Dream d2064-s: Smoke and the Whole Book

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the archive-annex was already burning when we reached it.

The Foundry's gauges had been screaming for an hour, needles pinned so hard the glass cracked, and the sky above the district had gone the color of old coals. I could feel the ground through my boots, hot and faintly hollow, the way ground goes when whatever held it together underneath has been spent.

The annex was a narrow stone room off the main hall, two walls of shelving, and the shelves were catching fast, the wooden brackets going first, then the cloth spines of lesser ledgers curling and blackening. The Builder did not wait. She went in through the doorway before any of us spoke, one forearm up across her face, moving low and fast the way she moves when she has already decided.

Rurik found the seam. There is always a seam of cool air along the floor in a burning room, he had told me once, because fire climbs and the fresh air comes in underneath. He went in after her, nose down, tracking that thread of breathable dark, and I heard him guide her by sound alone: a sharp chirp, a pause, another. The Builder reached the shelf where the Book of Readings sat, the big flat volume we had carried so many circuits, every margin-line and role-name and keepsake notation, and she hauled it down. Her forearm caught the shelf's edge coming off, the wood already past ignition, and she made no sound about it.

Lano barked twice from the doorway. Not a warning bark. A direction. Short, certain, the kind that means here, then here, then out. The Builder followed the sound with the Book held flat against her chest, Rurik flanking her ankle, and they came through the smoke into the outer hall where the air was merely bad instead of killing.

We left the Foundry burning behind us. I did not look back more than once. There was nothing back there that could not eventually be re-made from principle and patience. The readings could not. Every place we had been, every name we had learned to read there, the margin-notes the Weather Reader had penciled in the high-altitude columns when we crossed the ridge approaches. That was the one thing.

The Weather Reader pressed her palm to the Book's singed spine as we cleared the last gate, checking its warmth the way she checks a weather instrument, and reported: whole.

The Builder's forearm was already wrapped by the time we reached the road. She said nothing about it. She asked only whether the index section had been damaged.

It had not.