Dream d2476-s: The Road Was Not Gone

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the walker came down the ridge road in the dark, and the road held. That was the surprise of it - not the village below, not the stillness of the rooftops, but the road itself, intact underfoot, stones fitted as they had always been fitted. Someone had told the walker that Mistgarth was gone. The walker had believed it, had not come for months, and now stood on a ridge that did not know it was supposed to be impassable.

The mist was not thick. It lay in the lower parts of the valley the way mist does when there has been no wind, filling the spaces between the houses without hiding them. The walker could see the rooflines. The walker could see a window with a faint light behind it, the kind of light that comes from embers, not lamps.

There was no one on the road.

The walker went down. The stones were damp and the walker moved carefully, and the village did not recede the way a village sometimes does when you approach it in a dream. It stayed where it was. It grew larger, as places do when you are actually walking toward them.

At the edge of the village, near what had been the wardhouse, there was a post where notices had been kept. The frame was still there. The notices were gone, taken down by someone who either intended to replace them or had decided there was nothing more to say. The walker could not tell which.

A man came out of one of the near houses. Not to meet the walker - he did not seem to know the walker was there at first. He was carrying a bundle of some kind, cloth, folded, and he crossed the lane to put it under an overhang out of the wet. Then he turned and saw the walker on the road and stopped.

He did not seem alarmed. He seemed, if anything, tired in the way of someone who has been doing small necessary tasks for a long time and expects to continue.

The Scribe's work, he said. Not the Scribe - the work. The work was still here.

The walker asked what work.

The man gestured back at the building he had come from. He said the Annex had been open every morning since he could remember, and that the registers inside it were current, that someone had been maintaining them. He did not say who. He said it the way you say a thing that has no author - the way you say that the fountain runs, or that the bell rings at sixth hour.

The walker asked about the Convener's Hall.

The man looked toward the east, where the ridge curved and the Hall would have been visible from the upper road. He said the Hall was still marked on the survey. He said the Council still met there, on paper. He said the seeing had gone out of it seven nights ago, all seven readings at once, which was unusual, because usually one would go first and then the others. He said the Registrar at Cinderfirth had noted it, and Ivorymere had noted it, and Nettleness, and no one knew yet if the failure was in the Hall or in the instrument used to see it.

The walker asked what that meant.

The man said it might mean nothing. He said sometimes the seeing fails and the places are fine when you go and look. He said he had not gone to look. He said he had work here.

He went back inside.

The walker stood on the lane for a while. The mist did not move. The embers in the window did not brighten. Somewhere up the ridge, behind the walker, the road continued to exist, doing nothing, holding its shape, waiting to be wrong about.

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