Dream d2242-s: Smoke at the Gate

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the city announced itself in smoke before it announced itself in walls. Three stacks rising from workshops I hadn't yet seen, lit windows strung along the rampart like a sentence I was walking toward to read. I stopped on the road - not to rest, I wasn't tired - to let the arrival be an arrival before it became a measure.

Lano pressed her flank against my leg. The road dust was pale here, the settled kind. Rurik walked three paces ahead as he always does, ears angled up at the gatehouse. The Builder had gone quiet since the last ridge, the way she goes quiet when she's studying something. The Weather Reader put her hand to the wind - east, she said, just east - and that was all the weather we needed.

The pack sat heavy. Book of Readings, the grey pellet-stone, the ledger already half-filled with places counted. The measuring cord coiled at my hip.

We walked through the gate before I'd finished looking. Inside, the hands that built this place were still readable - three of them, each legible in the hall arrangement, the door heights, the way light moved through the main lane. Clean. Not the nervous kind; work-clean, the kind that comes from things staying where they belong long enough that clutter never gets purchase.

I made a mark in the ledger before I'd walked the first hall. A single stroke, no number yet. A tally against something I hadn't counted. I noticed myself do it and didn't cross it out.

Work was going on tonight - we could hear it, hammer-rhythm from the far hall, the particular scrape of something being fit to place. There had been three days of silence before this. I didn't know what had rested in that gap. Four complaints sat open in the city's book, unread, unwritten into mine.

Light came from high windows into the lane. Rurik settled on a step and watched the far end of it. Lano moved along the base of the nearest wall, nose low. The Builder tilted her head at the roofline the way she does when measuring pitch by eye. The Weather Reader looked east, through the gap between two workshops, at something the rest of us couldn't see.

I stood in the lane and breathed in the city. The smell of the road still on me, the ledger in my hand, the first hall not yet entered.

Smoke in the upper air. Lit windows. Work going on.

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