To get to Taithorkey from Tekagol required crossing Denxalue. It was a dingy place. The road was up on a bed of stone that rose above the muck of the swampy forests. Alongside the road were high-rooted trees hoisted above the slow-flowing waters, their branches weeping over the road as the rain continued. At points the great stone road had sunken despite the efforts of the road-builders, and though none dipped all the way to the muck, the caravan was slowed by the unevenness.

Ekis had made the walking easier. The untiring izerah at Denziu's side was a font of stories about the deep-under, of all things. The so-called “deep-under” was a realm of realms far below the surface of Theoma, where wingless dragons had their own societies.

There were myrghon, which species Denziu had never seen, who were small and wingless, but surrounded by floating gems that they used like extra hands. The myrghon (Ekis claimed) were tinkerers who made great big machines that they powered by slotting their gems into them. She wanted to see myrghon heavy machinery very badly.

There were myrskor as well, the other dragons of the deep-under, who had great big earfins like the finniest vashael and who were friendly light-summoning dragons. Myrskor had magnificent wingspans just like the izerah, Ekis said, and Denziu had burst into laughter despite the exhaustion of spending all day walking.

For izerah, of course, have no wingspan at all.

Ekis was unaffected by the walking. By the end of the day, for the first time in zir life, Denziu envied the tirelessness of the izerah quite bitterly. This is what zie thought about while preparing a price card for the Tekagoli charms and the pigment phials zie had made. A brush dipped in zir darkest brown paint, and a terrible longing to be an izerah, that was the taste of the evening.

That risen stone road had various off-ramps across the theome. When the sun was setting overhead, they pulled off the main road at the next off-ramp. The vrash in the caravan then unhooked themselves to go stomp a patch of muddy ground into hardness. Vrash magic flowed through their feet, packing grass and soil into a circle of sedimentary rock. When it was ready the wagons were pulled onto it and circled. Tarps were unrolled and pulled between the wagons to provide a dry space large enough for dragons to sleep in. They had no privacy in the camp, but between the firmed ground and the tarp, they did at least have dryness in a swamp.

That next morning, Denziu saw that the rising shadow of Choave's unnatural vigour spell excluded zir that morning. “Why didn’t you cast that on me?” asked Denziu.

“You’re injured,” Choave said gruffly. “Can tell by how you’re moving. We’ll tie your wagon to someone else’s, and you’ll rest today in Oghai’s carriage.” Road injury. Too much walking.

Thus on the second day of the caravan's journey, Denziu found zirself in the passenger carriage. Their shareholder Oghai the Absent owned the carriage that accompanied the caravan. He was a blue-backed and yellow-bellied izerah. This was one of the two who had been missing from the cafe.

Vashael being larger than izerah, Oghai had to rearrange the interior to make room for Denziu, and while the izerah was working on doing so, Denziu asked, “Is it a problem that I’m displacing you?”

“It is not,” said Oghai. “I walk alongside the caravan most days. Staying in one place all day would be harder than keeping up.” He came out of the carriage carrying a chest, and hauled it away to drop it in another wagon for the day.

With Oghai finished, Denziu climbed aboard. All of Oghai’s furnishings were pushed aside against the wall. The space opened wasn't quite large enough for a sprawled vashael to be at ease. Still, it was a relief on sore muscles.

Denziu's wagon was pulled along without complaint as the levitating thing contributed little burden. A small, wry part of Denziu's mind wondered if Choave would change his mind about the value of a flying wagon when he realised how much more he could carry if they were all using more such easy, frictionless vehicles.

Denziu passively watched the mucky swamp going by, occasionally stretching to ease the suffering of complaining muscles, and trying not to groan from the intensity of the ache. At a few points, when the caravan slowed to deal with poor roads, zie got out of the passenger carriage and walked alongside. Staying in one place all day hurt more than mild activity.

Much of the time though, zie talked to the caravanner who pulled Oghai's carriage. That was Orachu the Unambitious, who Denziu had met briefly at the brunch.

“Do you always pull Oghai’s carriage?” Denziu asked.

“No, I don’t. I pull Oghai’s carriage sometimes and a different wagon other times.”

“Who else pulls this wagon, if not always you?” Denziu asked.

“Sharisen the Sociable usually pulls Oghai’s carriage,” said Orachu. “Have you met her yet?”

There were only two dragons in the caravan who Denziu had seen at the mustering, but not at the brunch, and zie knew who Oghai was. The remaining outlier was a white-scaled vashael who must therefore have been Sharisen the Sociable. “We haven’t spoken,” said Denziu.

“Be nice to her, even if she’s cold,” said Orachu. “She’s as old as old gets, and she’s seen more tragedy than most in Theoma.”

Denziu said, “You said you’re a primordial, right? You must be super-old, too!”

“Super-old is right. I’m second gen, but first gen for most purposes. I’m 1,203 years old. My parents had me when they were 24.”

Denziu forgot zir aches entirely with this conversation topic. “24! That’s crazy young. What was it like being one of the first children ever born on Theoma?”

“Well…” Orachu took a moment to think, then said, “I had siblings because all the early births were triplets, but there were no other children at all. Hardly anything was built back then and the population was low, so we grew up isolated in the wilderness, but Raul gave us summoned dragons for tutors. They were still teaching basic skills personally all through the first century.”

Denziu listened closely, and when Oghai stopped talking zie said, “I was born into civilization. You got to see it start from nothing.”

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“And I did. I saw Tekagol when it was mostly wild, though already Baggil was getting started with farmergon abstracts,” here Orachu interrupted himself with a glance back at Denziu, “Do you know what an abstract is?”

“No, I don’t.”

“A summoned being. Looks real, but it’s got no soul. It’s just part of the land god. Just like the summoned dragon tutors I had.”

“So Tekagol’s first farmergons were Baggil’s ‘abstracts’?”

“That’s right. The land gods wanted us to develop in certain ways, even then. I didn’t want to refuse them or anything, but I was a bit sceptical, and I couldn’t think of anything that made me want to tear up the ground or pull down the trees. I settled on going from place to place asking what other dragons had and what they needed. That’s how I got started as a haulergon.”

“You said you were sceptical?”

Orachu didn’t skip a beat in pulling Oghai’s wagon, but his voice grew heavy. “Theoma got boring. Dragons lost their bite. I grew up flying and eating raw meat. Now I walk laden and eat bread. Sometimes I feel like I should’ve flown away to Niazion with the other dragons who rejected development.”

“Why’d you stay?”

“Oghai.” Orachu carried his head higher. “He was the first dragon I ever met who was younger than myself, and I was still a child at the time. He was so bright and avid, and he loved everything that was built. I couldn’t bear to fly away from him.”

Oghai checked in on Denziu several times that day as well. This seemed to be one of the functions of Oghai on the trail, as Denziu saw and overheard the blue-scaled runner move along the road speaking to different caravanners throughout the day.

“Do you know how old everyone on the caravan is?” Denziu asked at one of those check-ins.

“Most of them. How old are you?” Oghai asked back.

“I’m 74,” said Denziu. It was a young age on Theoma, where dragons live forever, though not so young that Denziu couldn’t be seeking a second career by now. Zie’d been a clayseller for decades.

Oghai’s brow ridges and earfins went up with surprise. “Unless Lorvaza earned fantastic wealth at a young age, you’re the youngest on the caravan.”

“You don’t know how old Lorvaza is?”

Oghai shook his head. “No. Not a clue. Although I would be shocked if she were younger than you.”

“Who is second youngest?” Denziu asked.

“Well, possibly Lorvaza,” hedged Oghai, but then he said, “Else it’s Chatulerin the Calculator. She’s 349 years old.”

All this lead up to what Denziu wanted to talk about. “Orachu told me you’re only ten years younger than he is.”

“Oh dear,” said Oghai, looking caught aback. “That came up already? Please don’t call me a primordial. I know I should be one, but I don’t really feel like a primordial…”

Orachu cut in cheerfully, “Stop worrying about that and tell zir who you were!”

“Oh!” Oghai laughed awkwardly and brushed his shoulder. “I was Zyrine’s first architect. Zyrine wasn’t a big city yet, so in that day, I ran all across the region trying to get involved in every early building project.”

Orachu said, “Oghai kept getting me involved in early building projects, too. Sometimes I was flying about to catch up to him.”

Around midday, the caravan paused without unhooking from their wagons, and Oghai distributed food up and down the column.

As zie accepted a quarter loaf of bread for a meal, Denziu asked, “Are you really named Oghai the Absent?”

“Yes, I am. Want to know what it means?” offered Oghai with a smile.

“Of course!”

“I own properties in ten different theomes along this route,” said Oghai. “Since I can only be in one place at a time, that means to most of my tenants and employees, I’m absent most of the time. I’ve taken it as a name; I’m Oghai the Absent.”

“Do the people you work with ever take advantage of your absences?” Denziu asked.

“Not often. You know, I can only do what I do, because I’ve found so many dragons I can trust,” Oghai said with a powerful emphasis on the word trust. Denziu had to suppress an eyeroll. Oghai’s delivery sounded didactic.

The dragons zie was travelling with were fascinating. The sore muscles of having pushed zirself so hard were not. The thought of having to walk all day again was a dreadful one. Zie thought of it as another misfortune that Baggil placed on zir, because the side effect of the vigour spell had only seemed to affect zir. Although it was very small, zie could not forget the feeling of the little pewter bird charm at zir neck.

Near the end of the second day of travelling the endless swamp gave way to increasingly vast trees and the road signs started referring to places in Taithorkey whose names Denziu had only read on maps. With Choave’s spell they had fast-marched through Denxalue just as fast as possible. They had no business in the swamp theome.

When they pulled the wagons from the road at a clearing, which was only a clearing at ground level owing to the exaggerated trees, they camped that night under the vast trees of Taithorkey. Since zie had been carried all across Denxalue without the group stopping at any of Denxalue’s markets, Denziu asked Choave, “Why did we bypass Denxalue?”

To this Choave replied, "Denxalue is Fated to a kind of impoverished stagnation. There's little profit in this place, and a bit of everlasting bog iron doesn't do enough to make up for that."

That attitude shocked Denziu, and that night zie unwrapped several of the painted pots from Denxalue to show them around the caravan, defending the reputation of the pottergons of Denxalue by showing their names and best works to a caravan of Tekagoli merchantgons. Zie did not try to convince the caravan to go back, but was merely the entertainment of the night, sharing painted pots in firelight.

They were unwieldy things, the pots that Denziu had acquired. Too tall to pass around, they stood sentinel around the fire that evening, with the flickering light revealing the three that Denziu had selected: the pot with the weeping willows, the one with with a vashael poling a boat, and the panorama of Badyen. These were the best by firelight in Denziu’s opinion, although none of them were ideal in this light.

“So this is what brought you out here!” said Choave, admiring the panorama of Badyen.

You have good taste, Denziu thought. “Yes, and that is my favourite of the pots.”

Omrezen lounged near the fire. “Are ceramics with paints like this always available in Denxalue?”

“Only sometimes, if you know which pottergons to buy from,” Denziu said proudly. “Their brushing is inconsistent, but their lesser works are still good pots.”

Kishka was studying the weeping willows pot. “I want to see the other side, but I don’t want to handle a piece of artwork. Oghai, can I borrow a light?”

Oghai fetched a lantern on a stick from his carriage, aglow with an everlight. He carried this over to where Kishka stood, and the two of them circled the pots that Denziu had set up, studying together the side of the pots away from the firelight.

“Are you regretting not going to Denxalue’s markets?” boasted Denziu.

Chatulerin said, “I don’t think we know how to sell these. I’ve no doubt they’re worth a good profit to the right merchantgon, but I think working outside of our specialty like that would leave us stuck carting the same stock all over.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” said Choave. “We’d sell them as pottery. Good pottery, but still just pots. It’d be bad competition for Denziu, too. I think we’d fairly ruin Denziu’s journey if we tried to pick up more of these.”

“Oh!” Denziu was taken aback.

“You’re welcome!” said Choave with a laugh.