Dream d1730-s: Fog Walk, Three Roles

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the morning fog had not lifted when we set out into Cinderwharf's streets, and the town looked different on foot than it had from the gate the night before.

What had seemed orderly from a distance was, up close, a tangle. Ropes coiled across doorsteps, barrows left at odd angles, a stack of iron fittings half-blocking an alley as though whoever had set them down meant to return in an hour and never did. The Builder paused at each obstruction and said nothing at first - just looked, the way she does when she is counting load-paths in her head. I wrote in the book: tools everywhere, no clear path. The place is mid-thought.

Lano moved ahead of us, nose low, reading the cobblestones for everything we would miss. Her tail moved in small arcs. She stopped at a doorway where a woman in a grey apron stood watching us, and sat. The woman looked at the dog, then at us.

"Bridgekeeper," she said. It was how she introduced herself - by role, not name - and we took the offering in the same coin. I told her we were readers, that we had come to learn the town before we could help it. She nodded as though that were a reasonable thing to say.

We found the Miller at the square's east corner, beside a low stone building that shook faintly with whatever turned inside it. The Weather Reader held up one of her instruments - the small brass one she uses for pressure memory - and read it quietly. "This building remembers work," she said. "It has not forgotten what it was built for." The Miller heard this and looked pleased in the way people do when they are not used to being noticed.

The Clerk of the square found us, or rather found the book under my arm. He was a neat man with a ledger of his own, and he asked, with genuine curiosity, what we were writing down.

"What the place says," I told him.

He considered that. "It says a great deal," he said. "Most of it at the same time."

That was the most useful thing anyone said all morning.

Rurik sat on a wall above the square and watched the fog thin. He marked nothing - no threshold, no fork - which I took to mean we were still in the middle, not yet at a decision. The Builder made a small sketch of the iron fittings in the alley. I wrote beside it: tangled, but not broken. There is a path here. We have not found it yet.

Day two. Four more to read this place properly.