Dream d2057-s: Roots Below the Frost

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the frost had not lifted by mid-morning, and the fences of Slatewharf still held their white rime in the thin grey light. We had been here five days. I knew the smell of the place now - coal smoke and damp stone and something sharper underneath, like cut timber or hot metal carried on a wind from the eastern quarter.

The Builder found me near the well before the town had properly woken. She crouched at the verge of the main street, one knee on the cobbles, tracing the edge of a rut with her finger.

"These aren't old," she said. "Two weeks. Maybe three. Heavy load, repeated passes, same line."

Lano sniffed along beside her hand, nose working the cold ground. Her tail moved once, slowly, then she sat and watched the Builder's finger with her ears pricked high.

"What was moving?" I asked.

"That's what I need to find." She stood and looked down the street toward the eastern gate. "Last night I heard hammering past the second hour. Not repair work - the rhythm was wrong. Building."

The Weather Reader came down from the upper wall where she had spent the early grey hours with her barometer. She had a look about her that meant the numbers had surprised her.

"The pressure dropped four points overnight," she said, setting her notebook on the well-coping beside mine. "It should have risen. There's something drawing heat at the edge of town - sustained heat, not hearth-fire. Kilns, maybe, or forges working through the night."

"Testing grounds," I said. I had seen the marks myself two evenings back - measured paces in the frost-stiff grass east of the walls, stakes at intervals, targets rigged from sacking. I had written it in the book without understanding it yet. Now the Builder's ruts and the Weather Reader's pressure and my own evening observation were pulling toward the same point on the map.

Rurik appeared at the corner of the cooperage, amber eyes catching the pale light. He sat, tail wrapped around his feet, and looked east. He had a way of confirming directions without speaking.

"Day five," the Weather Reader said, not unkindly. "We almost missed it."

"Casi," Lano agreed - not in words, but in the way she rose and took three decisive steps toward the eastern quarter, then looked back at us.

I opened the book of readings to a fresh page. The settlement was the same grey-walled town it had been when we arrived. What we were learning of it had deepened overnight into something with roots, and the roots had not yet been fully traced.

We went east.