Dream d1812-s: Hammers in the Rain

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the drizzle had been steady since before dawn, fine and cold, and Brackensquare smelled of wet stone and pine smoke by the time we reached the main street on the third morning of our stay.

I was already opening the book of readings before Rurik stopped walking. He sat at a crossing of flagstones and pressed one paw flat to the surface, then looked back at me.

"Tracks," the Builder said, crouching beside him. She ran two fingers along a depression in the soft mortar between stones. "Weeks old at most. Someone walked this street after the last good rain, and not lightly."

I wrote that down. Not lightly: a laden person, or many.

The Weather Reader had her glass out, tilting it toward the grey above. "Pressure's been steady for six days," she said, "but the town has been breathing harder. Something here burns fuel at a rate that changes the air."

From the far end of the street came a sound that had been under everything since we arrived: the dull ring of hammers, not a single one but several, offset from each other. Brackensquare did not sleep early. We had heard it from the lodging-room window both previous nights and I had recorded it as ambient - a surface fact. This morning I understood it was the center.

We followed the sound. Lano moved ahead, nose low, ears pricked forward. She caught something before we did, some specific warmth or smell, and her tail went level and still, which meant she was deciding. She rounded a corner and we rounded it with her.

The long room opened on our right: wide tables set end to end, and at every place someone sat with their own tool-kit spread before them. Not one shared set of instruments but a dozen private ones - measures and templates and small bright implements I did not recognize. A quiet industry, each person absorbed in their own portion of the work.

The Builder exhaled through her teeth. "This is not improvised," she said, low. "Someone planned the spacing. These tables have load-paths."

At the far edge of town we found the testing ground before noon: an open strip of packed earth, targets set at measured paces, the targets marked with chalk rings. Lano nosed one and sneezed. "Tranquila," I told her, and she came back to my heel.

The Builder walked three of the measured intervals with her compass. The Weather Reader watched smoke trail from the long room and checked it against her chart.

I wrote: Brackensquare is not a town waiting. It is a town preparing. The question, for days four and five, is what it is preparing for - and whether the reading will show us how to help.