Dream d1988-s: The Relay Reads Crooked

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the west wind came off the river and carried grit through the gaps in Brackensquare's gate, and I pulled my coat closed and followed the Builder down the main thoroughfare while Rurik walked the edge of the lane, nose at each doorstone, testing each threshold in turn.

The town was well-made. I wrote that in my book before we had gone twenty paces: well-made, properly proportioned, the kind of place where someone had drawn the plan before the first stone went down. The Builder moved slowly beside me, tapping a wall here, pressing a lintel there, and her face had the settled look it gets when a place has been built to outlast whoever built it.

We met the Bridgekeeper at the crossing near the west wall. She was a broad woman with callused palms and a precise way of speaking, the kind of person who names each beam and bolt in a sentence. She told us how many years the bridge had stood, what weight it had taken, where the road on the other side forded in spring flood. The Weather Reader asked about the pressure patterns over the gap and they compared notes with the ease of professionals who had never met but spoke the same language.

The Miller found us at the grain hall and offered a tour with no particular ceremony. The stones were old and well-matched, the flour clean. Lano sat in the doorway and watched the dust hanging in the afternoon light, tranquila, ears settled, nose working through the layers of it.

Then the Clerk of the square came to us in a small room off the counting hall, and said something had gone wrong with the beacon relay.

I felt it before he finished the sentence. There was a quality to the silence in the room, a particular absence, as though a low tone I had grown used to had stopped. Lano was on her feet. Her ears went flat against her skull. She turned toward the relay tower at the eastern corner of the square and let out a single bark, sharp and complete, aimed at the tower like a thrown stone.

The Clerk set a piece of paper on the table. A transmission log. The patterns made no sense: characters layered on characters, clean signal corrupted mid-run, the encoding scrambled from the eighth line down as though something had reached into it and squeezed.

The Builder leaned over it and said nothing for a long moment. The Weather Reader set her barometer beside it and checked the needle. Outside, racing clouds crossed the sun twice before either of them spoke.

"When did this start?" the Builder asked.

The Clerk looked at his hands. "We are not entirely sure," he said, "when it started, or whether it has started or whether it is starting still."

I wrote that in the book and drew a circle around it. The relay tower's light blinked once at the window and did not blink again.