Dream d2908-s: Neither Altered Nor Explained

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I sat at the head of the long table on the fourth of eight nights and the hall settled around me the way it always does, as if the chairs had been waiting.

Nineteen guests were fitted for the night before they arrived: a face cut fresh by the morning's trials, not recalled from the last gathering but remade, saying now who is trusted to lead each kind of work and who is not. The faces sit across seven orders of task, and when a guest's record in any order moves, the face in that order moves with it.

The medals are older. They are struck once, on witnessed evidence, and they do not move. Nine hundred and fifteen of them hang across nineteen coats, spread through nine orders of deed, and not one has ever been taken back. Where a correction is owed, a new medal is laid beside the old, and the old stays. They accrete; nothing is revised.

Lano sat beside me with her chin near the table's edge, ears tilted toward the Reader.

The Reader stood at mid-table and opened the Charter. The hall stilled. The ruling appointed for tonight was one of the seven, and the Reader read it aloud: counting alone earns no medal. To have tallied the tallies, to have numbered the numbered, to have sat in the chair and accumulated the runs - these are noted in the register but they strike no iron. The deed is the thing done on witnessed evidence. The tally is not that.

I recorded the reading. The Clerk at my left hand entered it: read on the fourth night.

Then the Registrar rose and read the night's single entry from the mismatch ledger. Of the seven faces cut for the seven orders, six sit flush with their wearer's medals tonight. One does not. The moved face belongs to a guest whose coat holds medals in the order where the face now sits lower. The station that was open is closed to it. Four of the guest's eight trials in that order were passed; the others passed more.

The gap was entered in the ledger. No column asks for an explanation and none was offered. The medals cannot be re-struck; the face cannot be held while the trials run cold. The disagreement was written down and left there.

Lano's tail moved once against my boot. Rurik had taken the warm end of the table bench, curled into himself, amber eyes shut. The hall heard the ruling. The ruling was recorded as read.

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