Dream d2335-s: Louder Than Its Size

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the cold came in under the door and I stood at the edge of the room for a moment rather than moving to the center of it. The ledger was under my arm. The grey pellet-stone was in my coat pocket, a small weight I had stopped noticing, which meant I noticed it now.

The others were already there. Lano sat very still with her paws folded and her eyes on the lamp. The Builder had her back straight and her hands palm-down on the wood. The Weather Reader had not removed her coat. Rurik was at the far end, watching the door as I closed it, and for a moment the only sound was the latch clicking home.

The Book of Readings lay closed at Lano's elbow. I set the survey ledger on the table and opened it.

The reading was mine to do. I had made the entries; I would speak them. Settlement by settlement, I read the name and the count and the condition, and the room received each number the way stone receives rain - without comment, without warmth. The lamp threw long shadows behind us all.

Somewhere in the middle tier of the survey, I came to the abandoned places. That was what the column head said: ABANDONED, in a hand more careful than mine, because the word had mattered when I wrote it. But the counts beneath it did not read like abandonment. Three mills in the eastern stretch had grain-dust on the floor still fine and even, the way flour settles when a wheel runs without hands. A loom in the water district had thread loaded and taut, the heddle still swung to mid-pass, no one at the treadle - not resting, but paused, mid-stroke, as if the operator had simply ceased to be. I had noted these because they mattered. I read them now.

No one interrupted.

I had marked in the margin a pairing I could not account for: one of the abandoned settlements was noisier than its footprint warranted - pipes in the walls still cycling, a pressure sound with no source I could find. Another was quieter than emptiness usually is, quieter than a place left to rot, as if the silence were deliberate, maintained, like a hand held over a mouth. I read both entries without inflection, one after the other.

Then I came to the final column. The sum.

The Builder exhaled once through her nose. Lano did not move. The number I read aloud was not the number anyone in that room had been carrying before I began. I watched them receive it. The room held that weight the way a floor holds a dropped stone - not cracking, but the sound did not leave.

I closed the ledger. Outside, the mills were still running. The loom's heddle was still mid-pass. The quiet settlement was still keeping its silence, for no one, all through the night.

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