When Sharlo woke from the theatre at midnight, he did not go back to sleep.
He lit a candle and sat before the filing cabinets, staring at the keyholeless brass padlock on the highest compartment from midnight until three in the morning.
His theatre and the Dirge Society's Stage Announcer had read from the same programme. There were two explanations. First: his theatre belonged to the Dirge Society.
The place where he had stood night after night for three months, soliciting applause, was enemy property. Second: the Society's Stage Announcer and his theatre shared something deeper—the same charter, the same... landlord.
Neither explanation encouraged sleep.
And the only man in Kandelburg who might know the answer had left him a lock without a keyhole.
"Uncle." Sharlo addressed the filing cabinet, his voice dry and rough in the empty rooms. "I know you can hear me. Perhaps it isn't you. Perhaps it's the lock, the cabinet, or something else you left in this room. I'm done guessing. I'll put my cards on the table—"
He took the Curtainbreaker card from his pocket and held it up.
"After opening night, you passed this card out of the theatre and wrote, 'Do not take your bow.' Last midnight, the theatre read me the Dirge Society's programme. I need to know whose stage I stand on every night. I need to know where you went. I need to know which word in the third line of the oath is wrong."
He pressed the card to the lock. "You said not to take my bow. Fine. But a player ought to know whose company he has joined."
The pocket watch stopped on the desk.
At the instant its ticking vanished, the lock in his palm grew hot.
Not warm. Hot, like the hand of someone feverish. On the smooth, unbroken brass where no keyhole had ever been, a line of fine grooves surfaced, as if an unseen hand inside the metal were forming each stroke:
Ask the right question, and I open. You just asked three.
I can answer only one.
"... Well, look at that. Rationing." Sharlo stared at the words, his throat dry.
Three questions: Whose theatre was it? Where was his uncle? Which word of the oath was wrong?
He closed his eyes.
Whose theatre? Ask, and he would know whose stage he stood upon. But what then?
He still had to stand on it. He had no other. Where was his uncle?
That was what he wanted most to ask, what he had wanted every day for three months. Yet a voice in him offered the same warning over and over: a man who had fitted himself a keyholeless lock before leaving, and who had given his nephew only the words Do not take your bow, had buried his whereabouts this deeply because he was protecting something. Answers to questions like that often cost more than ignorance.
He opened his eyes and tried to bargain with a padlock. "Three questions, one answer. Could I pay in installments? A third today, another third next month—"
The writing smoothed away. Four new words appeared at once:
No. Stop being clever.
"... All right. Even the tone sounds like you."
Sharlo gave a helpless laugh. The curt vigor of those words was his meticulous uncle straight from the labels on the case files. And then something occurred to him, bringing a sudden ache to his chest.
Whatever lived upon this lock—a trace of his uncle's hand or something else—it knew him. Knew him so well that it could not be bothered with courtesy.
He closed his eyes and weighed all three questions anew.
Then Sharlo opened them.
"The third line of the oath," he said, word by word. "What was the original?"
The grooves flowed. The old writing smoothed away and a new line appeared, brief and simple:
Third, keep the world in dreaming sleep.
Dreaming.
Not dreamless. Dreaming.
One word changed everything. The Duskwardens had originally sworn to preserve "the world's dreaming sleep." At some unknown point, the bronze plaque had come to say "dreamless sleep." Generation after generation had recited it that way, turning the protection of dreams into the preservation of their absence.
Click.
The padlock opened. No key turned. It simply released, like a hand that had waited too long for a countersign and now wearily uncurled its palm.
* * *
There was little in the highest cabinet compartment.
A black notebook of the same make as Sharlo's, only much older, the leather worn ragged at the edges. A roll of plans. A brass pocket watch, with the Vesper Bureau's bell emblem and a number engraved inside the lid: Seventh Class, 03. And a letter whose envelope bore one word: Sharlo.
He opened the letter first. His uncle's hand was meticulous as ever, but the pen had borne down more heavily than usual, leaving scores on the back of the sheet.
Sharlo,
If you have opened the cabinet, the theatre has chosen you and you have asked the right question. Do not be proud. It took your uncle twenty years to ask it.
I will be brief. Three matters.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.
First: never kindle a name. It does not matter who urges you, how generous the terms are, or how desperately you think you need strength in that moment. Your blankness is your only inheritance. Squander everything else if you must. Do not squander that.
Second: keep faith with your audience. Every shadow seated in the theatre is a performance you saved. They are not your strength. They are your creditors. The Curtainbreaker's stage is lent to him by his audience. The day you decide their applause is yours by right, you begin to become the thing we spent our lives hunting.
Third, and the true reason I left this letter: on the night the sun goes out—and that night will come; I have calculated it, and it lies within the next year or two—climb the Dawn Tower. At the summit is a bronze plaque cast in the same batch as the one in the Bureau's swearing room. Stand before it and speak the third line of the oath correctly.
You need only say it correctly. The tower will know what to do with the rest.
Do not come looking for me. I am in a crowded place and do not lack company. On the day you learn what "the sun's oil" is, you will understand where I am. When you do, don't cry. It is embarrassing.
Look after Mrs. Porter. Pay the rent on time.
—Your uncle
P.S. You broke the fourth string of the violin when you were eleven. You do not remember because someone "pawned" part of what happened that year for you. Do not redeem it. Listen to me.
Sharlo read the letter three times.
At "a crowded place and do not lack company," his hands began to shake. At "don't cry; it is embarrassing," a laugh escaped him, and only then did he discover his face was wet with tears. At the postscript, he went rigid as though someone had emptied a bucket of ice water down his back.
The fourth string of the violin. He had no memory of its breaking. Neither set of memories contained it. Something from the year he was eleven had been "pawned" for him.
He, Sharlo Vane, had been pawned too.
Before he imagined himself a Worldcrosser, before he imagined he had seen through the entirety of this body's past, a piece of that body's eleventh year was already missing.
"Do not redeem it," he said hoarsely to the letter. "You knew the moment I read that, I'd investigate. Didn't you, Uncle? Is this reverse psychology, or a warning?"
The paper did not answer. The watch on the desk resumed its ticking.
He did not examine the remaining contents of the cabinet at once. He crossed to the corner and lifted the violin with the broken string.
You broke the fourth string when you were eleven.
Sharlo turned the instrument over and studied it by candlelight. Its body had been well cared for. The rosin marks were fresh; old Vane had polished it not long before he disappeared.
Four tuning pegs, three strung tight. The fourth stood empty, still wound with the end of the broken string, whose snapped edge had darkened with age. For eleven years, his uncle had never replaced it.
A violinist did not leave a string broken for eleven years—unless the broken string itself was what he meant to preserve.
Sharlo held the violin against himself and, copying a posture remembered from—which memory? He could no longer tell—set the bow to the strings and drew it once. The three-stringed instrument wailed appallingly out of tune.
He could not play the violin. In neither set of memories could he play. But his left hand, falling unconsciously upon the neck—
Knew with terrifying precision.
Each finger came down in its position upon the fingerboard; the web of his thumb settled seamlessly into the curve of the neck, as if returning to a familiar place worn smooth by a thousand repetitions. His hand remembered. His mind did not, but his hand remembered.
Before the age of eleven, this body had played for years. Those years, along with that broken string, had been "pawned" out of his memory.
Do not redeem it. Listen to me.
"Uncle." Sharlo held the violin in the empty room, his voice raw. "Do you know the worst of it? Not that a piece is missing. That I've only now discovered I couldn't even feel its absence. Without that postscript, I could have carried this hollow my whole life and believed myself complete."
"Do all three hundred thousand people in this city carry hollows like this? Old Sepp's anniversary. The 'old hands' the manager cannot remember. The dreams no one in Kandelburg recalls. Everyone is missing something, and no one knows they are missing it."
He gently returned the violin to the corner, turning the empty peg outward. From tonight, it was another item in his case record. Then he went back to the cabinet.
He opened the old black notebook first.
Like the first page of his own, it bore a title, though his uncle's phrasing was distinctly old-fashioned: Discrepancies in the Accounts of Kandelburg.
Beneath it ran twenty years of entries. The handwriting sharpened, steadied; the ink paled, deepened, and paled again, as though one man's life had been compressed into a ledger. Sharlo turned the pages one by one in the candlelight.
Entry Seven: Every ten days, the Dawn Tower receives forty barrels of lamp oil aboard a dedicated vessel of the Church of the Daystar. I inspected the vessel. It is empty. For twenty years, it has always been empty. The tower does not burn oil.
Entry Thirty-One: The Stillwater Society's ferries make six fixed crossings each night. But the bridge keeper says there is an additional crossing when the fog is thick. The seventh ferry has no ferryman and no lamp and rides extremely low in the water. Once I counted the footfalls of the passengers boarding: three hundred and seventy-one. The city's obituaries that night totaled forty-six. Who were the three hundred-odd others crossing the river?
Entry Fifty-Nine: The shadow of every bell tower in the city is longer than the tower. Measure at true noon: each shadow extends three feet beyond. What casts the additional three feet?
Entry Eighty-Eight: I record the children's skipping song each year. The words are changing. Not through corruption; they are "growing." Ten years ago there were fifteen lines. Today there are seventeen. A nursery rhyme should not grow—unless it has not finished singing.
Entry One Hundred and Two: Meant to write to Barney today and forgot his wife's name when I took up my pen. Remembered only after looking through old letters. This is not age. The whole city is forgetting. Dreams have been forgotten most completely.
Entry One Hundred and Three consisted of a single line in ink so dark the nib seemed to have been driven into the paper:
It is made by burning. All light is made by burning. To burn, it must have fuel.
Beneath it lay half a blank page, followed by a much smaller line. The hand had abruptly lightened, like a man speaking to himself:
When the three of us swore beneath the tower that year, the boy had not yet been born. God grant me one mistaken calculation.
The black notebook ended there. Every later page had been neatly cut away along a ruler-straight edge—not torn out, but solemnly removed one at a time with a paper knife.
Sharlo closed the notebook and sat for a long time in the candlelight.
He understood half of Entry One Hundred and Three. The sun was made by burning, and burning required fuel. What he did not understand was the line after half a blank page: Grant me one mistaken calculation.
A mistake about what? Who was "the boy"?
A cold premonition told him the answer had occupied those missing pages. His uncle had preferred to cut them out and carry them away rather than leave them even in this locked cabinet—which meant some things could not be secured by a lock without a keyhole.
He steadied himself and unrolled the plans.
The Dawn Tower. A hand-drawn cross-section in precise ink lines. Ten thousand steps spiraled upward; every level was labelled by use: lamp-oil store, duty room, hall of names, Stairclimbers' quarters... Down the exact centre of the tower, running from far underground to the summit, a great spiral cavity pierced the structure like the pith of a tree. Beside that shaft, his uncle had written one word with strokes deep enough to tear the paper:
WICKWELL.
At the bottom of the Wickwell, in the section sunk beneath the earth, the drawing showed a structure Sharlo could not understand: a round hall whose walls were packed with tiny compartments, like a honeycomb, like an apothecary's drawers—
Like the seating in a theatre.
The plan gave the number of compartments: three hundred and seven thousand.
Kandelburg's population stood a little above three hundred thousand.
Sharlo's fingers tightened slowly on the paper. He did not yet know what the compartments were, what burned in the Wickwell, or where "the sun's oil" came from. But a thought settled inside him, cold, clear, and undeniable:
Beneath the Dawn Tower, one compartment had been reserved for every one of the city's three hundred thousand people.
Outside, the morning bells rang. At precisely seven, flame climbed on schedule from the Dawn Tower in the east. The dark-red, weary sun coughed twice and came alight, spreading a new day's radiance over Kandelburg's roofs.
Sharlo stood at the window, and for the first time the sunlight on his skin felt as heavy as debt.