Dream d1800-s: Fog at Nettlefall Gate

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road bent south and the fog came with it, low and grey against the morning, rolling off the rim in slow sheets that swallowed the upper courses of Nettlefall's outer wall before we reached the gate. The Weather Reader stopped walking and held her barometer up to the light, tilting it until the mercury caught what grey illumination the sky offered. "Settled," she said, not cheerfully. "Has been for a while." She did not say how long. She didn't have to.

Lano's nose went forward before we did. She trotted four paces ahead, ears pinned, reading the air the way she always does - then stopped and sat in the road's centre, which meant she found nothing alarming, only unfamiliar. The gate itself stood open. Not broken open, not rusted through. Just open, the way a door is left when its last occupant expected to return before dark and did not.

The Builder crouched at the hinge post and ran her thumb along the joint. "Mortised well," she said, mostly to herself. "Whoever laid this out knew the load was going to settle left." She straightened up and studied the hall-shapes beyond the gate, the long pitched roofs intact against the fog, the careful spacing between structures. "It reads correctly from here. Everything in its proper place." A pause. "We'll see what the proper places are actually holding."

I wrote that down. It was the kind of observation that rewards annotation.

We took a room in what had served as the waystation at the settlement's inward edge - one long space with a low ceiling and a fireplace that drew clean when Rurik found a stick to test the flue. He moved through the threshold of each interior door before any of us followed, amber eyes ahead, unhurried, marking each passage in whatever way he marks them. He didn't explain. He never does.

Lano settled near the hearthstone. Leno - she had carried something small in her mouth all the way up the last quarter-league, a dark pebble from the road, and she set it down precisely inside the door. Regalo. Her word for it, if she had one.

The fog pressed the windows. Outside, Nettlefall lay still and correctly arrayed: every hall in its place, the light long out, the silence not hostile. The Weather Reader sat on the sill and read what she could of the pressure above the roofline. I opened the book and wrote the date, the name, the fog's weight and color.

We had arrived. The reading would begin tomorrow.