Dream d2235-s: The Open Bracket

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the mills were turning when I came through the lower gate, and the smell of the place hit me before the sound - grain dust and iron and something faintly scorched that I filed away as old. The ledger was open on my knee before I'd crossed the first yard, and I was writing the date and the gate count - two gates, both open, both sound - when Lano stiffened beside me, ears flat.

I looked up. One of the upper mills had slowed.

Not stopped. Slowing. The vanes cutting the hill-wind at the wrong interval, the rhythm off by just enough to notice if you were paying attention. Rurik had gone ahead to the grain-house and I heard him call back - not loud, the kind of call that carries weight without volume.

I wrote it in the ledger anyway. Not because I understood it yet - the mill was still turning when I made the mark - but because the ledger rule is honest, not optimistic. A tally made before the thing tallied is fully understood is still a tally. I drew the bracket and left the right side open.

The Builder was already at the base of the tower when I reached it. She had a panel off the housing and her hands were inside the mechanism. She didn't look up. The Weather Reader stood back a pace and watched the vanes with the same attention she gives clouds.

"The drive shaft bearing," the Builder said, to no one, or to all of us. "It's seized."

The part that had failed was salvaged, she said, without saying it the way someone says a thing to explain blame. She said it to explain the situation. The bearing was a piece that had come from somewhere else and had done its work well past any warranty of circumstance. Now it was done, and we had no replacement, and the mill it supported turned the gear that fed the second-floor hopper, and the hopper fed three of the eight stations below.

Lano barked once and then went quiet, pressed against my leg. I put my hand on her back.

The town held around this. The gates were still open. The other mills were still turning. A few tools had been left on a bench outside the grain-house - I'd noted that earlier, not as a fault, exactly, but as a loose thread in an otherwise tight weave. Now one of those tools, a long-handled striker, was in Rurik's hand and he was looking at the Builder, waiting.

She pulled her hands back and looked at the seized part in the last light coming over the hill.

I hold the pen over the open bracket in the ledger, the right side still empty.

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