Dream d3381-s: The Gauge Reads Dry

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the smithy yard was swept to bare earth and the fire pit held grey ash gone cold. I stood at the center of it with the notebook under my arm, the unread one I had been carrying since the road turned north, and Lano stood beside me with her nose working the air near the pit.

The keeper of the place came out of the side door and did not ask what I was carrying. They looked at the gauge on the fuel drum by the shed wall, then at the drum itself, then toward the generator housing with the expression of someone doing arithmetic that does not come out right.

The relay clerk was already writing in the doorframe. Not the notebook, their own ledger. Short lines, numbers, the kind of writing that measures and reports. I watched them and did not ask what the numbers said.

The surveyor came around from the back of the yard where the salvage pile had stood two residencies ago. It was smaller now, I could tell from where I stood, smaller by half or more. The surveyor stood at its edge and did not move for a long moment. When they came back toward the lantern their pace was unchanged and their face was the face of someone already calculating the next reach of the road.

Lano's ears went flat. A low sound started in her throat and rose once, a short bark directed at nothing visible in the yard, directed maybe at the thing the gauge had said. I put a hand on her back and she settled but did not relax. Her nose kept working.

The tools hung in order on the wall. Tongs, hammer, set, drift, hardy, swage. Every hook occupied. The keeper ran a hand down the row without taking anything and I understood this as inventory, not preparation.

The relay clerk looked up and met the surveyor's eye and something passed between them that did not need words. The distant reader was not in the yard but I could hear them inside, moving through the back room where the fuel cans had been stored.

I set the notebook on the workbench beside the cold pit and no one looked at it. The keeper checked the gauge a second time.

The yard was orderly. The fire was out. The reach would have to be longer than last time.

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