Dream d1722-s: Hammers After Dark

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the drizzle had not let up since morning, and by the time the lamps came on in Quillgreen's upper street I had filled three pages without meaning to.

It started with the mud. Lano found it first - she dropped her nose to the lane near the cooperage and her tail went rigid, reading something older than today but not by much. I crouched beside her. The prints were deep, heeled, numerous: a dozen people at minimum, all moving in the same direction, toward the far edge of the settlement. Weeks old at most. Whatever drew them had drawn them more than once.

"Purposeful," the Builder said, and she did not mean it as praise or criticism. She was already measuring the stride. "Consistent spacing. Someone set the pace."

We followed the lane as the lamps yellowed against the wet air. The Builder paused at each doorframe, pressing a thumb to the joint where new timber met old. She said little but I watched her expression: approval twice, a small frown once, then something that might have been surprise. I wrote: the joins are good. Newer than the wood suggests. Someone has been re-mortising, quietly.

The hammering began after the second bell. Not one hammer but several, staggered, coming from the building at the northern end - the long low one we had taken for a granary. Light leaked under its doors in thin gold bars. The Weather Reader stood in the lane outside and uncapped her barometric tube, holding it level.

"Pressure's been building since yesterday noon," she said. "Not weather. Activity. The air in this place has been disturbed. You can feel it if you know where to put your hand."

Rurik was already at the building's corner, amber eyes tracking the thin bar of light. He did not go in. He sat.

We found the testing grounds at dawn, when the hammering finally stopped and someone opened the granary doors to air it out. Beyond the last fence line: staked cords, measured paces, a row of standing targets at intervals a careful person had spaced. The ground was churned. Lano moved along the line of stakes with her nose down, unhurried.

The Builder studied the targets for a long time.

"They're not practicing," she said at last. "They're calibrating."

I wrote that down too, and underlined it. The Weather Reader refilled her tube from the rain barrel and said nothing, which meant she agreed. Reading a place truly is the first half of re-lighting it - and Quillgreen, I was beginning to understand, was already in the middle of lighting itself. We had arrived in the second act.

Lano sat at my feet in the thin cold drizzle. Quieto, I told her, though she already was.