Dream d2549-s: Quiet, Standing, Answerable

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I sat at the clerk's desk in Sablegate on the ninth night of ten, and the column I was trying to name kept coming apart in my hands.

The column was meant to hold the places that were neither gone nor present - the ones that had gone cold but still stood. I had written four words across the top of the draft and crossed each out in turn. Silent was wrong because it implied something had stopped speaking. Vacant was wrong because it implied a leaving. Dormant suggested a return that could not be promised. I sat with the trimmed pen and the shuttered window at my back and tried again.

Lano lay under the desk. She had been still for a long time, which was not her habit. Then her ears went flat and she lifted her head, not toward the window but toward the far corridor, and she gave one low bark before pressing herself against my feet.

A moment later the Keeper of Accounts came in without knocking. She set a ledger on the corner of my desk and did not sit.

"The fuel stores are lower than the last reading," she said. "Not by an error. By use, and by the supply not arriving."

I set the pen down.

"How much lower?"

She told me. It was not a number that called for alarm in a single night, but it was a number that meant the settlement could not wait for the supply to come to it. Someone would have to range further - out past Elderhaven's boundary, through country that had not been walked in the time since the count was first attempted.

Rurik came through the door she had left ajar and took the warm spot by the hearthstone. He tucked his paws and watched her with amber eyes that gave nothing back.

"The salvage materials," I said.

"Also low. The reserve meant to last the quarter is at a third."

The count could not be taken on a broken instrument, and the instrument that was supposed to read all seven - Cinderfirth, Ivorymere, Nettleness, Elderhaven, Glenholt, Mistgarth, Sablegate itself - had failed tonight. All seven were dark to the Hall. The seeing was what had broken, and ranging out to repair it was already more work than the stores could fund at once.

"We cannot do both," I said.

"No," she said.

Lano did not settle again. She stood at the edge of the lamplight with her nose toward the corridor and her tail low - not tucked, just low. She had caught something I had not yet named.

I looked at the draft. The column that held the cold houses still had no heading. Quiet was the word I had been circling - accurate without being conclusive. A quiet house was not a gone house. A quiet house was one that would answer when called, if the calling could reach it.

I wrote Quiet at the top of the column. Below it I wrote Standing. Below that: Counted, and answerable when called.

Not the final wording. The wording that would hold until the instrument could see again.

But the settlement's working lights ran on what was in the stores, and the stores were lower than last week's reading, and somewhere past Elderhaven's cold border a route would have to be walked that had not been planned for. The ranging party had not been named yet. The supply line had not been drawn.

I left the draft open. Lano did not come back under the desk. The count would wait one more night, and maybe more than one.

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