Dream d1805-s: What the Mud Holds

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we woke to Kestrelsquare still working.

The sliver moon had set by the time I came into the yard of our lodgings, but lamps still burned in the cooperage two streets over, and I could hear the methodical knock of a mallet driving hoops. Three days into our stay and I had grown used to the town's daytime rhythm; I had not known, until this night, that it kept a second one after dark.

Rurik was already at the gate when I reached it. He sat with his tail wrapped around his feet, amber eyes moving between the two road-mouths that opened onto the square. The mud between the cobbles told a story he had clearly read before I arrived: deep parallel ruts running wheel-width, filled with water that still held the pressed shape of tread. Fresh. A day, maybe two. Coming in from every direction.

I crouched beside him and opened the book of readings to a clean page.

The Weather Reader found us there a few minutes later. She had her mercury glass out, tilting it toward the nearest lamp.

"Pressure's been climbing since yesterday morning," she said, not looking up. "Whatever they are moving, they moved it ahead of the change. Someone in this town reads weather."

The Builder came last, from the direction of the cooperage. She had been walking the walls.

"The mortar on the east face is newer than the stone by thirty years," she said, settling cross-legged beside me with her chalk and measuring cord still looped around her wrist. "The west gate lintel was recut recently. Look at how clean the saw-line is."

Lano trotted in from the far side of the yard, nose skimming the mud. She circled the deepest rut, sneezed once, then sat beside me and looked toward the cooperage as if she had formed a view about the hours kept there.

"She has a point," the Builder said. "Something changed here and the whole place is answering to it."

I wrote that down exactly. Reading a place truly means writing what it shows you, not what you came in expecting to find. The cart-tracks were not old commerce; they were recent, and they ran in from every road into town, which meant Kestrelsquare was not drawing from one source. It was drawing from everywhere at once.

The Weather Reader capped her mercury glass. "Three more days," she said. "Let's find out where the carts are going."

I turned to a fresh page. Above us the stars held their positions, unhurried, and the hammers in the cooperage kept their count.