Dream d2687-s: What Nobody Keeps

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was waiting in the stone doorway of the ledger room when the Keeper of the First Round came up behind me carrying something flat and wrapped in cloth.

Lano lifted her nose from the threshold stone and watched. Her tail moved once.

The Keeper was a careful figure, neither young nor old, carrying the wrapped thing the way one carries something that must not be dropped. She unwrapped it at the doorway: a narrow volume, bound in grey board, with a list written on the inside cover in the hand I recognized as the hand of the count.

She said: from now on the round belongs to the unkept places.

I asked what that meant for the first round.

She said: the first round will be walked by the hands already there. They don't need you for what they keep. You are wanted for what they don't.

I took the volume. It was lighter than I expected. Lano pressed against my shin and stayed there.

Inside the front board, the list: forty-three names. Below that, the condition of each place at the time of the count. Good order, I read, and read again: good order, good order, tended, good order. Two entries marked simply green, which meant not a place anymore, which meant whatever had stood there was now only growth. One entry marked untidy.

I read the roads out. Most of the names had one listed, or none. A small number had two.

One had more than all the others: the Ruins of Pewterlow. I counted the roads out from Pewterlow while Lano sat and her ears shifted toward something in the corridor I could not hear. There were more roads leaving Pewterlow than leaving any other place in the volume. The Ruins of Pewterlow was also the oldest entry: the date of first standing sat so far back it occupied a different column from the rest.

I said: I didn't know Pewterlow was in the second book.

The Keeper said: it's been cold a long time.

I asked if there was anything else I should know before starting.

She said: record what is. Not what was and not what might be. What is.

She had already begun to leave when she finished the sentence. I stayed in the doorway with the volume under my arm and my satchel across my shoulder and looked at the corridor, which was dimly lit and long and offered nothing back.

Lano looked up at me.

I opened the volume to the first name on the list and held the page toward the corridor light. The ink was steady and dark in the way ink is when nobody has touched an entry in some time. I wrote the date in the margin, which was the one action the volume required before the round could begin. Then I closed it and started walking, and Lano trotted at my heel, her nails making their small even sound on the stone, and we went.

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