Dream d2622-s: The Arithmetic of Absence

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I sat at the desk in the ledger room on the second of eight nights, and the stack of entries for the year came to my shoulder when I stood beside it.

The Keeper of the Receiving Room had sorted them by location before bringing them to me. Sixty-five places on the map. One year of walking. Three of those places accounted for nearly a quarter of all entries between them - places where hands had stayed long enough to develop a habit of writing. Thirty-five more accounted for most of what remained, each with a handful of entries from a handful of people who had passed through and bothered to set something down. Twenty-seven places appeared in the ledger with no entry at all across the full year I held in the stack beside me.

Forty-three of the sixty-five were ruins. Forty-seven were cold.

The Ruins of Pewterlow had the most hands of any place on the map. Its portion of the pile was fat and the edges were dog-eared. The Ruins of Mistthwaite had the largest pile of letters with no answer written beneath any of them. Nobody stood at Mistthwaite to receive them, and the letters had gone on arriving anyway.

I set those two portions side by side on the desk. Lano sat on the floor to my left, watching the door.

I had begun copying the arithmetic into the margin of the summary sheet - sixty-five places, twenty-seven with no hand, forty-three ruined, forty-seven cold - when Lano's ears went flat against her skull. She did not move from her spot but her head turned toward the window and her whole body dropped into the particular stillness that comes just before. I looked up. The window showed only the dark of the lane and the lantern at the far corner.

The bark came. Once, sharp, not repeated. Then she pressed her side against my leg and held there.

The Keeper of the Receiving Room appeared in the doorway a short while later. She said the receiver on the east wall had taken in a pattern. Not from any beacon in the registered network. She had run the check twice against the full chart. The origin was not in the register. The pattern did not match.

I put my pen down on the summary sheet. The arithmetic sat half-written in the margin. I had not drawn a line beneath it.

The Keeper stood with the printed strip in her hand and said nothing further. I said nothing. Outside Lano's ears stayed flat, and the ledger room was very quiet, and the pile from Mistthwaite sat on the right side of the desk with all its unanswered letters still facing the same direction.

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