Dream d2569-s: The City Held Its Shape

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road into Emberford ran straight at first light and I walked it with the column open in my hand. Seven places already settled. Fifty-eight ahead. The lit cities first, the Mapkeeper had said, and I had written it down without understanding why until the road began to glow at its edges where the frost burned off the gravel.

Lano trotted at my left boot, nose low, reading the stones. Rurik had come from somewhere behind and now walked ahead, black against the pale road, tail upright, ears turned toward the gates.

The gates were there.

This was the first remarkable thing: they were there. Every approach I had made on previous walks had found something other than what the record said - a wall with no gate, a gate with no wall, a city that had moved its entrance a quarter mile east and never reported the change. But the gates of Emberford stood where the report said they would stand, at the end of the straight road, flanked by two towers that matched the towers in the count.

I stopped and took the measurement. Then I took it again, because I could not trust the first.

Rurik sat down in the road and blinked slowly at the gates.

Lano pressed her side against my leg, which is what she does when something is happening that neither of us has seen before.

I wrote: gates present, position confirmed, both towers standing, condition: lit. The Emberford entry had been marked uncertain because no walker had been through in eleven seasons and the last account was secondhand from a Roadkeeper who had seen the torches from the hill but had not descended. Torches at a distance could mean anything. Torches up close meant the city was heated and the count was good.

The gates opened before I reached them. Someone inside had been watching the road. This also matched the report - the entry said the Gatekeeper of Emberford kept early hours - and when she came out to the threshold and asked our business I was already holding the column so she could see what it was.

"The count," she said.

"The count," I said.

She looked at Lano. Lano looked back at her, tail moving once. Rurik had already slipped through the gap between gate and wall and was somewhere inside the city now, doing whatever he does in the hour before a place is properly surveyed.

I entered and began the walk of the interior. The column had spaces for what was present, what was absent, and the new category cut in for the seven - the column for places that were neither running nor gone. I did not know yet which spaces Emberford would fill. I did not know until the walk was finished, which took most of the morning, Lano padding through each quarter-district beside me, pausing where I paused, moving on when I moved.

But this was the part I carried into waking: the fact of the gates being where they were supposed to be. The report that matched. The thing I had written down from someone else's secondhand account, and the thing itself, and the distance between them being, for once, nothing at all.

---