Dream d2899-s: The Measure and the Medal

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I sat at the long bench beneath the gallery of coats, and the Recorder opened the book to the night's third page without preamble.

The house was quiet in the way it gets when the tallying has already begun. Nineteen coats hung along the upper rail, each carrying its full weight of medals - nine orders of deed, struck once when the deed was witnessed and never re-struck after. The Recorder counted before writing: nine hundred and fifteen in all, distributed across the nineteen without alteration since the first night the house opened.

Seven faces had been fitted, one for each order of task the house measures. Six of them sat flush with their wearers. The trial that re-cut them had moved nothing, and the Recorder noted each with a mark and a number and passed on. The seventh did not sit flush.

Lano had been at the bench's edge since the doors opened, her nose working along the flagstones where the coats' long hems had swept years of dust into the corners. I reached down and she was warm beneath my hand. She did not move from the flagstones. I did not ask her to.

The Recorder read the seventh face aloud and then read the medals that hung beneath the coat above our heads. I wrote what he said into the secondary log. The face had been re-cut by trial and the trial had moved it: four of its eight measures had passed where the others had passed more. One station named in the Charter's seven standing rulings was now closed to it. The medals on the coat said something else - said deed done, witnessed, entered - and not one of those medals had been touched.

The Recorder wrote: face moved; medals unaltered; station closed; mismatch recorded. Rurik had come in at some point without anyone marking when, and sat on the bracket above the seventh coat, amber eyes open, one ear tipped toward the Charter table. He blinked once and was still.

The seven rulings hung on their board above the table. None of them addressed the gap. None of them were meant to.

The Recorder closed the book on the entry and did not remark further on it. The medals cannot be re-struck to match what the face now says. The face cannot be re-cut without a trial that has not been called. The entry stands open in the record, which is all the house can do tonight, and the house knows it.

Lano padded to the door when the Recorder rose. I followed her out.

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