Dream d3436-s: Umber Frequencies

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the sky over Umbermarket spread in every direction without margin or edge, the raked square below it flat and pale in the last of the evening light. The notebook was in my coat. I had not opened it in three days. I had stopped wondering who might.

The entry-keeper stood at the far end of the square, near the beacon post, making a small adjustment to the relay housing with a tool wrapped in cloth. A keeper of the place crouched beside a stone marker, chalking a line that had worn away. Neither of them spoke. The relay clerk stood at the corner where the two main paths met, writing into a ledger with a short stylus.

Then the beacon's signal changed.

It was not a sound exactly. It was a quality in the air, something in the interval between one pulse and the next that came back wrong - stretched, then clipped, then stretched again in a different ratio. The relay clerk looked up from the ledger. The entry-keeper straightened.

Lano had been sitting at my heels with her nose toward the square's center. Now her ears went flat and she was on her feet, her body taut and angled toward the beacon post, and she barked once - not a greeting bark, not the short sound she made for passing strangers, but the low-chest bark she kept for something that had changed without being asked.

The relay clerk crossed to the entry-keeper in a few quick strides. They spoke quietly. The keeper of the place set down the chalk and looked at the sky as though the sky were where the signal came from, which perhaps it was.

The beacon pulsed again. The interval was wrong again - this time longer than the last, the ratio not holding. The entry-keeper worked the relay housing open and inspected something inside. I could not see from where I stood.

The raked square was still. Nothing had fallen, no structure had moved. The stone markers stood. The chalk line the keeper had drawn was still visible. But the relay clerk had stopped writing, and was watching the entry-keeper's hands with the particular stillness of someone tallying what is known against what is not.

I took the notebook out of my coat and held it. I did not open it. Lano pressed against my leg, her small body warm against my shin, her nose working the air toward the post. I looked at the wide sky. It offered nothing back.

The entry-keeper called something to the relay clerk - a short word, a category or a quantity. The relay clerk made a mark in the ledger and then looked up again.

The beacon pulsed a third time. The interval was different again.

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