Dream d2905-s: Where the Measure Moved

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Charter landed on the table with a sound like a closing door, and I heard it before I saw the room. The Reader was already at the head when I found my seat, both hands flat on the cover, waiting for the hall to settle. Lano had come in with me and she took her place beneath my chair, nose resting on her forepaws.

The Reader lifted the cover and said, without looking up: tonight the rulings are read, not voted. Seven of them, each carried a year or more. No one at the table spoke.

I knew the house: nine orders of deed, and in each order a medal for every deed witnessed and confirmed. Nine hundred and fifteen of them in the room that night, spread across nineteen guests, and not one had ever been changed. A correction was a new medal, set beside the old, never struck over it.

What moved was not the medals. The house fitted each guest for the night in the order of task it measured - not carried in from last time but cut fresh by the trial just completed, saying who was trusted to lead a task of this kind now. Seven orders measured, seven faces fitted. Six of them sat flush against what the medals said. One did not.

The Reader reached the entry where the mismatch stood. No explanation was offered. The Reader read the current station of that order - one task closed to it since the measure last moved - and read the trial count: eight conducted, four passed. Then the Reader read the medal column beside it, the same order: what had been witnessed, what had been confirmed, how many times. The two columns did not agree. The Reader set no mark between them. The disagreement was recorded in the Charter and the Charter was left open on the page.

Lano pressed close against my ankle once, then settled.

The other six orders were read without incident. Each flush. The Reader recited the total: nine hundred and fifteen medals across nineteen guests, seven measures taken. Then closed the Charter.

Rurik had taken the far end of the room. He sat on the sill above the last seat with amber eyes on the Reader, unblinking, tail curled around his feet.

No one explained the mismatch. The mismatch was recorded, and that was all the house required of this night.

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