Dream d2670-s: The Calling Returned Divided

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood on the raised platform in the Hall and called the count by settlement, as I had been taught to do, and the count did not come back.

What came back was many things at once.

The Keeper of the Ruins of Pewterlow read from a ledger she had been keeping herself for three seasons. The numbers were different from mine. Not wrong in any way I could name: different. She had counted the same threshold crossings but had folded the cold days into the reckoning, and the total held its own logic. Three others in that corner of the Hall held sheets that agreed with her sheet and disagreed with mine.

I called the next name. The Ruins of Mistthwaite. Nobody answered. The pile of letters in that settlement is the largest on the map and there is nobody to read them, and so when I named it the Hall held the name in the air for a moment and let it fall. I wrote down that I had called it. I wrote down that no voice came.

The difficulty was not in the disagreements. The difficulty was in what the calling became once the count no longer lived only in my records. When I had been the single source, a call was a statement. Now a call was a question, or something between a question and a reaching toward a number that existed in several places at once and could not be gathered into one.

Lano had found a spot near the edge of the platform. She sat with her nose toward the Hall floor, not sleeping, her ears shifting slightly each time a new voice rose from below. The small stone she sometimes carried in her mouth was on the boards beside her. I had set it there earlier so she could rest without it.

Rurik was on the high railing behind me. I could not see him but I could feel the particular quality of that silence, different from the silence on the other sides.

I called twenty-three names before the hour turned. Of those, eleven had keepers who answered with their own marks. Of those eleven, seven matched mine within a small margin and four did not. Of the remaining twelve, four had keepers present who had not been keeping records, and eight had no keeper standing at all.

What the call raised - and it had become a question now, that much was measurable - was whether a count called from a single source had ever been a count, or whether it had been something that resembled a count from the outside while being something else inside. I did not pursue that. I was not there to pursue it.

I called the remaining names. I wrote down what came back. Where nothing came back, I wrote down the silence by name.

That was the second night on the Hall floor. The calling was not the same calling it had been before I understood that the marks were distributed now, and could not be gathered, and were not going to wait for me before continuing to be kept.

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