Dream d2929-s: Every Lamp Already Burning

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the city appeared before the sun did.

I came down the slope with the list in my coat and Lano at my heel, and Tansythwaite was already bright - every window in it, from the lowest street to where the rooflines broke against the not-yet-dawn sky. I had expected to walk into a city waking. I found one that had not stopped.

The count on the sheet read one hundred and twenty-nine. Forty-eight with a second mark, meaning I had stood inside them and written from inside. Eighty-one without. Twenty of those cold and dark. Thirty-eight lit at every window, busy, smoke from the chimneys, voices carrying on the air before I was close enough to make out words - and not one of them entered.

I had thought the dark ones were the harder accounting. A cold house is easy to see as unentered. But here was Tansythwaite, which I had named in the record nine times, whose trades I had noted and whose streets I had drawn from hearsay - and it was not in the short column. It was not in the short column and it looked, from this approach, like a place I knew.

Lano moved ahead of me on the verge, nose down, reading something the ground had left for her. Rurik had gone on at the last fork; I had watched him take the upper path without hurrying, tail upright, and he had not looked back. A black cat in a place this size finds his own level.

I took the count out at the gate. A Toll Keeper stood in the arch with a lantern she did not need - the street behind her was bright enough to read by. I told her what I was doing and she did not ask why. She stamped the margin of the sheet with something dry and official. I wrote the date under it and wrote the city's name in the short column for the first time.

One entry. The city spread behind her for a mile in every direction and I had not walked a step of it yet. Being listed is not the same as being entered, and being entered at the gate is not the same as being inside. I wrote the first street in the margin and started walking.

Lano came through the arch at my side and sat down on the flagstone just past the threshold, ears up, watching the street run away from us in both directions - lamplit, moving, at work since before I arrived and going to be at work long after I left.

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