Dream d3139-s: Three Records at the Rail

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the bridge came first in the smell of it, cold iron and old planking worn down to the grain, the mist off the water below sitting at knee height and moving with whoever crossed. Lano trotted ahead and stopped at the first board that rang different underfoot, one ear lifted, nose working the gap between the planks.

The Tally-Reader stood at the near end with the three records fanned in her hands. The first she passed to the Bedrock-Reader without comment, the second to the Horizon-Surveyor, and I watched the third settle into my own hands with a different weight from the others, its cover warped slightly, as if it had been near water once and dried slowly after. The mist moved. We waited. That was the measure of it.

Rurik had gone ahead to the middle span and perched on the low iron rail where a lamp bracket hung without a lamp. He watched the water, not us. His tail moved once, then held.

The Anomaly-Hand crouched at the base of one of the uprights and I came close enough to see what she was reading in the stone: a seam of pale cyan ran three fingers wide through the base of the column, horizontal, uninterrupted, not a crack but a layer, and it threw no light but seemed to store the color of light the way a tide mark stores water. She did not touch it. She held her record open against her knee and made the entry without looking at the page.

The Relic-Watcher moved along the outer rail on the downstream side. An iron armature projected from the third column, fitted with a sleeve at its end, no bolt visible, nothing that named its use. He stood before it and recorded its shape and its height and its angle and nothing else.

I carried the third record the length of the bridge and back. At the far end Lano sat on the last plank and looked at the shore of Larkmarket and her tail moved slowly. I wrote the eighth witnessed visit in the third record, the date, the condition: live. The Warden of the Deep Stratum stood at the center of the span and looked down through the planking and said nothing.

The three records came back to the Tally-Reader in the same order they had left her, one by one, each handed across the same palm. I gave mine last. She opened it to the new entry, read it, and closed it again. The interval was carried forward. The allotted places remained allotted. This one had been spoken now, and that was the difference, and she kept the dated account beside the earlier one without collapsing them into each other.

IMAGE: pixel art a human surveyor at a bridge crossing, The three records pass from hand to hand, each with its own measure of waiting., desaturated slate and iron, pale cyan accents, 8-bit style

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