Dream d2635-s: What Was Pinned

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the sample sheets ran the full length of the wall on the copying floor, pinned close enough that their edges almost touched. I had worked the row from the left: the first sheet showed the hand agreed upon for place names, the second showed the weight of line chosen for column headings, the third the spacing between entries, the four after that the forms of numeral the clerks would use. Each sheet was leveled and pinned at two points in the order that had been decided.

The Registrar of the Copying Floor had watched me pin the last of them and then gone. I straightened the seventh sheet, which had come slightly forward at the lower corner. Lano sat near the baseboard and watched the wall. Her nose worked at something in the cool air. She did not move from where she had settled.

The form of the entry was this: one line per place, the name in the agreed hand, its count in the agreed numeral, the tally of hands in a second column, nothing else. I had written a copy of the form on the first sheet of the row and again on the last, so that a person walking either direction found it at the start.

The Ruins of Pewterlow stood at the top of the count. The name was written in the agreed hand. The tally beside it was the largest on the roll. This was all the sheet recorded.

The Ruins of Mistthwaite carried the largest pile of unanswered letters. The form recorded the pile by count. It did not record the letters themselves, or how long they had waited. The count was a number. The number was entered in the agreed numeral.

Lano padded the length of the wall and back, her nails quiet on the boards. She stopped once near the far end, nose down, then came back and pressed against my leg for a moment before settling again.

I pinned a blank page at the far right of the row with one pin at the top, the lower edge left free. This was the place where additions would go if the standard was revised. Nothing had been added. The sheets held what had been chosen.

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