Dream d2218-s: Every Hall Its Proper Work

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road bent left around a stand of older trees and suddenly the city was there, larger than I'd calculated from the morning's bearing - walls of pale dressed stone, workshops behind them still breathing smoke into the grey afternoon, lit windows keeping their own schedule apart from the sun.

We came down the last slope in loose order. Lano ahead, as she tends to be on approaches, nose low, ears tracking the city's sounds before the rest of us could separate them. Rurik at my left, close but not speaking. The Weather Reader had been watching the sky since the last crossroads and she hadn't stopped; whatever she was reading up there I left unasked. The Builder walked with both hands free, turning her head at each new structure that cleared the wall-line.

At the gate there was no ceremony. A figure checked the ledger marks against a written list, nodded us through, and we were inside.

The place was clean the way a working place is clean: not scrubbed but ordered. Every hall had its function and its tools racked or laid on benches at the exact angle of last use. We passed through a long workshop where the benches held half-finished work and nobody was at them - a rest hour, a shift change, something like that - and on the nearest bench a drawknife lay on its back with the blade angled as if the hand that set it down meant to return in a minute. The iron had gone cold. The wooden handle seemed still slightly warm, or I imagined it; I didn't test long enough to be certain.

Five hands built this place, one of the city's keepers told us. Five open complaints sit in its accounting book, none of them small and none resolved.

I noted both numbers. The ledger page was already marked with the date of founding and I added today's count beside the measure I'd taken from the road. We are to stay four days.

I am trying not to see all of it yet. Not the complaints, not the full extent of the halls, not the source of every stack of smoke. Today is arrival. Lano is sitting at the courtyard's edge, watching a worker cross the far end of the yard with a belt of tools over one shoulder. The smoke comes down from the stacks and the lit windows throw yellow squares across the cobblestones.

---