Dream d2254-s: What the Lamps Kept Off

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the mills had been turning since before I opened my eyes - a bass drag of millstone against millstone that Nettlesquare laid over everything like a hand pressed flat. Third morning here. I knew the sound; I knew the grain dust that settled on the sills before sunrise.

Lano moved ahead through the upper ward, her white coat dulled by the light - or by the absence of something in it. There was plenty of light, technically. Lamps at every third post, lit in the middle of the day, and nobody I asked could say why exactly. The Weather Reader walked at my right shoulder. She said nothing, which was its own answer.

We had counted nearly everything by now. The halls in their rows, the gates still open on the second road, the watercourse running clear around the west end. A hundred pairs of hands had built this place - millers and carpenters and load-bearers and planners of the hauling - and their successors were working tonight, though quieter than you would expect from a town with mills still running. I watched a woman at a loading bay move a crate to a shelf and pause there, not resting, just stopped, looking at nothing I could name.

Rurik was sitting on a boundary post near the south edge, his black tail switching once. He had been watching the same woman I had. When I reached him he glanced down at the ground, then at the stone beneath him - old granite, edges cut sharp in the old style, set for a line that had shifted in the years since the planting. The ground had moved around it. The stone had not moved. It marked something that no longer held.

The Builder came around the corner of the granary with her pencil already raised, and I opened the ledger against my knee and read back what I had already written. She made a sound of confirmation. No complaints open in the book of this place. None. That was either very good governance or a different kind of silence, and I wrote it as I found it.

Seven days since the last sign of life. I set that down exactly.

The mills kept turning. The lamps burned in the afternoon. Lano stands at the end of the lane with her ears raised, watching the gate where nothing is coming through, and the cold light lies even and clear across the whole well-ordered town.

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