The tower summit was smaller than Sharlo had imagined.
It was a circular hall with a skylight in its dome, directly beneath the dark-gold false sun. In the exact centre stood a stone lamp—chest-high, crude, ancient, like the sort of lamp the first human hands might have made. A flame burned in its bowl.
The flame was no larger than a finger. Yet one glance held Sharlo's eyes fast. It was not bright, but it was full—so full it warmed his chest, like the first breath of warmth when one opened the door of home on a winter night, like someone's hand tucking in the blankets many years ago.
The captain's sun-crown insignia burned against his breast like a red-hot coal. This was the First-Kindling flame. The true one.
The figure before the lamp slowly turned.
Sharlo stopped breathing.
It was a man. It had once been a man. His unnaturally tall form was draped in the old robes of successive Lamplighters—not dressed in them, but grown into them.
One aged robe lay over another still older, like the growth rings of a tree; by a rough count, there were dozens of layers. Deep inside them was a face. Sharlo stared at it for three breaths before he recognised it—not from the photograph, for that face had been scraped away there.
He knew it from Grey's description. Left-handed. The hand resting on the rim of the lamp, shielding the flame, was his left.
"The Three Belfry Fools," Sharlo heard himself say, his voice dry. "The one who cleaned up afterward."
"Once." The tall figure inclined his head. His voice was startlingly ordinary: weary, mild, and carrying the faint Kandelburg accent that time had worn smooth.
"Now they call me His Lordship of the Tower, Chief Lamplighter, or—as the manuals of successive tower wardens put it—'Do not name.' You carry old Barnaby's whistle and old Vane's letter. Child, in forty years this is the first time I have smelled old friends so near."
"Your name—"
"Gone," he said simply. "Surrendered willingly. This station accepts no names. A name is an anchor for the living, and whoever keeps this lamp cannot have an anchor. The day I came up, I folded my name outside the door and laid it beside my whistle, my wine bottle, and the salted biscuits I always ate." He paused. A very faint, rusted smile touched his mouth. "Looking back, I miss the salted biscuits most."
Sharlo looked at the layer upon layer of old robes. "This station... how many held it before you?"
"I am the nineteenth."
"Three hundred years, nineteen keepers. Yet the Church's records show not one death of a Chief Lamplighter."
"Because we do not die," said the nineteenth Chief Lamplighter, as calmly as if discussing an ordinary tower duty. "We go out. When we can no longer keep the lamp, we walk into that flame and add what remains of us to it. The first eighteen are all here."
He raised his left hand and gently brushed the rim of the lamp, as though brushing the shoulders of eighteen old friends. "This flame has burned for three hundred years, and dreams are not all it burns. Child, did you think we stayed here to light the sun for the Church?"
He slowly shook his head.
"It is the opposite. We stay here to keep the sun from eating quite so much."
* * *
Over the next quarter of an hour, the nineteenth keeper opened three hundred years of accounts before the young man who had climbed ten thousand steps to see them.
They had not built this tower. The tower, the three hundred thousand lamps underground, the silver threads, and the sunwick had all been "already there" three centuries ago. After the First Sun died, it had been kindled in emergency as a streetlamp, fed by the cheapest and most inexhaustible fuel there was: human dreams.
The tower could run, harvest, and burn by itself. It needed no one.
What required a human hand was the throttling.
"This machine has no heart," the Chief said. "Left to burn as it pleases, it rips a person's dreams out by the roots. You've seen people whose dreams were stripped bare. Grey eyes. Faded colours. Empty houses. When the first lampkeeper came up three hundred years ago, thirty percent of the city was already like that. What he did was wedge himself between the flame and the city—use the lampkeeper's soul as a sluice and, night after night, pinch the flame's ration down. Let it drink only the froth. Keep it from the roots."
"So you changed the oath?" Sharlo asked. "From dreaming sleep to dreamless sleep?"
"We didn't change it. We begged for the change." The Chief's voice sank.
"The first keeper struck a bargain with the Vesper Bureau of his day: the Duskwardens would attend to the human world and leave the tower alone. In return, the tower would guarantee that mankind slept dreamless, but slept soundly. Changing one word in the oath stitched the bargain into the tongues of every generation of Duskwardens. Child, that was not a lie. It was the cutting of losses. For three hundred years, all we could do was let three hundred thousand people sleep, even if their sleep was empty."
The summit was quiet for a moment. Beyond the skylight, the false sun's amber light poured in, drawing one clear pool on the floor beside the warm glow of the First-Kindling flame, the two utterly distinct.
"What about Brandt?" Sharlo asked the question he had been saving on Cole's behalf. "He came up here. You saw him. Then he died at the base of the tower."
The nineteenth keeper was silent for a long time. Beneath his layered robes, that towering figure stooped for the first time.
"He was a good Stairclimber. He counted the ash-wick's accounts and followed his questions all the way to my door. I showed him this flame and told him what you have heard. I asked him to carry a warning down—tell the person who 'can see the words' about the ash-wick."
The Chief's left hand tightened on the lamp's rim. "He reached eight thousand steps before their thing caught him. From here, I saw every detail. And I could not leave the lamp. Every breath the lamp stands unattended opens the flame's throat for one breath, and in that single night the city would lose the dream-roots of another thousand people."
"So I kept my lamp," he said, one word at a time, his voice flat as a river frozen solid, "and watched that child fall from eight thousand steps. Child, you ask what this station has felt like for three hundred years. It feels like that. You can save everyone except the one person before your eyes."
* * *
"Now for tonight." The Chief Lamplighter turned back to the lamp, his voice taut once more with the discipline of a keeper. "There is little time. In the ten thousand steps of tower beneath you, that ash-wick has burned for six hours. It isn't giving light. It's climbing. What it wants is this flame."
Sharlo looked through the skylight. The false sun's amber light had deepened since his arrival, like congealed honey turning to congealed blood.
"It cannot climb here because I am throttling it." The Chief opened his left hand. Only then did Sharlo see that the palm which had guarded the flame for three hundred years was charred black, fresh burns laid over old ones.
"I have been doing so all day. I have narrowed the flame's throat to its finest in three centuries. The ash-wick cannot reach it, so it can only hang in midair and burn. That false dusk your city sees is what it looks like suspended there. But child, I am a sluice gate, not a dam. I cannot last until dawn. Once it reaches the First-Kindling flame—"
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"What happens?"
"It eats the First-Kindling flame and turns it inside out," the Chief said. "There will still be a sun in the sky. It will rise and set as usual, warm and bright, and no one will see the difference. Except no human hand will pinch that sun's flame anymore. The hand at its throat will belong to the one who writes the playbills. From that day onward, how much it burns, whom it burns, and how long it burns will all depend on the needs of the play. Three hundred thousand people's dream-roots will become its rehearsal budget."
Sharlo's nails dug into his palms.
The Golden Iris was a theatre. The wax theatre was a theatre. This city of tuned purses was a theatre.
And from beginning to end, all of it had been no more than a sideshow on the apron. What the Dirge Society had truly wanted for three hundred years was to turn the sun itself into its stage lamp.
"The way out," he said. "You let the door admit me because there is one."
"There is. Two steps. Both must be yours." The Chief's left hand pointed to the wall.
Set into it was a bronze plaque cast in the same batch as the one in the Vesper Bureau's swearing room, three centuries of lamp smoke having stained its surface dark brown. "First step, the plaque. The third line of the oath—speak it back to its original words, with your own mouth."
"That line is the tower's key. When they changed that word three hundred years ago, they changed the covenant between the tower and the human world. The tower went from 'guarding dreams' to 'collecting dreams.' If someone whose 'name appears in no script' speaks the original aloud, the covenant turns back. The tower stops harvesting, the silver threads break, and all three hundred thousand lamps return their contents to their owners."
The Chief paused. "But think carefully. Once the silver threads break, the sunwick loses its fuel. Without fuel, the First-Kindling flame will go completely out before dawn. The ash-wick, meanwhile, will have lost its rival."
"Which is why there is a second step."
"The second step." The Chief looked at him, a cruelty almost tender in those three-hundred-year-old eyes. "The lamp must be kindled anew with something it has not eaten in three hundred years. Not a dream collected, not a dream stolen, not a dream pawned. A dream freely given, handed over by a living person. A whole dream—the kind dreamed for many years and not yet completed."
Silence settled over the summit. In the warm First-Kindling light, slowly, very slowly, Sharlo understood the words carved beneath the base of his lamp.
Reserved for the Curtainbreaker. No oil beneath this lamp. No debt owed.
"Of the three hundred thousand lamps, mine is the only empty one," he heard himself say. "Nothing has been collected from it since I was born. So my dream is the only 'whole' dream in the city, the only one qualified to be given 'freely.' That lamp was reserved for me. Tonight is what it was waiting for."
He raised his head. "Who? Who carved those words before I was born? You?"
"Not I." The Chief shook his head. "The words were already there when I came up. The eighteenth said they were there when he arrived as well. Child, I have been asking that question on your behalf for twenty years, and there is no answer. Some games are older than the Dirge Society, older than this tower. All you need to know at this moment is one thing: the words say 'no debt owed.' That means—"
He spoke one word at a time:
"No one can force you. If you refuse tonight and the sun goes out at dawn, that will be the settlement of this city's three-hundred-year debt. None of it will lie at your door. Turn and descend the tower, and no one—including me—has the right to say a word."
Sharlo stood before the First-Kindling flame. It was small and warm, reflected in his eyes.
"My dream," he said slowly. "Which one?"
"You choose. But the flame doesn't accept damaged goods. It knows when it is being fobbed off," the Chief said. "It must be one you have held in your arms as you slept for years, one you hated to release when you woke."
Sharlo closed his eyes.
Two lifetimes of memory opened in his mind: twenty-two years in this body, and more than twenty in another world. He turned through them layer by layer until he reached the very bottom, where lay the dream he had carried through both lives and seldom admitted even to himself that he still dreamed.
A little theatre. The lamps of a rehearsal room. A play half staged.
In that other world, before he went out to buy a late-night meal, the script had lain open on the table. Act Three had only just begun. The company had agreed on a full rehearsal the following week—
Through two lives, his longest-held dream had been to finish staging that play.
In three months since crossing worlds, he had never mentioned it to anyone. Not because he had forgotten, but because he dared not touch it. It was the last unbroken thread between him and the world to which he could never return.
"Chief." He opened his eyes, his voice steady. "One last question. When a dream is burned, does the person still remember it?"
"Yes," the Chief said. "The memory remains. What burns away is the wish to do it still. Afterward, recalling it will be like recalling something that happened to someone else. No pain, no ache, and no more waking in the middle of the night with it on your mind."
Looking at the young man, he added the only intimate kindness a lampkeeper could offer. "Child, that is the best price the flame can give. It has burned dreams for three hundred years, and this is the first time it has told the owner the price in advance."
* * *
Sharlo walked to the bronze plaque.
Three centuries of lamp smoke had stained it dark brown, but the engraving remained clear: the Duskwarden Oath, three lines. At that moment, the word "dreamless" in the third line looked to him like a nail driven into the throat of the entire city.
He raised a hand and pressed it to the plaque. The metal was bitingly cold.
"I'm not a Duskwarden," he said. "I never swore the oath. I'm a consultant, irregular staff, the sort even the candle assay can't read. Does it count if I say the words?"
"The people who erected this plaque three hundred years ago left a message," the Chief said behind him. "Anyone can speak this line wrongly. Only one kind of person can speak it aright: someone who, at the moment of speaking, owes this tower nothing. Child, of the city's three hundred and seven thousand lamps, who owes nothing?"
Sharlo drew a deep breath.
The summit was very still. The crawling ash-wick inside the tower, the low song of three hundred thousand coins throughout the city, the false sun's stagnant amber light—everything hung suspended like the held breath of a full house.
He began. For the first two lines, he followed the words on the plaque, speaking slowly and steadily, one word at a time:
"First, keep the flame."
"Second, keep the long night."
The third line. He closed his eyes, pulled free the word driven in three centuries before, and restored the one that had been there first:
"Third, keep the world in dreaming sleep."
Crack.
It was not the sound of a lock opening. It was the sound of something far larger than a lock coming undone. From summit to foundation, from foundation to the underground circular hall, a succession of distant, brittle snaps rang through ten thousand steps of tower, like a set of shackles worn for three hundred years bursting link by link.
Belowground, three hundred thousand silver threads snapped as one.
The instant the motes of light in three hundred thousand lamps broke free of the silver threads, they were like three hundred thousand fish set free, swimming back along the ways they had come—back to pillows in the harbour district, back into nightcaps in the belfry district, back between the brows of every Kandelburger curled up through the long night.
That night would later enter countless family histories. At the darkest hour of the eternal dusk, everyone asleep throughout the city suddenly began to dream together. The first dreams in three hundred years. Families keeping watch by bedsides saw brows furrowed by the troubled night relax, one after another.
At the tower summit, the First-Kindling flame rocked violently. Cut off from its fuel, it visibly shrank.
"Quickly." The Chief's voice strained to its limit, his left hand clamped around the flame's throat. "It won't last a quarter hour—the ash-wick is here!"
Deep in the tower, the ash-wick, rid of its rival, burst into an exultant chorus like a roaring sea. Baleful amber light surged wildly upward through the Wickwell—
Sharlo knelt on one knee before the stone lamp.
He had no rite. He knew no rite. He used the method shared by storytellers everywhere: he faced that dying little flame and told it his dream.
"There is a play," he said. "Half staged. Act Three has only just begun."
"It's about a little theatre company, poor enough to hear every coin rattle, staging a play nobody believes in. I remember all the lines—every one. The heroine's umbrella is supposed to be lake blue. It rains in Act Three, and the sound of rain is made with dry beans in a pan. Opening night is set for spring..."
As he spoke, he smiled. Tears followed.
"Through two lives, I've thought every day about finishing it. While moving tables, while investigating cases, even on the Golden Iris stage—I kept thinking about what music should play during the curtain call when the house is full."
He extended both hands as if cradling something invisible and burning hot, and offered it to the flame:
"It's yours," he said. "Finish it. Play it for three hundred thousand people."
The fire accepted.
There was no roar. The First-Kindling flame merely deepened, like a breath sinking to the centre of the body—then leapt high. Warm golden fire raced down the sunwick and met the evil light of the ash-wick surging upward, colliding with a crash at the exact centre of the tower.
True flame devoured false flame as sunrise devoured the remnant night.
The ash-wick's chorus changed key in the blaze, shrill and struggling, falling mute one segment at a time. The hum of three hundred thousand coins stopped dead. Beyond the skylight, the stagnant false sun cracked and sloughed apart, its amber shell shattering piece by piece across the night sky—
And then, in the instant before true fire passed through the summit and leapt into the firmament.
The pocket watch in Sharlo's coat—
Stopped.
The whole world froze: rushing fire, crumbling false sun, city below, every light and every sound. In the motionless silence, the circular hall slowly darkened. A beam of deathly white spotlight snapped onto Sharlo.
Something was carried into the darkness. Its feet touched the floor with soft knocks. Tap. Tap—
A chair.
Upholstered in dark red velvet, its armrests polished smooth with age: the chair at the exact centre of the grey-white theatre's front row, forever spotless and forever empty, now stood precisely arranged in the summit's darkness, facing him.
From deep in the dark came the dry, courteous voice he had heard for four months:
"Splendid."
"And now—intermission," said the Stage Announcer. "Let us talk."