Dream d2332-s: Speak the Number True

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the door had been standing open when we came back to it. The lamp inside was already burning - not by anyone's hand that I could account for - and the light fell across the table the way it had the first morning, when the ledger was still mostly blank pages.

That was the only thing the same.

I put the ledger on the table. It had weight now, real weight, the kind that comes from ink and not from what you mean to write. Rurik took a place at the far end, back against the wall, arms folded. He did not look at me. Lano sat beside him and watched the ledger with the patience she uses for things that cannot be changed by watching. The Builder had her hands on the table edge, braced like she expected the floor to shift. The Weather Reader stood near the window with the Book of Readings open across her forearms, ready to confirm or not confirm, as the numbers required.

I opened the ledger to the first entry and I said the place name aloud.

The room was quiet.

I said the count.

The room should have been quiet - it was a good number, or near enough - but the silence was wrong. It arrived before the count finished, the way a held breath arrives before the blow. I felt Lano's ears move. I did not look up.

I turned the page. Second place. Said the name. Said the count. Said the figure for what had been there and was not anymore.

The Weather Reader made a small movement with her left hand against the Book's margin. Not writing. Just placing her thumb there, as if to hold the page open at something.

The grey pellet-stone was in my coat pocket. I had been pressing my thumb against it since the door. Its texture was the only thing keeping the numbers in order in my mouth - if I stopped, I thought I might start rounding, and a rounded number is a wish dressed as arithmetic.

Third place. Fourth. The lamp did not flicker. The silence arranged itself differently each time, pooling in places I had not expected it to pool - after a name I thought no one cared much about, passing quickly through a figure I had expected to stop the room.

By the seventh entry Rurik had uncrossed his arms.

By the tenth, the Builder had lifted her hands from the table.

I kept reading. The ledger was the point. Every number spoken aloud is a number that cannot become something more agreeable later on the page.

The lamp holds a circle of light on the stone floor and I am still inside it, reading, and the room keeps going quiet in the wrong places.

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