Dream d1835-s: Sawdust and the Testing Ground

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the sliver moon had not moved from its position over Ospreycrossing's eastern rooftops by the time we were already deep in the work. The Builder had been up before the rest of us - I heard her boots on the boards before the sky showed any color - and when I came down from the loft she had spread her notes across the keeper's workbench, chalk lines following the grain of the wood.

"The cart-tracks on the northern approach are less than a week old," she said without looking up. "Whatever they're moving, they've been moving it fast."

The tracks were real. I'd walked them myself the evening before, reading the ruts, the way the earth had been pressed and not yet fully recovered. Ospreycrossing had been busy before we arrived, and it was busy now. Hammers had started somewhere behind the tannery before the breakfast fire was lit, and they didn't stop.

The Lamplighter - a compact, deliberate woman who ran the western quarter's repair yard - put us to work without ceremony. The Builder took the timber joints; I took the ledger, recording what was lifted, what was finished, what was deferred. Lano threaded between stacked beams and piles of fresh-cut planks, nose working overtime, tail low and purposeful. She settled finally near a pile of sawdust, ears forward, watching the workers with the focused attention she gives to anything that moves.

Rurik arrived mid-morning. He came from the direction of the testing ground at the settlement's edge - a long strip of packed earth with targets at measured intervals, scuff-marks from boots, a tripod with instruments I didn't recognize. He sat at the edge of the yard and watched us work. His amber eyes moved from the Lamplighter to me and back.

"He's been out there since dawn," the Weather Reader said, coming up beside me with a barometric log tucked under her arm. "Something at the targets. He found it and left it alone." She didn't sound concerned. We had learned to read Rurik's stillness as information.

By afternoon the noise had built into something solid - voices, mallets, a saw somewhere, the ring of metal on metal from a building we hadn't entered yet. The Lamplighter handed me a second ledger, older, its pages soft with handling. "What's yours says what's done," she said. "What's mine says what was planned."

I opened both. The two records diverged sharply around the third page.

Lano lifted her head from the sawdust and gave a single quiet bark, as if she had heard something the rest of us hadn't. Rurik stood, stretched, and walked toward the testing ground again. The Weather Reader glanced at her instruments.

There was more to read here. There always was, on day four.