Dream d3223-s: What the Stamp Confirms

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I carried two accounts into the village hall at Ashholt, wrapped in brown paper and tied with cord. I had not opened them again in transit. They belonged to the surveyor and to the distant reader: one a faithful record of unreckoned stone, one nine residencies authored in intervals, the two accounts traveling together without either erasing the other.

The hall was quiet. Low ceiling, floorboards, the kind of stillness that has been maintained over time rather than simply arrived at. The relay clerk was at the desk near the window and said nothing when I came in. Lano came in beside me and then stopped at the edge of the inner room. She sat down on the boards there and watched. Her ears were up.

I set the parcel on the desk. The relay clerk opened a drawer, took out the stamp, pressed it to the pad, and brought it down on the parcel twice: once on the paper, once in the ledger beside it. Black ink. Today's date. The stamp had a clean edge and the ink did not spread.

That was the record of arrival. The absent witness would receive the parcel through whatever passage it traveled next. My work was to bring it here, to have it dated, to leave it with the clerk.

I did not say what was in it. I did not summarize the surveyor's account or explain the distant reader's intervals. I set the parcel down. The clerk stamped it. That was all that was asked of me.

Lano got up when I turned to go. She padded out ahead of me.

Outside, Rurik was on the low wall to the left of the door, amber eyes steady, the look he gets when he has been waiting without complaint for some time. He did not follow when I walked back down the road. I heard, after a moment, the sound of him landing softly on the far side of the wall.

The stamp was black. The date was today's. The hall stayed quiet behind us.

---