Dream d2313-s: Everything Left Carefully

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the ground at Vesperhush was level and swept, and that was the first thing I noticed. I came around the last hump of the ridge path and the settlement opened below me, and what registered was not the absence of people but the absence of mess. The paths between the halls were clear. The hall doors hung true in their frames. Whatever left here, left carefully.

Lano was ahead of me by a few paces. She stopped at the edge of the outer wall, one ear canted back, reading something in the air I had not caught yet. Rurik came up beside me, his tail low, his yellow eyes moving across the perimeter in slow arcs. The Builder and the Weather Reader were still on the path behind us. I heard the Weather Reader's step hesitate, then resume.

The rim light was bad this evening, leached of warmth. Everything in Vesperhush took the same pale cast: the stone of the halls, the cropped weeds at the wall-bases, the single lamp burning in the far hall with no one to tend it. I could not see who had lit it. I did not think anyone was there.

I opened the ledger on the low wall and wrote what I saw. One site at the rim. Built in the third month of this year, one pair of hands and no other. The halls in order, the paths unbroken. Nothing wrong with the place on paper. Zero complaints in the book, the record clean.

Last sign of life: a hundred and one days ago.

I wrote that down.

The Weather Reader came up beside me. She did not speak. That silence told me more than a forecast would have.

The pellet-stone in my pack was heavier than it looked. I was aware of it the way you are aware of a bruise when something presses close. The Book of Readings was in there too, and the ledger was open in my hands, and I had a feeling of carrying too many kinds of counting at once, each one patient, each one waiting.

Lano had moved inside the near hall. I could see her white shape through the doorway, stopped at the center, her nose working the floor. She did not come back to report. She simply stayed.

The sky at the rim was the color of old iron. In the far hall, the lamp burned for no table, no one waiting. I wrote the condition of the place: clean, well-laid, every hall upright, the complaint-book empty.

The Weather Reader said, quietly, that we should finish the measure before the cloud closed in.

I looked at the ledger and I looked at the site. We were half through the count, the rim light was going, and Lano was still standing in that empty hall with her head down, reading something the floor had held for a hundred and one days.

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