Dream d3069-s: The Arch Lists East

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was at the stone table in the Fennbrook watch house, my pen following the elevation of the second aqueduct intake, when Lano's ears went flat.

I held the pen still and listened. Rurik, who had been asleep in the warm chair by the lamp, opened one amber eye.

The Tally-Reader had the road count laid out at the far end of the table - 127 surveyed places in careful columns, the unreckoned stratum still blank beside them - and she looked up from her figures without speaking.

Then the sound came: a low resignation of masonry, somewhere below and east. Not a crack but a giving, the sound of weight finding a new path.

The Bedrock-Reader had been out at the eastern intake. We heard her lantern swing before we saw it through the watch house gap. She came through the door without running, which told us she had seen it and had time to leave.

"The revetment on the old sluice wall," she said. "The lower coursework. It was never original to this stratum - someone set it during the network years, unmortared, and tonight it remembered."

I set down my pen. On the page, the elevation showed the second flight of steps hanging precisely in space, exactly as cut stone permits. Outside, somewhere on the slope below us, the same stone was arranging itself without permission.

The Warden of the Deep Stratum had been at the unreckoned field since dusk. Through the watch house gap I could see her lamp still moving in steady arcs. She did not know yet.

Lano pressed against my knee and gave one short bark at the darkness, then held still, ears forward, reading something the instruments could not reach.

The Relic-Watcher opened the eastern shutter a hand-width. A cable - old network line, repurposed for the drainage sluice - now ran slack from its anchor post. The anchor had shifted in the settling ground.

"The penrose sluice is upstream of this," the Horizon-Surveyor said from the doorway. He had come in from his measurement post without any of us hearing him arrive. "If the lower coursework is gone, the sluice feed is carrying weight it was not rated for."

We stood with that fact. Rurik dropped from the chair and went to the doorway, sitting there between inside and outside, tail flat against the sill, staring at the dark slope.

I looked at my elevation. The steps hung in the drawing, true and unmoved. Outside, we did not yet know what hung and what had fallen.

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