Dream d2507-s: The Ledger Notes a Burning

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was in the ledger room on the second night of my residency there, and the candles had been burning since the supper hour. The tall chair at the Council Hall end of the room had been turned to face the table - not removed, not carried off to some storage corner, just turned, so that whoever sat across from it now sat across from its back, and whoever walked past it saw it still occupying its place at the head of the long table, present and patient and pointing toward the center rather than toward the door.

The Convener was reviewing correspondence. The Scribe was at the annex, working through the night, as the annex had been working through the night since before I knew either of them. I could hear the scratch of the Scribe's work through the interior passage, slow and deliberate, like rain that has decided to stay.

Lano was on the floor beside me. She had been resting. Then she was not resting. Her ears came up flat against her skull - not the way ears rise when there is a sound of interest, but the way they fold back when the sound is wrong. She gave one bark, short and certain, and rose to her feet. Her eyes were on the far end of the room where the sight-glass hung.

The sight-glass was how the Hall kept its eyes on the seven settlements. Or had been. Cinderfirth, Ivorymere, Nettleness showed their familiar colors in the glass, steady and amber and dim, the way far settlements look in the small hours. But Elderhaven, Glenholt, Mistgarth, Sablegate had gone the same flat dark. Not flickering. Not dimming in sequence. The same dark at the same moment, as if something had happened to the glass rather than to the places.

The component that maintained the glass was salvaged - it had always been salvaged, from before the Scribe's time there, and the Scribe had noted in the logs that it showed wear but still held. Tonight it did not hold. There was a smell of something overheated, something that had given all it had to give and then given past that, and a thin wisp of smoke from behind the panel where the component lived.

The Convener set down the correspondence. "Is it the glass or is it the places," they said, though not quite as a question, because the Convener already suspected the answer and was buying time to think past it.

"The glass," I said. I did not know this, but Lano had stopped barking and was sitting quietly, watching the dark panes without alarm, and that seemed like a kind of evidence.

The component had no replacement. Whatever improvisation would carry the Hall through the night would have to be built from what was here: thread, gut-string, a reserve lens from the survey stores, and the knowledge that the Scribe had kept records of how the glass was assembled the last time it had been rebuilt, which was the time before this one, which was not recent.

The Convener was already going through the shelves. The chair at the end of the table stayed where it was, turned inward, doing nothing useful and also doing nothing that needed undoing. The Student had used that chair. The log still said so, in the Scribe's steady hand: the dates, the decisions, the long nights of correspondence. The chair was not the Student. The chair was a chair. But it was still there at the table, and there was something in that, something the Convener had decided was worth keeping until there was a reason to decide otherwise.

Lano lay back down. Not fully. Her head stayed up, watching, waiting for the repair that had not yet begun.

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