Dream d2337-s: Where the Tiers Slipped

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where my hands did not know where to go when we first came in.

We had walked the last road that morning, the survey ledger heavier than it had been at the start - a full ledger weighs differently than an empty one, and I had felt this without naming it for weeks. Lano went ahead. Rurik came in last and stood near the wall, tail still, eyes on the flame. The lamp was already burning, steady as if lit by someone who had walked out and not come back. The Builder's chisel lay on the sill exactly where she had set it the day we departed. I touched the blade and it was cold through and through, the kind of cold that is not absence but the record of a long time.

The survey ledger went on the table. The Weather Reader opened to the first column and began to read.

I had known, somewhere in my body before the numbers came, that the total would be wrong. Not false. Wrong. The tally had been made honestly: each settlement entered in the same hour it was seen, no estimate, no rounding toward comfort. But between the setting-out and the coming-back, some places had moved. Not in terrain. In tier.

Three had risen. I had walked their streets early, when the counting was fresh, and they had been what they were: working settlements, legible registers, modest yield. I wrote them in the appropriate column. But the Builder had passed through them near the end of the circuit, before we turned back, and she said what she'd seen without embellishment: new forge-district fires, a second gate, a dressed-stone well. The tier that was true when I wrote it was no longer true when we closed the ledger.

Two had fallen. No one said this part loudly.

Lano held the Book of Readings in her lap and did not open it. Her ears were flat, the way they go when she is listening hard to something she already knows.

The grey pellet-stone was in my coat. I had carried it from below the perch for reasons that had not clarified, and I set it now on the corner of the table near the lamp.

There is a discipline in honest counting that no one explains: the count does not lie, but it is always already past. The places that changed tier did not betray the ledger. They kept moving while the ledger held still. The foreboding in that room was not error or loss. It was time made visible: five people and a long column of marks, and the marks correct, and the marks no longer true.

The Weather Reader's finger reaches the last line and does not lift.

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