Dream d3019-s: Smoke That Does Not Lean

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road ran straight and the smoke above Garnetsquare ran straight and nothing moved in the air between us. Lano trotted ahead, nose down, then nose up, reading the distance in increments I could not read. Four fires. From here they were four fires. The sheet said nineteen cold houses and thirty-three working ones and a population that had been counted from a road much like this one, in weather much like this one, by someone who did not go in.

I went in.

The first street was not the street the sheet described. The sheet described a central market that was large and open; the street the first entering found was narrow, two wagons standing close together, a smell of sawdust and something cooked in fat. A child crossed ahead carrying a bundle that was too large for the child and no one watched her cross. Rurik slipped through the gap between the wagons and was gone.

What the sheet had listed as the cold district was lit from inside. I wrote that down. Not explained, not reconciled with the count made at a distance. Both accounts are now in the record. Neither is settled.

The office of the Entering Clerk keeps two columns. Left: what the sheet said. Right: what the doorstep finds. They are permitted to disagree and in this place they disagree in the following particulars: the market square is smaller, the cold district is warmer, the lit district is quieter, and the smell of the place is not a smell that travels to a field road. That smell is inside the record now.

Lano came back from ahead and pressed against my leg and stayed there. Her ears were forward. One of the four fires was close enough to see the person tending it, a figure turned away, unaware of the census, not part of it. The entering does not require speech. I did not speak to them.

The record states: Garnetsquare, night one of seven. Conditions as found. The near account disagrees with the far account in at least the particulars listed above and possibly others not yet found. This is expected. This is the purpose of the entering.

Rurik reappeared at the doorway of the third building I passed, sitting in it in the way a cat sits when a doorway has become its business. His amber eyes were on something behind me. I looked back at the field road, now behind us, and it was empty in both directions, and the smoke stood up without leaning, and the place we had entered was the place we were now in, and the sheet was the sheet.

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