Dream d2677-s: Dark at the Press End

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the second book was thinner. I held it against the first and felt the difference before I opened it - less weight, softer cover, the kind of paper that takes ink quickly and doesn't argue. The Keeper of the Room had found it in a drawer behind the correspondence cabinet, still wrapped in its original cloth. Nobody had thought to use it because nobody had needed a book for the places that keep no record themselves.

I set it on the table and began to rule lines.

Rurik had taken the high shelf above the correspondence cabinet, amber eyes half-closed in the lamplight, tail curled against his paws. Lano sat near the door, nose lifted, reading the room.

The ruling press was salvaged - the Keeper had said so on the first night, without apology, the way a working person names a tool's history and moves on. A bracket repaired with copper wire, a tension spring replaced with a length of flattened banding. It had worked for two nights without complaint. I was three pages into the thin book, ruling the lines for the twenty-seven places nobody keeps, when the smell reached me first.

Lano was on her feet before I understood what I was smelling. Ears flat, body low. A single bark, sharp and without echo.

Then the lamp at the press end of the table guttered and the mechanism went dark.

The Keeper crossed the room in four steps. I held the main lamp steady. In the silence I could hear Rurik shift on the high shelf, claws finding the wood again.

The bracket had held. The spring had held. What had burned was the salvaged collar around the winding gear - a piece of material none of us could name with certainty, dark brown and close-grained, that someone had pressed into service before any of us arrived. It had simply run out of itself.

The Keeper turned it over in the light I held close. There was nothing to replace it with. Not tonight. Perhaps not at all.

"We have the ruling frame," the Keeper said. Not a question. A location.

The ruling frame was slower, older, a tool for single lines rather than pages. But it was whole. I set the press aside. The Keeper found the frame on the lower shelf and placed it on the table without ceremony.

Lano pressed her nose once to the burned collar where the Keeper had set it at the table's corner, then moved back to the door and sat.

Rurik did not move from the shelf.

I picked up the ruling pen and drew the next line by hand. The thin book was for places nobody keeps. It did not require speed. It required only that the lines be straight and the pages be true, which the frame could manage, which I could manage, if the lamp held.

The lamp held.

Outside, past the door Lano watched, the rest of the settlement went about its night not knowing what had gone dark in the ruling room. In the morning there would be an accounting of what we had and what we lacked and what could be fashioned in place of the thing that burned. That was for morning. Tonight there were still pages waiting.

I ruled the next line straight. The one after that I was less sure of.

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