Dream d2976-s: The Difference Is a Room

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Ledger-Keeper set the two books side by side on the long table in Ivorylow, the column of names on the left and the column of entries on the right, and the right one was much shorter. Lano walked the length of the table once and came back and sat at my feet. Rurik had taken the high shelf at the far end and watched from there without blinking.

The count was 128 in the left column and 48 in the right. I wrote the gap in the margin: 80. The Ledger-Keeper did not comment on it. That was not the work.

Of the 80 not entered, 20 stood cold, windows dark, no smoke from the chimneys. Thirty-four stood lit at every window, doors moving, smoke rising. I wrote: bright and not entered. The Ledger-Keeper ruled a line under it. The bright ones are the harder record because a bright place reads as known, and the column makes no allowance for that reading.

Twenty-nine in the left column had never been spoken aloud on the road. Only on paper. I read each of those twenty-nine names into the room, once each, so they had been said at least once. Lano's ears moved at a few of them. I set the pen down while she sniffed the edge of the left-hand ledger. Then I picked it up again.

The difference between the two columns, set side by side on the long table, was the length of the room. Rurik's tail moved once and was still. Outside, Ivorylow was quiet. The road ahead held eighty places named and counted and not entered, and thirty-four of them were lit.

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