Ruins (Pathfinder 2)

Umbo didn’t exactly ignore her. He waited for her to finish talking, and he was listening. But he didn’t look at her once. And when she was done, he said, “There’s one thing we should be seeing, and we’re not.”

For a moment Param didn’t know what he was talking about. But then he pulled out his jeweled knife, and she realized. “No expendable to greet us.”

“There wasn’t one in Odinfold, either,” said Umbo. “But the way I see it, Larex has been without a job for eleven thousand years. He’s too busy to come chat us up when we come into his wallfold?”

“The ways of expendables are inscrutable,” said Rigg.

“Scrute them,” said Umbo. “If you think it’s a good idea, I’m going to call for the flyer. Do you want me to ask Larex to come with it?”

“Maybe later,” said Rigg. “At some point we might want to see what the local mechanical man has to say for himself. At least his people aren’t all dead, like Vadesh’s.”

“We assume,” said Umbo.

“If we can still call them people,” said Param.

Loaf spoke up. “Oh, my definition of ‘people’ is definitely broader than it used to be. The mice have decided to take my advice and not accompany us. We’re weird-looking enough, what with this thing on my face and Olivenko being so butt-ugly by nature, without tipping off the locals about this smirky-smarty mouse invasion.”

“In other words, they want time to get established before the Larfolders find out they’re here,” said Olivenko.

“They’re already mating their little brains out,” said Loaf. “They won’t want to meet any Larfolders until their babies are having babies.”

“Which should be in about an hour and a half,” said Rigg.

“Gestation’s a little longer than that,” said Loaf.

“So?” asked Umbo, holding up the knife.

“Call for the flyer,” said Rigg. “I’m trying to figure out how I used to get around. I vaguely remembered that I used my legs somehow.”

“Yes, legs,” said Umbo. “I try never to use mine.”

Param chuckled. But the banter between the boys stung her. Olivenko was right. By blood, she was Rigg’s sister. But by love and loyalty, Rigg’s only sibling was Umbo. That was why Rigg had been so angry with her. He didn’t want to have to choose between them. But if push

came to shove, quite literally, he would choose Umbo. Had chosen him.

And he was right, thought Param. I haven’t earned my place with them yet. Damsel in distress, even a talented disappearing damsel who’s also your closest living kin, isn’t automatically a dear and trusted friend. That will take time. And more strength and courage and self-control than I’ve shown up to now.

CHAPTER 20

Larfold

The flyer carried them over pristine landscape, but because Rigg saw with the eyes of a pathfinder, he was struck by how empty it was. Like Vadeshfold, only even more devoid of paths. Though Odinfold had billions of paths, they were all faded by the thousands of years that had passed, and in recent years the paths had been few, and clustered up against the Wall.

How different they all were from Ramfold, full of life, the webs of paths still weaving themselves afresh with every day’s activity.

Odinfold was carpeted with ruins; Vadeshfold had its one empty city; but Larfold had nothing at all in this vast sweep of forested land, the hills and cliffs and mountains. Only the wispy trails of the colonists from eleven thousand years before, heading northward to the sea, and then nothing on land that was more than a few hundred meters from the shore.

Yet this land was similar in climate and terrain to the land the Sessamids had come from, the barbarian forests that had spawned invasions of the great valley of the Stashik River again and again through history. The land was the same, but untorn by slash-and-burn farming, unscarred by roads, ungraced by bridges and buildings.

It was not more beautiful than lands that human beings had shaped, thought Rigg. He remembered the ruins of the old arches that had once spanned the Stashi Falls, broken in ancient storms or earthquakes. He remembered the stairs cut into stone that led up in a breath-robbing highway to the crest of the falls; he remembered running up those stairs, and also staggering down them carrying bundles of pelts. Was the mountain somehow ruined because humans had cut away stone to make a stairway for themselves? Or was it made more beautiful as well as more useful?

What comes into being naturally is pleasing to the eye, yes, Rigg thought. There is a beauty to the wildness of it. But there was also beauty in the Great North Road that wound along beside the Stashik River, and beauty in the patchwork of farms, and in the rough raw buildings of Leaky’s Landing, which was such a new place, and in the ancient buildings of O, so many of them built of stone barged down the river, as if humans had moved a mountain to make O. There was beauty in Aressa Sessamo, too, by nature a shifting swampland, but made by humans into a huge island of raised earth on which a city ablaze with life had been raised, a forest of wooden buildings where an empire was governed and people lived their lives of joy and misery, of boredom and excitement, leaving paths behind them in a tangle that to Rigg seemed the very tapestry of life.

The natural land is beautiful, and it is beautiful again when it reclaims the ruins of humans who are gone. But when humans are there, that is the beauty I love the most, because it’s a web I’m part of, it’s the fabric that my own life, my own path, is helping to create. What humans make is not less beautiful than what comes into being out of wildness alone.

“We’re wild, too,” said Rigg aloud, because he needed to hear the words, and so he had to say them.

Olivenko was the only one near enough to him in the flyer to look up at the sound of his voice.