Dream d2547-s: Fog on the Ledger

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the question was put in under a minute and the Hall sat with it the rest of the day.

A floor clerk, standing where the central flagstones meet, spoke it plainly: a place that is quiet but still standing - does it count among those gone cold, or does it hold its own row in the ledger? That was all. No argument followed. The clerk took his seat, and the question settled.

The Hall worked.

Seven places to account for before the count could close: Cinderfirth, Ivorymere, Nettleness among the lit; Elderhaven, Glenholt, Mistgarth, Sablegate among those gone cold. All seven unreadable from here tonight. The instrument that should show the state of each place was returning fog, and we could not determine whether the fault was in the instrument or in the places themselves - and that distinction mattered to the count.

Lano came in sometime before noon. She padded the length of the south colonnade, nose low, circled once near my bench, and pressed close against my leg where I sat. Rurik had taken the high shelf of stone above the south door early in the morning and watched from there with his amber eyes, motionless through the long deliberations, tail curled around his feet.

The clerks worked the instrument in different lights, testing its readings against the lit places where we had other evidence to compare. By midafternoon they had found the fault: a calibration line in the seeing-table had slipped, so that any place not touched by a recent recorded transaction returned the same empty reading regardless of its actual state. Quiet was being read as cold. Every quiet place and every cold place looked the same from here.

That was the defect.

We did not attempt the count tonight. Repairing the line was the session's work, and by close we had corrected the section covering Sablegate's range. The others - Elderhaven, Glenholt, Mistgarth, and the three still lit - would follow, one range at a time, until the instrument could again be trusted to tell the difference between a place that is quiet and a place that is gone.

The floor clerk's question remained in the register, correctly stated, unanswered but no longer undocumented.

Lano did not leave the Hall until I did.

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