Dream d2238-s: Noise Before the Numbers

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the smell reached us before the gates did - mill-dust and fresh timber, the particular industry of a place that does not stop for visitors.

Both gates stood open and tied back, and through them the town's internal logic was immediately visible: paths straight, halls labeled, everything sitting in the slot it was made for. Not tidy in the way of a place cleaned for inspection. Tidy in the way of a place that has never needed it.

Lano trotted ahead and turned back once at the threshold, reading the entry on her own terms. The Builder paused beside me and said nothing, just looked. Three hands had laid the plans here, I remembered - three, which is a small number for something this ordered.

The mills turned. I could hear them before I could see them, a low rhythmic motion that was not a complaint at all - just the sound of work going on at its own tempo, indifferent to our arrival. Rurik slipped past and was already inside the nearest hall, head tilted, ears up, doing his own accounting in the way of cats.

I did not open the ledger. The rule I set myself early in this survey: look first, let the place come in before any of it becomes a mark on a page. The ledger rested in the pack on my back, its spine pressing against the Book of Readings, and beside them the small round weight of the pellet-stone from below the perch.

The Weather Reader came to stand near me. She looked at the rooftops, then at the sky behind them, then back at the rooftops. Reading something I did not have the instruments for.

I slid the survey ledger half-out of the pack - not to write, just to rest my hand on it - and three pages back I found an entry where I had written the figure for the last town's open complaints as forty-two. It had been forty-nine. I had written the wrong number in the haste of the road. I marked it in the margin, closed the ledger, put it back.

Then I looked at the town again.

The mills turning. The gates open. Fifty-eight complaints in its book, work going on in a place that has not felt a hand on it for fourteen days. The sun holds on the rooftops and the paths are quiet except for us.

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