Dream d3002-s: One Day, One Door

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the party sat in the stone court of Kestrelhush on the seventh night of eight, and the Recorder read the tally aloud.

One building entered. One day given to it. The count before the entering: forty-eight places carried an inside account. The count after: forty-nine. Seventy-eight remain only a name and a number.

The Registrar had the sheet: what was written before the entering and what was found inside. The far account said the granary was in partial use. The near account said full to the cross-beams on three sides, empty on the fourth, and the smell was of something dried long ago rather than recently. Both go into the ledger. Neither settles the other.

Lano lay against the base of the wall where the stone held the morning's warmth. Her nose moved once.

The Registrar turned the page. Of the seventy-eight still without inside account: nineteen written as cold, thirty-three as lit and working. Thirty had been called on in the record - mentioned, cited, given a role in some earlier description - without anyone having stood inside to say the word aloud. The granary was one of them. Twenty-nine remain in that condition.

Rurik had come in through a gap in the south wall and taken the top of a low stone post. He sat with his tail hanging and watched the Registrar's hands moving across the sheet.

The Archivist noted the disagreement on condition. The far account said partial use. The near account said mixed state: one side full, one empty, two uncertain. No explanation is entered for why. Distance flattens, the Archivist wrote, and no one is blamed for that. The condition found at the doorway and the condition written from the road are two accounts of one place. Both stand in the record.

The day's tally: one building. Seventeen rooms inspected. Four conditions revised. One confirmed. Six rooms not entered - locked, or the floors were uncertain, or the light ran short before the rooms did.

Lano lifted her head, looked once toward Rurik on the post, then set her head back down.

Tomorrow is the eighth night. The residency ends. Kestrelhush will close with forty-nine inside accounts. Seventy-eight will carry only the name and the number when the party goes out through the gate.

Rurik blinked once, slow, and turned away from the court.

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