Dream d2627-s: Keepable, and Not

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the ledger room had taken on the smell of sorted paper, that particular dry scent that rises when sheets have been handled many times without being read. I was on the floor with the entries spread around me. Lano had found a warm patch near the lamp and curled herself into it, her nose tucked under her tail.

The work was simple to name and slow to do. Each entry went to one of two piles. The left pile held places where a hand still wrote in the record each time something changed. The right pile held the rest.

Rurik came in sometime after the first hour. He stepped between the sorted groups without disturbing them, chose the top of the cabinet where the oldest volumes lived, and settled there. His tail moved once, then stopped.

By the second hour I had worked through the first third of the floor. The left pile was thin. Three entries, no more. The Ruins of Pewterlow had hands enough, more than any other place on the map, and the record there stayed current by the ordinary motion of those still standing in it. Two other places had reached the same condition by different paths. I set those three aside and did not return to them.

The right pile grew steadily. Thirty-five places had a hand or two but not enough - a single record-keeper who had aged, a deputy who had taken up the work without training, a rotation that had not rotated in some time. Those entries would go stale between inspections. I did not note the reasons. The entry named the condition, not the cause.

Twenty-seven places had nobody. The Ruins of Mistthwaite sat in that group. Its letters had accumulated the way water finds a low point: not because anyone directed them there, but because there was nowhere else for them to settle. I counted the pile without opening any of them. The count was the fact. The contents were not my task tonight.

Lano lifted her head when I reached the last entry, as though she had kept her own tally and knew when the floor was done. She set her chin back down a moment later.

The left pile: three. The right pile: sixty-two.

I stacked them separately and noted the division at the bottom of the night's page. Forty-three of the entries in the right pile were ruins. Forty-seven of the sixty-five were cold. The numbers did not explain each other, and I did not try to make them.

Rurik's amber eyes were still open when I put out the lamp. Lano did not stir.

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