Dream d2257-s: Warm Tools, Cold Light

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the mill nearest the east gate had been turning since before first light. I know because I watched it from the grain-hall steps when the sky was still iron, and it was turning then too, and when I come back from the far edge of the square now with the ledger open on my arm, it is still turning - the same speed, the same soft creak, as though the town does not need its miller present to keep the work moving.

Lano walks a step ahead of me, her white coat picking up the strange cold that has settled over Brackensquare since mid-morning. She has not said much since the hall of measures. Neither has Rurik; he moves along the wall's edge, tail held low, reading something in the stone that I cannot read. The Weather Reader stopped twice on the lane between the dye-house and the fulling shed and looked at the sky without speaking. The Builder said the framing joints on the east granary extension are recent - fresh-cut wood, the shavings not yet swept - and then she said nothing further.

Thirty-seven hands have been at work here. I can see it in the fittings, the even spacing of the gate-pins, the way the water-channel runs exactly where a channel should run. Everything is in its proper hall. The ledger lists zero open complaints. I recorded that on day one, and it remained true on day two, and it is true now, on the third day, and it is the number that does not match the lamps: all of them lit, though it is only afternoon.

Seventeen days since anyone passed word out of this place. The chisels in the granary extension are still warm - I checked them this morning with my thumb - and I wrote that in the ledger's margin because a surveyor writes what the hand finds, not what the hand expects. Warm tools. Seventeen days of silence. The ledger does not resolve the contradiction; it records both.

The Weather Reader touches my sleeve. I look where she looks: the top of the western hill has gone soft at its edge, not cloud exactly but a particular dimming she would know and I would not. I finish the east count before I look again. The count is the count. What they are building tonight in the granary extension - somebody is - nobody mentions. I asked the gate-keeper on day one and he found something urgent in his logbook. The Builder ran her hand along the fresh timber and said: good work. Nothing more.

The mill turns. The lamps hold their small fires against the coming dimness. Rurik sits on the channel-wall and watches the western hill go dark.

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