The Land of Broken Roads

The lines in the area around the tower turned out to be fencing made of old, crumbling wood—logs laid through x-shaped posts that had mostly collapsed. They cordoned off respectably large areas of irregular shape, now overgrown and lacking any obvious purpose.

Socks padded through at a slower pace, content to look at everything and take it easy, and that was fine with Dirt. It was an afternoon for relaxing, after the day they’d had so far.

Prisca had a clear memory from her youth of riding a horse through farmland, and it had looked something like this, even though it had been elsewhere. In contrast, though, the Empire’s fields were never so disorderly as this. The fields of the Empire were all straight lines and deliberate curves, each field containing the same amount of ground. Nothing like here.

The farmland in her memory had been full of tall yellow grass which Dirt knew to be grain, even if he wasn’t sure what it was good for. There was plenty of grass without having to mark off sections of ground and grow it on purpose. It wasn’t good for eating; of that, he was sure. He’d tried.

Prisca had been feeling wealthy and joyous in that moment, but that just made all this dead land look more desolate in comparison. What might have once been ditches for irrigation were now shallow dips. Small houses, huts really, stood forlorn, half of them toppled to the ground, and the rest still coming apart. The tight thatch that once made their roofs was little more than rotted clumps of grass, where anything was left of it at all. The mud-and-wood walls fared a little better, but the rain would wash them away eventually. The wooden fences would rot, the uneven lines carving up the landscape would fade, and nothing would be left at all to say anyone had been here.

Except the tower. That still stood, sturdy as ever. The main door was missing and all the openings for windows were empty now, but the roof was intact and its pale stones weren’t going anywhere. It was a respectable size, perhaps as tall as Mother, and all square. As Socks took them closer, the number of fields decreased, and the houses multiplied. Some had sturdier walls and roofs of clay, and enough of them remained to tell that a fire had destroyed most of the town.

Socks sniffed around at everything he found interesting, which was a growing number the farther they got, and Dirt was content to let him take his time. Some of the decaying houses still had stuff in them—burned furniture, ancient piles of rags in places where water was less frequent. Rusted metal tools.

-This happened after Marina was here. How long ago do you think that was?-

“I don’t know, but probably a long time. Her memory of it isn’t very clear.”

-I wonder how long it takes for things to rot this much. Is it a long time, or a short time?-

“Neither of us have been alive long enough to guess. But can you still smell the fire? What does it all smell like?”

Socks sniffed around again, poking his big nose through the window of a nearby house, then pulling it out and looking inside. ­-Well, for one, I don’t smell human anymore. Not anywhere, even the bones. Do you want to go in any of these houses?-

Dirt leaned over, considering. “I guess so. This place isn’t from my humans, when I was alive last time. We never made stuff that looked like this. But I should still go see what there is to find.”

-If you are lucky, perhaps you will find some human clothes, and then you won’t have to make them.-

“Really? Do you think so?”

-Not all of this is burned or rotted. I think whatever happened to the humans who lived here was fast, and they didn’t come back. Maybe they’re all dead.-

“Well, if they stirred up all those digger creatures, then I wouldn’t be surprised.”

-You go in the houses, and I’ll go look elsewhere. Don’t get sad again and cry.-

“I won’t,” said Dirt, but Socks leaned down and licked his face anyway. Dirt patted him on the nose, then looked around for a likely house. The closest one had a mostly intact roof of clay tiles, making it as fine a choice as any.

Dirt stepped in through the doorway and found the door laying flat on the old wooden floor, a few steps inside. It had been smashed open, it seemed. Cracked and beaten before finally being knocked over.

The walls were white plaster, once, until the fires. And before the fires, something had marred them. Perhaps blood, perhaps something else. Dirt wondered if there had been a fight in here, or even just a slaughter. All the furniture was smashed, as if done on purpose, but most had survived the flames. Only the left side of the house had burned, leaving the rest of the house intact.

Dirt stepped out of the first room into the next one to the right. It was smaller and full of shelves, all still intact. Pottery and jars of glass filled them, many of them shattered. The intact ones were full of old dried fruit and vegetables, all gray with mold and decaying to dust. Still, some of the color remained on a few bits of old fruit, making Dirt wonder if it was still edible. He decided not to risk it. Socks had warned him about eating like a scavenger.

Other than that, the room was unremarkable except for two human skeletons, one adult and one child. Judging from the state of their bones, something violent had happened to them, but it was so long ago that Dirt almost didn’t notice them lying there in the midst of all the other decaying garbage.

The next house was much like the previous one, and the one after that. Dirt found plenty of things that might have been useful if he were planning on staying or had some way of carrying everything. Hammers, awls, chisels, and larger tools he wasn’t familiar with—some of them with little or no rust. Knives, but none of them as clean and perfect as the one he already had. Oil and lamps to burn it in. Candles. Flint and rusty iron that could still spark if Dirt scraped it clean enough.

Clothing, too. Shoes and pants and shirts and plenty more uncut cloth besides, most of it damp and rotting with mold inside when he unfolded it. And everything he found was adult-sized, not child-sized, which didn’t help.

Most houses didn’t have any dead in them, and never more than one or two. And most of the corpses Dirt found were skeletons, except a few who’d landed in dry spots and mummified instead. The adults were clothed, all of it rotting and useless now, and the one other child skeleton he found was in a spot overgrown with moss, so it was impossible to tell what he’d had on.

Dirt decided the only truly interesting thing he would find here was clothing, and only if he was lucky, so he began tearing from house to house, looking for dry places and things unburned. He upended baskets and wicker chests, lifted fallen furniture, kicked through ashes.

Finally, finally, he found a single pair of pants that were small enough for him to put on. They were dusty with ash and had been partially buried under an old bed that had fallen in, covering it with straw. But when Dirt shook them out, their dark green color returned and revealed a decorative stripe of red boxes down the side of each leg. The rope belt sewn into the waist even had the knot still in it, and after picking at it a bit, Dirt learned the trick.

He pulled them on, and his first thought was that the cloth was softer than ferns, but not as soft as puppy fur. He wouldn’t wear them all the time. Only when other humans were around. He decided that immediately. They were also too long for him, and so baggy they’d never stay up if he didn’t tie them tightly. Dirt took his knife and cut off the bottoms, regretting losing that nice hem with its charming coloring.

Nonetheless, it was clothing, and it was in good repair. It wasn’t even that old, really; not compared to the other human places he’d explored.

-Congratulations, little Dirt. Now you can toss that other cloth away because it still smells like those digger things. Get rid of it and then come to the tower. I found out what happened to this place.-

Dirt obliged and untied the creature’s rough cloth from around his torso, then tossed it with deliberate disdain into a moldy pile of old bedding. Then he grinned and ran, feeling how the cloth pants tugged his legs as he went. What a strange thing to do. Pants, of all things. Humans were silly.

The roads were only identifiable because they had nothing in them but grass, but that made easy running. Dirt reached the tower in an instant and went in through the large empty doorway to find Socks wagging his tail next to a pile of skulls.

-Goblins got them. Many goblins, I am sure. They brought all the heads and left them here.-

Dirt stepped over to the skull pile, which was almost as tall as he was. Hundreds. He almost wanted to count them to find out just how many people lived in a place like that, but decided against it. He wanted his new pants to stay clean for as long as possible.

“How do you know it was goblins?”

-Because of the dead goblins. Look, here and here.-

The goblin skeletons laying on the old, marred wood of the tower floor were impossible to mistake for human. For one, they were wider and thicker, and for two, the fangs gave it away.

“If this is all the heads, where are the rest of the bodies? And I found a bunch of skeletons with heads still on them.”

­-I don’t know. Do you have another explanation?-

Dirt thought about it for a moment. “I guess they took the rest of the bodies home to eat.”

-Oh. I bet you are right. So do you like your pants?-

He danced a bit to show them off, then said, “They’re okay. I just hope Marina and Hèctor and Ignasi like them.”

-They look looser and baggy than what those humans had on.-

“Yep.”

Other than the giant pile of skulls, the ground floor of the tower was a respectable chamber, or at least, it had been. Now it was largely empty, with a roof a couple feet above Socks’ ears and three large fireplaces along the wall. Whatever furniture had been in here once was long since burned, along with the stairs to the next floor. The next floor itself, however, was still fine. They’d only succeeded in burning the stairs.

The wood floor was stained nearly black and the more Dirt looked at it, the more he thought it was dried blood. So much of it that almost none of the floor was untouched. So much it must have been a pool deep enough to splash in. The majority of humans had probably been killed in here. They’d run in and hid but the goblins had taken down the huge doors.

Dirt looked at the stairs again, wondering why everyone got killed here instead of up higher. Then he remembered something he’d hardly taken note of and ran back outside. Sure enough, the windows all had awnings to keep the rain out, and long streaks of black under each one told him the goblins had built fires on the outside. The smoke must have gone up into the windows and made it impossible to breathe, so the humans inside had to come down. That was his best guess, anyway.

Dirt went to the opening, stumbling through the half-burned chunks of wood in the pile, and jumped with mana. He shot up through the gap and landed on the bare edge, waving his arms to keep from falling back out. But Socks gave him a little push with his mind, and Dirt was safe.

The second floor was curiously untouched, compared to the lower floor. A stain of smoke and a layer of ash over everything hid the room’s color beneath a coating of gray, but none of the furniture was smashed. Long streaks of black along the wood floor told him that a few stragglers might have been killed up here and then dragged down the stairs, but the room was otherwise tidy.

Desks and shelves filled the space, full of paper. Paper everywhere, all kinds of it. Dirt stepped over to a desk and picked some up and found it full of letters he couldn’t read. He only recognized half of them and nothing made sense, even when he tried comparing it to the new human language he’d been learning.

Each of the four square walls had a window in the center, which was the only light in the room. Sunrays shone in through the dusty air, illuminating the spots close enough to be damaged by years of wind and rain despite the stone awning. Most of the room was untouched, and for the first time in his life, Dirt truly felt like he was in a real human place. Not an old, lost place, preserved only in stone and memory, but an actual human place, separated from life and vibrancy by only a few short years.

Dirt walked over and sat in a chair, just tall enough for his toes to dangle. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table and wondered what a person who sat here might do all day. The wind didn’t seem to touch this spot when it blew through the room, and the papers were stacked right where the last person had left them.

-You are looking at things up there, aren’t you? Share your sight with me.-

Dirt quickly complied and went around looking at everything again, especially the papers. Socks was curious about all the little scribbles on them, and the furniture. Armrests on chairs, of all things, merited a great deal of his attention. Dirt found it all amusing and marched around examining things until they got bored. The stairs up to the third floor were intact, but creaked when Dirt went up them.

-The stairs farted.­- said Socks, which got an out-loud bellow of laughter from Dirt.

“I guess you have one thing in common with stairs, then. You both fart when I get on you.”

Then he had to make the stair squeak over and over again and laugh, accompanied by waves of deep amusement from the pup.

The third floor wasn’t open like the lower two—the stairs ended at a door, which opened easily when Dirt turned the latch. It opened inward, not toward the stairs, and a sturdy wooden post leaned on the wall beside the doorframe. Dirt stepped inside and shut the door to get a closer look. Iron hooks in the doorframe made a place to put the post and hold the door shut. He even lifted it, heavy enough he needed to use mana, and dropped it in place. The door wasn’t opening with that there. So had the people up here been smoked out? Or had there been some who waited out the attack and left afterward?

Beyond the door was a hallway with a lower ceiling than the floors below. Six doors lined the hallway, three on each side. Four of them opened to bedrooms, perfectly untouched. The doors had been shut during the fire and stayed that way ever since. The two bedrooms with windows were musty but still livable, and the two without windows were fresh as the night of the massacre.

With shaking hands, Dirt removed his pants, pulled away the blanket from a bed, and prepared to climb in. For reasons he couldn’t explain, it made him incredibly nervous. Like he wasn’t supposed to be there. Not allowed. Not his place. Dirt was a wild creature and belonged huddled on the ground, not resting on clean sheets and a comfortable mattress in a safe room atop a stone tower.

Dirt opened a bit more of his mind and shared his sense of touch along with his sight. That was a somewhat more involved and would result in a headache again if they kept it up, but for just a moment, Socks got to find out what it was like to be a human going to bed.

He climbed into bed slowly, sliding his bare skin across the gentle cloth. The soft sheets smelled like linen and dust, a strong, clean, welcoming scent that tickled his nose. He laid his head on the pillow and pulled the blanket up to his chin and immediately warmed right up. The heavy blanket pressed down on every inch of him, holding him tight.

-Are we going to take a nap? Because I’m still down here with nothing but a pile of skulls,- said Socks, trying to hide his envy.

“No, I just wanted to see what it was like.”

-It always feels weird that you have no fur.-

“If I had fur I wouldn’t be able to feel the cloth.”

-Well, that does seem comfortable. Not all human things are silly, I suppose. Beds are not silly.-

“Someday, I’ll have humans make you one. A great big one, just for you.”

-Come down, if you are going to. I think I do want to take a nap.-

Dirt ended the sharing of his senses and slid back out of bed. He carefully spread the blanket back how he found it, even and free of any wrinkles. He tossed his pants over his shoulder instead of putting them back on and made his way down to Socks without checking the other rooms. There might be more things here he’d want to see, and maybe they could even stay for a few days until the Devourer got close to finding Socks again.

But for now, he had more important things to do. He and Socks left the tower to find a shady spot in an overgrown field just outside of town where they lay down for a nap. The nap was a long one, and when Socks woke first and licked Dirt awake, the sun was slipping toward the western mountains.

-Are we going to try and find the humans now? Or wait until morning?-

“Well, after that nap, we won’t be sleeping any time soon. Let’s go find them. You’ll be fine seeing if it gets dark, right?”

Socks huffed in feigned indignation and tossed Dirt up onto his back, staff, pants, and all. Then he took off at a run, excited about the coming dusk and cooling air. They raced across the valley at high speed, too fast to examine anything they passed.

Their path went around the mountain peak claimed by the digger-beasts and missed the canyon with the stream entirely. Socks had great fun leaping downhill at top speed, so happy in midair with the wind in his face he may as well have been born a bird. Dirt enjoyed it slightly less, since it always seemed like he was about to drop something, but he still whooped in excitement at the incredible distances the pup could cover with a single downhill jump.

The path through the mountains to the previous valley was long enough that night fell before they reached it, and Dirt declined sharing their sight. He was content to watch the stars above come out as the cloudless sky moved from blue to purple to black. The Home-staff gave him a dinner of sap, which he chewed thoughtfully as he stared upward.

In the daytime, the sky seemed an empty void that could yank him up to hurtle forever into emptiness, but at night, the stars made the sky feel closer. The lights were still impossibly distant, but there was a limit to them. If something flung him upward at night, he wouldn’t fall forever. He would land on whatever was holding them up.

Down here on the ground, there was very little for Dirt to see, but Socks had no trouble and hardly slowed down. The starlight was enough for him, coupled with his senses of smell and hearing. Dirt watched the pup’s mind from time to time, always enjoying how vivid it was, with so much more sensory information than Dirt took in. And underneath it all, that tug northward that he hadn’t known about before, directing Socks anywhere he wanted to go.

The pup smelled the humans fairly close to the stream and followed their trail from there to a little campsite they set up. He approached close enough for Dirt to smell the smoke from their campfire and hear them arguing.

“Fa setmanes que no he vist ni una pista de cérvol. Què menjarem quan ens quedi sense pa?” Hèctor was saying, his voice raised. Something about not seeing tracks for a while, and What are we going to eat when the bread is gone?

Marina shot back, “No ho sé, Hèctor. Troba una altra cosa. Sé que estem a prop de la torre. Hem de ser. Reconec aquestes muntanyes. Conec aquestes plantes. És només una mica més lluny.” I don’t know. Find something else. We are close to the tower, something about mountains and plants. Something farther.

Socks said, -Wait, Dirt. Let’s get them some birds to eat. If you want someone to like you, you should give them food.-

“Oh, that’s a good idea. Can you smell any? And by the way, I’ll give you more sap for dinner when you’re ready.”

The pup crept silently away from the camp, leaving them to argue. He sniffed all around until he found a scent he’d passed up earlier—birds big enough to bother with, the size of Dirt’s forearm. He crept up to the nest, which was tucked away in some bushes where Dirt would have trouble climbing in. The pup’s long legs simply took them over the worst of the tangle.

­-Here.-

Dirt slid down, landing loudly and shaking a bunch of leaves. The birds immediately flapped their wings to escape but Socks hit them with a wave of mental force and knocked them from the air. Even though they were white, Dirt had to feel around until he found them, and he decided four was enough since he didn’t need any.

He pulled his pants on, tied the rope belt, then jumped back up.

Socks carried him back to the camp and Dirt slid off his back, all four dead birds tucked under one arm and the Home-staff in the other. He braced himself, taking a deep breath.

The humans fell silent all at once. Dirt almost panicked, thinking they’d spotted him before he was ready. He hadn’t even thought of what to say yet.

But it wasn’t him they’d seen. Socks could smell their fresh terror, and in their minds, Dirt found two huge glowing eyes staring down from the darkness. Oh, they’d just seen Socks’ eyes reflecting the firelight. Thank Grace!

Dirt walked toward the camp, only a couple dozen paces. He strode with forced calm and fearlessness until he was well within the firelight.

The three humans were too terrified to move. They were like prey that hoped the predator would move on if they played dead.

He took another step closer, close enough to start feeling the heat from the little fire. “Hola. Crec que estàs perdut,” he said. “Tens gana?” Hello, I think you are lost. Are you hungry?

He smiled warmly, held the birds toward them, and waited for their reply.