Dream d2733-s: Into the Blank Column

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I sat at the long desk in the ledger room and the second book was open before me, its pages ruled in columns: place, condition, roads out, last hand. Every line blank. The lamp threw yellow light across the table and Lano lay on the floor beside my chair, her chin on her forepaws, watching the door.

I took the pen and began at the first entry. The Ruins of Pewterlow: condition cold, roads out more than any other place in the book, last hand absent. I wrote it and moved to the next. Cold and one road. Cold and none. Cold and one. The work was slow and honest and I did not look up.

Thirty-five of the forty-seven I marked as left in good order. Seven tended, meaning someone had been and gone recently enough for it to show. Two gone to green, which is not a failure: green is what a place becomes when it is left long enough that something else moves in. One untidy, which is the unkindest entry of the three categories and also the rarest.

Lano shifted. I heard her nails on the stone floor and then felt her press against my leg.

From somewhere deeper in the building, in the direction of the receiving room, there was a sound I did not recognize. Not a mechanical fault. Not ordinary static. A pattern, or the beginning of one. I set my pen down.

The Keeper of Instruments appeared in the doorway. He had come quickly, which is not his habit. He said only that the receivers had woken on their own, that the signal did not match any beacon format in the register, and that he had checked the register twice before coming to find me.

Lano's ears went flat. Not the flat of sleep. One short bark, low, which she gives rarely and only when she means it. Then silence.

I looked back at the second book. The line for the Ruins of Pewterlow was the only entry I had finished. More roads leave the Ruins of Pewterlow than leave any other place in the book, and nobody is on any of them. I had written that, and it was true when I wrote it.

The Keeper of Instruments waited. The signal, he said, was still coming in.

I did not close the book. I left the pen beside the Pewterlow line and stood. Lano stood with me. We went toward the receiving room to see what the instruments were holding, and the blank entries stayed blank behind us, and nothing in them answered for what we were walking toward.

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