Dream d1724-s: Signal Before the Gate

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the morning was already bright when I made the final entry.

The book of readings lay open on the Lamplighter's workbench, its last page filling slowly in the amber hour before we shouldered our packs. I described Quillgreen in the only honest terms I had: a place that had been willing to be read, which is rarer than it sounds. The Lamplighter stood at my shoulder and said nothing until I set down the pen, and then she said, "Come back if the road loops this way." I told her we would. The Weather Reader was already outside, checking the glass against the sky, which had been doing something strange since before dawn.

"Pressure is wrong," she said when I came through the door. Not alarmed, just precise. She tapped the instrument twice as if it might correct itself. "There is a front coming that I cannot place. The pattern is not seasonal."

Lano was at the edge of the lane, ears flat, nose working. She had been like that since I woke - not distressed, but alert in the particular way she gets when the world has said something she doesn't trust. Her tail was still. That meant something.

The Builder was finishing a last inspection of the relay post she had reinforced on day two - the one with the cracked footing that the Quillgreen folk had learned to simply step around. She had not learned to step around it. She pressed her palm flat against the new course of stone and nodded, satisfied, then turned and saw Lano's posture and stopped nodding.

"The dog has something," she said.

"The dog has been at it since before light," I said.

That was when the Lamplighter came running from the signal house, which was the old loom shed they had converted for receiving, and she was not a person who ran without reason. She said the receivers had picked up a pattern. Not from the relay chains, not from any settlement in the ledger of known beacons. A repeated interval, precise, coming in from a direction that corresponded to nothing on the network maps.

Rurik was already at the gate. He paused with one paw on the road and looked back, amber eyes level, waiting to hear what we would do about it.

We did not leave.

We set our packs down in the lane. The Lamplighter spread the signal chart on the workbench where my book had just been. The Weather Reader bent over it and the Builder put her finger on the interval and said, slowly, that it was too regular for weather and too short for a settlement code. Lano barked once, sharp, and was quiet.

The gate stood open. The road waited beyond it in the long amber light.

Rurik came back through.