Dream d2217-s: Three Pages Back

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where Rurik crossed the floor sometime before dawn, his paws making almost no sound, and I lay there counting the ceiling beams - six, or possibly seven if the shadow near the eave was one - and then I stopped, because that was exactly the habit the survey was supposed to break.

The pack was on the bench and I'd been adding to it in my head for an hour: the Book of Readings, the grey pellet-stone wrapped in cloth, the ledger with its ruled columns and its filling pages. The Wardens would be on circuit by first light. We had to be out before them, which meant packing was a thing you did in the dark and got right.

The Builder was already awake. I could hear her sorting cord in the next room, checking tension by feel, the way she'd done since before I knew her. The Weather Reader came in from outside with cold on her coat and said the sky had gone still, which wasn't a prediction and wasn't nothing, either. Lano sat by the door and said nothing; she was the kind of presence that makes a room quieter.

I took the ledger from the pack to add one last entry - the roof-count from the eastern terrace, which I'd measured but not written - and when I opened it I went one page too far, then two, then three, flipping back toward the beginning without meaning to. And there it was: a column I'd footed wrong. Not by much. Seven units off in a row that should have run to forty-three. I had written forty-six, and the line below it had been built on that.

Seven. A small number. Small enough to round away if you were in the habit of that.

I put my finger on it and held it and felt the particular cold of having been wrong in ink on a page that people might use. I didn't wake Lano. I didn't say anything. I took a pencil and drew a single fine line through the forty-six and wrote forty-three above it in the same hand. Then I footed the column again. Then I footed the next column, which depended on it. Three corrections, each smaller than the one before, and then the page was right.

The Builder appeared in the doorway. She looked at the ledger and then at me. I showed her the pencil mark without explaining. She nodded once and went back to her cord.

Rurik came to sit beside me, not asking anything. I held the pellet-stone in my left hand while I checked the column a second time. Outside, the road ran out into dark that would be something else by the time we walked it, and the pages that came after the correction sat empty and waiting, pale as ground not yet measured.

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