Dream d2931-s: Full Noise, No Mark

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the market street of the City of Tansythwaite was running at full pitch and I was standing at its far edge with my back against a stone wall and the ledger open on my knee.

The stalls ran the full length and past the corner. A figure at the cloth cart was shaking out a length of something dark. Another figure was setting roots into a long row on the boards. I did not count the stalls. I looked for the City of Tansythwaite in the ledger and found it, and found the market district of it on the line below, and found no mark against it.

Three nights in residency. No mark on the market.

Lano sat at my feet with her nose working the layers of the place, something smoked, something that had been out since morning, something wet from the drain at the corner. Her ears swung once toward a cart that shifted on its wheel. She watched the cart settle and went back to her nose.

I wrote the entry in. Market street, City of Tansythwaite, entered, night three of residency. Then I looked at what I had written and wrote it again on the line below, the same words, to be certain they had landed and not slipped.

Rurik was somewhere ahead. I had seen him go between two carts near the cloth figure's pitch. I did not see him come back.

A place that is lit and busy reads as known. This is the difficulty the record keeps finding. The market was running at full noise. The market was in use on all sides. Nobody had stood inside it with the ledger open and the column empty until now, and that is not the same thing as having been there, and the ledger does not pretend otherwise.

129 places. 48 with a mark. 81 without. Of the 81, 20 standing dark, 38 lit. The market was one of the 38. It is not one of them now.

I closed the ledger. Lano stood when I stood and moved two steps ahead of me back into the noise.

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