Dream d2230-s: The City at Its Proper Hour

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the noise came first - hammers, the shriek of a saw finding a knot, voices calling across a yard. We were still a quarter-mile out when the city declared itself, louder than the road had suggested anything this size could be.

Lano pressed close to my leg. She had been quiet since the last settlement, but here she tilted her nose and her tail lifted once, deliberate. Rurik walked two paces ahead, which he always did when he found something worth reading. The Builder had her eyes up, counting windows. The Weather Reader had stopped entirely and was looking at a flag over the nearest tower - not for weather, I thought, but for the angle it gave her on the whole silhouette.

I opened the ledger on my knee, standing in the road like that, the city talking at us.

First built: the fourteenth of the second month of this year. That was all I had written in advance. A city built by one set of hands - I didn't write the role, just the number, one, and felt the smallness of it against the noise coming through those walls. One craftsman who had built something loud.

The gates were open and lit. Clean stone, not new-clean but tended-clean, the kind of clean that takes daily attention. Everything inside, from what I could see on approach, was in its proper hall: workshops in the workshop quarter, storage where storage went, foot-paths that led somewhere rather than drifting. Lano walked in ahead of me and didn't startle, which told me something.

I wrote down the size as we had measured it, the heading, the date. Three open complaints in the city's book - I could see what might produce them. Bright as it was, there was a quiet place at the center, an absence the noise bent around, a courtyard or a building that was doing less than the city wanted it to. Not failure. An invitation not yet answered.

The Weather Reader came up beside me. "Louder than I expected," she said.

"Than its size," I said. And quieter, too - but I didn't say that yet. The survey ledger was for numbers. The quiet at the center I would put in the notes, and only after I had walked there myself.

Rurik had found a wall to sit on. He was watching the windows. The Builder was already inside the gate, her hand on the doorpost of the nearest workshop, feeling the way you feel good timber.

I closed the ledger and followed her in.

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