The Books of Knowledge

  The landscape began to change once more, now from desert to the area labeled on the travelers’ map as the Benoit Buttes. The Benoit Buttes were a disorienting place, all ups and downs around a rocky maze that left the travelers turned around every time they reached the bottom of a gulley, then again when they crested a hill they thought would be an exit. Rounding any one of the hundreds of corners through the confusion led to many surprises, such as majestic creatures like viraliers and giant grelt. There were hundreds if not thousands of grelts, rolling in the dirt, scraping their matted fur against boulders, and grazing on the tall grasses around the hundreds of muddy little water holes pooled around the buttes. Patch and Chestnut had to be careful not to step in any of the thousands of doryholes that were everywhere in the ground, and Pilotte made a game out of chasing the little creatures into the holes.

  Just before nightfall on the second day through the rocky maze, the buttes lost their argument with the plains and travel became easier for the horses. Water came flowing to Slate and Arianna from a river that sprang up not far from a road they found, and Pilotte was able to scrounge a gammit out of the low grass for dinner.

  The team arrived at the outskirts of TkLawt under starlight. Trees and forests began to reappear, and the air began to carry smells again, something Slate hadn’t noticed missing. He and Arianna decided to camp just outside the city, as it was already late. With the promise of a fresh start and warm food the next morning, the two fell asleep under the stars.

  Slate awoke early to a brilliant yellow sunrise and decided to take Pilotte into town, to see if he could find some folds or glint as a surprise for Arianna.

  The sprawling logging operations just outside town told Slate that TkLawt was booming. The streets he came to were wide, built for the massive carts that hauled towering stacks of lumber from the woods to the mills, of which there were dozens, all bustling with activity.

  The storefronts lining the sawdust-strewn streets of the city’s downtown appeared slapdash, built quickly of whatever material had been available at the time. The dusty citizens crowding these few, small buildings were hard-faced, and cast hostile looks toward Slate. It wasn’t until he saw his reflection in a filthy window that he realized how ragged and burnt he looked.

  Anxious toescape the suspicious townsfolk, the young man stopped at the first grocery cart he reached. The humorless merchant sold him glint in two small, dirty cups, and a dry, broken fold, then got angry when Slate questioned the quality of his merchandise. Another man who had been in the queue stopped Slate to apologize for the grocer’s attitude.

  “Sorry, outsider. Don’t take it personal,” the bearded man said.

  “Oh, I don’t, ever,” Slate said. He began to walk away.

  “Where ya in from?” the man asked after him.

  “Aurora Falls,” Slate answered.

  “All the way up there? What are you doing here in TkLawt, of all places?”

  Slate stopped and turned around. “Looking for work,” he said after a moment’s hesitation.

  “Plenty of that here. Wait a second, I have to pay the man,” the stranger said, dropping some coins on the grocer’s counter before he joined Slate and Pilotte near a hitching post.

  “The pay is terrible,” he continued, “But the work is steady. Though first, I have to ask: What exactly do you call that thing you got there?”

  “That’s Pilotte, he follows me everywhere,” said Slate. “He’s a snarlingwulf.”

  “A fine looking animal. Never seen one. Anyway, if you want work, you should come over to my place. It’s right here in town. We’ll get you set up. You a hard worker? You know trees?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good deal. I’ll see if we can’t find something for that beast to pull around, too. Clyde Batch is my name, what’s yours?”

  “Dahzi Juke. Good to meet you.”

  “We’ll see how you feel about me after a couple weeks sawing wood, Dahzi!” laughed Clyde. “I’m at the corner of Line and Alat. Look for my name on the sign when you come ‘round.”

  “Sounds good,” Slate said.

  “Say, who’s that other cup of glint for?”

  “For my partner, back at the camp.”

  “Well you should bring him on by, too. Remember, there’s plenty of work, plenty of work,” Clyde repeated as he shuffled off.

  Back at camp with two cold, dirty cups of glint, Slate told Arianna about his meeting with Clyde. She suggested that it might be a good idea to look him up in town, even if they didn’t need work, as he might know the best way to get to Opal Pools.

  “Why don’t we just ride old Patch and Chestnut?” Slate suggested, while he and Arianna had lunch in a cool grove along the edge of town.

  “I’m kind of sore already…” Arianna said. “Didn't Ginny say that Murtle somebody or other would take good care of them here? I mean, I love you, Chestnut. You too, Patches. But my backside, not so much. If we have to, I'm happy, but if there’s any other way, I’ll take it.”

  “I don’t know that there is,” Slate said with a sigh.

  A distant cry of ‘timber’ echoed through the trees.

  “Where do you suppose all this wood ends up?” Slate asked.

  “Probably Opal Pools,” Arianna guessed.

  Slate leaned up. “And how do you think it gets there?” he asked.

  “Oh, they usually float…” Arianna explained without thinking, before she realized what she was saying. “…It down a river!”

  “So there’s probably a river that flows from somewhere near here all the way to Opal Pools, right?” Slate asked.

  “Look at how clever we are,” Arianna said.

  The two sold Patch and Chestnut to Murtle, who they located by asking Clyde Batch. The horses seemed happy as they were led off, even stopping to rear up in good-bye as they went.

  Just as Slate and Arianna suspected, the O River flowed just outside the town of TkLawt, at the end of the logging roads. After sliding down the log flume to the river banks, the group hopped onto one of the hundreds of booms of felled trees floating downstream. They were clear of the city before they knew it.

  The soot, sap, and gnarled bark of the boom didn’t make for the most comfortable transport, but it was free and fleet. The team drifted past the countryside, trading posts coming and going along with forests and animals along the riverbanks. The river was jam-packed with log booms, yet the travelers onlyever occasionally saw a lumberman, separating the logs with their long, hooked,wooden poles. Even so, the friends hid. When night came, Arianna used one of her scarves as a net to catch fish under the stars. The five days it took to reach Opal Pools were passed in relative relaxation.

  Word that the metropolis was approaching passed along a chain of lazy calls from the lumbermen over the stowaways’ heads. Peering out from their hiding place, Slate could see the skyline of Opal Pools, as strange as the rock formations in the Glass Desert.

  The time had come to get off the log boom, though how exactly that was to be accomplished remained unclear.

  “I don’t think we can make it all the way to the bank if we jump from here. We’ll have to jump into the river and then swim over,” Slate said.

  “I think I’ll go second,” said Arianna.

  “Your humor is as dry as anything’s going to get around here for a while,” Slate said.

  “Terrible,” Arianna said, shaking her head.

  The two stood poised, watching and waiting for the best moment to jump, when at once their senses were overtaken by a horrendous noise that roared up all around them.

  Slate couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw a giant steel cart come barreling down the side of the river. The cart was moving at an impossible speed, quickly revealing itself to be not one but a series of carts, all linked and tearing along as one. The monstrosity whipped and wound along the riverbank like a strake, before it turned toward the river and bore down on Slate and Arianna.

  It tore past their boom with such velocity that t
hey were thrown back onto the logs as it went by, appearing as a terrifying blur of metal and lightning. The roar it emitted was ear shattering, louder than the greatest winds and thunder Slate had ever heard. Pilotte had never looked so bewildered, if he had ever looked bewildered before.

  The nightmare seemed to last forever, and then was gone as quickly as it had come. Slate’s entire field of vision changed in an instant from a metallic blur to bucolic countryside again, as the monster rumbled off into the distance spewing smoke and steam and squealing, leaving Slate’s ears ringing.

  “What was that?” screamed Arianna.

  “What?” Slate screamed back.

  “What was that?” Arianna hollered at the top of her lungs.

  “I don’t know!” Slate hollered back. “Do you still want to get off the river?”

  Just then, he spotted an embankment wide enough to risk attempting a jump. He didn’t wait for an answer from Arianna; he leapt to his feet and ran, gaining what speed he could before diving off the boom. Heoverestimated his abilities, and fell immediately into the water. Arianna failed her jump as well, and so the two had to slog their way through the marsh, up the side of the embankment, and finally to level, dryground. Pilotte, of course, had no troubles with the jump at all.

  It was at the top of the embankment that Slate found the secret to the great metal monster’s flight: an interminably long pair of rails, which stretched out in either direction until they looked to converge, like huge arrows pointing north and south. The metal monster had left these runs of steel hot to the touch, as Slate discovered when he tried to touch one.

  “Careful! It’s hot!” he cautioned, jumping up and shaking his hand. “Whoa… put your foot on it, though, you can still feel it vibrating!”

  “I don’t want to touch those, Slate,” Arianna said. “Have you ever seen something like that before? What was it?”

  “I have no idea. But these are kind of like mine tracks. It was just, like, a giant mine cart, that could propel itself somehow. Incredible! Imagine what the rest of the city must be like!”

  “Oh, I can’t even!” Arianna gasped.

  “Well we’re not too far off now, are we?” Slate asked, standing up tall. “Let’s go see this Opal Pools.”

  "Are you scared?" Arianna asked.

  "No," Slate said. "A little. Are you?"

  "A little," Arianna confessed.

  “It’s okay,” said Slate. “That makes it even more exciting!"

  Chapter 23