Dream d2244-s: Louder Than Its Walls

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the city made itself known before I could see it - a percussion from the workshops, metal on something harder, the sound that means hands are at work and have been at work for a long time. By the third day inside its walls the sound had reorganized in my ears from noise to pulse, and the pulse was steady.

Lano walked the east arcade with me in the early afternoon, her nose reading something I could not. Rurik had gone into the northern hall before sunrise and came back at midday with his tail carried level - neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, just present. The Weather Reader stood at her preferred window, back to the room, reading the air that came off the smelting wing. The Builder was in the records hall, hands flat against a shelf, muttering numbers I was not meant to hear.

I had the ledger open on my knee against the outer wall. The founding entry was easy: three hands, fifth month, a year before the current survey. Everything in its proper hall - I had written that in the margin twice now and the city kept earning it. Clean, not recently cleaned but fundamentally clean, the kind of order that comes from builders who agreed on purpose before they began.

The last sign of life in the record was three days ago, which was the day we arrived. I had noted it without ceremony. The city could not explain the gap to me and did not try. The workers talked about tonight's work, about the smoke, the order of the shelves, the particular angle at which the smelting hall threw its heat into the court. When I brought my pen near the gap in the record the conversation reorganized itself around the weather.

Four complaints in the open book. Three days of residency and no one had volunteered them. I had read each one myself, in the hall of records, the day we arrived.

There is a quieter place inside every loud one. This city was louder than its size - you could hear it from the road and feel it through the soles of your feet on the flagstones - but the hall at the north end, past the last lit window, was a place where sound went to be absorbed. I stood there for a while with the grey pellet-stone in my hand, not using it, just holding the weight of it.

Then I went back out into the court where the smoke was rising from three separate chimneys and the Builder was carrying something from one hall to another and the lights in all the upper workshops were on.

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