Dream d3197-s: The Corridor's One Duty

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I carried two accounts into Thornhollow on the seventh night, and when I found the room the relay clerk had left unlocked, I set the parcel on the bed and came back out into the corridor and sat down on the floor.

The parcel held what Phase 41 had recorded: each stone entered and dated, each signature placed. And what Phase 42 had witnessed: nine residencies, ninety authored moments, two dated accounts travelling in the same bundle without either one crossing into the other. I had not decided what any of it meant. I had wrapped it as given and brought it across.

The absent witness was not in Thornhollow yet. The relay clerk had confirmed a morning arrival, or a possible morning arrival, and had left the door unlocked and the key on the sill. That was the arrangement. I was not part of the morning.

I lay back against the wall. The floor was cold through my coat. Lano settled against my leg, her chin finding my knee, and I felt her breath slow into something longer. The door stood open a finger's width, the dark in the room beyond it unmoving.

Rurik arrived from somewhere above. He came down the stair end without hurry, amber eyes steady, and slipped through the gap in the door without touching the frame. I heard him take two turns of the room, his paws soft on the boards. Then nothing. He had found the bed's edge, or the warm patch the afternoon had left behind, or the parcel itself to lean against. None of that was my concern. I had placed it and come out.

I would not open the door again. I would not go in to check the arrangement. The relay ends at the handoff, not at the reading.

The cart I had heard earlier moved again somewhere below, then stopped. Lano's ear turned toward it, then settled. Her nose found something at the baseboard and she breathed it in once, carefully.

"Aqui," she said, very quietly.

She put her chin back down and slept.

I listened to Thornhollow hold the night. Seventy-two places still unentered. Thirty-nine cold, thirty-eight picked but unspoken. The record in the plain room behind me knew none of that and did not need to. It was a faithful account of unreckoned stone and of intervals witnessed. The absent witness would come, or would come later, or would send word. I had carried it across and set it down and come out of the room and sat on the floor and that was the full length of my duty in this. I closed my eyes. The door stayed open a finger's width. Rurik was silent on the other side of it.

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