Dream d2607-s: The Smoke on Return

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was on the road back to the Ruins of Mistthwaite on the seventh night, the card in my left hand, the number facing inward so the road could not read it. Lano walked a few paces ahead and to my left, her nose working the wet grass at the road's edge.

We were still a quarter-mile out when her ears went flat. She stopped and turned her head not toward the road but toward the settlement, and held that posture long enough that I stopped too and looked.

A column of smoke that had been rising steady from the drying-room stack had gone out. Not banked for the night. Gone. The column had been rising since I set out six hours prior and I had checked it twice on the far ridge as a mark of distance. Now there was nothing above the stack. The drying-room was where the salvaged blower ran, the one the Keeper of Letters had recovered from the eastern annexe three seasons back and wired into the flue to draw the damp out of the oldest paper. Without the draw, the room would seal. The letters inside would begin to absorb the night air within the hour.

Lano let out one short bark, flat and low, and then trotted forward.

When I came through the gate the Keeper of Letters was already in the yard with a lantern and the Clerk of the Outer Rooms beside her, both of them looking at the blower housing with the particular stillness of people who understand what they are seeing and have not yet decided what to do about it. A burned smell hung in the cold air.

The Keeper said the coil had gone. The salvaged component, the one part they had never been able to source new, the one piece the whole mechanism turned on. She did not say it was the end of the matter. She said it had gone, and looked at the Clerk, and the Clerk looked at the housing, and neither of them reached to touch it yet.

I put the card in my coat. The number on it had nothing to do with what was in that room, but I did not take it out.

Lano pressed against the Keeper's leg and stayed there.

The drying-room door was closed. Whatever was inside was already inside. The Clerk asked whether the chimney throat could be opened from the roof and left wide, to let the cold pull through on its own draft until morning. The Keeper did not answer immediately. She held the lantern up and studied the housing and then said that something might be done with the bellows fitting from the reading annexe, if it could be made to seat in the stack mouth without leaking. That it would require a trial, and might not hold, and that there was no other option she could name.

I stood with them in the yard. The lantern swayed once in a crosswind. Lano sat down in the dirt between the light and the door and did not move from there.

Nobody on the road had been told what was written on the card, and I did not speak it here either. The number sat in my coat. The night was long and the blower was cold and nothing had been decided yet.

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