Dream d2015-s: Signal Before Dawn

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we were leaving Umberfold before the lamps went out.

The Lamplighter had come to the gate with bread wrapped in linen, a small thing, practical and kind. The Builder was checking the beam above the gatehouse one last time - she had shimmed it two days ago and wanted to know the settlement would hold that repair through winter. The Weather Reader stood at the roadside with her instruments, reading the morning pressure, her breath fogging. "Dropping fast," she said, not quite to anyone. "Not a storm. Something else."

I was writing the final entry in the book of readings. Umberfold: five days, one gate repaired, one well cleared, one argument between neighbors arbitrated at the commons fire. What we leave better than we found it. I pressed my hand flat on the page before I closed it, a habit I had never explained to the others.

Rurik was already at the gate. He sat in the gap between the posts with his tail wrapped around his paws, amber eyes on the road ahead. He always chose the threshold before the rest of us did.

Then Lano went stiff.

She had been trotting between the Lamplighter's heels and mine, loose and content, and then she stopped mid-stride. Her ears went flat against her skull. Her tail dropped to nothing. She turned toward the north corner of the settlement wall and barked once - sharp, not at any visible thing.

The Weather Reader pulled a secondary instrument from her satchel, the small one she used for interference mapping. She turned it in a slow arc.

"I have something," she said. Her voice had shifted.

The Lamplighter looked at her.

"Signal on the receivers," the Weather Reader said. "Not from any beacon I know. Not from the relay chain. The pattern is -" She shook her head. "I don't recognize the pattern."

"Decay? Old signal bouncing in the ridge?" the Builder asked. She had come down from the gatehouse beam.

"No. It's live. Cycling."

We stood in the gate's shadow. Lano remained alert, nose working, though she had stopped barking. The Lamplighter looked north. The road out of Umberfold bent that direction before it straightened.

"Investigate or leave it," the Lamplighter said. Not to us. To her own settlement, to the question hanging in the air between all of us.

I left it unanswered in the book of readings. Some entries close without a verdict. I wrote the signal down - time, bearing, the Weather Reader's notes on the cycling pattern. Whatever it was, Umberfold would need the record more than we would.

Rurik had not moved from the gate. He was watching the north bend in the road where it curved out of sight, and his tail had gone very still.