Dream d2725-s: Seven Roads at Pewterlow

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the second book lay open across my knee at the entry for the Ruins of Pewterlow, and the first thing I did was count the roads.

The gate is not a gate anymore. The posts still stand, but the crossbar is gone and only its shadow persists in the stonework, a groove worn by decades of something I did not see. Lano stepped through the gap ahead of me, her nose working before her feet, and I came through after. On this side the roads fan out so evenly they might have been laid with a rule, seven of them, pale lines across the scrub, each one leaving at a different angle, each one going somewhere the second book does not follow. No other place in the book has seven. Six places in the book have four or more, and the most any of them carries is five. Pewterlow carries seven, and seven is what I put down.

I walked each road to the first bend or the first fifty paces, whichever came first. The book requires only that I record what a road is, not where it goes. The first was a cart track, grassed down the center, and it bore west by the light. The second was stone-set, older than the others, and the stones were heaved by root-work so that walking it required attention. The third was mud packed hard and offered nothing else to the record. Lano kept close, drifting from the verge to the road surface and back, reading something I could not read. She did not range far. She padded at my heel and when I stopped she sat, ears forward, watching whatever direction I was watching.

By the time I reached the seventh road it was plain why Pewterlow has seven and the other cold places do not. The ruins lie at the junction of two older crossings, and the crossings have frayed at their edges into secondary ways, and those ways are still in use by whoever uses them now without naming them in any book. The seventh road was the narrowest and the most worn. I recorded it: a foot-path, direction north-northwest, surface compacted earth and fine gravel, present condition passable. Nothing growing across it. No collapse and no flooding. Someone has been this way within the season.

I sat on the stone that marks the gate and I wrote the number down: seven. Lano pressed against my leg. I did not know whether the number was large or small until I checked the other entries. It is the largest in the second book by two. It is the largest in the book entire.

The ruins gave no account of themselves. They did not need to. I closed the record for the day and the gate posts stood as they had always stood, their crossbar gone, the fan of roads leaving in silence in every direction a road is able to leave.

---