Dream d2474-s: The Sluice Closed From Upstream

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the bottom of the mill-race under Glenholt and the stones were dry. Not cracked the way stones go when water leaves slowly. Dry the way a channel goes when someone walks to the sluice and lowers the gate with both hands.

Lano was beside me. We did not speak for a long time. The race ran straight and the walls were good stone, fitted work, the kind that takes years to set right. Nothing was broken. That was the thing I kept returning to.

The Convener's Hall and the Scriptorium Annex still held their seats. I knew this without traveling there. The offices were filled. The work continued. In Cinderfirth the lamps were lit. In Ivorymere someone had opened the shutters. In Nettleness the morning bread was already done. Life going on at its ordinary pace, using what had been built, not marking the building of it.

But from the Hall the seven places had gone unreadable in a single night. The seeing had failed, not the places. That distinction mattered and no one in the Hall seemed sure what to do with it. Elderhaven, Glenholt, Mistgarth, Sablegate - still there, stones intact, fires banked or cold but the structures standing. Only the sight had closed.

Lano crouched and put a hand flat to the dry bed of the race. The moss had begun. That is how long the gate had been down - long enough for the first soft growth to take hold in the dark.

The Scribe's office would have a record of when the sluice was set. That was the kind of thing that got recorded. Not why. Just the date, the hand that wrote it, the office that authorized it. The closing was deliberate and the record would be clean and nothing in the record would be wrong.

I walked the length of the race to where the sluice stood. The mechanism was in good order. The gate sat flush. Someone had maintained it even after lowering it. That was the detail I could not stop looking at: that someone had come back, after, to oil the iron.

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