Dream d2764-s: What Comes Across the Weather

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the moor had no boundary I could name in ink. I had been walking since the grey hour before the light settled, and the undrawn ground ran in every direction without a fence or a ford to give it a seam. Lano moved ahead through the heather, nose low, her breath making small flags in the cold. The weather was coming from the west: a wall of grey pushing flat across the open, taking the far slope and then the nearer one, and then the ground within a long throw of my boots.

I had the drawn sheet folded in my coat. It carried sixty-five places and nine of them showed a mark of life - a lamp, a fire, a recorded working. The Hall holds two hundred and seventy-six places in its full count, and a hundred and seventy-one of those sit on no sheet I have ever seen. I had come out to give the moor its measure in hours, because no sheet carries it and the Hall does not know its width.

Three hours walking north brought me to a rise. I stood and turned. Behind me: the smudge of Osierthwaite's chimney smoke. Ahead: nothing named. Seven marks on the drawn sheet point toward country I cannot reach from here - seven references to ground that either shifted or was never fixed. I noted them. The moor beyond them was the same moor underfoot: open, brown, patient, wet. Fifty-eight places have been walked past the ink in the last thirty days. Twenty-seven of those are alight in some fashion. Yarrowgarth is the newest, one day standing.

Lano stopped.

She had been trotting a yard ahead and she stopped as if the ground had asked her to. Her ears went flat against her skull. Her tail went still. She turned back toward me and looked, not at me - past me, toward the south, toward Osierthwaite. One bark, short and clean. Then she held: rigid, watching something I could not see.

I heard nothing. The weather crossed us and kept going.

I came back to Osierthwaite in the early afternoon. I had walked the moor six hours in its north-south extent and found no far boundary. The Listening-Keeper met me at the Hall door. She had not come to ask about the moor. She had the log open under her arm.

The listeners had taken a signal at the third hour past midnight. Not from the beacon ring. Not from any registered post. The pattern matched nothing in the charted list - not the long-period pulse from the upland relay, not the short-period tick from the coast shelf, not any interval we had ever logged. Forty-one pulses. The gaps between them: irregular, but not random. The Listening-Keeper's word for it was deliberate.

The Hall was not empty when I came in. The Archivist had pulled the full beacon register and was working through it by column. The Signal-Walker was already accounting for which posts along the receiving line had been properly staffed at that hour - three of eight standing, the other five on passive hold. Whether the signal had a direction was not yet determined. Whether it had sent once and stopped or was still running was not yet determined.

I wrote in my log: moor extent, north-south, not less than six hours walking. Western bound not tested. No sheet carries this ground.

Then I sat down with the Listening-Keeper's log and read the forty-one pulse record myself, because she offered it and because I do not know what I am looking at and that is the correct reason to look.

Lano pressed close against my leg and did not lie down. Her ears had not risen since the moor.

---