Dream d2262-s: The Mills Still Turn

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the gates of Emberbridge stood open and the mills were turning and nobody had told the mills to stop.

We had been here one night already - this was the second morning come to afternoon, the light doing something strange with the clouds above the eastern ridge, going cold before it had any right to. Lano walked ahead of me with her nose low to the cobblestones. Rurik moved at the edge of things, the way he always does, keeping the walls at his shoulder like he was reading them.

The survey ledger lay flat across my knee where I'd found a low wall - the right height for this kind of work. The grey pellet-stone sat below it in the pack, under the Book of Readings. I counted the mill-wheels visible from the central square. I said the numbers aloud. One. Two. The counting-aloud is a small discipline: the wish to have more wheels, or fewer, or a different kind, can slip in sideways if you let yourself just write. Say the number before you write it. Three.

The Builder had walked the full perimeter by midmorning and come back with her own tally scratched in her notebook. We compared figures, not conclusions. Where the numbers matched, I entered them clean. Where they differed by one, we walked back to see which of us had missed a structure tucked behind a grain-store. The answer was her, and then me, once each. I entered both corrections without notation. A correction is just a number arriving late.

The Weather Reader stood at the market square and looked up for a long time without speaking. Then she said, quietly, that the lamps shouldn't need lighting yet. They were lit anyway - not all of them, but enough that you noticed, amber points along the covered walk near the eastern hall. Someone had lit them this morning. The place was clean, the halls in order, the goods stacked in the proper rooms. The hands that built this - two of them, and you could see that care in the spacing of the posts, the way the drainage ran - those hands had set everything where it should go.

Lano sat down in the middle of the square. She was looking at something I couldn't find. Rurik crouched near a doorway and touched the threshold stone with one paw, then pulled it back.

I wrote: open complaints, none. I said it aloud first.

The mills turn. The gates stand open. The lamps hold their amber in the cold afternoon light, and nobody comes through the gate, and the ledger fills.

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