Dream d2729-s: Passable to the Fourth Step

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the smell of silt reached me before the river did.

The road from Pewterlow runs northeast along a ridge for three miles and then drops through a cut in the bank to a gravel bar at the water's edge. There it ends. The gravel is firm underfoot and the road is passable to within four steps of the water; the fifth would be wet. I wrote this in the second book under the heading that names the road by the direction it leaves and the direction it arrives, and I noted that the ford exists but is marked impassable at current depth by a stake driven by some prior hand. The stake is still there. Whoever drove it kept the custom.

Lano walked out onto the gravel bar and stood at the water's edge, ears flat, nose working the downstream air. I waited. She did not go in. She came back to my side and sat, and did not wag.

Then from upstream - farther than I could see, where the ridge bends south - came a light that was not steady. A relay beacon, the kind the second book records as present at the hill station two miles north. It was burning correctly when I passed the station at dusk; I had marked it as maintained, the oil fresh, the glass clear. Now the light stuttered. Not wind. The shutters were opening and closing in a pattern I had been taught to read, and I had been taught that pattern well enough to know when it broke. What came down the river valley was not the pattern. It was the shape of the pattern with the meaning taken out - the intervals wrong, the groupings wrong, a signal in the form of a signal, saying nothing, saying it rapidly.

I stood on the gravel and watched and could not read it.

A bark from Lano, short and high, the kind she gives when something is moving that she cannot see the source of. She pressed against my leg. I put my hand on her back and she was rigid.

The road behind me was passable. I could go back the way I came. The second book says nothing about what to do when a beacon goes wrong - it is a record of places, not a set of instructions. I am the record-keeper tonight. I was here when it happened. That is a thing to be written down, not yet understood.

I took out the book. I wrote: the road ends at the gravel bar, passable. The beacon at the north station was transmitting on my arrival at dusk. At the hour of standing at the road's end, the beacon was transmitting without legible pattern. I was present. I do not know what it is saying.

The light kept going across the water, making its wrong noise in silence.

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