Dream d2479-s: Low Water, Leaning Stone

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was walking the grey strand at Mistgarth at low tide, when the water had pulled back far enough to show the old pilings standing in wet mud like the stumps of arguments nobody had finished.

Lano was with me, walking close to my heel. She stopped before I did - ears flat, head low - and let out a single bark aimed inland, not at the water, at something beyond the seawall.

The Scribe from the Scriptorium Annex had come down to the strand to read the tide charts. He stood at the waterline with a lantern and was speaking to someone who had the look of a long-tenure clerk, the kind who had survived two changes of administration by being useful and asking nothing. They were talking about the reading-lenses at the Hall - how for eleven nights the lenses had shown nothing from any of the seven places, and how the clerks had argued for two of those nights about whether nothing meant dark or only unlooked-at, before concluding, carefully, that it did not.

The places still lit, the Scribe was saying - Cinderfirth, Ivorymere, Nettleness - those came through clean. Whatever the lenses had lost, it was not the lenses. The cold houses were cold before the seeing failed. Elderhaven, Glenholt, Sablegate. And here, Mistgarth, where we were standing, where the seeing had stopped on the same night as the others.

The clerk said: the one who built the reading-station here was already gone by then.

The Scribe said: yes. And the station still reads. It is the lamp-tender that is absent.

Then Lano barked again, harder, two short reports aimed at the eastern seawall, and we all turned.

The old section - the portion rebuilt on foundations from the corrupt era, when the network first reached this coast and was laid in haste over ground never surveyed for it - moved. Not a collapse. A lean. A slow outward tipping of stone, the way something heavy decides. One of the old buried cables along its base snapped somewhere underneath and the sound came up through the mud, dull, felt more than heard. A seam of old mortar sifted down into the wet.

The Scribe handed the lantern to the clerk and walked toward it at a pace that was neither urgent nor slow - the pace of someone doing the correct thing and not performing it.

I stayed on the strand. Lano pressed against my leg, trembling at the flank.

The Council Hall had sent a question to the Annex three days ago, asking how to classify a seat whose occupant had left nothing wrong behind - no fault, no complaint, no open account - only absence. The Annex had not returned an answer. The Scribe had come to the strand to think, and now he was walking toward a leaning wall in grey morning light, and the question was still somewhere in his pocket.

Dark and unlooked-at are not the same word. I understood that on the strand. The cold houses were cold because no lamp-tender remained, and the seeing had failed not because the places were gone but because the going had not been recovered from yet. The work was still there. The foundations were old and had always been old, and now one section of them was leaning, and we did not know how far it intended to go.

The Scribe reached the wall. He put his hand flat against the stone and stood very still.

Lano watched him. I watched the water, which was beginning, slowly, to turn.

---