Dream d2876-s: Three Sendings, None Alike

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was the Keeper of Records in the cellar of struck medals on the eighth and final night, and the last task was the sealing. I went down the stair with the lamp raised, Lano at my heel, her small white shape moving close to the stone. Rurik had claimed the bottom step for himself and sat washing a paw as though the whole house waited on his pleasure.

The nine hundred and fifteen medals on their shelves had not moved. I checked the tally sheet against the hanging ledger, order by order: not one entry was altered, not one deed mark adjusted. The Keeper of the Stair waited at the door; I nodded once and she wrote the confirmation into the closing record in plain hand, without embellishment.

The seven fitted faces were recorded in the same hand. Six of them read flush against their measure. The seventh was entered in its own line: the moved face, with its station now barred to it, having passed four of its eight trials where the others had passed more. The disagreement between that face and the medals beneath it was written down and left standing. No explanation was offered. The house does not explain disagreements; it records them.

I was raising the lamp to go when the bell from the relay post rang wrong.

Not the double-tone of a courier. Not the held note of a clear message. A long, broken sound that stopped, resumed, stopped again, and then the flag outside the cellar window turned in a pattern I had not been taught. Lano's ears went flat against her skull. She pressed hard to my leg and looked up at the window, and then she barked once, short and sharp, into the silence.

The Keeper of the Stair stepped back into the doorway. "The eastern post has sent the same sequence three times," she said. "It is different each time."

That is not how a relay works.

I watched the flag. It moved again: the start of a known pattern, then a deviation from it, then a repeat that matched neither the first sending nor the second. Something in the chain between sender and receiver was arriving changed. Whether the distortion lived in the sending, the carrying, or the receiving end, I could not say from the cellar floor. The Keeper had no more information than I did.

I handed her the lamp and told her to leave the door open. The medals were confirmed. The closing record was written and sealed. The one entry I could not yet make was the relay, because whatever it was trying to say, it did not appear to be saying it the same way twice.

Lano sat between the door and the stair, ears still flat, watching the window where the flag had gone still.

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