Dream d2674-s: The Other Kind of Book

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the letters from Mistthwaite had been sitting on the step all afternoon, wrapped in brown cord, nobody to carry them in and nobody inside to answer them. When I finally lifted the bundle the cord left a mark across my palms. Lano pressed against my ankle and looked ahead at the open door.

Inside, the Hall had gone quiet with evening. The benches had emptied the way a tide goes out: slowly and then all at once. By the time I reached the book, only one other figure was still standing at it - the Keeper of the Outer Register, who had been in argument with the Second Clerk since midday over whether the count at Mistthwaite should be entered under Settled Places or Abandoned.

They were not arguing that now. They stood on either side of the open page and neither of them was speaking. The question had shifted somewhere between the third hour and the fourth, the way a room shifts when the light changes direction without warning.

I set the letters down beside the book.

"Which book does it belong in," the Keeper said - not to me, not to the Clerk, only to the page.

That was the new question. Not who counted right. Not whose method stood. Which book, which shelf, which keeping - whether the tally of a place with nobody left to answer belongs in the living register or in the other kind of book, the one that does not wait for a reply.

Lano found the warm spot under the last bench and turned three times before settling. Rurik had come in at some point I had not marked; he sat in the doorway now with his back to the last light, watching something I could not see.

I wrote the question in the margin where the argument had been. Which book. I left it without an answer, because some questions are new enough that writing them down is the whole work of the evening.

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