Winter solstice, the Hour of the Tiger, Dawn Tower Square.
The night was still purely black. Forty Stairclimbers stood before the tower doors in four shifts, bearing on their harnesses the forty newly cast segments of the sunwick. Each segment was wrapped in plain white ritual cloth, making them look like forty giant bones swathed in bandages.
In the torchlight, the priests' chanting rolled on, low and solemn. Worshippers who had come to witness the rite knelt all around the square, their white breath gathering into a thin mist.
On the officiants' platform, Lord Emery, High Steward of the Chandlery, wore a sacramental robe stitched in gold. His voice was sonorous, every word steeped in compassion. Sharlo stood among the porters of the third shift—a guise Selden had arranged for him—with a bundle of spare ritual cloth on his back, watching from afar the words above the Chief Steward's head.
Amid the dense amber mass of words, the brightest line burned quietly:
【He will offer up darkness on time.】
At three quarters through the Hour of the Tiger, the bell rang. The four shifts of Stairclimbers entered the tower in turn.
The instant the tower doors closed behind them, Sharlo knew something was wrong. The light inside had changed. The honeyed glow that streamed down the tower walls was a tenth dimmer than it had been on his last visit, and it was still fading at a pace almost too slow for the naked eye to catch.
They had already begun withdrawing the flame from the old sunwick. The "quarter-hour window" in the ritual schedule was in fact being prepared from this very moment: inch by inch, the tower was relinquishing its light.
"Keep close," Selden called from the head of the procession, his voice unusually hoarse in the darkening tower shaft. "The tower's colder than usual today. Save your strength for the climb."
The procession climbed in silence. Forty pairs of the finest legs in the tower kept to a rhythm unchanged for fifty-one years, step after step. With every footfall, the wick segments quivered inside their harnesses and gave off a low, teeth-grating hum—the ash-wick was singing.
At the rear of the third shift, Sharlo could clearly feel that hum greeting something in his pocket. The double-rowed key trembled, once, then again.
Two thousand eight hundred steps: the Hall of Names. Their first shoulder change and rest.
Viola and the medical officers were already in place. Wearing full duty uniform, she stood before the wall carved all over with names and gave Sharlo the slightest nod. Everything was as it should be. Under cover of handing out water, Sharlo moved close to her, and the two exchanged their first private words of the night—perhaps their last.
"The lamp is still burning," she said, answering what he wanted to ask.
"My legs are still steady," he replied, answering what she wanted to ask.
That was all. The third shift rose and continued upward.
* * *
Five thousand five hundred steps: the Ventilation Gallery. Their second shoulder change.
Here, as planned, Sharlo left the procession. Selden sauntered over on the pretext of inspecting his harness and, in a voice meant for two ears alone, gave him the route up the maintenance stair one last time. "Third wall panel at the end of the gallery. Push it in half an inch, then slide it left. The stair is narrow and hasn't borne a man's weight in a hundred years. Don't trust the handrails completely. At nine thousand steps, you'll reach a cross-grating. The keyhole is the old sort—"
The old man paused, drew a brass key from inside his coat, and pressed it into Sharlo's hand. The tower warden's master key.
"Beyond the grating, there are a thousand steps left. No lights, no handrails, no rules." Selden looked at him, his clouded eyes shining unnaturally bright in the gloom. "Duskwarden, in fifty-one years the highest I've ever gone is nine thousand steps. Above that, every tower warden's manual has only one line: Do not ascend. Do not behold. Do not name."
"Three 'do nots.'" Sharlo put the key away. "Tower Warden, have you guessed what I do for a living? I make a specialty of whatever other people say not to do."
The old man bared his teeth in a silent grin, then swiftly sobered and clapped Sharlo hard on the shoulder. The blow landed with the weight of a tower brick. He turned and rejoined the shift.
At the rear of the third shift, Cole passed Sharlo with a wick segment on his back. He did not look over; only his lips moved, ever so slightly. Sharlo read the words there:
—The thing at the top of the tower makes no footsteps. Listen to the wind.
The sound of the procession's steps receded. Sharlo remained alone in the Ventilation Gallery with the ever-colder wind sweeping through it.
He found the third wall panel, pushed, and slid it aside. A black slit just wide enough for one man opened its mouth in the wall.
* * *
The beginning of the Hour of the Rabbit, outside the tower, Kandelburg.
The moment had come for the old sunwick to go out.
There was none of the solemn pealing promised by the rite—or rather, the bell did ring, but no one could remember it, because a single thing seized everyone's attention: the sky.
Before dawn on the winter solstice, the sky ought to have been black. Yet everyone in the city looked up at once, because they felt it. The sensation defied description.
It was as though a machine had been humming in the house since the day they were born, unnoticed by anyone, and had suddenly stopped. For three hundred years, something unseen and warm had lain over Kandelburg. Now it had gone out.
The sky was still black. But it was a different kind of black. An empty black.
The chanting in Dawn Tower Square faltered as one. The kneeling worshippers looked at one another, unable to say what was wrong, only aware of a chill at the nape of the neck. In the belfry, Grey lowered his telescope and spoke his first words of the night to the clerk beside him:
"Record this. Beginning of the Hour of the Rabbit: the old wick extinguished. The window begins."
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He glanced at his pocket watch, then at the black pinnacle of the tower.
"A quarter of an hour," the old inspector murmured, as if speaking to the whole city. "Hold steady, all of you. Until daylight comes, don't trust a single thing in that sky."
* * *
A quarter of an hour later, the new wick connected.
From the tower's summit came a distant vibration like muffled thunder: the new wick's forty segments had locked together in the tower's heart. According to the ritual schedule, the Chief Lamplighter would now perform the First Kindling Rite. New fire would climb the new wick, and at the Hour of the Dragon, a new sun would hang overhead.
The new fire did kindle.
Everyone in the city saw it. A point of light appeared at the tip of Dawn Tower, climbing along an invisible path into the sky, through the fog and through the clouds—and then the day brightened.
If brightened was what one could call it.
Light seeped across the firmament, but it was no daylight anyone had ever seen. It was a deep amber radiance, heavy and stagnant, as though someone had paused the final instant of dusk. Where the sun should have been hung a dark-gold blur, casting long shadows from everything, all pointing the wrong way.
The sky was not dark, but it was most certainly not light. Morning was not morning, nor dusk dusk.
On Kandelburg's winter solstice, the day "dawned" into eternal twilight.
At first, the city tried to carry on as usual. Bakeries lit their ovens, newsboys took to the streets, and the first trams went clanging along their routes. People looked up at the strange sun and traded uneasy jokes. Winter fog, that's all.
The sun was feeling shy. Too much night watch last night had played tricks on their eyes. The more jokes they made, the quieter their voices became.
Halfway through the Hour of the Dragon, the Church posted its announcement: this winter solstice's unusual celestial display was "the Daystar lowering His gaze to watch mankind." The faithful were advised to remain at home in prayer and await divine grace. At the bottom was the golden-wheel seal of the Archbishop's See.
One hour after the announcement went up, the first rolebound incident erupted.
In the harbour district, a boilerman who had kindled the Glimmer of the "Hearthkeeper" was halfway through his shift beneath that neither-morning-nor-evening sky when he suddenly straightened and murmured, in a voice that was not his, "At last the furnace is going cold." Then he plunged barehanded into the firebox. When his workmates dragged him out, he was unhurt—a Hearthkeeper did not fear flame—but his eyes were no longer his own.
He broke free of five or six men and walked on, extinguishing every lamp in his path, chanting over and over, "Cold. Everything should be cold."
The second incident followed. Then the third. In the belfry district, a Candlebearer watchmaker locked himself inside a clock tower to "stop time across the whole city." Beside the canal, a spirit-ferryman of the Stillwater Society who had kindled the Guiding Moth stood motionless while a line of sleepwalking figures silently formed behind him and began marching toward the water—
The Vesper Bureau mobilized every last officer.
"Contingency B! All hands, Contingency B!" The branch office's brass bell rang as if deranged. In the belfry, Grey issued more than a dozen deployment orders in succession, his voice steady and his knuckles white.
"Remember the briefing, every team: this twilight can't suppress fate-lines. Every Lightbearer in the city is standing on a precipice today! Talk them down if you can, tie them down if you must, but don't kill them—they're victims too!"
Under the wan dusk-coloured sky, black-coated Duskwardens grappled with rolebound madness in street after street of Kandelburg. Yet on another level of the city, a quieter and more absolute change was unfolding:
Money began to ring.
A bank clerk noticed first. Silver candles were stacked on the counter, one coin atop the next. Though no one touched them, they quivered ever so faintly, giving off a hum as thin as a gnat's whine.
Then it began in pawnshops, offering boxes, housewives' coin jars, and gentlemen's waistcoat pockets. All three hundred thousand silver candles in the city woke at once beneath that neither-morning-nor-evening light, humming softly in the same note.
After fourteen years of tuning, the tuning fork had found its note.
Alone, the hum was nearly inaudible. But three hundred thousand sources spread across a city merged into a slow, rising and falling chorus beneath every other sound. People clutched their purses, buried their silver candles in flour tins, threw them down wells. The hum was everywhere, seeping through cracks in walls, out of the ground, and from their neighbours' houses.
A sharp-eared child listened for a while, then suddenly said, "Mama, the money is singing that song."
"Which song?"
The child hummed two lines with it. His mother's face went white, and she clapped a hand over his mouth—
It was the song children sang while skipping rope. Love unmakes the Scarlet Queen. Loyalty unmakes the Plotweaver.
Three hundred thousand silver candles sang the Seventeen Dirges together beneath the eternal twilight.
* * *
At the same moment, on Dawn Tower's maintenance stair.
Sharlo climbed step by step through the darkness inside the wall.
The maintenance stair was so narrow he had to turn sideways and so steep it was nearly vertical. A century's dust sifted down beneath his feet. He could not see the tower's heart, but he could hear everything happening outside: the muffled shudder of the new wick locking together travelled through brick and into his bones; once the ash-wick kindled, the whole tower began sounding that low, slowly swelling and ebbing chorus, in the same dirge form he had heard in the wax theatre. The tower sang, and the city answered.
The honeyed light in the tower walls went out.
When the final thread of warm light in the masonry faded, Sharlo stopped for a moment in the dark. For the first time in three hundred years, the tower was cold. He pressed a hand to the brick.
A little warmth still lingered, like the back of a hand just gone lifeless. Then that warmth, too, dispersed, leaving only the bone-deep chill of stone.
He kept climbing. With no reference point in the dark, he counted steps to keep his bearings. Selden had said there would be a rest niche every hundred steps on the maintenance stair. At the thirty-first niche—somewhere around eight thousand six hundred steps—the sacred objects in his pockets began speaking, each in its own way.
First, the captain's sun-crown insignia grew warm. Through the cloth came a faint heat, like a sun-warmed pebble carried against the skin. The insignia had recognised something.
Yet its warmth fluctuated with uncanny uncertainty, rising and falling like an indecisive heart. The First-Kindling flame was still above, but something about that flame was wrong.
Brandt's double-rowed key was trembling. No longer the gentle quiver of a greeting, but a continuous, quickening vibration that numbed his ribs. It was close to the lock it was meant to open.
And the pocket watch—
The pocket watch had stopped.
Sharlo froze in the darkness. That was wrong. He swiftly counted the hours in his head.
It could be no later than the Hour of the Snake, a full six or seven hours from midnight. For three months, the watch had stopped only for that single minute at midnight, without exception—
Unless "midnight" was no longer a moment in time.
The instant he understood, cold shot from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head. The watch had never stopped for time at midnight. It stopped for the boundary—the instant the curtain between the human world and the theatre lifted.
Now, with the whole city trapped in eternal dusk and three hundred thousand coins singing the Dirges in unison, time had been steeped rotten in the play. The curtain had risen all the way.
One Night of Dusk was not waiting for midnight. At this very moment, all of Kandelburg was onstage.
As if to confirm the thought, a sound came through the darkness.
First, applause. It seeped through the other side of the tower wall, both far away and very near, wave after wave. It did not come from three hundred thousand people, but from something more numerous, older, and dustier, like three centuries' worth of auditoriums awakening at once.
Then came that voice. Dry, courteous, unhurried. It no longer came from any particular direction. It rose from the bricks, from the wind, from his own bones where they pressed against the tower wall:
"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen."
"Tonight's performance is the Dirge Society's three-hundred-year labour: One Night of Dusk."
"The entire cast is in position." The voice paused slightly, as though the Stage Announcer had turned a page in the playbill. "All three hundred thousand of them."
"Special thanks to our production's sole uninvited guest—the gentleman without a script, currently ascending the actors' passage."
In the dark, Sharlo tightened his grip on the icy rung.
"Yes, sir, you have not taken a wrong turn." The Stage Announcer's voice brushed the bones of his ear, gentle as a whisper. "Maintenance stair, backstage passage, actors' passage—different names for the same road. For three hundred years, everyone who has climbed it has been going onstage."
"Your seat has always been waiting."
"Your part—"
The voice stopped. The tower's entire chorus, the hum of the whole city, and that boundless applause all held their breath at once, like the final hush before the curtain rose.
"—is about to begin."