Dream d3109-s: At Slack Water's Margin

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the causeway held its breath between tides.

The stone here runs darker than inland stone, salt-pressed and streaked with old iron leaching from the armatures that brace the low sections against the pull. I carried the board the Horizon-Surveyor had worked the morning prior; they carried mine. Neither of us had looked at the other's marks until this hour, and the silence of the exchange was part of the method.

The Tally-Reader walked behind us, lips moving without sound, keeping the true measure of the paces from the last dry marker to the next. The Relic-Watcher had stopped some way back, crouched at the base of a plinth the water had worn to a suggestion of a plinth, its original height and purpose unrecoverable, its iron ring intact, hung with dried weed like a garland nobody arranged.

Lano moved ahead, her white fur carrying the grey morning light. She paused at a seam running diagonal through the causeway stone, nose dropping low, then raised her head and watched me the way she does when the smell is older than she can name. Rurik had preceded her by a length, as cats do; he now sat at the far lip of that same seam, amber eyes on the water below the causeway edge, his tail moving once and going still.

The Anomaly-Hand crouched where Lano had paused. I watched them trace the pale cyan line without touching it - the emission is surface-deep, lit from no source we have named. A notation went onto a fresh board. Not mine, not the Horizon-Surveyor's, but a third board kept for such things.

We walked on. The Bedrock-Reader had gone ahead to the low middle section where the causeway dips and the tide comes over the stone at full. They were taking rubbings from the stratum visible in the causeway wall - a dark banding, compressed and old. The Warden of the Deep Stratum stood beside them and said nothing.

This was the fourth time Vesperwharf had been entered in the account. It did not feel like a return so much as a continuation of the same attention, differently distributed. The boards we carried were heavier for being each other's, not in weight but in obligation. When we exchanged them at the end of the crossing, the information would need to be married, and nowhere would the two accounts fit without pressure.

The Horizon-Surveyor stopped at the far gate and made the measurement of the line where the sheet ends and the unmapped water begins. Lano sat beside them. "Espera," she said softly. The surveyor did not look up from the instrument. The line was marked.

We crossed back. The armatures were silent in the stone.

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