Dream d2874-s: The Trestle and Nineteen

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Clerk had carried the ledger out to the yard before the cellar work began, setting it open on the trestle under the long wall, and the question written at the top of the page was not how many medals the house held but how many hands had ever been struck for. Those are different counts. The first had been walked on other nights. Tonight was the second.

I went into the cellar aisle with a candle and Lano at my heel, her nails a small percussion on the stone. The coats hang here on their pegs from the first guest to the last and the medals on each coat are the record of that hand's deeds, one struck per deed on witnessed evidence, none ever altered, a correction only ever a new one laid beside. I started at the north end and called each name from the peg-tag as I passed: one, two. Lano's nose went to the hem of the third coat and I marked three. Four. The orders of deed are nine and a coat may carry from any of them, or from several, and a coat that carries nothing is still a coat and still a hand and still counted if it has ever been struck for at all.

I reached the south wall at nineteen.

Back in the yard I gave the number to the Clerk and she wrote it in the column: nineteen guests the house has ever struck for, holding between them nine hundred and fifteen medals across nine orders of deed, and not one of those medals has ever been re-struck, scraped, or altered. Rurik had taken the warm end of the trestle for himself and sat with his tail curled over his paws, watching nothing in particular with the particular attention of a cat that is watching everything.

The Clerk turned the page and read the face-ledger aloud, not to me but to the record: seven faces fitted tonight, one for each order of task the house measures. Six of the seven sit flush against their measure, moved by trial as the measure moves. The seventh does not. The station that face once held is closed to it now; it passed four of its eight trials where the others passed more. The mismatch is recorded here. The Clerk wrote it in the column without remark. The medals on that guest's coat are unchanged - they cannot be re-struck to fit the face, and the face cannot be re-cut without a trial that has not happened - so the disagreement is written down and left standing.

She closed the face-ledger and opened the Charter, which carries seven standing rulings, and read each ruling into the book as the house requires on the sixth night of eight. I held the candle. Lano sat beside my boot and her ears went still.

When the reading was done the Clerk blotted the ink and closed the ledger and Rurik dropped from the trestle and went ahead through the yard gate without looking back. Lano pressed once against my leg - breve - and we followed.

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