Dream d2260-s: Tool Left True

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the evening light had gone grey-gold over the commons, and by now I knew where each shadow fell before it fell. Third day here. My boots knew the path from the near hall to the open center without looking down.

The Builder found the level first - a small brass frame, propped against the base of the stone bench at the commons edge, set there so exactly that it had to have been deliberate. She did not pick it up. I watched her look at it a long time, then step around it to the far side of the bench where she had been working before the light changed. Cold, that level. Long cold. Whoever set it there is fourteen days gone and did not come back for it.

Rurik has been sitting on the low wall since before supper, watching the single lamp in the hall across the square. He watches it the way he watches things when he is not ready to speak. I do not press him. The survey does not ask for moods, only measures, and I have the measures - perimeter, compass bearing, the count of doors in use versus doors latched shut. One pair of hands built this. The book shows no complaint ever filed, which is either a very healthy place or a very quiet one. I write both possibilities in the margin and mark neither as true.

Lano is working the far edge, nose low, moving in slow arcs. She has done this every evening here. She does not report what she finds. I have learned to trust that if she found something worth reporting, she would report it.

The Weather Reader sits on the commons bench with her notebook open on her knee. She has been watching the sky since the clouds came in from the west at four. I asked her once what she was writing. She looked at it a moment, then said: what the air knows. I wrote that in the margin too, without a column for it.

They are building something in the hall tonight. The sound of it carries - not construction, exactly, but work of some careful kind, unhurried. What they are building, none of them have said and I have not asked. The survey does not require it. The ledger needs walls, not plans.

I open the Book of Readings on my knee, the grey stone a flat weight in my pocket, the ledger half-full and honest.

Across the commons, the lamp burns steady.

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