Dream d2565-s: Signal Breaks at the Glass

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the tall window of the map room on the fifth night, the far country spread before me in darkness, and began the walk outward from the seven already settled.

The wall-chart held sixty-five marks. I drew a line under the seven and counted what remained: fifty-eight, none of them walked by anyone in this Hall. Lano sat at my heel, nose pressed briefly to the glass, then pulled back and looked up at me.

I began with the lit cities first, moving the lamp along the chart. The City of Emberford: counted, lit, noted in the column. The City of Frostridge: counted, lit, noted. The City of Osierlow, the City of Willowhythe: each in turn, the lamp moved, the mark recorded.

Then the relay board beside the window began to speak in a wrong voice.

The Keeper of Relays had been transcribing incoming signals at the far table, her quill moving in the steady rhythm of a night with nothing unusual in it. The rhythm stopped. She held the quill above the paper and said, without looking up: the station at the eastern edge is sending, but the pattern is not the pattern it was taught.

I turned from the chart. She showed me the paper - a transmission that should have been a location report had arrived as something else, a string of marks that followed no agreed form.

Lano's ears went flat. She moved away from the window and stood between me and the relay board, tail low, posture taut. Then she barked once, short, at the board itself.

I returned to the chart to continue the count, because the count is what this phase requires. The Keeper of Relays began querying the nearest station through the secondary channel, the one that had not yet reported anything garbled. Rurik, who had been sleeping on the high shelf above the chart, lifted his head and fixed his amber eyes on the room's single door. He did not move. He held that look for a long time.

The Ruins of Mistthwaite: the largest pile of unanswered letters in the world. Marked. The column for neither-running-nor-gone held steady here; it fit.

The Ruins of Frosting, the Ruins of Mossness, the Ruins of Zephyrden: not left in good order. I marked them each in turn. The column received them without difficulty.

Eldergate Town, the town of unfinished roads: noted in its state, the roads still unfinished in the record as they are unfinished on the ground.

The Keeper of Relays said: the secondary channel is also distorted now.

I marked another place on the chart and did not speak immediately. The count continued because the count does not wait for a relay to right itself. Lano circled once near the relay board and lay down facing it, chin on her paws, watching it with the stillness she reserves for things she does not understand but does not leave.

By the time the lamp had passed over thirty of the fifty-eight, the relay board had produced four transmissions that could not be read as any known form. The Keeper of Relays had written each one down in full and set them in a separate folder. She had not discarded any of them. That was the correct thing to do and she did it without being asked.

The far country sat past the glass, its marks dark and uncounted, its relay stations sending things we could not yet read.

The night had five hours left in it.

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