Dream d2256-s: The Mills Turn Still

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the mills were turning when we came down the ridge into Brackensquare, and that was the first unsettling thing - not the mills themselves, but the absence of anyone at the chute.

The vanes caught the grey morning light and swung. The grain bins stood open at the base. Nobody stood to receive what came through.

Lano walked beside me, her ears angled toward the sound of it. The Builder had gone ahead along the wall-line, measuring in the way she measures: arm out, fingers spread, stepping it off at a pace she has kept since the first place we surveyed. The Weather Reader stopped at the gate and looked up at the overcast and said nothing. She always says something. Rurik found a warm wall - literally warm, as though a fire had been built against it not long ago - and sat in the residual heat with his tail over his feet, watching the square.

I opened the ledger on my knee in the middle of the main road, which was clean. Everything here is clean. The chalk marks on the hall doors were fresh and dry, the gutters swept, the walkboards in order. I wrote: "Thirty-seven hands built this place," and then I hesitated, because I had not yet paced the outer edge, had not yet confirmed the boundary markers - and so the tally mark sat in the ledger before I knew its full weight, before the thing it stood for was completely under my hand. I thought about that while I walked the perimeter, the grey pellet-stone shifting in my pack against the Book of Readings.

The tools were still warm.

That is a fact I recorded without understanding it, and I still don't, entirely. A chisel left on a bench retains heat from the hand that last held it for perhaps an hour. The bench I found held six, each cool to the back of my hand, each warm to the palm. I wrote the number. I did not write a reason for the warmth.

Lano stayed beside me around the back quarter, past halls where everything was in its proper place. Zero open complaints in the book here. I checked the complaint hall; the book in its alcove was dry and tidy and had not been opened in some time.

We are staying the night again. The lamps are already lit in the square - not because it is dark, because it is not dark, but because the light that falls here today gives no warmth and the lamps do something the sky will not.

The mills are still turning. I can hear them from inside.

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