Dream d3031-s: The Count from Inside

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the book was already open when I sat down, and the page had been written in another hand before I arrived in Fennmoss. Three ranges. That was what the far account gave the survey district, three ranges of structures set in the eastern quarter behind the miller's yard. I had read the number on the road coming in and had not questioned it.

The writing room holds a long table and two lamps and the smell of a fire that went out before I reached it. Lano came in ahead of me, nose low, following something along the baseboard, and then she settled under the table near my feet, the small weight of her against my boot. I opened the book to the current page.

The count I brought back from the eastern quarter was five. I had walked all five. I set five marks on the page, one beside each description I had made from inside each structure, and when I reached the end of the column I wrote the number in the margin: five. Then I drew a second mark beside the three that was already there and wrote a small notation: survey, far account, undated.

Both are on the page now. I did not add a note explaining which is correct. Neither has been retired. The far account was made by someone who did not enter, and was not wrong to give a number before entering was possible. The near account was made by me from inside, and is not wrong to disagree with it. These are two accounts of the same eastern quarter and they will remain two accounts. The distance flattened something that the doorway uncorrected, and now both numbers sit in the margin together.

Rurik appeared sometime during the second mark. He came through the gap at the bottom of the writing room door, which does not close flush, and he settled himself on the far end of the table in the ring of lamplight and watched my hand move across the page. He made no sound. His tail moved once. I continued marking.

The fifth entry took the longest to write. The fifth range had been listed as cold in the survey, cold being the word used in the far account for a building no longer in use. When I entered it I found it cold in temperature only. The hearth had been laid but not lit. There were tools hung in order on the interior wall. There was a hook where a coat had been recently enough that the dust had not settled on the wall behind it. A cold house on the survey, and not a cold house in the room. I wrote both. I did not choose between them.

Lano shifted under the table. I heard her settle again, one small exhale, and then the room was quiet except for the scratch of the pen and Rurik turning on the far end of the table to face the gap in the door. The lamps held steady. Outside the residency the town was doing whatever a town at this hour does, which is not recorded here.

The number five will not be justified in any dispatch. It will sit beside three and both will pass to whoever opens this book next. That is the cost the entering carried: not certainty but a second account, a second number, a second reading of the same quarter from a different position. The page now holds both, and the person who walks in after me will not be left with only the far one, and the far one will not be erased to make room for the near one, and that is the whole of what happened tonight in the writing room in Fennmoss on the sixth of eight.

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