dronedaries grazed the long grass. They wandered, complaining, without even glancing at the ghostly streets around them. An Insect bridge arched up from the green plain, became transparent at its apex, then descended into the center of Vista Marchan. The bridge was so old that cracks showed in its silver-gray patina like weathered teak.
Vista Marchan is a city that crashed through in the wake of an Insect invasion. The entire world of Vista was undermined by the Insects and collapsed into the Shift, where it is now visible from Epsilon. Its sandy wasteland seemed to emerge from the ground and extended at an incline to high in the sky. The dead towers of its capital city leaned at forty-five degrees through the Epsilon plain, listing so that their tops hung over the Insect bridge. Their basements looked to be embedded in the ground, but actually they neither entered nor overlaid it, and they shimmered slightly in a heat that the savanna did not feel.
Nothing survived the Insects in Vista Marchan, but since they destroyed the boundary between the worlds so completely, people could walk there now, over their bridge.
One Insect tunnel bored into Vista’s deep-sea abyss, causing a kilometer-high waterspout in another world, through which the entire ocean drained away. No good came of this apart from the fact that it killed god knows how many millions of Insects, and there is now a peaceful saltwater sea in downtown Somatopolis.
I wondered if the Insects would eventually reach Tris of their own accord; some time millennia from now the Trisians might truly need Eszai to defend them. I wondered if the Insects burrowing down and piercing through the worlds would in the far future infest them all-the last worlds forming the outer layers of their teeming nest. Were they imperceptibly surrounding the Fourlands on all sides? Were we at the center, near the Insects’ long-overrun world of origin, or were we on the outer reaches, one of the last to fall?
Tarragon said she wanted to view the ocean’s sphere from the outside. I wanted to strip away the worlds and look at the complex extensions, apertures and twisted continuous shapes of the Insects’ domain.
Lost in contemplation I wandered through the market’s fresh clothing region and the designer food district, to the edge where the Constant Shoppers’ rickety shacks were dotted around between the stalls. The poorest Shoppers had to walk hours to reach the Squantum Plaza, heart of the market. They are a collection of all species but habitually a breed apart. They are either creatures of Epsilon, or Shift tourists like myself, so overwhelmed by Epsilon’s bazaar they never escape.
“They buy things all the time,” Tarragon had said. “Compulsively. I mean, that’s their only pastime. They trade morning to night, and then all night in the southern souks. It’s fashionable to spend money. Some of them are terminally addicted, which is as terrible as your habit.”
“These Constant Shoppers, what do they do when they run out of funds?”
“They set up their portable stalls on the other side of the Plaza and sell everything they’ve bought. Then, with that money, they start shopping again.”
I explored toward the river mouth. The market did not end at the waterline; the rows of stalls kept going, unbroken, straight into the estuary and along the sea floor.
Out here in the periphery Epsilon market extended into the air as well. Tall metal struts supported stalls on platforms thirty meters high. Creatures on top flitted, squawked and chirruped, eager to buy and sell. Marsh gibbons swung hand over hand along ropes strung between the poles; vertebrate spiders with meter-long fangs spun webs across them to catch flying machines.
Seldom ripples came in on the limp Epsilon sea. The water was as clear as air. At first half-submerged, the market continued down to great depths, where it faded from view in the poor light. Jellyfish hung motionless above it. Things with long, intricate shell legs waded between the stalls and reached down to select bargains. In comparison with the aerial stalls, the underwater market moved slowly and gracefully; columns of kelp swayed like trees. Temblador eels glowing eerie white swam at a sedate pace in shoals through the passageways. Nicors with ivory tusks and whiskery faces flapped along with lazy fins. Saurians snacked on pre-Cambrian sushi, tasty bundles of seaweed and writhing worm junk food. They haggled over jewels-green glass beads on silver rings. Anorkas clustered with geeky excitement around a shell stall and frales-very small whales-cruised picking up crumbs just as dogs, rats and trice do on land.
There were red octopi with pale undersides and eight shopping baskets. Rays with sinister ripped-off goods under their cloaks avoided the pikemen patrolling the aisles.
The market surrounded a large, translucent hall that the stinguish had constructed out of solidified water. Their building materials were monumental, colorless pyramids of spring water atop black water slabs from the lightless abyss, and gray speckled blocks from the deep silt where soft carcasses degrade to their elements. Their edifice was decorated with bricks colored bright blue from the brine captured in sea caves, and rare aquamarine from the surface water that flares green when the last ray of the setting sun flashes through it.
A mirth of female stinguish looked up from the forecourt of their hall, through the surface tension. I waved to them; they turned to each other and giggled, long silver fingers over their lipless mouths in girly gestures.
Stinguish are a lighthearted people who live in groups called mirths. They communicate by laughter that carries underwater for thousands of kilometers, so any two individuals can chatter to each other through a network of mirths, anywhere in the vast ocean. According to Tarragon, chatter is exactly what they do; their flaky air-head nonsense pervades every cubic meter of the sea. Stinguish mirths migrate fifteen hundred kilometers twice a year, dive two thousand meters down to chasms, or lounge on the beaches in the tidal zone and breathe air. No stinguish was ever solitary. They had even more camaraderie than Plainslanders did. If you kicked a football along the streets of Rachiswater, an Awian would either tell you to keep the noise down, or point at the KEEP OFF THE GRASS signs. If you kicked a football about in the wrong side of Hacilith, someone would knife you and steal it. In Eske, Plainslanders start fifty-a-side matches that last for a week. But stinguish never stopped playing. How they managed to swim vast distances and remain cheerful is one of the great mysteries of nature.
My boots crunched on the pebbles. I passed a refreshment stall under which crouched a pair of brown, scaly tea dragons. Their innocent yellow eyes tracked me. Tea dragons breathe streams of hot, black tea. They were being used as caddies; I approached carefully because I didn’t want to be sprayed with it. The stall holder was a polyp, a teacup held in each tentacle and its wet skin shining in the sun. “What’s it like being a polyp?” I asked.
“It’s awful. Bits of me keep budding off and becoming accountants.”
The polyp sold tea to a flabberghast who bought a whole armful of ghostly doughnuts. I didn’t see the flabberghast in time and accidentally walked straight through his corpulent, overhanging belly.
“Hey!” he exclaimed. “Look where you’re going, skinny boy!”
“Sorry, sorry.” I backed down to the water’s edge, my hands raised.
Immediately a stinguish girl shot out of the wavelets. She grabbed my ankle with fingers as bony as a bird’s feet.
I shook my leg. “Get off! What are you doing?”
“Can you spare some change, please?”
The stinguish was young, with circular silver eyes, not much of a nose at all, and an ample mouth side-to-side of her round smooth head. Her mouth turned up at the corners like a dolphin’s and was full of small pointed teeth. Her thin arms grew down into long, bony claws, her chest was flat and lacking nipples, and her body ended in a broad tail like an eel’s-thick in the middle, edged with a fringe of fin that came to a point. She coughed up some water, shuddered and quailed as she took a lungful of air, as if she didn’t like it at all. Water drained out of the gills that lay shaped over her ribs. The stinguish’s smooth silver skin was extraordinary; every imaginable pastel color shone on her iridescent metallic hide. I could see the herringbone arrangement of muscle in her tail. Her ribs were like ripples in platinum sand; she looked malnourished.
Oddly, she was alone and she hadn’t laughed once. She was not behaving like a stinguish at all. She waved her tapering tail exhaustedly and pleaded with big lidless eyes. “Please. I need to buy things.”
I crouched down and peeled her pointed, nailless fingers from around my ankle. “Hello, little urchin,” I said.
“I’m not an urchin. Urchins are prickly.”
“No, they’re not all bad-tempered. I was one once.”
The stinguish shook her head and an expression of confusion appeared in her medallion eyes. “What are you
