Dream d2295-s: Cold Lamps at the Rim

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road ended at a low wall and the wall ended at a gate and the gate stood open, not broken - just open, as if whoever last passed through had expected to return and had not yet been proved wrong.

Alderbarrow sat at the rim the way things sit when they have been there long enough to be mistaken for part of the earth. The stone was clean. The paths between the halls were swept or had been swept at some point before the sweeping stopped. Nothing had fallen. Nothing had been pushed aside to rot in a corner. Whatever had been put in its proper place was still in its proper place, which was the strangest part of it.

The Weather Reader came through the gate first and stopped. Lano pressed close at her side, ears low but not back - listening, not afraid, or holding the fear the way you hold a lamp. Rurik moved along the inner wall and said nothing, only looked at the ground the way he looks at ground when he is deciding what the ground is telling him. The Builder stood in the open yard and turned slowly, reading the rooflines.

I had the survey ledger out before I had decided to open it.

Twenty-six hands had built this place. I could see that in the way the work changed from hall to hall - the stonework here tight and even, there a little rough at the corner where someone had learned partway through. Nothing wrong with either. Both had held. The ledger said the last sign was two hundred and twenty-three days back, and when I counted the ivy from the gate-post to the well I believed it.

There were no complaints in the book of this place. Not one. That should have felt like relief and did not.

I found the tool on the low bench inside the eastern hall - a small brace, the wood worn where the grip goes, set down flat with care, parallel to the edge of the bench the way you set something down when you mean to pick it up again in a moment. I did not touch it. I did not need to. It had been there long enough that it was neither warm nor cold, only still, the way still things become after long enough - part of the silence rather than a mark against it.

Lano came to stand beside me and looked at the brace and then at me.

The lamp in the yard burned against something nobody had named. I wrote down the number of halls, the number of hands, the zero in the complaint column, and closed the ledger, and stood in the doorway while the light went the color of ash.

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