Dream d2545-s: Cold Seat, Spent Lamp

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the gatehouse window of Sablegate and looked down over the courtyard, shut and quiet in the dark. Lano stood beside me, her nose to the cold glass, breath fogging a small circle and then fading.

The work was the count, and the count had come to the standing seat. Sablegate was on the list of places gone cold, but the gatehouse stood with smoke in its chimney and a register on the writing-table and the Warden's mark on the latch, still drawn. A cold house has no warm mark. A standing seat has one. I wrote both cases on the same page, neither one above the other, neither one struck through.

The register lay open to the column for Sablegate when the lamp on the bracket went out.

Not a flicker first - simply out, the way a salvaged wick burns its last without announcement. I stood in darkness with the pen still in my fingers. Lano's ears went flat against her skull. She pressed into my leg, very still, and then gave one sharp bark at the floor near the bracket, as if the dark itself were the thing to warn against.

I had a candle in my kit. I found it. I found the striker. While I worked at it Lano did not move from her place near the bracket, ears down, watching the nothing where the light had been.

When the candle caught I saw what had burned through: the salvaged reflector behind the lamp, a piece of mirror-plate we had carried to Sablegate from the emptied Annex stores because the gatehouse had lost its own to the cold seasons. The solder at the rim had given. The whole housing had listed and the wick drowned in pooled oil. The reflector was the seeing instrument for this count - without it the lamp spread no reading light wide enough to work by, only a small bright point in dark that was useless for a register column.

The Warden's deputy arrived at the door with a lantern of her own. She looked at the bracket, looked at the pooled oil, looked at me.

She did not say anything that was not necessary.

There is no spare reflector in Sablegate, she said. There is none in Elderhaven or Mistgarth either. Those stores are cold.

I wrote that in the margin of the register beside the open entry. Both columns still unresolved. Sablegate: standing seat, or cold? The entry was not finished. It could not be finished by candlelight held at arm's length, by a deputy whose arm would tire before the count was done, in a gatehouse whose one instrument for the work had drowned in its own oil.

The courtyard below the window lay shut and dark. Lano did not leave her post at the bracket. She sat with ears flat and her eyes on the place where the light had been.

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