Dream d1775-s: Old Seams Under New Weight

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the sliver moon was barely enough to read by, but I had been reading Cinderwharf by its sounds instead.

We walked the inner perimeter at the third hour, following Rurik, who moved along the base of the curtain wall with his nose low and his amber eyes cutting across the cobbles. Somewhere beyond the lower ward, hammers were still going - not many, two or three workers at most, but the sound carried clearly in cold air and the Builder paused each time to listen to the rhythm. "Load-bearing," she said at one point. "They're pinning something, not finishing."

The cart-tracks told us the second part. Every approach road into Cinderwharf carried fresh ruts - deep ones, narrow-wheeled, which the Builder identified as supply carts rather than freight. Work done within the last three or four days. Significant quantities of something, moving fast.

"Stone," she said, kneeling at a rut-edge near the testing grounds. "Fine aggregate in the track-fill." We had passed the testing grounds that afternoon - targets at measured paces in a tramped-flat field - and I had written them into the book of readings. The Builder had paced the distances herself, murmuring numbers to no one.

Lano had been patient all evening, trotting at my heel. Then she stopped. Her ears went flat against her skull and she turned her head toward the far end of the lower ward, a low sound gathering in her throat, not quite a bark but building toward one. "Quieta," I said, not to stop her but to tell her I was listening too.

Rurik stopped also. He sat and stared in the same direction.

The sound reached us a moment later: not a hammer-stroke but a settling, a deep creak that traveled up through the cobbles and into the soles of my boots. Then Lano's bark came, sharp and once.

We moved at a jog. The Builder was ahead of me by the time we turned the corner into the lower ward, and I heard her say something flat and technical under her breath - a name for what she was seeing that I didn't have. The building at the end of the row was a reclaimed structure, its upper story braced with iron cables run between it and its neighbor. One cable had separated from its anchor-pin. The east wall had developed a lean - slow enough that no one had seen it begin, visible now only because the Builder was looking at it and knew what a plumb line should look like.

"Those footings," she said, and went quiet.

The Weather Reader had her barograph out. "Pressure dropping since noon," she said. "Ground-soak. The old foundation material doesn't drain the way new work would."

I opened the book of readings and wrote down what we were looking at. The night was not finished showing us what Cinderwharf had hidden in its old seams.