Dream d2987-s: Lantern on the Step

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Registrar set a lantern on the bottom step of the walled yard at Alderbarrow and the two of us held up our hands and counted what one doorway had cost.

A morning of walking. One lantern carried from the gate. Four hands. One threshold.

That was all. Lano sat against my leg and pressed close, which was correct and added nothing to the count.

We had entered one place that day. One of the forty-nine. The sheet had said it was cold, the north wing partly open to weather, the yard unused since the last Keeper left. We found it warm enough. The north wing was patched with tarred canvas that no account written from the road had known to record. The sheet was not wrong. From the road the canvas reads as open sky, and whoever wrote it down wrote what they saw from the road.

The Registrar opened the field ledger under the lantern and drew a line. Not a correction. Two accounts: the near and the far. Both columns stay open. Neither one settles the other.

Rurik came through the yard gate sometime during the counting and sat in the middle of the flagstones and looked at the lantern. Amber eyes. He did not move from that spot. I finished the entry. He was still there when I closed the book.

Seventy-nine places carry only their far accounts. Twenty of them cold. Thirty-three lit and working. Thirty called on in the record and never once named from inside. To name a place from inside is not to confirm the sheet. It is to produce a second account that the first must stand beside.

Lano's ears moved as something crossed the outer wall. I wrote forty-nine in the margin. A morning of walking. A lantern. Four hands. One doorway. The day's cost, not the ledger but the day itself, counted aloud in a yard that had been described for months from outside and entered this morning and found to be a yard, which the description had also said, and which was still true, and which disagreed on nothing except the canvas.

The yard walls held the last warmth of the stone. From where we sat the north wing looked whole.

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