Dream d2530-s: The Answering Hour

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood on the instrument floor of the reading-house at dawn, the last night of twelve come to its close, and the tall windows behind me held a pale sky just beginning to lighten at the edges. Seven brass shapes stood across the floor in a loose arrangement - some taller, some wide, one no larger than a counting-box - and all of them had been dark since before I arrived.

The small white dog lay near the eastern window, watching.

The work had taken the whole residency. Twelve nights of adjustment, of listening for the places the instruments were meant to read. Not the places themselves - they had not changed in their standing or their cold - but the reading, which had broken before the count could be properly taken. The Hall had sent word that the count could not be trusted. So the instrument floor had been the work.

At the first horizontal light, all seven answered.

Not in sequence. Together. A single low sound that was less a sound than a settling, the way a door fits its frame when the wood has finally dried. The Council Hall and the Scriptorium Annex answered the same as the others - Cinderfirth, Ivorymere, Nettleness, Elderhaven, Glenholt, Mistgarth, Sablegate. Cold and lit alike. All seven in the brass, each returning the same low note of being readable again.

I wrote nothing that morning. There was nothing to write that the floor had not already said.

When the door opened to let the first messenger through, I had only this to give the Hall: the seeing is repaired. The walking can begin.

The dog rose and stretched beside the window, and that was the end of the night.

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