Dream d2520-s: Seven Sightings, All Unread

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood on the instrument floor of the reading-house on the second night of twelve, and the seven brass sightings stood with me, each one mounted on its own low post, each one pointed at a different compass bearing, and none of them reading anything true.

The floor was old wood, dark with oil and use, and the seven instruments threw no shadow because the light in the room came from everywhere at once and nowhere in particular. I walked the row. The first sighting was trained on Elderhaven, and through its eyepiece I saw only a soft grey flatness, the kind that comes not from fog but from the instrument failing to resolve. I noted it. The second was trained on Glenholt, and the same flatness met me there. Then Mistgarth. Then Sablegate. Four cold houses, four unreadable readings, the instrument returning nothing useful on any of them.

I came to the fifth sighting, which was trained on Cinderfirth, and the flatness was different there - warmer in tone, as if something was still burning at a distance I could not measure. I wrote that down too: lit, unresolvable distance. Ivorymere gave the same warm flatness when I looked. Nettleness, the seventh, showed something that might have been a lamp in a window or might have been the instrument catching its own reflection, and I could not say which, so I wrote both possibilities and left them both open.

The point of tonight's work was not to see the places. The point was to establish that the seeing had failed, and to write down the exact character of the failure for each of the seven, so that when the instrument was repaired the count could begin properly. A bad reading was not a finding about the place. It was a finding about the instrument.

I sat down at the small desk at the end of the row and drew a column for each of the seven, and in each column I wrote what the eyepiece had returned. Four: grey flatness, cold resolution. Two: warm flatness, distance unknown. One: ambiguous source, two possibilities noted, neither struck. Below that I left space for the repaired readings, which were not tonight's work.

The reading-house was quiet. No one came to ask what I had found. The question the Hall had deferred was still deferred; it sat in the margin of the ledger like a reservation for a table that had not yet been cleared.

I kept the record and waited for morning.

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