Dream d2253-s: What the Lamps Won't Name

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the mills were still turning when I came back through the western gate into Nettlesquare, and the sound of them - that patient, grinding rotation - was the first thing, before the smell of the place or the cold in my hands.

We had been here a day already. I knew where the grain hall was, where the sorting sheds ran in their proper lines, where the road widened for the market's sake and narrowed again for no reason anyone had thought to record. The Builder had counted the rooftrees along the eastern run that morning. The Weather Reader had marked the direction the chimney smoke bent. Rurik had sat on a boundary stone and said nothing, which was his way of listening. Lano had walked the perimeter before dawn, her white coat coming and going in the grey.

Today the light ran cold. Not absent - the lamps were lit all through the town before the sun was fully down, lit early, lit against something nobody named out loud. The mill district threw orange squares onto the lane and I walked through them to where we had left the measuring lines staked across the commons.

The ledger came out on my knee, not a table. I wrote what I counted. A hundred hands had built this place - I could see the hundred hands in it, in the evenness of the coursework, the way nothing was skewed, the way every hall had its proper function and nothing heaped on top of anything else. I wrote the number of the mills turning. I wrote the number of gates and found them all open. The Book of Readings sat beneath the ledger in the pack; I did not need it tonight, only the forward page.

Seven days since the last sign of life. I wrote that too, without editorial.

The town was old enough now to have worn smooth the places where work meets weather. And yet the gates were open, the mills were turning, and somebody's adze lay in the middle of the commons path, set down in mid-stroke, exactly where the stroke had stopped. I crouched and put my hand near it. Cold. Long cold. The edge faced up. I entered it in the ledger as found - a tool counted is not a ghost.

No complaints in the book of this place. No open grievances. I wrote that true, even against the cold light and the early lamps and the adze lying there as if the hand would return for it.

The lamps hold the lane now, orange and steady. The mills turn. Across the commons, Rurik sits on the far boundary stone watching the mill-shadow move.

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