Dream d2917-s: The Open Account

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the courtyard was lit by torches set into the wall, and the wall itself held the work: nine ranks of brackets, each rank for a different order of deed, and the brackets filled with small discs of hammered metal that caught the light in rows.

I stood at the near end with the Registrar beside me, and Lano sat close against my leg, her nose working the cold air, ears tilted toward the clatter of brackets as we moved along the wall.

The Registrar carried the ledger. I carried nothing. That was the division of the office.

We were not the first to arrive. Rurik had already taken a high position on the wall's coping, amber eyes half-lidded, tail hanging down and swaying once as we passed beneath him.

The Registrar named the count without looking up from the page: nine hundred and fifteen medals, across nineteen guests, in nine orders. Each struck once. None ever altered. On the facing panels - set perpendicular to the wall at intervals, one for each of the seven orders this house elects to fit - the masks were pinned for the night, freshly cut by the morning's trials.

Six panels showed a medal-row and a mask in agreement, the contours rhyming without forcing. I noted each in the ledger at the Registrar's instruction: a line, a date, a bracket number.

The eighth panel was the work of the evening.

I set the torch in the bracket nearest to it and looked.

The mask pinned there had moved since the last night's reading. Its trials had produced a different cut - four passed of eight, where the others had passed more - and the station whose bracket sat directly above the panel was now closed to this mask. The medals had not changed. They recorded what had been done: a row of deeds, all witnessed, all permanent. The mask recorded something else, cut fresh on tonight's trial, saying something different from what the medals above it said.

Lano moved forward and sniffed the base of the panel. She backed away and sat.

I opened the ledger to the record page for this mask and wrote what I observed: the station, closed. The trial count, four of eight. The medal-row above it, unchanged. The distance between them, present. Nothing else. The Charter on the table behind us carried seven standing rulings on questions shaped like this one, and none of them authorized me to close that distance with an explanation. The distance was the finding. The finding was the entry.

Rurik dropped from the wall coping without sound and padded to the base of the panel. He sat in the passage between the mask and the station bracket above it, and his amber eyes stayed open and did not blink.

I finished the entry. The Registrar signed beside it. The torchlight held on the wall while the medals remained where they had always been and the mask remained where tonight's trial had placed it, and the ledger closed on both and recorded neither verdict nor reproach, only the open account of the two standing apart.

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