Dream d2828-s: The Third Lamp Stutters

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I sat on a stone bench at the center of Willowden's main square with the Keeper of the City Ledger beside me, the book open flat across both our laps. The stone held the cold of the night and the book's spine crackled when the Keeper turned a page.

The work was simple: read what the book held, look at what stood, record the two together. The book held one hundred and twenty-nine names. The Keeper moved a finger down the column and I moved my eyes across the square and called out what I saw standing. Sixty-four names had something standing under them. Sixty-five did not.

"Set them beside each other," the Keeper said. Not against each other. Beside.

I wrote sixty-four in the left column and sixty-five in the right and we looked at them that way for a while. The one name that had waited longest sat near the top of the right-hand column, set down in a different ink, an older hand, and between that entry and the rest of the waiting names there was a visible difference in the paper's surface, a slight dimpling where the pen had pressed harder once and never returned. I noted it. I did not explain it.

Lano lay at my feet on the cold stone, her chin on her paws, watching the far end of the square where the relay tower stood with its three lamps. She had been still since we opened the book. Then her ears went flat.

I looked up.

The middle lamp was pulsing wrong. Not dark, not steady: it stuttered in a pattern that carried no pattern, three short flashes and a long one and then nothing for a count I could not hold, then two shorts and a long and nothing again. The Keeper saw it too. He closed the book without marking the page.

A runner came across the square at a trot, not a sprint. He reached us and bent forward with his hands on his knees.

"The north station," he said. "They are receiving the transmission but it is not reading. The relay is encoding. The Keeper's office at the north wall cannot decode what arrives. They have tried twice."

"What does the garbled text say?" the Keeper asked.

"That is the difficulty. It does not say anything coherent. It has the right length. It has the right shape. The structure is there. The words are not."

Lano barked once, sharp, and then was quiet. Her nose stayed pointed at the tower.

The Keeper stood and tucked the book under his arm. I stood with him. The sixty-four and the sixty-five waited inside the closed book with the pen mark still wet, set down beside each other without a verdict between them, and I thought: we will come back to finish this, and did not know yet whether that was true.

Rurik dropped from the windowsill above us, landed without sound on the bench where we had been sitting, and stared at the stuttering lamp with his amber eyes, unblinking, his tail making one slow movement and then going still.

The runner straightened. The Keeper looked at me. The tower's third lamp burned steady while the middle one kept losing itself. We had work that belonged to the tower now.

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