The grey strand lay in Selden's palm. Of the three people on the maintenance platform, none spoke first.
The hum of the sunwick filled the silence.
"Warden." Sharlo was the one who finally spoke. He did not reach for the grey fibre.
In this tower without shadows, instinct told him that whoever touched it would have the account entered under his name. "How long has this been entering the tower?"
"The shipment Brandt counted arrived two months ago." Selden folded the grey fibre back into his sleeve. "Wick-fibre has always come by the church's dedicated supply barges. The crates bear the archbishopric's wax seal. The tower receives; it does not inspect. Fifty-one years, always the same. You heard the tower's rules today: do not touch the lamps; do not ask names. Ask nothing, and the tower is holy. Ask—"
The old man tipped his chin toward the enormous, slowly turning wick at the tower's heart.
"Brandt asked. He fell."
"You believe the tower punished him?" Viola asked.
"For fifty-one years, I have not dared ask." Selden looked at her, the crack in his clouded eyes opening wider. "That is why I have not fallen in fifty-one years. Miss Duskwarden, what would you say I believe?"
Wind rose from the hollow, carrying the warmth of the sunwick. Sharlo went to the stone rail and looked up at the billion points of light streaming against the current, then down toward the place from which they rose. The stair curled downward, ring after ring, and disappeared in the depths of the honey-coloured glow.
The Wickwell on his uncle's plans ran down from here, directly into the circular hall with three hundred thousand and seven compartments.
"Warden," he said, "I want to see the oil-vault ledger. And I want to go below."
"Below?" Selden's back drew a little straighter. "The oil vault is the most forbidden precinct in the tower. Your inspection permit extends only to the maintenance platform where the incident occurred—"
"The church issued the permit." Sharlo turned. "But Warden, you repeated the question Brother Brandt asked before he died. You have wanted someone to look below all along. Otherwise, you would not have hidden that strand in your sleeve for so many days, and when the church asked for me by name, you would not have agreed in silence."
Old man and young faced one another in the honeyed light.
There were no shadows in the tower, no "seeing through," no scripts to read and no lies to strain out. Yet for that very reason, Selden's struggle was naked upon his face, every inch exposed in the light.
"... Fifty-one years ago, on the day I entered the tower," he said at last, his voice seeming to rise from a very deep well, "the old warden who trained me said: Child, this tower burns for the peace of the whole city. Do not ask what the fuel is. If you ask, you must carry the answer. I obeyed. I carried 'do not ask' for fifty-one years."
He unfastened a ring of brass keys at his waist and selected the oldest.
"Brandt was less obedient. He asked. He could not carry it. He fell."
Selden forced the key into Sharlo's hand. The hand sheathed in fifty-one years of callus trembled like a lamp in the wind. "Now you carry it. Go below. The oil vault is beneath Step Two Thousand. When you've seen it, come back and tell me—"
The old man paused. His voice sank into a plea.
"Tell me what lamp I have truly been lighting for these fifty-one years."
* * *
Before descending, Sharlo took the gloves from his coat pocket and put them on—the stone steps downward were colder than those above. His fingertips brushed something that did not belong to him.
A slip of paper, folded to the size of a fingernail and pressed into the bottom of the pocket.
Without betraying himself, he turned away and unfolded it under the pretence of adjusting his cuff. It was the coarse paper Stairclimbers used to pad their wooden cases. The words were written in charcoal, their strokes crooked; whoever wrote them had plainly been frightened and in haste.
Uncle Brandt did not fall.
He went up. I saw him pass our dormitory level that night and keep climbing. The summit.
No one searched above for him. They searched only at the tower foot.
Sir, when the thing from the summit came down, I kept Uncle's lamp for one night. When it descended all ten thousand steps, there was not one footfall.
The writing ended there. A long charcoal trail dragged from the final word, as though something had startled the writer into snatching away his hand.
Sharlo folded the slip again and tucked it into his inner pocket beside his uncle's letter. He thought of the young man who had looked at them while passing—Cole, checked by a single word from Selden. When had he planted the note?
Probably during that half-beat when their eyes met. The tower had no shadows, but it had sleeves.
The last known movement of the man who died at the tower foot had been upward. Those who searched had looked only below.
And something else could descend ten thousand steps "without a footfall."
He told neither Selden nor, for the moment, Viola. There were no dark places in the tower. Who knew on whose behalf the honey-coloured light watched and listened?
* * *
The two thousand steps downward felt longer than the four thousand upward.
The farther they descended, the deeper the sunwick's pulse became. Its hum lowered into a vibration felt in the chest. The honey-coloured light changed too—warmer, thicker, until at last they seemed to be walking through a luminous artery. Viola, in the lead, stopped abruptly.
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"Listen."
Sharlo held his breath. Beneath the vibration were voices, infinitely faint and broken, countless little sounds layered together like an eternal market far away—except it was not a market. He listened for a long time before finding the exact comparison. When he did, every hair on his body rose.
Like an entire city talking in its sleep, each person in a separate bed.
At Step One Thousand Seven Hundred, they passed a platform and resolved one of the day's questions.
Six wooden cases shaped like bellows stood there—the kind the Stairclimbers carried up the tower. Here their lids were open. There were no bellows within, but rows of velvet-lined hollows, each holding a glass sphere the size of a fist. Glimmer filled the spheres and swam slowly against the glass, like fireflies trapped in bottles.
Two Stairclimbers were at work. From a copper channel along the platform's edge, they guided the upward-moving lights into the glass spheres one by one, sealed them, and placed them into the cases. They worked with the gentle absorption of men collecting honey.
"Transfer," Selden explained quietly ahead of them, his tone deliberately flat. "The sunwick sends oil upward by itself, but slowly. When the tower finds it too slow, we collect one stage by hand, carry it up, and pour it back through an inlet higher on the wick. Saves two thousand steps of 'process.'"
"When did the tower begin to find it too slow?" Viola asked.
Selden did not answer. But his bowed back, curving toward the tower, bent the answer plain: when the sun began to cough. There was no longer enough oil to burn. The tower was using human legs to make up the lost days.
Sharlo stared at the glimmer swimming inside the glass spheres and felt his chest tighten. The humming cases carried by the three shifts of Stairclimbers they had passed halfway up the tower contained this—the dreams of a city, sealed in glass, carried ten thousand steps by a company of nameless men, then poured into the sun.
The stair ended at a door.
It was no monumental gate guarding the most forbidden precinct. It was an ordinary old wooden door in the tower's style, with a small brass plaque nailed above it, made by the same hand as the plaque reading ACTORS' ENTRANCE above the ten-thousandth step. Two words stood upon it:
OIL VAULT
The key turned. The door opened.
Beyond lay the circular hall from his uncle's plans. In reality, it was a hundred times more terrifying. Its ceiling rose beyond sight.
Compartments covered every wall, one beside another and tier upon tier, spiralling upward into the honey-coloured radiance overhead. Three hundred thousand and seven compartments. Within each rested a tiny lamp no larger than a palm.
In every lamp, one quiet point of light burned.
Sharlo approached the nearest wall. Each compartment bore a brass nameplate:
MENDEL, Sepp.
PORTER, Martha.
OPHIR, Thomas. HART, Cheryl.
He followed the wall, walking faster and breathing more tightly—RAVEN, Viola. The lamp in her compartment was almost dark. Only a grain-sized glimmer remained upon the wick, flickering in and out.
Then he found it. He had known he would find it ever since the night he first saw the plans.
VANE, Sharlo.
His own compartment. One among three hundred thousand and seven.
There was no flame in the lamp.
Its base was immaculate, its wick new and snow-white, as though it had never been lit—the only cold lamp on the whole wall, in the entire circular hall. Beneath the base, where a number ought to have been engraved, was another line in smaller letters. The cuts were old, burnished with age, plainly carved before the compartment's owner had been born:
Reserved for the Curtainbreaker. No oil beneath this lamp. No debt owed.
"Sharlo."
Viola's voice came from the far side of the circular hall, taut as a bowstring. She stood before her own compartment but was not looking at her dying lamp. She was studying the structure beneath it.
"Come look at this."
At the foot of every column of compartments ran a silver thread fine as hair. The threads entered channels in the wall's base; channel joined channel until all converged upon the exact centre of the hall. There, the root of the sunwick descended from the unseen vault and plunged into the floor like an inverted tree.
Billions of silver threads flowed from the compartments lining the walls into that root. Along each, tiny beads of light moved slowly.
From the compartments toward the sunwick. From below to above.
"Oil," Viola said, one word at a time. "Selden said the oil comes from 'below.' This is below. Three hundred thousand lamps—three hundred thousand people. Every night, every person sends a little something along these threads into the sun."
Sharlo bent closer to the silver thread beneath the compartment beside his own. The beads travelling along it were minute. But now he was near enough, and the tower's light was full enough, for him to see what each contained.
Inside one bead, a field of wheat swayed.
Inside another, a blurred face smiled.
Inside a third was a moment of flight—no human form, no landscape, only the sensation of flying itself, curled within the bead like an insect in amber.
Dreams.
Every bead was a dream. Dreams dreamed last night or being dreamed tonight by three hundred thousand people, dreams they would never remember upon waking, ran drop by drop along the silver threads into the sunwick, streamed upward for ten thousand steps, and burned at the tower's summit into that weary, dark-red sun.
The sun's oil was the dreams of the whole city.
The people of Kandelburg failed to remember their dreams not because they were forgetful. Their dreams had never remained upon their pillows. Every night, the tower took them, burned them, and turned them into the light that fell across their rooftops the following morning.
The Duskwarden Oath rose in Sharlo's heart, every word turning to ice: Third, keep the world in dreamless sleep. The original had read, "Third, keep the world in dreaming sleep." In what year, and by whose hand, had one word of the oath been changed?
From that year onward, Duskwardens had ceased to protect the dreams of the people. Instead, they protected a gentle harvest on the scale of a city, continuing for no one knew how long.
"My uncle's final note." Sharlo heard his own voice echo hollowly through the hall. "It was burned into being. All light comes from burning. And to burn, one needs fuel. Dreams are the fuel. This is what old Vane discovered."
"There is worse." Viola had reached the centre of the hall, where the sunwick took root. She crouched beside the "inverted tree" and pointed to the couplings at its base.
"Come here. Look at what is old and what is new."
Sharlo crouched. The instant he saw, every clue from the past days slammed together inside his mind.
Something new had been wound around the sunwick's root, where billions of silver filaments merged into the main trunk. Grey wick-fibre, turn upon turn, vines strangling a tree. The work was subtle and practised.
Old and new fibres had been twisted together so skilfully that the difference was invisible from more than a foot away. The ash-wick followed the trunk upward and vanished into the honey-coloured glow, with no end in sight. The "excess wick-fibre" that entered the tower two months ago had already been wound around thousands of steps.
That was how the Golden Iris chandelier had been wound.
That was how the fuse beneath the wax theatre had been laid.
The Dirge Society had made the entire Dawn Tower—the sun itself—into its next theatre, and half the fuse was already in place. The stage for One Night of Dusk stood on no street corner in the city.
The stage was the sun in the sky.
"Back," Sharlo said, rising, his voice too hoarse to sound like his own. "Now. At once. I have committed every inch of this place to memory. We report to Grey, warn the whole city—"
His words stopped in the air.
Because the light in the circular hall changed. The warm honey glow of three hundred thousand lamps dimmed as one—like a theatre lowering its lights before the performance.
From high above the hall's impossibly distant vault, from the summit of the Dawn Tower ten thousand steps overhead, a voice descended through the whole length of the sunwick. Faint, dry, and faultlessly courteous, it flowed down billions of silver threads and woke a tiny answering resonance in the glass shade of every lamp at once, as if the oil vault, the tower, and the whole firmament above were merely its foyer.
"You have arrived early."
"One Night of Dusk has not yet begun."
"But since you are here—" The voice paused like the Stage Announcer opening its programme. "Allow me to reserve seats for you in advance."
In Sharlo's compartment, upon the wick of the cold lamp that had never burned, a grey point of light sprang alive without flame.