Dream d3038-s: Cool, Not Cold

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we stood in the passage outside the counting room in Brackenbrook, the doorway ahead throwing a band of light across the stone floor, and nobody moved because the Tally-Reader had not yet come to the threshold with the book.

Lano sat against my ankle, her ears pitched toward the lit room, her nose working at the air between us and whatever the room held.

The Keeper of the Walking Record carried the far account folded in her coat. I knew its figures before she opened it: nineteen places written as cold, thirty-three written as working, forty-nine already entered and written from inside. Those were accurate as far as they reached, which was as far as the door.

The Tally-Reader appeared in the doorway. She stood at the threshold with the book open and read what the entries said, in a voice sized for entries, not for reassurance. Forty-nine written. The fiftieth was this room.

I had the pen. The Keeper of the Walking Record held the far account open between us. We compared, line by line, and where the two accounts disagreed we set both down and marked neither settled. The room had been entered in the far account as cold. It was cool - occupied still, a hearth gone out sometime in the previous day and not yet relit. That is a different condition from a hearth never lit. I wrote: cool, occupied, hearth lately out. I did not write that the far account was wrong. I wrote the near account beside it.

Lano moved past me into the room. She went to the corner where the hearth was and pressed her nose against the stone surround, then came back and sat in the doorway between the passage and the lit room, facing inward.

The Tally-Reader watched her. I wrote what Lano had done and offered no reading of it.

The Keeper of the Walking Record asked how many places remained only a name and a number.

Seventy-nine, I said.

She wrote it down. Nobody asked for the figure to come out smaller than it was.

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