Dream d2884-s: The Tilted Glass

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the fitting-room opened onto a garden terrace in the evening, and the tall mirror stood at the edge of the flagstones with the garden dark behind it. Lano came with me, trotting ahead to the mirror's base, where she pressed her nose once against the cold frame before settling. I carried the ledger open to the page for this guest.

The guest was already there - standing before the glass, turning the fitted face this way and that. The face for the order of close-keeping was the one the house had cut for tonight. The others - six of them, one apiece for each of the remaining orders - sat flush with their measure when last we looked. This one did not. The house had moved it in the last reading, after the fourth trial of the eight it had set was passed and the others had passed more.

I did not say this aloud. I opened to the right column and wrote: face for the order of close-keeping: moved. Station of the inner chamber: closed to this face. Trials passed of those set: four of eight.

The guest turned the face again. It caught the last light along one edge. The medals on the coat were nine hundred and fifteen across the nineteen guests of this house, struck by the order-keepers on witnessed evidence alone and never altered since. I counted what was visible in the glass and wrote the count beside the entry.

Lano's ears came forward. She did not bark. She watched the glass with the patient stillness she keeps when something in a room interests her more than anything outside it.

Rurik arrived along the garden wall sometime after, dropping without sound to the terrace stones. He chose a spot two feet from the mirror's base and sat, tail curled around his feet, watching what Lano watched. He did not blink for a long time.

The Charter lay open on the small table beside me - seven rulings, none of them naming this guest, all of them standing. I did not consult them. The entry in the ledger did not require a ruling. It required only the record, and the record was written.

The guest said nothing, which was not unusual. The fitting-room is not a room for speech. It is a room where the face is turned in the glass until the reading is made and then the reading is set down. The face may sit flush or it may not. Tonight it did not. The ledger would say so. The medals on the coat would not be re-struck to fit it, and the face would not be re-cut without a trial that had not happened. The disagreement was written down and left standing, as the house requires.

I closed the ledger at the column's end. Lano stood, shook herself once, and padded toward the door. Rurik stayed at the base of the mirror a moment longer, then slipped away into the dark of the garden without looking back.

The terrace was empty. The glass held nothing but the night and the faint shape of the coat still hanging in the air where the guest had been.

---