Dream d3086-s: Stone Past the Survey Line

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the barrow track climbed into a cold that had no source, only presence. The heath stretched flat on either side, heather pressed low by wind, black basalt jutting through in slabs where nothing grew. The surveyed sheet ended somewhere below us - the Horizon-Surveyor had marked the boundary with a chalk strike on the path two hours back, and we had not spoken much since.

Lano moved ahead in short bursts, nose dragging the frost-bitten turf, ears suddenly flat against her skull. She stopped, facing the northern mounds, and barked twice - a low, declarative sound, not at the dark but at something she had read in the air.

The Tally-Reader had been quiet since we crossed the survey line. He spoke now, evenly: the fuel drum brought from the last waystation was a third of what was expected. The manifest said full; the drum said otherwise. He did not editorialize. He opened the log and wrote the discrepancy in the column beside the distance walked.

The Warden of the Deep Stratum crouched where the basalt broke the surface and read the crack-lines with two fingers. He said nothing. The Anomaly-Hand noted a pale seam of cyan in the exposed face - thin, running roughly east, brighter where the stone was freshest-broken. She measured its extent with her arm-span and wrote the figure.

Rurik had taken the high point - a capstone of one of the small barrows - and sat there, amber eyes open, watching the way we had come. He did not move when the Relic-Watcher passed beneath him. He blinked once, slow.

The Relic-Watcher was recording a pair of armatures rising from the heath perhaps thirty metres to the west, their shapes uncounted by any census: two vertical stakes joined by a horizontal bar, no inscription, the metal old enough that the oxidation had gone past red into black.

The Horizon-Surveyor had turned back toward the line he had marked. He said the salvage cache at the second waystation - the one we had been counting on to resupply the settlement's materials ledger - was marked exhausted in the advance report. Someone had ranged ahead and found it already stripped. He said this plainly.

Lano came back along the path to where I stood. Her tail was low, not tucked, but held horizontal. She sat at my boot and tilted her head toward the western darkness where the armatures stood.

The Bedrock-Reader pressed his ear briefly to the stone in the manner he had. He straightened without announcement.

The settlement, behind us now by two hours of walking, would be reading the same numbers from the fuel gauge. The network had paths marked, candidates for ranging further. Whether the paths were real and the sources at their ends still intact - that was the question the stratum did not answer tonight.

Rurik, from his capstone, made a sound. Not a call. A single small note, uninflected.

The Tally-Reader noted the hour and wrote it beside the fuel figure. The unreckoned stratum received no comment from the rock and the heath. We walked on toward the barrow mounds.

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