Dream d2221-s: Before the Count Was Whole

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the cord went into the pack last.

I loop it three times around my wrist before letting it coil - a habit from early in the survey, when I lost the end in tall grass. Here there is no tall grass; there are clean cobbles and proper halls and the sound of tools going even now, at this hour, when the workshop windows have begun to glow steadier than the sky above them.

The Builder closes the hall behind us. Not locking - it will open to anyone who comes next - but closing with a hand held flat on the door for a moment, the way you close a good book. Lano sits at the top of the steps with her chin on her paws and watches the street. Rurik has already moved to the edge of the nearest pool of lamplight and is looking outward, beyond the gate, toward the road we came in on.

I open the ledger against the pack's flap and read back what I wrote on arrival: six pairs of hands first raised this place; the first course was laid on a February morning seventeen months ago; the count of hands actively at work tonight is not diminished. Everything in its proper hall. The complaints - five of them, still open in the register - are not errors in the building. They are the building arguing with itself about what it wants to become next. I entered them as complaints because that is what the column says. I almost did not enter them at all, because at the time I was not yet sure what they were.

That is the tally mark I made before I understood the thing being tallied. I can see it now.

The Weather Reader stands at the foot of the steps with her hand out, reading whatever comes off the courtyard at close of day. She says nothing, but she tilts her head slightly, and I understand: the city breathes a particular warmth at this hour, the kind that comes from mass - all those courses holding what they were given and releasing it slowly. Not weather. History, almost.

I close the ledger. The page is filled. What it holds: six hands, one February, one July still in motion, five open arguments, a count of rooms and a count of tools, a note that work was going on at last visit. What it cannot hold: the particular sound of those windows chattering slightly in the draft off the courtyard, the smell of cut timber and hot metal that the street corner funnels toward you just as you stop looking for it, the way the Builder's hand rested on the door.

Lano stands. Rurik has already taken three steps toward the gate.

I shoulder the pack and feel the ledger's weight settle between my shoulder blades, dense and filled, and the grey pellet-stone shift in the side pocket, and the cord go still.

The workshops burn behind us in the early dark.

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