Dream d3131-s: The Quarter Turn

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the approach to Larkmarket opened between two rows of packed stalls, and the first thing I noticed was the brass disc. It hung from a timber crossbeam above the central lane, wide as a cartwheel, turning very slowly on a chain I could not see the top of. No one looked up at it. The workers moved beneath it with their frames held high - rectangular shapes of dark wood, some as small as a handspan, some large enough to frame a doorway - all of them empty, the light passing clean through where a canvas or a glass might have been.

The Tally-Reader walked beside me, lips moving, counting without sound. Lano pressed close to my left heel, nose low and sweeping, reading the ground the way the Bedrock-Reader read the strata: steadily, with long passes, missing nothing. Rurik had gone ahead. I could see the tip of his black tail disappearing between a spice vendor's cloth and the iron leg of an armature bolted to the lane's edge.

The Relic-Watcher crouched at that armature, not touching it, only recording its proportions in her ledger. The Anomaly-Hand moved farther in, tracing the base of a stone column where a faint pale cyan seeped from a horizontal seam, barely visible in the afternoon light. She did not put her finger to it. She marked the seam's height on a measuring strip and stepped back.

The Horizon-Surveyor climbed to a low platform at the lane's end to sight across the roofline. From where I stood, her figure against the sky made a clean vertical.

The workers with their frames did not acknowledge us. They moved in short relay: one set the empty frame against a stall's post, another lifted it and carried it twenty paces further, then leaned it and walked back. The frames were never filled. The exchange was the point.

Lano sniffed at a frame someone had set down - cedar, I thought, from the dry resinous smell - and then looked up at me. Vacío, she said in the way she sometimes did, not really saying anything. Rurik emerged from between the stalls and sat at the base of the armature the Relic-Watcher had just logged, amber eyes level with the cyan seam, blinking once.

The Warden of the Deep Stratum stood in the lane's center, watching the brass disc. She wrote nothing. The disc turned.

The first time I crossed the threshold, the disc had been directly overhead. When I came back through the same gate at the end of the interval, it had rotated perhaps a quarter-turn, and the afternoon light caught its underside, throwing a brief amber oval across the workers and their empty frames before the cloud closed again.

Lano sat on my foot and did not move.

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