Spring in the Railway Regions

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

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

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

There has still been no sign of Professor Flanderdrack.

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

Endless Tracks

We're out in the uninhabited parts of the Railway Regions. The mountains stretch away in every direction like a rumpled quilt made of trees. There are misty gray patches of skeleton trees, green speckles of fir and hemlock and pine, and smooth expanses of gray and brown stone. Birds fly overhead - crows, vultures, and the occasional Winter falcon. Their calls carry for miles across the empty mountains.

This is balloon country.

They're everywhere. There's always something in the sky - rarely more than one at a time, but always something. Hot-air balloons float by like brightly patterned soap bubbles. Floating cupolas hang like little cupcakes of architecture beneath their own balloons, larger than the ones with baskets, long tubes like cucumbers or stacks of balloons like abacus trees. Pedal-balloons putter by now and then. The people beneath them are visible if they get close enough, turning the rudders and propellers with bicycles rebuilt for flight. Airships of every size loom overhead, massive hulks of inflated cloth or leather or paper with tiny gondolas underneath, casting shadows like clouds on the mountains. Some spin their propellers lazily; others just drift with the wind. They're only crossing these mountains on their way to somewhere else.

The Train traveled all day without passing a single city, town, or village - not so much as a trackside cabin. Nothing but trees. The only sign that people had ever been here was, in fact, a sign, stuck on a post near the tracks. The paint was cracked and faded, but the writing was still legible. There was only one word:

WHERE?

It looked like it had been sitting there for years, asking its impossible question to the silent trees. I wish I had an answer for it.

Actually, that wasn't the only sign of civilization. Passengers on the Train just stop noticing the other one after a while.

After all, the tracks are always there.

The first tracks were laid by the Hill Builders. For centuries, no one was sure what they were; the long, straight pieces of metal just turned up now and then for no apparent reason. Farmers would find them beneath their fields or exposed by landslides. For some reason, the tracks were made of ordinary steel, which is why they didn't last as well as most of the Hill Builders' creations. Most of them had been buried and rusting for a long time.

After the Train was unearthed, of course, it was only a matter of time before someone noticed the shape of its wheels and realized what the tracks were. Most of the tracks were bent and rusted beyond repair by then, and there's no telling how many have never been found at all. Nearly all of the intact ones had been dug up and taken away. They obviously weren't doing any good where they were, after all. The scattered tracks show up in the strangest places. One of them is the roof-beam of a barn near Milldacken. Two others are in a circus that travels through the Railway Regions; they've been turned into stilts for a giant. A pair of tracks runs the entire length of a hallway in the Vanister Museum. They've been used as foundation pilings in Golgoolian, fence posts in the High Fields, and pillars and railings in several of the floating cities, where metal is lighter than air. According to one of my fellow passengers, one piece of track has made it all the way to the Golden Desert; a crinkle-bagel vendor in Thrass Kaffa uses it as a frying pan. Little pastries sizzle in the Desert sun, lined up in a row on top of the old steel.

As a result of all of this, when the Train was finally repaired and began running again, there was more or less no track for it. A few sections had survived, but it could have crossed all of them together in about two minutes. The Engineers had to lay their own tracks for several years.

Of course, once it became obvious that the Train was the best thing to ever happen to travel in the Railway Regions, every town and city wanted the tracks to come to it. The railroad doubled in length within the first few years.

It's fairly simple for a town to connect to the railroad. The people just add a small circle of track to their station - usually with one side hidden, so that it's not held in place by people looking at it - and within a few days, the track going through the station is just another part of the railroad. Instead of going in a circle, it continues out of the town in both directions. There is only one track in the Railway Regions. Any set of rails laid on the ground will become part of it sooner or later.

Strangely, it's continued to grow over the years. Each town only adds one or two hundred feet of track - not enough to even reach the edge of town, in most cases - but the rails still stretch across the mountains for miles.

No one puts tracks in the middle of the wilderness. They're there anyway. The railroad may have been started by hand in towns and cities, but most of it has grown all by itself.

Hollowane

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Linewurm

The Train came around a curve this afternoon to find what looked like a lizard-shaped heap of scrap metal shuffling along the tracks. It was almost as large as the engine. When it saw the Train, it got off the tracks in a hurry, shedding machinery and pots and rusted sheet metal as it went. The noise was horrendous. It sat by the tracks as the Train went by, lashing its tail and hissing at us. The combination of clanking and hissing sounded like a steam engine about to explode. Its teeth were quite impressive. There were storm-drain gratings fitted over its eyes.

I only recognized the junk-heap creature from photographs and descriptions in books; I'd never seen one above ground. The Train had surprised a linewurm.

Small dragons and their relatives, such as salamanders, are usually content with anything metal. That's one of the many reasons to keep salamanders in lanterns; they've got a piece of shiny metal that's bigger than they are. Craftsmen's salamanders are generally happy with their ovens or forges. The ones in the great metal hulk of the Train - or, better yet, the floating cities - must feel like kings.

Large dragons usually have more refined tastes. They prefer gold. This is by no means true of all dragons, or even most, and the less obsessed ones can get rather unpleasant if you imply that it is. Quite a lot of dragons these days collect gears, or teapots, or umbrellas, or any number of the other pretty things that people make. I know of half a dozen off the top of my head who collect only books. (Frankly, I don't know why everyone doesn't do that, but you know how I feel about books.) Some don't collect anything - though most dragons consider those ones eccentric, or possibly just lazy. Still, all the most traditional dragons collect mainly gold and the occasional gemstone.

The linewurms - distant relatives of dragons, like giant white newts - have almost nothing in common with their winged cousins except their size and their love of metal. They certainly don't share their brains. Even the most uncivilized and temperamental dragon can outthink most smaller creatures; when you live for centuries and have a brain larger than an entire cow, you can hardly help it. Linewurms are considerably less intelligent. They spend all their time hoarding things. They prefer metal, but they'll settle for rocks. They're not picky. When they find something nice and hard, they glue it to themselves with the mucus they secrete, making their own armor plating to cover their soft bodies. They make claws out of old knives and pickaxes stuck to their toes. When two linewurms meet, provided they don't find each other attractive (and most of them don't), they fight. The fact that their claws and scales are secondhand and handmade makes them no less eager to use them. They fight, and the winner takes whatever useful bits and pieces are left on the floor when the loser runs away. The focus is generally on knocking armor off rather than actually hurting each other.

In other words, linewurms collect stuff to fight and fight to collect stuff. People have suggested that they could just leave each other alone, but the linewurms don't seem interested. Perhaps there's nothing better to do down in the caves.

The mucus that holds linewurm armor together eventually covers it with a thick white layer, like glue, giving the metal (and other assorted junk) a pearly shine and softening its edges. It reduces the clank of metal on stone to a quiet rustle. Old linewurms look like the ghosts of junkyards. The mucus also coats the insides of the caves where they live, turning rough stone passages into the smooth tunnels that linewurms prefer.

This, incidentally, is where linewurms got their name: they are wurms* that line stone with slime and line themselves with stone. It seems like rather a pointless cycle, but linewurms seem to like pointless cycles.

A rare few wurms have been known to make sculptures out of mucus, building them up layer by layer with the patience of a cave drip forming a stalagmite. Most don't have the patience.

The hardened mucus is said to be like tree rubber, only better, and there's gotten to be quite a trade in stolen linewurm upholstery. People go down into their caves and peel the coating off of the walls. It's a job for only the exceptionally brave or foolish. Linewurms grow to be several hundred feet long, keep themselves well armed, and suspect everyone they meet of being a thief. (To be fair, they're almost always right.) They're the main reason that abandoned underground villages stay abandoned. Linewurms like abandoned villages. People always leave such nice stuff behind. Fortunately, there's no shortage of abandoned underground villages in Hamjamser, so linewurms rarely need to bother with the inhabited ones.

Of course, not all linewurms live in the wild; quite a lot of them live in Mount Moler, primarily as garbage collectors. Once again, they're not picky. Lineworms have been known to live above ground, but only with completely opaque armor (they sunburn easily) and truly enormous sunglasses. It's extremely rare to see one out in daylight. I still have no idea what the one we saw today was doing. According to the passengers at the back of the Train, it got back on the tracks after we passed, clanking away behind us and lashing its tail angrily. It stopped first to pick up some of the pieces it had dropped.

Later in the day, when the Train stopped at the village of Hoggen, I found a horseshoe and the crank handle from some piece of machinery - a gramophone or pepper grinder, perhaps - caught on the front of the engine. Shreds of rubbery mucus still clung to them. The crank handle looked quite old, an elegant piece of Caroque brasswork. I brought them in and put them in my suitcase. I think I'll hold on to them for a while. It's not every day you get your hands on a piece of a linewurm's coat-hoard. Who knows - maybe I'll get a chance to return them someday.



* "Wurm" being the term for the amphibious variety of dragon. Not to be confused with "worm" (a limbless invertebrate), "werm" (any other limbless animal, such as furry snakes and nullipedes), "wirm" (a long, segmented robot), or "warm" (the same as hot, but slightly less so). "Wyrm" refers only to scaled dragons (though in some parts of Hamjamser, it's considered rude and therefore highly dangerous to use the word to their face). Why we can't just use completely different words for all of these, I have no idea.

The Smokestack

Sure enough, there's a smokestack in the center of Ayagolla. It's a hollow monolith of ancient red brick on the highest point of the mesa. A rusty ladder is bolted to its side. Anyone can climb up and look into the opening on the top, so that's exactly what I did.

The outside of the smokestack is about as tall as a two-story house; it's small compared to most of the ones on Hamjamser. Inside, however, the hole goes down too far to see. It's at least as deep as the bottom of the mesa.

Being large, ancient, inexplicable, and remarkably well-preserved, the smokestacks are generally thought to be yet another mysterious leftover from the Hill Builders. They seem to be made of perfectly ordinary, if rather large, red bricks; several of the stacks are known to be at least a thousand years old, though, and they don't look more than a few hundred. Nobody has ever built as permanently as the Hill Builders. They're named for it, after all.

The smokestacks turn up all over Hamjamser, usually in high places. There are at least fourteen in the Railway Regions. Explorers have found them rising unsinking from the Great Shwamp, drifted in sand in the Golden Desert, and crowning the peaks of half a dozen islands in Kennyrubin. They're all made of identical red bricks, no matter where they are. As far as anyone can tell, the smokestacks are bottomless. Explorers who go down them run out of rope before they reach anything. Attempts to excavate the stacks, to follow them from the outside, have turned up nothing but endless perfect rows of bricks. The shafts are too narrow for flight; the bases are wider than the tops, but they stay the same width below the ground. Katara Katravandisask, the notorious daredevil photographer, probably would have gone down one long ago if her wings could fit.

A few people - geckos and insects, mostly - have managed to climb down the inside walls of smokestacks. They've brought back strange tales of tunnels and rooms at the center of the world. Some say the smokestacks go straight through the planet, and that each one has an identical counterpart on the opposite side. (This theory is only held by supporters of the round-world theory, of course - the flat, shapeless, mosaic, and moebius world theorists think it's complete nonsense.)

No smoke ever comes out of the stacks - they're named only for their shapes - but they're always a few degrees warmer than the surrounding air. The inside of Ayagolla's is full of bats and cliff-swallow nests. Aeroscorpions hook themselves to cracks in the bricks during the Winter. A few of the cold-blooded villagers join them, preferring to hibernate in the warmth of the smokestack instead of their own chilly basements. They hang little tents inside the bottomless hole. From the top, I could see several of them hanging like canvas fruit over the empty blackness. Each tent has at least five or six ropes holding it to the top of the smokestack, as does each person inside it. Apparently, the drop doesn't bother them.

The Ayagollans agreed to let Miss Hepsedine plant a small inkweed sprout at the base of the stack. It's the perfect spot - the bricks are surprisingly smooth after hundreds or thousands of years of weather, and the ground all around them is as black as charcoal.

On a completely different topic, I heard from another passenger on the Train that there was an accident at the Bank of Bannarbangle last month. A dragon's hoard fell through the floor and ended up hopelessly mixed with the vault of gold below it. It took weeks to sort them out. The dragon is thought to have come out of the mess about thirty pounds richer than before; when a dragon says that yes, it is sure that this particular brick belongs to it, you don't argue. The whole thing reminded me instantly of Professor Flanderdrack. I wonder where he is right now.

Ayagolla

Ayagolla is a small fishing village on top of a small mesa. It's farther away from the water than any other land within two miles. The valley around Ayagolla is deep, edged by cliffs on every side, as if a section of the Railway Regions just sank three hundred feet straight down. Most of the valley floor is a lake.

The villagers have carved dozens of steep, precarious staircases into the wrinkled cliff sides of the mesa; at the bottom, where the cliffs rise straight out of the water, are the docks and the little boats that the Ayagollans use for ordinary fishing. They row occasionally to the little shacks and cabins on the valley's other islands, or to the outer staircases that lead to the rest of the Railway Regions.

The Train, on the other hand, can only get to Ayagolla by bridge.

The Bridge of Golla is built on two rods of hypersteel. They were laid across the valley a long time ago - far too long for anyone to remember, possibly by the Hill Builders themselves - and their ends were driven deep into the face of the rock. No one really knows exactly how long they are. One end of the bridge is attached to the mesa, the other to the top of the valley's outer cliffs. For hundreds of years, the two rods - each over two miles long and roughly the thickness of a pencil - simply had wooden boards laid across them. People could walk to Ayagolla, three hundred feet above the water. The boards had a tendency to rot in the damp air, though, and people kept getting blown off the bridge by the high-altitude wind, so most preferred to take a boat. No one objected when the Train began running and the bridge was turned into a a railroad bridge. Instead of wood, the two hypersteel rods were connected by bars of iron, and tracks were laid on top of them.

It's rather unnerving to cross the bridge. It's less than a foot thick. Nothing supports it except the two pencil-thin rods of hypersteel; from the middle of the bridge, with the cliffs far away, it looks like just a thin strip of metal hanging in the air. Underneath the steady beat of the Train, you can hear the bridge humming, the deep ringing sound made by the metal that does not bend. A piece of hypersteel doesn't just vibrate in one part. If the middle is vibrating, so are both ends and everything in between. The Ayagollans can hear the Train coming long before they can see it.

Ayagolla was originally built by fishermen, who cast their lines over the cliffs to catch the glider-eels that swim through the air over the lake. It's part of their migration route. The river that flows through the lake has carved a deep canyon into the cliffs on either side; the eels weave their way from one opening to the other, avoiding the waterfalls that spill over the edges. They float high above the surface. They swim with the same languid rippling motion used by aquatic eels; their fins are as large as wings and covered in shimmering rainbow patterns. Each eel has four long whiskers, far longer than its body, which it keeps trailing in the water at all times. If an eel's whiskers leave the water, it falls. No one has figured out why. Aeroicthyologists have spent their entire lives trying to discover the secret to glider-eel flight.

The villagers don't really care how glider-eels fly. They just catch them. When the first schools of eels start drifting through the valley, all other fishing stops. The villagers get out their poles, thick bamboo rods strung with rope and baited with apples (a favorite of the eels, for some reason). You need a strong pole to catch a glider-eel. Young eels are no larger than a garter snake, but the adults can reach the size of a tiger shark. The eels are completely weightless until their whiskers have left the water; after that, though, it sometimes takes two fishermen to reel in a large one. They anchor themselves in the fishing-holes scattered over the top of the mesa. Over the years, depressions in the stone fill with small grains of sand, which are blown around in circles by the wind and expand the holes a fraction of an inch every year. Some of the oldest and largest ones have had houses built on top of them and become root cellars. Each eel-fisher picks a hole and stays in it until their eel has reached the top of the mesa; mature glider-eels are large and strong, perfectly capable of pulling a loose fisherman over the edge.

The Ayagollans rarely catch more than ten eels each year. They salt or pickle the spongey meat to eat until the next migration. They sell the whiskers, which are quite popular among experimental aviators. The sky-sails used on some airships, which appear to be constantly filled with a wind blowing from below - like parachutes that never fall - are actually ordinary ship's sails with glider-eel whiskers woven into them. The owners of sky-sail ships keep large supplies of water on board so that the sails don't dry out.

The Train is going to stay at Ayagolla overnight and move on tomorrow afternoon. I hear there's a smokestack in the middle of the town, which I plan to go see tomorrow morning. I've never seen a smokestack up close before.

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.

Passenger Tree

The cold is still new and sharp in the air, only a few days old. No one is used to it yet. Most of the Train's passengers spent the day snug and warm in their compartments, sleeping or reading, talking to friends and relatives and random strangers. The Train had been quiet all day. It was getting dark when we pulled into the station at Filligan, a little wooden shack next to the tracks, and there was no one awake in the car except the Conductor and I. The platform in Filligan is a small field on the outskirts of town. The snow had melted there, and the ground was dark and muddy.

The Train always stops for at least a minute or two at every station, even the completely empty ones, in case someone wants to get off. No one had gotten on or off the Train all day. There was no one waiting outside the door. The Conductor was about to give the all-clear to the engine when I noticed something standing farther off on the platform (I was coming back from a quiet dinner in the dining car - just me, a plate of pasta, and Herveli Pipe's Lifted Engines) and pointed it out.

There was a silhouette in the dark, a slightly lighter brown than the darkness around it. At first it looked like a woman, then like a tree trunk, and then I realized it was moving. Not a tree trunk, then. It came slowly closer while we watched.

When it reached the light from the open door, we could see slowly moving limbs and the shine of light on wood. It was a Drae.

Drae are one of the few species of intelligent plants in Hamjamser. Their origin is a mystery. They are trees, leafy and wooden, but they're shaped (sort of) like humans. I've only seen two or three of them before, and never this close. It was surprising to see one at all this time of year. Most Drae are motionless through the winter, lost in sleep or whatever it is that trees do until Spring. This one was quite awake. She wanted to ride the Train.

Her torso was a trunk; her trunk was a torso. Drae look like trees and like women at the same time, and it's impossible to separate the two.* Her arms were branches. Her fingers were twigs. Her body split at the waist into two legs, like a double-trunked tree in reverse. There were knots at her knees.

Her head was little more than a knob of wood on top of her trunk. Being plants, Drae have no mouths or noses; they don't eat and they don't breathe. Her ears were wrinkled knotholes in the sides of her head. Her eyes were similar, two dark holes in the wood of her face. They were completely black inside. A tangle of vines hung like hair from the top of her head, framing what there was of her face. They rustled softly as they moved over her shoulders. She'd lost her leaves, like the other trees. Two skeleton-tree branches sprouted from her shoulders. She kept them folded behind her back, like wings, and the twigs rattled as she walked.

Drae don't walk on top of the ground. They're plants, after all; they prefer to stay in it. She waded across the field instead, plowing up little waves of dirt in front of her ankles. Soil is about as solid to Drae as water is to other creatures.

"Good evening, Ma'am," said the Conductor, with his unshakable catlike elegance. "Would you like to come aboard?"

Drae don't talk. They understand spoken words, and speak to each other with a slow language of moving branches, but they have no mouths to speak with. She nodded her head, slowly, and reached out with both hands. The conductor took the Train ticket she held silently in her wooden fingers. He waited for her to climb the steps, but she just stood there, arms lifted to us. Her feet were completely still below the ground. The meaning was fairly obvious: she wanted us to lift her into the Train.

It took both of us. Drae are trees, creatures of solid wood, and it takes more than one slender Conductor to lift one. Her arms were as stiff and heavy as branches. Drae don't exactly have muscles; they move using water pressure, like venus flytraps. They're incredibly strong. When a Drae moves her arm, it's not a motion involving separate pieces, like the bones and muscles of an animal. The arm is a single piece of wood. One moment, it's one shape; the next, it's a different one. To any outside force, a drae is as rigid as a tree trunk, even when she's moving. They can crack stone with their fingers.

She held our hands with exquisite care. Her own were as hard as carvings and as cold as the air outside. She pulled down heavily as she lifted one foot out of the ground.

It wasn't a foot. Below the ankle, her leg branched into a tangle of thick roots, like the trunk of any other tree. Clods of earth fell from them as they emerged. The roots kept coming, the thick primary ones branching into smaller ones the thickness of a finger, then into tendrils no thicker than string, and finally into huge masses of fine root hairs. There were as many roots sprouting from her ankle as there were twigs on one of her wing-branches. Normal trees have as many roots below the ground as they have branches above it; apparently, Drae are the same way. It's no wonder they don't walk on top of the ground. They have no feet.

She put the tangle on the lowest step of the doorway, the roots twisting and grasping for purchase like an octopus on land, but she kept most of her weight on our hands as she pulled her other set of roots out of the ground. The ground sagged as she left it. There was a fairly large hole below the door when she finally had all her roots spread on the steps. She climbed them, still leaning mostly on us, and walked slowly to the nearest seat. Her roots left a trail of dirt on the floor.

She sat perfectly still as the Conductor called to the engine and the Train started again. Her wing-branches framed her in rattling twigs as we moved on. At the very next stop, the station in Sellendendra, she stood up and we helped her back off the train. Her roots made the ground ripple as if she was stepping into water. She walked away into the night without a backward glance.

We watched her go. When she disappeared in the dark, the Conductor called to the engine, thanked me politely for my help, and said goodnight. I went back to my compartment. Flishel was asleep already, as (of course) was the other passenger. No one else on the Train had noticed the Drae at all.

I still have no idea where the Drae was going, or why she decided to get there by Train. I'm just glad I had a late dinner and happened to be walking by at the right time. If I hadn't, neither the Conductor nor I would have met her, and she would have had a long way to walk.



* Technically, Drae have no gender, but they've made it known (somehow) that they prefer to be called "she." They do look more female than male, even if it's just because of the hair.

Kingdoms in the Snow

It snowed for most of the day, surrounding the Train in silent curtains of white flakes. A layer of white built up outside the compartment window. I could see the tiny crystals in it against the dark wood of the frame. The engine dripped, hot and iron-black in the middle of all the white, and snowflakes vanished on it in tiny puffs of steam.

We stopped at a few small villages - Tremel, Arn, Tackahoe, and two or three more whose names I've forgotten. Everyone in them was tucked away in their houses, sleeping or sitting quietly, looking out at the snow. It's the first snow of the year. By January, no one will even notice it anymore; the flakes on the ground and in the air will become as unremarkable as leaves in Summer. Today, though, the world stops to watch them. Everything is quiet. The sleeping passenger in our compartment wasn't the only one. Only one passenger got off the Train all day, wrapped in so many scarves that nothing was visible but a pair of gleaming yellow eyes. The bundled figure was walking away down the streets of Tremel, a lone silhouette in the empty whiteness, when the Train pulled out of the station. The smell of frost came in through the open door and lingered for half an hour.

A few miles past Tackahoe, there were snowflies in the snow. They looked a bit like tiny white moths. I couldn't see their faces or their tiny hands; I'd need a microscope even if they ever stayed still. They were barely visible even when they flew right up to the Train's windows, braving the raging heat that leaked through the panes of glass. I doubt they got anywhere near the engine. The salamanders on the roof, letting out curious little puffs of steam, must have seemed like enormous fire-breathing dragons.

No one is sure where snowflies come from. They are never seen before the first snowfall. Some people believe they are born then, that one water drop in a million freezes into a snowfly instead of a snowflake and takes on a tiny life of its own.

Snowflies live fast. A day lasts about a year for them. They live through nights that are whole Winters, when ice blooms and the world flourishes, and bleak daytime Summers when the sun drains the cold from the world. An exceptionally long-lived snowfly might see the passing of an entire week. They collect snowflakes, digging them out of the layers on the ground or catching in them midair. Some of them look for quite a while. No one knows why, but only certain snowflakes will do. They build castles with them. This is probably the first tribe of snowflies to appear this year; they will begin a new era, here at the dawn of time, and be remembered in myth and legend by their descendants.

Their castles are marvels of miniature architecture. Snowflies lock snowflakes together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, building them into walls and minarets and tall spires like icicles made of lace. The very thickest walls are thinner than my little finger, and they can withstand the strongest Winter gale. For their size, the snowflies' ice buildings are stronger than stone. The rooms are smaller than the ones in a doll's house.

The castles are more or less the same every year. Either the snowflies build them by instinct, or the basics of snowflake masonry are rediscovered each Winter.

By February, each castle will have become a palace, a monumental construction of a trillion tiny crystals. The snowflies will build an empire. Settlements will grow around the palace, little clusters of ice huts sprouting like mushrooms. A few snowflake empires have grown to cover whole hillsides. The farmers will harvest the frost every morning. Hunts will fly out after gargantuan field mice and the occasional terrifying shrew, waging ferocious battles in the tunnels beneath an inch of snow.

It's almost impossible to observe snowflies, as they're not much larger than snowflakes and move so fast they're practically invisible. Nearly everything we know about them is thanks to Brindle Soffmoggin, a scientist who once spent three weeks in the snow with a camera and a magnifying glass, studying the snowflies. They were curious about him at first (a mute, molten giant, lying motionless on the ground for years at a time), but started treating him like part of the landscape after a few hours. They harvested frost off of the mountain of his coat. Most people these days know Soffmoggin by his nickname, Snowfly Brindley.

In Spring, the world of the snowflies will come to an end. The days will grow longer and harsher. The castles will drip and collapse. The frost will become scarce and die out, the snow will stop falling, and empires that have stood for months will crumble and fall into anarchy. Every snowfly in the Railway Regions will be gone before May.

Next November, when the first snow falls, a new tribe of snowflies will appear and start history all over again.

The world, it is generally agreed, has been around a long time. It will probably be around for quite a while longer. Looking at the snowflies every year, though, I can't help but wonder how many there have been before it.