Dream d2542-s: Clean Wood, Dark Places

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Hall was cold and I had come with a cloth to dust the council bench.

The bench ran the length of the north wall, one carved seat for each place and office that had, at some point, sent a voice here. Two of those seats were closed: the Convener's, which the Council Hall had carried, and the Scribe's, which the Scriptorium Annex had held. I did not look at those two for long. They were settled matter.

Lano padded in behind me, nails ticking on the stone, and circled once before she sat near the far pillar. She watched.

I began at the east end of the bench, where the dust lay thickest. The cloth came up grey on the first pass. I worked slowly, the way the work required. There was no point in doing it quickly. The bench had waited a year for this, and it could wait another few minutes for me to do it properly.

Rurik was on the bench when I reached the middle section. I had not seen him arrive. He sat at the edge of one of the closed seats, blinking in the low light, his tail wrapped around his paws. I worked around him. He did not move.

The carvings in the bench's face held the dust in their grooves and the cloth could not reach all of it. I folded a narrower strip and pressed it into the acanthus borders where the years had packed the grime tight. None of this would tell me what I needed to know.

The count was the reason I had come to the Hall tonight, not the dust. I had needed to read the seven places, to look at each in turn and mark whether it was lit or cold. But the instrument that showed me the places had failed, and all seven were dark to me now. From the last reading I could trust, three should be lit: Cinderfirth, Ivorymere, Nettleness. Four should be cold: Elderhaven, Glenholt, Mistgarth, Sablegate. But a count taken on old knowledge is not a count. It is a guess wearing clerical clothing, and I would not file it.

So I dusted the bench.

Lano had stretched out on the floor by the time I reached the west end, chin on her paws, watching me with the patience of an animal that understands waiting without needing to understand why. Her ears were up.

I folded the cloth and set it on the end of the bench.

The bench was clean now. The seats, closed and open, ran in their correct order under the pillars. The Convener's carved back was clean. The Scribe's armrest was clean. The bench was as it should be, and that had changed nothing, because the bench's question was never about the dust. It was about a vote that had been taken in this room once, and a count that could not be taken tonight because the seeing had failed, and those were two separate problems that happened to share the same room.

Tomorrow I would try the instrument again.

Rurik dropped off the bench without sound and walked toward the door. He sat in the doorway for a moment, not going through, not turning back.

I picked up my things and followed him out.

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