to see what he meant. He came to work outside as I painted, saying that he liked to stand in the sun before it rose above Crucible's perpetual smoke. I had no idea what he was making. It started as a block of iron. He pounded it flat, then indented the surface with a complex pattern of holes and grooves, working with a progression of steadily smaller hammers and chisels. The ones at the end were hardly bigger than upholstery nails. In the end, the thing looked as if it had been made in a machine. You could have used the sides as straightedges.

It was, he said, a metaphorical flange for the Answer Machine in Miggle-Meezel. The machine has a tendency to catch the flanges with its paradox pistons and break them. He makes replacements when they're needed and has his apprentice bring them to Truckle Stop. Miggle-Meezel stops over Truckle Stop occasionally to pick up pipe crawlers from Tesra Malerian; his apprentice waits for the airship to come down from the floating city and brings the flanges up with it. Tesser Hammergavel rarely delivers themself these days. He is, he said, getting too old to make the trip, and his apprentice still finds it exciting.

I asked if it wasn't dangerous for the apprentice to travel alone. I've had relatively little trouble myself, but there's no telling when a traveler might run into bandits or cathomars or a nastier-than-usual troll. The smith laughed for a good half-minute at that. Apparently, his apprentice takes in wounded alligators that wash up on the Shelf; several, once healed, have decided to remain with her. They follow her everywhere. What few bandits there are on the river road have learned very quickly not to trouble her.

"Besides, she's got a lad there," he said, grinning. "Apprentice to a gear-cutter in the floating city. Reason enough to give her a little time to herself. Anyone's guess whether he'll convince her to stay in Miggle-Meezel or she'll convince him to come here. The other apprentices have been laying bets on the two of them for years. Personally, my money's on Serilla. A girl who can beat an alligator back to health isn't one to give up easily. I just hope she waits to bring him back until he's finished his apprenticeship. We could use another gear-cutter in Crucible."

Later, I asked about the creatures on the buildings. Apparently, the people of Crucible (most of them, anyway) disapprove of representations of plants and animals. This is not a particularly rare opinion. The mesmerizing geometric artwork of Thrass Kaffa and Hestamar is a result of this belief, as is the elaborate calligraphy of the Talixa Valley.* Quite a lot of people disapprove of copying the work of other artists, and many believe that the creator of the world - whoever they consider that to be - should be given special respect in this matter. Depictions of plants, animals, rocks, clouds, and anything else not made by people are strictly forbidden. Needless to say, I won't be painting any portraits in this town, unless they're of buildings.

As a result, the only creatures available to Crucible's artists are the ones they make up. No dragons, no chimaeras, no doorknob gremlins; the only creatures you'll find in Crucible are imaginary. Sculptors and painters are judged here by their ability to depict unreality. They restrict their work to beasts that don't exist - preferably ones that couldn't possibly exist, just to be safe. You never know what explorers are going to find.**

This is why the buildings teem with unidentifiable creatures. Happily, Tesser Hammergavel was able to identify quite a lot of them for me. The serpent-bird is a Frenible Tepiary; the tortoise-crab, a Chelimincer; the skeleton fish, a Garnet-Tailed Lissel. The oak-tree squid that shows up several times in the rafters of the Flue is a Hastadendraflack, commonly attributed to the Lady Pyrafax. The snail-shelled bulldogs are Pemerines, the birds with butter-knife feathers are Tallimonians, the feathered wasps with peacock-tail stingers are Claridots, and the snake with a head on both ends is an Ouroboruo.*** Even Crucible's flag is its own invention. The town's emblem is the Carrifrock, a plant that grows upside-down with its fruit buried and its perpetually flaming roots in the air. It's fitting for the town. Their harvest comes from the ground, produced by flame, and there's more water in the air than in the river.

The most popular artists here are the ones that make up the best impossible things. I wasn't surprised to hear that many of them had come from elsewhere; there's no shortage of inventors of the impossible in Hamjamser, both the drawn and the written, and it's rare to find places that appreciate them so completely. I knew most of the ones Tesser Hammergavel named. Ramer Oswelt - writer, illustrator, and beast-maker extraordinaire - was quite well-loved here. According to the smith, the town holds several hundred of his creations, copied many times in wood and iron and stone. The Chelimincer and Frenible Tepiary are among them. Oswelt's original sketches are in the town's fireproof museum, as are several paintings by Elva Ursunorn and the legendary (some say the mad) Mynorbious Chesho. Rae Drawdle and Carlis Rowell, writers of surprisingly sensible nonsense poetry, also spent several years each in Crucible. There are several of their impossible beasts on the buildings around the Hammergavel smithy. Many of them, according to the smith, have the poems from which they came carved into the walls beneath them. I'll have to go look for them when I have time.



* Talixan calligraphers are masters of not-quite-representational art. They will not paint a horse. They may paint a glyph that captures the essence of a horse, all its speed and grace and elegant strength, but it would have none of the features of a horse. Where are its hooves? they would ask you. Where is its eye, its tail, its snorting nose? Do you see them in these brushstrokes? No? Then how could this be a horse? It has no part of a horse within it. Many stubborn people have debated with the calligraphers of Talixa over this, and to the best of my knowledge, none of them have ever found an answer to that question.

** The discovery of the aerobatic frogs on the floating islands of Salyovemit, nearly a century after their invention by the decidedly earthbound Herbert G. Welleger, goes to prove that either the impossible is a lot more possible than it originally sounds, or science fiction authors know a lot more than they let on. I don't know which is more likely.

*** I thought this one was skirting dangerously close to reality, but apparently the fact that it has two heads and no tail to bite with them was enough to let the artist get away with it.

The End of November

Once again, November is over, about two weeks after it began. November and October always seem like the shortest months of the year. They're over far too soon.

The postbirds started leaving today. I'm not the only passenger on the Train who tries to write every day in November; the birds have been swamped with letters all month. They've taken off every day in ungainly postmarked flocks. Today is the last day, though, and most of the passengers will go back to being merely intermittent correspondents, like me. (Hopefully, most of them will do better than that.) The Train will get by with only a half-dozen postbirds for the rest of the year. The rest are off to warmer places for the Winter. They're all Wayfinders, so it won't take them long to get there.

I've found my warm place already; I'll be staying on the Train for the rest of the Winter. Most travelers in the Railway Regions do the same. Trenchcoat Guy showed up this morning, waiting by himself at the tiny Blue Wilderness station (named for the bluets that grow all over the roof and the ground around it). The Train stopped for him and he got on, grinning as widely as always. He has acquired a truly enormous umbrella at some point in the last month. It's pumpkin-orange with a pattern of plaid mushrooms. It's wider than the station, which is little more than a roof on a stick.

I don't know how he got there; there's nothing but trees for miles. Maybe he hitched a ride on a balloon. Maybe he really is a septuplet and this is one of his identical brothers. Maybe he just walked. He's certainly not telling anyone.

It's quiet out here in the wilderness. There are no cities, no noise like the rumble of Milldacken's thousand wheels or the buzzing of Carvendrone, none of the bustling crowds that have been such a common sight for the last two months. Just the calls of birds and the constant rhythm of the Train. Even Flishel has mostly stopped talking; he's been working on something in a small book, using several kinds of ink and the occasional dab of umbrella paint. He hasn't shown it to anyone yet. Maybe he won't. The sleeping passenger continues to sleep, breathing softly in the corner of the compartment. The days are long and peaceful.

Someone has been sitting on the roof and playing the handbagpipes for the last three days. Whoever it is picks a different tune each day - lilting, tentative melodies that move in loops and never quite seem to repeat themselves.

The whole Train gets quieter as the weather gets colder. The cold-blooded passengers get sleepy, even the ones who aren't hibernating. The warm-blooded ones are content to sit in their compartments and read, or dream, or just watch the mountains go by. No one ever knows where the Train is going; we all just get on and hope it's somewhere interesting. It certainly has been this year.

I'll try to write more next year than I have before. I love the November challenge, as exhausting as it is, but it shouldn't be the only time you ever hear from me. I can't promise anything; my mind is not the most organized place. I will try, though.

Wish me luck.

Nigel

Inkweed

Since the abrupt disappearance of Professor Flanderdrack, our compartment has been only three-quarters full. A few people have taken a look at it, but being less inclined to stay up late than Flishel and I, none of them have stayed. One of the four seats has stayed empty. The sleeping passenger sort of spreads into it occasionally.

Today, we were joined by a fourth passenger.

The Train had stopped at Arkentram, a small town that seemed huge compared to the little villages we've been passing lately. The station was centered around a tall thing like a scrap-metal tree. The station-master explained that it was to attract sunlight. In Arkentram, he said, the sun shines even when it's raining. It certainly did while we were there.

The Train stayed for a few hours, so I went to buy some more ink in the market. I don't know when we'll find another town large enough to have ink vendors. I found the stall just as a heap of coats and scarves, presumably with someone inside them, was leaving with a gallon jug of ink. I bought one of my own and came back to the Train. The heap of coats arrived at our compartment only a minute or two after I did.

"Norrel Hepsidine," it said. "Midnight."

We introduced ourselves.

"Nigel Tangelo, two am."

"Flishel, midnight." (The only English word I've ever heard him use.)

"And, um... that?"

"Never wakes up."

"Ah."

That was all. Without another word, the heap put down its suitcase (her suitcase - Norrel is a girl's name) and settled in. She spent the next half-hour taking off layer after layer of coats and shawls and sweaters. Underneath, she turned out to be amphibian, with a salamander-like face and pale green skin. A fringe of vestigial gills hung down over her ears. Her face was covered with what I assumed were tattoos or paint: black spirals and leaves, like the shadow of a vine.

Her coats took up nearly every coat-hook in the compartment. Fortunately, the Train gets a lot of cold-blooded passengers, so each compartment has about forty hooks for just this reason. The air slowly filled with the smell of cinnamon. We found out why later, when she took a stick out one of the pockets - raw cinnamon, the alpine variety, still in stiff little rolls. She chewed on it absentmindedly all day.

Our compartment stays warmer than most, as a result of having three mammals in it. It would almost be stuffy without the blasts of cold air whenever the Train stops. In the end, all Miss Hepsedine kept on was a knee-length embroidered skirt, like the ones worn in the Golden Desert. (Keeping the chest covered is a purely mammalian habit; no one else has anything to cover up. Male and female amphibians look exactly the same to most people.) Her entire body was covered with the black vines. I was about to ask whether they were tattooed or painted when a leaf fell off of her arm. It dissolved into a puff of smoke before it reached the floor. That seemed to more or less answer my question.

I had only glanced at the falling leaf for a second, but that seemed to be all it took; Miss Hepsedine noticed me looking and grinned. "It's inkweed," she said eagerly. "Do you like it?"

Thus began the rest of the afternoon. Before the subject of inkweed came up, Miss Hepsedine had said all of seven words; after that, she turned out to be capable of talking steadily for hours.

Inkweed is a plant composed entirely of the color black. It's a dermatoglyph, like mobile hieroglyphics or rainbow splodge, a form of two-dimensional life that exists only as patterns on a surface. It can't exist by itself. It has color, but no thickness. A tree with an inkweed vine on it doesn't have stems and leaves stuck to its trunk; it has vine-shaped patches of wood that happen to be black. All inkweed needs is a smooth surface and a source of black, such as ink, tar, ash, or the dark mud on the bottoms of swamps. It has been known to survive on a diet of shadows, but it prefers more substantial kinds of darkness.

Miss Hepsedine, as it turns out, is something of an expert on inkweed. She makes her living off of it. Her suitcase is completely full of books, pens, and jugs of ink (I think she was wearing all the clothes she had), and all but a few of the books are copies of her guide to raising inkweed. She includes seedlings from her own plants when she sells them. The seeds look exactly like commas. They fall off of the plants when they're ripe and stick to the first surface they touch. The seed in each book is carefully planted on a sheet of black paper, which turns white as the seedling sucks the pigment out of it. Each seedling has to be added just before its book is sold; if it stays in it too long, it spreads and starts eating the words.

If it weren't for my disastrous luck with plants - every single one I've raised has died, except the ones that turned out to be weeds - I might be tempted to get an inkweed myself.

Miss Hepsedine fed the inkweed while she talked. Her hands were covered with the feathery black lines of roots. I wasn't sure why they were there, instead of on her feet, until she got out a jug of ink and started pouring it into her palm. I expected it to drip off onto the floor. Instead, it disappeared into her hand like a magician's trick, absorbed by the inkweed without spilling a drop.

She spent the evening writing; she's currently working on a book about dermatoglyph biology. When not discussing inkweed, she hardly talks at all, which is perfect - I don't either, and Flishel talks a lot but doesn't seem to care if anyone's listening. It all works out nicely. If we ended up with someone who talked all the time in a language I knew, I could never concentrate on anything.

Post

Look, it's a blog post! I think that's enough for today, don't you?

NaBloPoMo

I know I'm not the greatest correspondent; it's been... let's see... five months since I last wrote. Sorry about that. I've been doing fine, no serious problems or anything, but I just... haven't gotten around to writing. Or, when I have gotten around to writing, I haven't gotten around to sending.

In other words, I'm as absentminded and disorganized as ever.

Anyway. Apparently, it's a tradition among a lot of Cormilack's writers (and some in other places as well) to try to write something every day of November. Some of them take the opportunity to write entire books. I only found out about this a few days ago, with the result that I've already missed over a week; apparently, though, it's all right to start a bit late. I'll see if I can write a bit more than once a day, to try to make up for that a little. I can't promise a picture a day, but I'll try to send at least a few of them.

Let's see if this helps me write more regularly. It's certainly worth a try.

Seven Random Facts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Greetings from the Kilopede

This is quite a surprise! Thank you! I got your letter this morning and nearly fell out of my pagoda. I've never tried writing a blog before, unless you count the time I started interviewing all those spindle beetles who kept mistaking me for Captain Tamarac. That isn't exactly the same, though.

I never did find out who Captain Tamarac was, by the way. None of the spindle beetles seemed to know.

I'm glad to hear that the mountain's doing well! I wish I'd gotten to take a better look at it before I left. If only the Moler Festival were a few days later... Of course, the way things have been going, I still may not get there in time. I suppose I should write something about where I am at the moment. I still haven't reached Mount Moler. I think the Kilopede must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, maybe where it had to go around all the paper kite lizards by the lake. I don't know why this always happens; every time I travel by Kilopede, I somehow end up miles away from my destination. With all the eyes they have, you'd think they would always know where to go.

Now that I think about it, though, they almost always end up somewhere much more interesting than where I intended. Hmm. Maybe they know what they're doing after all. I've always wondered what goes on in those mile-long brains of theirs.

Oh! That's all I can write for now. The Kilopede just stopped to let someone cross it - I don't know who, they're about half a mile closer to its head than I am - and there's something off to the right that I have to get a picture of. I'm going to miss the Moler Festival for certain, but it will happen again next year, and I'll probably never be able to find this place again. As far as I know, the Kilopede is the only one who knows where we are - if even it does. It's a good thing I still have my suitcase packed. I'll try to send this by the first postbird I find after I jump off. I'll write more later...

Nigel