Dream d2880-s: What the Dog Heard First

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the ink had not dried on the evening's first entry when Lano went still.

She had been moving along the base of the low wall where the two Guests sat, nose working the flagstones, unhurried - and then she was not moving at all. Ears flat. Tail dropped. A warning bark, short and clean, before she pressed herself against my leg and stared toward the far wing of the settlement.

The two Guests looked up from the two faces laid between them on the wall's flat coping.

The Registrar - a quiet office that evening, third chair at the table under the Charter - said nothing and wrote nothing yet, because there was nothing yet to write about the sound that followed: a long, low shift from the direction Lano stared at. Something in the old infrastructure. One of the reclaimed wings, built over foundations that pre-dated the settlement's founding, that pre-dated the clearing of the corrupt network's claims on that ground. A sound like something being decided by weight alone.

I set the evening's ledger down and waited.

The two Guests did not move from the wall, but they watched the far wing with me now. The faces - the ones the house cuts fresh each night, one for each of the seven orders of task - were still laid out between them on the coping. One Guest's face for the third order had come back with a station closed to it and four trials passed of eight, where the others had passed more. That mismatch, the house's business for the night, sat unresolved between them on the stone.

A second sound came from the far wing: a cable, or what had been a cable, pulling free from whatever it had been anchored to in that older structure. Then something heavier, settling at an angle it had not settled at before.

Lano barked again. Twice. Then she stood in the gap between the wall and the path toward the far wing, ears still flat, watching both at once - the two Guests behind her, the far wing ahead.

Rurik appeared from somewhere beneath the wall's overhang. Black, amber-eyed. He sat without ceremony, tail moving once, and watched the far wing with the same attention he gives a thing he has decided to outlast.

The Registrar took up the pen and noted the time.

The two Guests said nothing to one another. The faces were still between them on the coping. The comparison - the business of this house, slow and clerical, two records laid side by side without ranking - had not yet been entered. The mismatch between what the first Guest's coat carried in struck metal and what this night's cut had returned for the third order was still only apparent, not written.

And whatever was happening in the far wing was still happening. The settlement's older bones making a decision we had not been consulted on.

I did not resolve it. I wrote down what I had seen.

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