Dream d2841-s: The Cord's Extent

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I walked the cold ground inside the broken walls of Kestrelridge carrying a cord marked at intervals, and at the far wall I turned and walked back, counting as I went. Lano padded ahead, her nose close to the frost-hardened earth, circling once when she caught a scent and then resuming her line. Rurik sat on a fallen course of brick at the south-eastern corner, watching, his amber eyes level and still.

I wrote the count in the record book: forty paces north to south, thirty-one east to west. That was what it was. I wrote it.

The Clerk of Surveys had given me a second list before I set out: one hundred and twenty-eight names, and beside each name either a mark meaning drawn or a blank space meaning not. I counted the blanks by lamplight while Lano pressed warm against my left boot. Sixty-four blanks. The number sat in the column and I let it sit there.

I noted something further. Of the sixty-four names without a drawing, sixty-three were entered in the same hand in what appeared to be one sitting: the ink shade consistent, the spacing even, no change of pen. The sixty-fourth was older, the ink faded to brown at the edges. That name had waited longer than the others. I wrote: one entry predates the rest by an indeterminate interval. I did not write how long. I did not know.

Lano nosed at a crack in the rubble near the northern wall, then lifted her head and trotted back toward me. Rurik dropped from the brick without sound, landed, and walked a slow arc along the perimeter of the measured space, tail low.

At the east wall I checked the list again. Forty-seven of the sixty-four waiting names shared an opening syllable with a name already drawn - connected, at least in their first part, to somewhere that had ground under it. The busiest drawn place among them carried one hundred pieces of work recorded in the last thirty days. One hundred. I wrote the number.

I ruled a line at the bottom of the column and wrote the total: sixty-four names, no ground under them. The cord lay coiled at my feet. The walls held the cold in. The record held what I had found and I did not add to it.

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