Dream d1989-s: Hammers After Dark

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the heat did not lift when the sun went down.

We had been in Brackensquare three days by then, long enough to stop looking at the place as travelers do - taking in the gate, the well, the general shape of a thing - and start seeing what was actually there. That is what day three is for. That is why we stay.

It was the Builder who noticed the footprints first. She crouched in the main street near the granary, running a finger along the edge of a boot-print pressed into dust that had not been touched by wind. "Weeks old at most," she said, without looking up. "Six different treads. Heavy loads, going toward the eastern quarter."

We followed the prints toward the sound of hammers.

The eastern quarter was alive in ways the rest of Brackensquare was not. Lamps burning in three long buildings past the second gate. Voices carrying - not argument, but the close, focused talk of people working a problem together. Through an open shutter I saw a row of figures at long tables, each with their own tools in front of them: calipers, awls, small planes, coils of wire. No one looked up. Everyone was in the middle of something.

Lano trotted ahead, nose low to the threshold, then sat and looked back at me. Her ears were up.

The Weather Reader had her hand on the wall of the nearest building. "The pressure here is different," she said. "Not the weather - the place's pressure. Something is being decided." She checked a reading, frowned, checked it again. "It has been building for a while."

At the testing grounds on the eastern edge of the town wall, we found measured distances marked in chalk - paces counted out and numbered, targets set at intervals. Fresh chalk, some of it still white. Whoever was pacing the distances had been here recently. Had probably been here this morning.

Rurik walked each line of chalk as if reading it himself, amber eyes tracking the distance from marker to target. He sat at the far end and waited for us to catch up.

I opened the book of readings and wrote what we had seen: the footprints; the lamps; the hands at long tables, each with their own tools; the paces; the chalk still pale. The Builder leaned over my shoulder. "Write that they are testing something specific," she said. "Not rehearsing. Testing."

I wrote it down.

"Two more days," the Weather Reader said, and looked at the lamps in the eastern quarter, still burning against the dark.

Lano leaned against my ankle. Cansada, I thought - but she was not tired. She was attending.