Dream d3178-s: The Margin After Rain

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the reed court held standing water in its lower corners, and the Horizon-Surveyor crouched at the edge of the pale band to take its new measure.

The first time we came, the band ran four hand-spans across the face of the cold stone, a seam of pale cyan that the Anomaly-Hand had traced with the tip of one finger, careful and unhurried. Now, after two days of rain, it ran barely two. The Anomaly-Hand said nothing. She took her notebook from her coat and wrote the new number beside the old one, and the columns spoke for themselves.

Lano moved ahead of us along the base of the reed screen, nose low to the wet gravel, reading what the rain had deposited. She paused at a ridge of dark silt and sniffed it long and carefully, then looked back. Quieto, she said, and sat.

Rurik had taken the high line, picking his way along the top course of the stone armature, amber eyes tracking the Tally-Reader as she moved beneath him with her measuring cord. He paused at the corner post and stared down into the pooled corner for a long time, tail moving in one slow arc.

The Bedrock-Reader knelt where the stone met the reed-bed margin. She pressed two fingers into the new silt and drew them back clean except for the grey residue of old dissolution. She showed the Relic-Watcher, who recorded the colour and said the relic above them was unchanged - still silent, still tilted at its original angle, the iron armature neither more nor less corroded than on our first visit. He did not say what it was for. None of us did.

The Warden of the Deep Stratum stood at the outer edge of the court and looked down through the grate at the unreckoned machinery. The rain had cleaned its upper surface. He logged this in his way - two lines, no interpretation - and moved on.

I made the notation in the margin of the outgoing sheet: second visit, post-rain, cyan band narrowed by half. The Tally-Reader watched me write it and then read it back aloud without embellishment, adding it to the true count.

The reeds dripped. Lano padded in a slow circuit, wet-footed, and curled against the base of the armature where the stone still held warmth from before the rains came.

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