Dream d3041-s: Slate and Static

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the boundary stone of Slatemoss stood at the exact place where the surveyed sheet ran out of ink. On one side of it, every crack and hollow had a name. On the other side, the cracked slate road continued into bedrock that no cartographer had ever bothered to record.

The Horizon-Surveyor knelt at the stone's base and placed one hand on each side of it, as if testing the temperature difference between the known and the unnamed. There was none. The Tally-Reader counted the road markers behind us, confirmed the number aloud, and did not round it up. The Bedrock-Reader pressed an ear to the flat of a stone and said nothing, which meant something.

Lano had gone still beside the Warden of the Deep Stratum. Ears flat against her skull. The white fur of her chest barely moving. She was not watching the road ahead. She was watching the air.

Then the Relic-Watcher's receiver spoke.

It should not have. The nearest known beacon network ended four survey-marks back, and this was the kind of equipment that returns silence when there is nothing to return. What came through was not silence. It was not noise exactly either. A pattern - or the shape that a pattern leaves when something removes the meaning from it. Repeating intervals. A duration, a gap, a shorter duration, a longer gap. No known signature in the logs the Relic-Watcher carried.

The Anomaly-Hand crossed to the receiver and stood over it without touching the dial. The pale cyan seams in the nearby stone face showed no change. Whatever this was, it had not come up from the bedrock.

Lano barked once, sharp, directional. Her nose aimed northeast, toward an iron armature that rose from the scree about two hundred metres off the road. It was not on any list. It predated the survey by at least two phases of construction, possibly more. The Warden of the Deep Stratum had already noted it in the log: unreckoned machinery, iron frame, purpose unestablished.

The signal continued. The intervals did not change.

The Horizon-Surveyor stood, brushed stone dust from one knee, and looked at the armature. I looked at the receiver. The Tally-Reader wrote the time of first detection in the margin of the road log, because that was what the margin was for.

Rurik appeared from behind the boundary stone - no one had seen him pass it - and sat down in the road between us and the armature. He stared at it. His amber eyes did not blink. His tail lay flat and still on the cracked slate.

The party had not decided anything yet. Investigate or ignore: neither word had been said aloud. The Bedrock-Reader came upright from the stone and dusted both palms and waited to hear what someone else would say first.

The receiver kept talking in its untranslated intervals, patient as the bedrock, naming nothing.

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