Dream d2042-s: Hammers After Dark

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the drizzle had settled into Ospreygreen like a tenant who knows not to knock, cold and unhurried, beading on the lanterns and collecting in the ruts of the main street.

I was crouched over those ruts when the Builder came to stand beside me. The mud had taken impressions, dozens of them, and they were not old. Weeks at most. Boots of different sizes, heavy-laden by the depth of the heel-strike, moving with purpose toward the eastern edge of the village. She crouched without being asked and pressed a thumb to the edge of one print, reading its compression the way she reads a mortise joint.

"Whoever made these was carrying weight," she said. "Regularly."

Lano had already followed the tracks a full street-length ahead. She stood at the corner, nose working, ears forward, and looked back at us once before trotting on.

We followed her.

The testing grounds were not hidden. They sat at Ospreygreen's eastern margin where the houses gave way to a flat muddy paddock, and I would have missed their meaning in daylight if the Builder hadn't named what I was seeing: measured paces marked in cut stakes, targets at three distances, the earth compacted in a lane the width of two shoulders. Practice had been done here, and recently.

The Weather Reader had taken herself to the high corner of the paddock while we examined the stakes. She was watching the sky with her instruments tilted, reading not what was coming in but what the village itself had weathered and kept record of. She called across to us without raising her voice.

"Pressure's been running high for six weeks. They've been working hard."

From somewhere behind the nearest building, voices and then a hammer. Late for a village this size. Not a repair hammer, a building hammer, something going up and not being mended.

Rurik sat on the nearest fence post and watched the eastern dark. He said nothing. His amber eyes did not move.

I opened the book of readings and wrote down what we had found: the tracks, the lane, the stakes, the late lamps, the compacted earth. The Weather Reader's six-week high. The sounds that did not stop. I wrote it without interpretation because that was the work of the next two days. Day three was only this: observe what is actually here.

Lano came back to sit beside my boot. She was carrying a small stone in her mouth and set it down very precisely on the mud.

"Gracias," I told her.

The Builder raised an eyebrow. I could not explain it. Some offerings only need to be accepted.