Dream d2229-s: Rain on a Filled Page

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the smoke from the forges had been running east since morning. I noticed it when I was kneeling by the south gate's footing, running the measuring cord along the base of the wall, and I looked up and the plume had swung, now pointing back toward where we had come from. The wind had turned.

The Weather Reader noticed it two minutes before I did. She was already standing with her chin tipped up, reading the sky the way she reads everything: quietly, without announcement. "Half the circuit is still open," she said, not to any of us in particular.

She was right. I had the north quarter and the central market and the workshop rows along the inner wall, but the eastern district and the deep-root section were still blank in the ledger. Eight hands had built this place. The foundations went in early spring, a year and a half ago almost. The last sign of life was yesterday. It was still alive tonight, work-lights burning in a dozen windows, the sound of metal on wood somewhere past the second row of workshops.

The Builder was working alongside the locals in the eastern quarter when I came through with the measuring cord. She didn't stop what she was doing, just moved her materials to one side so I could reach the wall. That is how she works. You measure around her.

I got the eastern district before the rain came. Not all of it, not the deep-root lanes, but enough to fill the page. Three hundred and nineteen complaints in the building's book, and I wrote that number down twice: once in the ledger, and once on the back of my own hand because I wanted to feel the size of it. Most of the place is orderly. A few tools left out near a covered threshold. A length of rope coiled loose where it could trip someone who didn't know it was there. That is the condition of a city where the work is real and the hands are many: mostly right, visibly imperfect.

Rurik had found a dry spot under a wide overhang near the courtyard and was watching the workers carry materials between the sheds. He doesn't offer opinions on the weather or the schedule. He watches.

Lano was at my elbow when I closed the ledger. She had been moving through the workshops for an hour, her white coat gathering the smells of the place, and she pressed her nose once against the leather cover of the Book of Readings where it sat in the open pack. The grey pellet-stone was in my coat pocket. I had not taken it out all day.

The rain came in from the east just as we moved toward the road. Not heavy, not the kind that makes you bend your neck. Light, constant, just enough to blur the lit windows as we looked back.

The city is still lit. The smoke is bending in the wet air. The ledger is closed.

---