Dream d2322-s: What Nobody Names

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the smell reached us before the settlement did - damp stone and something faintly sweet, like tallow burned down in a previous season and left as memory in the cold air. Rurik went still a few paces ahead of me, his tail low, reading something in the dusk I couldn't parse yet.

Then we crested the rim-fold and Umberhush was below us.

It was clean. That was the first thing and it was the wrong thing. A ruin should settle into itself - slump, scatter, let the weather write on its floors. This one hadn't. The halls were roofless but the walls stood plumb, the thresholds swept, the gutters clear of the season's accumulation. Whatever had ordered this place had ordered it completely, and then left, and the order had simply continued without instruction.

One light burned inside. I could see it from the rim - a lamp behind an open arch, angled so it threw its cone into an empty corridor. No one had lit it for us. No one had lit it for anything in particular. It burned because it had been set to burn, and the interval had not elapsed.

Lano moved close to my left, shoulder to my knee. She didn't speak. The Weather Reader studied the sky above the settlement, her head tilted at the angle she uses when the air disagrees with itself and she's deciding whether to say so.

We went down.

Inside, the survey ledger came out at the first arch. I was halfway through the entry when I found the error - three pages back, a count transposed, an eight written where a three should have sat. I corrected it in the margin: thin line through the false figure, true number beside it. Small repair. The Builder watched without comment. The ledger holds what the ledger holds; now it holds the right one.

Last sign of life: seventy-three days. Open complaints: none. Nothing checks its own work.

The lamp throws its cone down the empty corridor and the corridor receives it with complete indifference. Rurik sits at the threshold behind me and does not cross.

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