Dream d2986-s: Both Kept Open

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the candles had burned to their collars and the table in Alderbarrow ran long enough that the far end stood in shadow, and on it two ledgers lay open side by side.

The older was in the hand of the previous Keeper, a hand I had come to know well across months of reading. The newer was my own, written this week from inside. I read them together the way a surveyor reads two elevations of the same ground.

The older account of Corruth said: cold house, partial roof, upper windows without glass. My account said: cold house, roof sound except at the north corner, the upper windows all but one reglazed. I did not mark either wrong. I wrote the discrepancy into the margin of the registry in a notation hand, smaller and level. Distant account reads partial roof. Near account reads roof sound with exception. Both kept.

The Warden of Alderbarrow stood at the head of the table with his arms at his sides. He had not sat in the two hours since supper. He was not reading; he was watching me read. Once, when I looked up, he said: a disagreement is a record, not a question. He had said it on other nights. Tonight it held different weight.

Rurik was at the warm end of the table, the end near the covered flue, lying in a long line with his amber eyes open and his chin on his paws. He did not move when I turned pages. He did not move when I copied. The slow blink came once, late in the hour.

Lano had been under my chair since the evening bell. She pressed against my boot when I reached the page about Eskerow, where the distant account called it working and mine called it working but less known than the sheet assumed. I wrote that too. Distance had called the town known because it was named often and the names had multiplied the confidence. Inside, the town had not heard its own name spoken that way, and the names multiplied nothing. I wrote that too.

The figures at the foot of the open page: forty-nine entered. Seventy-nine remaining, of which twenty stood cold and thirty-three lit and working, and thirty of the seventy-nine had been called on in the record and never once named from inside. I wrote the thirty at the top of the next page and drew a line under it. Not an alarm. A preparation.

I was copying the third discrepancy of the evening when Lano came out from under the chair and sat beside the Warden's boot, looking up at him, ears forward. Nothing was asked of her and she said nothing. The candle nearest me guttered once and held.

The Warden's rule is that both accounts go in the same book, neither crossed out, and the notation hand is a third witness. When I finished the page I sat back and read what I had written. The cold houses were less ruined than the sheet. The busy towns were less known. Distance had flattened both, and the Warden had written in the registry's preface a line that had always read like apology and now read like measurement. He had not been wrong, and he had not been wrong in the way I had thought.

The two ledgers lay open side by side on the long table in Alderbarrow on the sixth night of eight, and nothing was struck.

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