Dream d2913-s: What Medals Cannot Unsay

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the torches in the courtyard had been burning long enough that their pitch had gone low, and the first chill of after-midnight was moving between the columns. The party was breaking up. An usher called each order in turn and the guests came to the rack, and I stood with the ledger open to mark what each carried out and what, if anything, they left behind.

The coat rack stood against the courtyard wall, nineteen coats arrayed by order. Each coat bore its medals flush against the breast: nine orders of deed, nine kinds of witnessing, and the metal caught the torchlight as the rack turned. I had not numbered them this evening - you do not number what you have already counted - but I knew their sum: nine hundred and fifteen in all, not one of them altered since it was struck.

I called the first order. The medals had been struck once, on witnessed evidence, and the house does not re-strike. A correction here is a new medal laid beside the old, and the old stays. I checked each coat down the rack against the Charter, which carries seven standing rulings above the long table, and found nothing in disagreement. The usher folded each coat and handed it across the threshold.

Lano had settled near the base of the rack while I worked, her chin on her forepaws. Her ears turned toward each passing guest without her head lifting.

The fitted faces were my second concern. The house re-cuts a face each night by fresh trial, never from memory, and it holds seven such faces - one for each order of task the records track. I went through them in order. Six of the seven sat flush with their measure. One had not. That guest's record showed a station now closed to them, four trials passed of eight, with the other orders holding better tallies. I noted the finding in the reserved column: the face had moved since last it was cut, the medals had not, and neither could account for the other. The medals cannot be re-struck to fit a new measure. The face cannot be re-cut without a trial that has not been held. I wrote it down and drew the line under it and left it standing.

Rurik slipped through a gap in the lower frame of the rack as the final coats were being lifted. He settled between two empty pegs, washed a paw once, and watched the last guests cross the courtyard.

The usher called the final order. The coat came down. I checked its medals: unaltered, saying only what had been witnessed and nothing more. The guest took the coat and passed through the doors into the street beyond.

I wrote the last entry in two columns.

What carried out: the medals, every one of them. What left behind: nothing.

The house records. It does not explain.

Lano rose and trotted to the gap in the doors before they closed. She sat there a moment, and from her throat came one word: "Buenas." Then she turned back into the courtyard, and I closed the ledger, and followed her out.

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