Dream d3080-s: Weighted Cable, Yielding Ground

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the gate of Kestrelfield stood broad and planked with reclaimed timber, and the workers moved in relays along its base, hauling the lead-sheathed coils through the gatehouse and down toward the drainage ditch. The water there was still and black, and the cables disappeared into it without sound, yard by yard, as though the swamp had long expected them.

The Tally-Reader stood beside the ditch with a length of knotted cord, counting each coil as it passed. The Bedrock-Reader had one hand pressed flat to the old foundation stones at the gate's eastern footing, reading the grain of mortar joints that predated every building in the settlement. She said nothing. Her hand stayed there longer than a reading should take.

Lano trotted ahead of the party to the gate's inner arch and stopped. Her ears went flat against her skull. Her nose worked the air near the east footing, then she backed two paces and barked once, sharp.

The Bedrock-Reader took her hand away and looked at it.

The collapse came from below the gate's eastern abutment where the old foundation met a buried culvert from the corrupt network era, a culvert none of the settlement surveys had mapped. The footing shifted inward by perhaps the width of a fist. A lead cable that had been routed along the base snapped with a low crack, and the free end whipped back through the mud. The storehouse that shared the abutment wall tilted, and a seam opened across its facing boards from sill to eave.

Workers nearest the ditch scrambled back. The Horizon-Surveyor pulled two of them clear by their harnesses.

The Anomaly-Hand walked the crack in the storehouse wall and ran a fingertip along it. Pale cyan seeped from the break where the old culvert material had been packed with something the settlement engineers had not recognized as load-bearing. The Warden of the Deep Stratum crouched at the edge of the ditch and looked down at where the broken cable had vanished, and wrote nothing, because there was nothing yet to write that was settled.

Lano sat at the Bedrock-Reader's heel, still flat-eared, watching the tilted wall.

The culvert had not finished moving. The swamp water in the ditch had begun, very slowly, to run.

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