Dream d2243-s: Hands at the Half-Mark

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the city's south hall smelled of fresh-sawn timber and a kind of industrious quiet, the sort that means work is actually happening, not just being discussed. I had the ledger open on a window ledge, and Rurik sat on the sill above me, his tail moving slow and deliberate, the way he watches when he is paying attention.

We had paced the outer circuit the day before. The city was clean in a way that felt earned - not scrubbed, not new, but well-ordered, each hall in its right relation to the next. Three hands had built this place beginning this past spring, and their work was still legible in the joins, in the way the doors sat true in their frames.

I had found four open complaints in the city's book by midmorning. I wrote all four into the ledger, unflattered, as they were - that is the only way to write them. An ugly true number is still a number; a smoothed one is a guess wearing a ledger's clothes. I set the grey pellet-stone on the page to hold it flat while the ink dried, then moved to the next hall.

The Weather Reader came to find me around the second hour. She said nothing, but she had the look she gets when the sky is making decisions. Lano noticed it too - the light on the east wall went from gold to pewter inside a quarter-hour, and by the time I had worked through the second hall the first drops were coming down on the cord where it lay coiled by the outer stair.

We kept measuring. Rurik held the cord's far end without being asked, planting his feet when the wind found the open passage between the halls. The Builder had gone ahead to the northern rooms, and I could hear her footsteps on the boards above, even and methodical. The Book of Readings was in my pack, unopened - this was not a time for old entries.

The rain came in earnest by the time I reached the midpoint. The ledger was half-full: four complaints, three founding hands, one date for last sign of life - three days gone, and the place yet clean for all that absence. I wrote the date flat, as the fact demanded.

Lano stands at the passage mouth now, watching the rain sheet across the open yard, her ears forward, her white coat darkening at the shoulders.

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