Dream d3268-s: Oil and Char at the Counter

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the bridge market at Quillbridge smelled of tallow and cold stone at that hour, the stalls half-shuttered and the foot traffic thin. A keeper stood behind a low counter with a row of clay jugs ranked beside her, and she was counting coins into a tin, moving her lips without sound. When she reached the end she tipped them back and started again. This was how she had always done it; the prior accounts said so, and she did it now without looking up.

The relay clerk sat on a crate near the arch, copying figures from a folded paper into a smaller one. The surveyor had her back to the wind and her notebook open, marking the arrangement of stalls tonight against the arrangement from earlier accounts. I stood between them and watched the keeper count.

Then Lano went still.

Her ears flattened before I heard anything - a low metallic groan from beneath the bridge deck, from the direction of the water-lifting post. The surveyor turned. The clerk stopped writing. The keeper moved her lips through the last few coins, unmoved.

The groan became a crack, and then a soft extinction of sound - the kind that means something that was running has stopped. On the far side of the arch, the iron-framed lamp rig that serviced the lower market went dark. The mechanism inside it, a salvaged clockwork arm that turned the wick and kept it fed, had seized. I could see the housing from where I stood. The edge of it had gone briefly orange, and then nothing.

The surveyor moved toward it. The clerk marked something.

Lano gave one sharp bark - not panic, but declaration - and pressed against my leg, her nose aimed at the darkened arch, her whole body held in that posture that means she is reading something I am not reading yet.

No one had run to it. The keeper counted her coins a second time, because that was what she did, and the jug beside her caught the one remaining lamp's light and threw it back amber against the counter.

The darkness at the far arch was new. The burned mechanism was new. What might replace it was not known - the surveyor crouched at the housing and did not rise, and the lower market stood unlit, and the coins counted to the same number twice.

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