Dream d2265-s: Seventy-Five, Honestly

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the mills were still running at dusk.

That was the first thing - the sound of them, the low grind persisting after the light went cold, after the gates stood open into an empty road. Marrowwharf is a place louder than its size. Coming in yesterday I'd felt it: the noise fills you before the buildings do, a hum carried on the wind off the turning stones that tells you something is working here, working hard, even when you can't see whose hands are on it.

We were into our second day of counting.

The ledger lay open across my knee, braced against a low wall at the south edge of the square. Rurik sat two paces off, watching the far mill's wheel catch the lamp-light and release it in rhythmic slices. He said nothing. He had said little since morning, which with him usually means he is watching something the rest of us haven't found yet.

The Builder walked the perimeter with a staked line, her footfalls even and deliberate. She would mark, call back a measure, wait while I entered it. No estimating. That was the discipline of the ledger: you wrote what the line said, not what you wished it said. Marrowwharf was clean, its halls well-ordered, its stores arranged with the kind of care that speaks of a single intent held for a long time. One set of hands had shaped this place from the beginning. You could feel it - a coherence that is hard to fake and hard to sustain.

And yet.

The Weather Reader found me at the second lamp-post and handed me her count without looking at it. "Seventy-five," she said. "Open complaints. I tallied them twice."

I wrote it. It was an ugly number and I wrote it anyway, because the ledger deserved an ugly true number more than it deserved a comfortable round one. The complaints lived in the town's own book, patient and numbered, waiting for a hand to come back to them. Last sign in those pages: three days past. The lamps were lit. Work was still ongoing tonight, the sound of it constant and cold. But the seventy-five stood in the record with nobody yet to answer them.

Lano moved through the market stalls slowly, her nose low. She looked up once, found me watching, looked away again toward the mill-sound, which had not stopped.

I reach into my coat for the pellet-stone - the grey one, brought from below the perch - and close my fist around it. Foreboding is not noise. It is the space under noise, the thing the lamps are lit against, the thing nobody here names.

The mills still turn. The town holds itself very still around us, louder than it should be and, in some interior room I cannot name, much quieter.

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