Dream d2894-s: The Night Records Four

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the party had moved to the wide terrace, and the sky was so thick with stars that the light from them was almost a presence you could lean against. We stood in a ring on the open stone. Lano moved at the edge of the ring with her nose low, reading the ground. Rurik had taken the high coping of the outer wall and sat there without moving, a strip of dark against the dark sky.

The Clerk of Faces set the measuring frame on the table at the center of the ring. The Keeper of Record opened the bound pages to the seventh order: custodianship, the capacity to hold a sequence across interruptions and return to the correct position without losing the count. The guest whose fitted face had moved stood inside the ring. Their coat carried medals from this order. Each medal had been witnessed and struck and was not subject to revision.

The trial ran without ceremony. A sequence of objects was named, then interrupted, then resumed, then interrupted again. At each return the guest named the next position. The Clerk kept the count aloud. The Keeper wrote each result in the narrow column beside the order's heading.

At the completion, the Keeper read the count back to the ring: four positions held, four not held, out of eight trials in this order. The Keeper wrote the fraction and closed the page. The ring was quiet. The Charter lay open on the side table, its seven rulings visible in the starlight, and none of them moved the count one way or the other.

The Clerk of Faces did not recut the face. Four of eight was the standing measure, and the face had already been cut, at the last re-measuring, to say what it said: a guest at the lower edge of this order, with one station closed accordingly. The medals on the coat continued to say what they had always said, which was different from what the face said. Both records stood. Neither was explained.

The Keeper capped the pen and set it down. Lano padded to the edge of the terrace and looked out at the dark below, her tail still.

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