Dream d2252-s: Against What Nobody Names

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the mills are turning when we come through the gates.

That is the first thing - the sound of them, before I see the wheel-gear, before I make out the high roof of any hall. A steady pull and release, like breath held and let go in sequence. Nettlesquare. The gate stands open and has stood open, I can tell, for longer than tonight.

Lano walks beside me. The pellet-stone sits at the bottom of my pack against the ledger's spine, the Book of Readings above both. We came in on the lower road and the town opened the way towns do when they are properly built: each hall in its place, each path sized to the work it carries. Five years it has been laid out like this, a hundred hands to the making of it, and the settling is real - the paving stones have found their proper lean, the guild-roof sits where a guild-roof should.

Rurik is ahead of us, ears back, reading something in the air I cannot yet read.

The Weather Reader falls in beside me without speaking. She has been watching the sky since we left the last mark. I follow her gaze up: the clouds have a quality I have no word for - a particular flatness, a held-in heaviness. The lamps are burning here. That lands before anything else does - afternoon light, and the lamps already lit, against something nobody names. Nobody names it.

The Builder stops at the corner of the first hall and runs her hand along the joint-work. Good work, evident everywhere, in the way the town breathes and holds its traffic. No complaint in the book against this place - the whole column runs clean, every entry counted and cleared. It is a well-tended town.

I pull the ledger out to open the count.

Something stops me before I start: three pages back, the margin notation I made at the last site carries a figure that does not match the tally I forwarded. Small error. An off-by-one in a column I was certain of. I run my thumb back, find the source line, correct the entry in the cramped hand I keep for revisions. The ledger absorbs the mark. The tally holds now.

I look up. The mills are still turning. Lano is watching the gate. Rurik has not moved.

Work is going on here tonight - in the halls, behind a shutter on an upper floor where a light moves slow and steady back and forth. But it has been seven days since anyone signed the outer book. I can read that in the quality of the step-dust, in the angle of a door left exactly where it was left. I write the name of this place at the head of the next clear line and hold the pen above the first column, and the lamps go on burning against whatever it is nobody names.

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