Dream d3229-s: Iron in the Reed Air

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the smell reached me first - reed water and iron in the delta air, a thread of metal I could not account for. I was carrying the parcel along the narrow path through the reed bed when Lano stopped ahead of me, ears flat, body low. She did not move forward.

I paused and listened.

The reeds bent east, then west. Then they stopped, and in the stillness a low sound came from the settlement edge: not wind, not water. A grinding, a slow reluctant settling of something that had not moved in years.

The relay clerk met me where the reed bed opened into the surveyed quarter. She carried a lantern and had not slept. "The south embankment," she said. She pointed.

In the lamplight I saw it: a section of reclaimed wall, cables netted through the old mortar in the network-era way, had separated from its footing by several handspans. The upper portion tilted into the empty building beside it. One cable end hung loose, frayed. Below it, the ground had opened a gap the width of a palm.

Lano barked once, short and certain.

Rurik came from nowhere - he is a cat; he is always from nowhere - and sat at the base of the tilt, amber eyes fixed on the hanging cable. His tail moved twice, then stilled. He did not go closer.

"Anyone know what was stored in there?" I asked.

The relay clerk shook her head. "It predates the settlement. Before our survey."

I set the parcel down on the waystation boards. The parcel was the reason I had come to Reedhaven: records from the stone days and the interval days, two accounts travelling together without erasing each other, bundled for an absent witness who would arrive in the morning. I had meant to deliver it tonight. But the surveyor was already on the embankment with a rod and a level, measuring how far the wall had shifted, and the absent witness was not here.

The records could wait one night. A wall in motion could not.

The reeds moved behind me, a sound like a page being turned. I watched them. The record in the parcel did not turn with them. It waited - dated, signed, patient in the way written things are patient, which is to say it had no other option.

The surveyor called down: "I need someone to hold the rod steady."

I went. Lano padded after me, still low, still alert, her nose lifting into the smell of severed cable and opened ground.

The absent witness would arrive in the morning. I would still have the parcel. Tonight the settlement was measuring what it did not yet know it had lost.

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