Dream d2241-s: The Count Against the Wish

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the grey pellet-stone is in my left hand and the pack is on my back, and that is how I know we are leaving: everything carried is distributed for walking, not for working.

The town opens on all sides, gates broad, the air moving through its halls in a way that tells me the halls were arranged for exactly this - the wind threading between the proper places where things belong. I have been here four days. I know the grain of the morning light on the eastern slope and the way the sound changes at midday when the upper hall fills. I know which gate the light hits last.

Fifty-eight. I said it aloud again, standing at the western edge where the ground levels before it drops. The Builder looked at me and said nothing. She had counted too, coming at it by a different path, and her number matched mine, and that was the confirmation I needed. The wish had been somewhere closer to thirty, a comfortable range, and I had felt it pulling as I went page by page through the complaint book. But I had counted aloud: thirty-one, thirty-two, past the wish, into the true country. Fifty-eight open complaints.

Lano stood at the gate, her white coat catching the afternoon, not watching me. She was watching the road out. She does not second-guess the ledger once it is closed.

I had opened the Book of Readings that morning, early, before the halls filled. Earlier readers had noted this town briefly - the gates, the layout, a line about the mills. They had not stayed long enough to count, or they had counted and not written it. The page was thin. I was adding to it now: the fifty-eight, the three sets of hands traceable in the work, the date first built - a spring morning, a year and a month back - and the gap: fourteen days since any sign of life. That I wrote down the same as the good things. A gap is a fact.

What the count could not catch was something else. The specific weight of the air in the upper hall. The way the whole arrangement felt like a decision trusted to run on its own - someone had thought hard about it once and then stepped back. I wrote around those things, as close as marks can get. There are always things that fall between the lines in the ledger. I have learned not to call that a failure of the count.

Rurik came around from the north slope fast, his black coat moving against the pale grass, and shook his head once. Nothing at the edges the main count had missed.

The Weather Reader tilted her head south, reading something in the cloud arrangement that I could not. She did not translate. Whatever she was reading, it would keep until we were moving.

The ledger is closed. The gate is open. Behind me the mills turn.

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