Dream d2646-s: Before Anyone Asked

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the guild floor of Pewterlow was already full when I came down the steps from the street door. A hundred workers at their benches - some standing, some bent close, some moving between stations with pieces of metal or cloth or turned wood in their arms. The noise was constant but organized: the tapping and sliding and low conversation of people who have worked alongside each other for years.

On a stand near the center of the floor, a book lay open. Not a small book. The pages were wide, the writing on them dense and small, in a hand that had belonged to whoever was Recording Master here before the one before the current one. The book was not new. The spine had been rebound at least twice; I could see the different threads at the margin.

Lano moved ahead of me down the last step and onto the floor. She did not bark. She picked her way between the legs of the workers, nose to the boards, reading what the floor had to say, and stopped when she reached the stand. She sat. Her tail moved once and was still.

I came to where she sat and looked at the book. The entries went back further than I had assumed. Dates in the left column that put the earliest record well before the count began, before the question of counting was raised in any quarter I had been part of. The guild had been writing itself down for a long time.

The Recording Master - a woman with ink on her left forearm up to the elbow - came and stood beside me. She did not explain the book. She watched me read one line. I read it. She waited.

I wrote nothing in my own ledger that night. I had come to teach a record, and the record was already here and already longer than what I carried. I wrote one note: that the book existed. That it had been here before anyone asked. That the guild floor of Pewterlow Town already kept its own mark, and had done so without instruction.

Lano stayed at the base of the stand until I turned to leave. Then she came.

---