With three days remaining before the premiere, Sharlo collected every favour Kandelburg owed him, door by door.
His first stop was City Hall. The new municipal magistrate had been the senior clerk in the year of the boiler explosion, when he registered three hundred and ninety-one faded people inside the temporary shelters, and Sharlo had helped him reconcile the list until dawn. Now the dignitary heard his request and rolled his pen thoughtfully between his fingers. "You wish to borrow Dockside Square, sir? To build a stage and sing for one night?"
"I won't be singing," Sharlo said. "The city will. On the permit, call it 'a spontaneous civic celebration of the anniversary of Relighting Day.' The date needn't match, so long as the intent does."
"Approved." The magistrate stamped the paper, then looked up and lowered his voice. "City Hall has watched those three red ships for half a month. A ticket was delivered to my own desk. I did not dare go." He paused. "Sir, my home village was in the Wheat Country to the south. It is gone now—abandoned thirty years. I feared that if I sat inside that theatre, when the house cleared, I might truly surrender it. An abandoned village is still a village."
"Your Excellency." Sharlo put away the permit and spoke in earnest. "Do not board those ships on the night of the fifteenth. Come to the docks and sing with us. Give an abandoned village to a stage and it is truly gone. Put it in a song, and it can live another hundred years."
His second stop was the Kandel Evening Bell Gazette. In the basement archives, Mr. Webber's dandelion hair had gone whiter still. When he understood the request, the old archivist said nothing, but led Sharlo upstairs toward the composing room. Passing a shelf, he casually pulled down an old bound volume and slapped it into Sharlo's arms—the front page from the day after Relighting Day, The People's Dreams Are Hereby Returned to the People.
"The notice will run in the front-page ear for three days. No charge," Webber said. "Every old compositor in that room wept when we set that edition. You want to light lamps? Good. The lamps of this city were returned to it that very night."
The notice consisted of two lines:
"On the night of the fifteenth, if you hear singing from the harbour, light one lamp in a window. Not to watch a play, but to tell those at sea: someone is home."
Sharlo did not need to make the third round himself. Mrs. Porter claimed it, took up her basket of baked cakes, and went out—Tailor Street, Rope-Makers' Lane, the fish market, the workers' quarter behind the boiler works. Sixty years of neighbourhood connections were denser than the Vesper Bureau's files. The old woman's message was direct: "Light a lamp on the fifteenth. Any house that does not can forget about one of my cakes next year."
Mick took the factorymen; Thomas took the parish. When Thomas heard the explanation, he rolled up his sleeves. "Cheryl's people come from a fishing village. She hates that ship. I'll draw a hundred candles from the parish."
Aboard ship, Half-Ladle rewrote the lyrics of The Road Home. The Mist Gorge verses sang of roads through fog. Kandelburg's must sing of roads across the sea. Squatting outside the galley to the bubbling accompaniment of a pot of stew, the cook worked through one line after another:
"Across the sea, the road runs home; its marks are lamps, and not the chart. One window lamp outshines by far a thousand charts of where you are. Waves rise high and waves fall low; your window lamp awaits you so. Your parents ask not how far you've roamed, but how many bowls to set at home..."
Mick learned each line as he heard it, then ran ashore—to teach Mrs. Porter, the fish market, and the night shift at the boiler works. Mist Gorge had already proved the nature of a song: no organisation or mobilisation was needed. If its words were true, its melody grew along the grain of the heart. In three days, the tailors of Tailor Street hummed to the treadle of their sewing machines, the fisherwomen hummed as they gutted herring, and even the tax clerks at the harbour-dues office began stamping documents in time.
On the third night, after Viola completed her inspection of the outer arrangements, she delivered her final tactical report to Sharlo in the chart room.
"All two thousand one hundred premiere tickets have been distributed. Not one was sold. Additional tiers have been built, bringing capacity to three thousand." She turned a page in her register. "They have altered the exit corridor. Examiner Hong measured the distance between the ships today under cover of copying their waterlines. The old harvesting passage has been removed. The new exit is three times as wide, with nine hundred apertures along its walls. They do not mean to harvest two hundred patrons at a matinee. They mean to harvest three thousand in one night."
"One more matter." She raised her eyes. "The playbill has been printed. Mick obtained a copy."
Grey paper, lettered in gold. Final Curtain Season · First Production · Never Homeward. The space for the leading role still bore the same words: Awaiting Its Star. But beneath them, in an elegant typeface, one further line had appeared:
"The occupant of this seat will be revealed on opening night. When the hour comes, we invite you to take it."
"They have reserved it for you," Viola said. It was not a question.
"Yes." Sharlo folded the playbill. "From the first copy sent to the capital, this production has been aimed at me. The stage is in my home town. The ticket was delivered to my ship. Centre seat, front row. I know Bassoon. He began as an agent, and an agent's art lies in making an actor believe that he betrays the whole house if he refuses the stage."
"You still mean to go." This too was not a question.
"I do," Sharlo said. "With three thousand people in his theatre, I cannot stay away. But Viola, do not worry." He smiled and pinned the playbill to the table beneath one hand. "An agent's greatest nightmare is not that his actor refuses the stage. It is that the actor takes it—and performs a different play."
Night fell upon the fifteenth.
Every one of the Floating Island Theatre's three thousand seats was filled. Crimson hangings descended from the heights. Two strings of grey lanterns came alight in order, laying a pale grey halo over the whole surface of the water. The opening gong sounded three times, and the murmur of the house gradually subsided.
Then the announcement came.
Neither loud nor soft, dry and courteous, it issued from the depths of the stage as though from somewhere at once very distant and very near.
"Final Curtain Season, First Production. Never Homeward. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for waiting."
In the centre of the front row, Sharlo's fingers tightened upon his knee.
He had heard this voice before. The announcements through three hundred midnights in the grey-white theatre. The interval atop the tower. The collection of interest in the hall beneath the mountain. Exactly the same delivery. It was not Bassoon. Every production of Final Curtain Season was announced from behind this same curtain.
The play began.
The first half was frighteningly good.
The curtain rose upon the sea. By some unknown mechanism, the entire stage had become a rolling expanse of water, and a lone ship emerged from the fog. The traveller aboard began to sing of the place he had left. Then Sharlo heard breaths catch all across the house. The traveller's first verse concerned a shell doorplate upon an atoll island; the second, an old recipe for cured fish on Osuna Island; the third, a crooked willow at a village gate...
Verse after verse, every homeland had been harvested during the past half month from the nine hundred apertures in that corridor.
The stolen homesickness came alive upon the stage, more beautiful than in memory. Light gilded the paper windows of old houses; song made the moss upon a well curb taste sweet. Diagonally ahead, Sharlo saw a fisherwoman trembling from head to foot. The stage was singing of the stone beach where she had once spread her nets. She reached toward it, half rising, as though to take it back across the sea of heads.
Fine craftsmanship, Sharlo thought. Take it first, then put it on display. Your homeland is safe with me, living well—better than it ever lived in your own heart. An old pawnshop craft made new: let the pledgor inspect the goods, then persuade him to renew the pledge willingly.
In the second half, the knife left its sheath.
A storm rose upon the sea. The traveller's vessel fought among the waves, while on the great curtain behind him, those homelands shining with golden beauty began to sink one after another.
The atoll island went under, its shell doorplate spinning through the water. The stone beach sank. The crooked willow sank. With each drowning, the traveller tore another lament from his heart—there was no return, no return; home was made of water and scattered beneath the wind; home was made of paper and sank beneath the waves. At the height of the lament, three thousand people wept as one.
Sharlo did not watch the stage. He watched the words above the house.
Three thousand amber lines peeled away amid the weeping. The endings of 【...is waiting for him to return】 dimmed and broke one after another, like sandcastles under an ebbing tide. Still the play continued. In the storm, the traveller grasped something—a drifting stage board. It held him. He climbed upon it, turned to his drowned homeland, and sang the gentlest passage in the play:
"Do not weep, do not weep. Your homeland has not drowned. It has moved house—moved into the play. The stage floats upon the water and shall never sink. Store your homeland in the play. A homeland kept in theatre cannot be broken by waves or aged by wind. It is stronger than your heart and will outlive you..."
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Upon the great curtain, the drowned homelands rose one by one in the stage lights, gleaming gold and whole as before.
The weeping throughout the house gradually softened into sobs of relief. In the front rows, Sharlo saw hands quietly feeling for the handkerchiefs they would need when the house cleared—not handkerchiefs for tears, but cloths in which to wrap something. They meant to wrap up their homelands and store them within those nine hundred apertures.
At that moment, the play stopped.
The traveller stood motionless upon his board. The light drew into a single spotlight at centre stage—and there, though no one had seen it appear, stood a chair.
Empty.
The dry, courteous voice of the Stage Announcer sounded again:
"Never Homeward, final act. This play still lacks one role—a person who can return."
"We must invite one guest upon the stage, to take this seat and name before the house the place to which he most wishes to return. With him as witness, your homelands will be entered into storage and archived, and the play will be complete."
"This seat has awaited its occupant for more than a month." The spotlight left the chair and swept slowly and perfectly straight over three thousand heads before it came to rest—
Upon the centre of the front row.
"Mr. Curtainbreaker—if you please."
Three thousand pairs of tearful eyes turned as one.
Sharlo sat inside the spotlight for three breaths before he slowly rose. He dusted the corner of his coat and mounted the stage. Step by step, neither fast nor slow, he climbed until he reached the empty chair and stopped.
He did not sit.
He turned to face three thousand spectators and bowed deeply to the whole house—the courtesy of a theatre company, observed without flaw. Then he straightened and began to speak. His voice was not loud, but this stage had been built for song, and it carried each word to the last row.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my apologies, but I must revise the script. They invited me here to name the place to which I most wish to return. That much I can tell you—"
"The place I most wish to return to," he said, "lies three streets away. The second house around the corner at the head of Tailor Street: the Daydream Detective Agency. When tonight's performance is over, I shall go home and still have time for one of my landlady's cakes before bed."
The house stared.
"You hear it, ladies and gentlemen? This answer is worthless." Sharlo spread his hands and paced twice through the spotlight. "A valuable answer must be what the play sings of—distant, broken off, impossible to reach. A homeland you cannot return to is easy to gather, store, and archive. My home is near. My home is warm. Even an ash candle shakes its head at the sight of it."
"But while I sat below, I made an accounting on your behalf." He raised one hand abruptly and pointed into the house. "Sister Li—the Sister Li from the fish market. Are you here? You surrendered the stone beach. But the home you live in now—how many steps away is it? Is your old man warming a pot of wine tonight and waiting for you to come back?"
Among the crowd, the fisherwoman slowly rose, dazed.
"And you, venerable sir—the old gentleman with the pipe in the seventh row. The crooked willow is yours, is it not? The village is far away. But where does your grandson sleep tonight? In your house. If he opens his eyes tomorrow and cannot find Grandfather, he will cry."
"Ladies and gentlemen." Sharlo's voice deepened, each word distinct. "This play has sung only half the truth. It sings that a distant homeland cannot be reached—perhaps that is true. What it does not sing is the other half: every one of you has a home to which you can return. Tonight. After the house clears. One stick of incense on foot, two, three at most."
"The play says that a homeland stored inside theatre cannot be broken by waves." He swept his gaze across the house and abruptly smiled. "I was once half a man of the theatre, so I shall tell you one saying from the profession—everything onstage is a prop. No matter how round a prop moon, it cannot warm your bed. If you truly store your homeland here, then pay three copper tinder each year to come and look at it, one day you will discover it has nothing to do with you. It will have become a play. You will have become a guest."
"Home is not something to be stored," Sharlo said. "It is for going back to."
From deep within the stage, the dry voice spoke, courteous as ever. "Mr. Curtainbreaker, you have strayed from the subject. Please take your seat—"
"Why the hurry?" Sharlo did not look back. "My play has one last line."
He turned toward the rear of the audience. There was no wall at the far end of the viewing tiers; they stood open to the harbour and to all of Kandelburg, climbing layer upon layer up the slope.
He raised one hand in the most ordinary gesture known to any company: Behold.
"Ladies and gentlemen, you need not believe me," he said. "Turn around and see for yourselves."
Three thousand people turned.
At first, there was one spark of light in Dockside Square. Half-Ladle stood upon the wooden platform built that day, holding a storm lantern. The cook drew a deep breath, faced the sea wind, and loosed the great voice he had trained in the burial detail at Mist Gorge:
"Across the sea there runs a road—its marks are lamps, and not the chart—"
As his voice fell away, hundreds waiting upon the docks caught it: Mrs. Porter, Thomas, Mick, the municipal magistrate, the fisherwomen of the market, the labourers from the boiler works. Hundreds of voices drove the second line upward, high and bright:
"One window lamp outshines by far a thousand charts of where you are—"
Then the lamps came alight.
First, the row of windows along the harbour road. One lamp, two, ten. Then Tailor Street, Rope-Makers' Lane, and the workers' quarter behind the boiler works. The notice had run for three days. The song had been taught for three days. Mrs. Porter's cakes had exerted their influence for three days.
Now, as the singing rose, the whole sloping city seemed to catch from an invisible wick. Light burned upward from the harbour, street by street, tier upon tier of rooftops. Thousands and tens of thousands of warm gold sparks danced upon the red tiles, climbing to the belfry district, climbing to the foot of Dawn Tower—
In Dawn Tower's observation window, old Selden set one lamp firmly upon the sill.
Three thousand spectators sat in a theatre upon the water, looking back at their city as it kindled an ocean of lights for them in the night. The song rolled across the water, wave after wave:
"Waves rise high and waves fall low; your window lamp awaits you so. Your parents ask not how far you've roamed, but how many bowls to set at home—"
No one knew who stood first. It was Sister Li, the fisherwoman. She rose and joined the song. Then the old man with the pipe, the weeping dock labourer, one entire row and then an entire tier. All three thousand people rose by degrees, faced their own city, and sang a song from the shore into the theatre upon the water.
Sharlo stood upon the stage and watched the words over the house.
In the lamplight, the amber lines that had peeled away grew back, one after another. The new words were different. Before, each line throughout the house had ended 【...is waiting for him to return】, a home imagined for them by the play. What grew now was ragged, some lines quicker and some slower, but every one alive:
【When she finishes this verse, she will go home.】
【He will take his grandson to see the lights.】
【She remembers the wine her old man is warming.】
Not one line mentioned the stage.
The spotlight dimmed. Amid the song filling the house, the chair upon the stage became utterly empty. Sharlo had never sat in it, and no one remembered to ask him again. Deep beyond the curtain, the actor who had sung the traveller all night stood dazed. Suddenly he tore the felt hat from his head, hurled it hard upon the boards, and began to sing with the audience's tune. He sang louder than anyone. Halfway through, his voice broke. He crouched in the false sea where he had performed half the night and howled. He came from the north. He had not been home in twenty years.
That night, not one of the nine hundred ash candles in the corridor's nine hundred apertures came alight.
Three thousand people left the performance through the corridor three times as wide, their steps hurried, each intent only upon reaching home. Before the blue-satin attendants could finish half a bowing speech, their guests were already ten feet away. One attendant chased after a patron, asking him to "leave a keepsake." Sister Li laughingly swatted him aside. "Out of the way. My old man's wine will be too hot."
When the last of the crowd was gone, Sharlo descended from the stage alone.
Manager Vaal waited at the mouth of the corridor, his top hat held properly in both hands and his oiled smile perfectly still. He bowed and opened a path toward the third ship. "The troupe master requests your presence."
The top deck of the third ship held an accounting office.
Not a box, but an accounting office. Drawers covered all four walls, each labelled with the name of a harbour. A broad counting table stood at the centre of the room, and behind it sat Mr. Bassoon.
He had changed little in two years. The same round face, the same respectable satin jacket. At the sight of Sharlo, smiles heaped across the plump face, warm as the reunion of old friends. "Mr. Vane! A fine performance! A fine performance indeed—" He applauded, the claps light and hollow between all those drawers. "That business with the lamps across the city was consummate. Thirty years staging spectacles, and never have I seen a man carry an entire city in for scenery. You won this engagement beautifully."
"Mr. Bassoon." Sharlo stopped on the opposite side of the counting table and did not sit. "Two years. The account of the Golden Iris, the account of the Magpie Pawnshop, the account of the House of Repose—the Vesper Bureau remembers them all."
"Good, good. Remembering is good." Bassoon took no offence. He patted the table lightly with one plump hand. "I keep accounts as well. Do you imagine I suffered a loss tonight, Mr. Vane?" From beneath the table, he raised an object and set it before them—a little brass steelyard of the kind pawnshops used to weigh precious metal. "Three thousand people in Kandelburg and not one grain harvested. On paper, a perfect loss. But in my profession, the custom of scattered individuals has never been the real business."
"One strand of homesickness from each traveller—mixed in quality and light in weight." He spoke unhurriedly. "My true merchandise lies ballasted in the holds: the harvest of thirty-seven ports. And the one item I truly wished to collect delivered itself to my door tonight."
He raised his eyelids and smiled at Sharlo.
"Would you believe it? With a few sentences, you turned the words of three thousand people back. I could not stop you. I had no wish to. But at the very instant all the lamps in the city kindled—Mr. Vane, a line appeared above your own head."
"Two years ago at the Golden Iris, the first time I saw you, your head was perfectly clean. Not one word. So clean I dreamed at night of entering one line against your name. But tonight—" Mr. Bassoon gently pushed the steelyard forward. Its pan rasped faintly over the tabletop. "You stood upon the stage and watched that city light its lamps for you—and five words appeared above your head, clear as day."
"Shall I read them to you?"
Sharlo stood among the roomful of drawers and said nothing.
"【He wants to go home.】" Mr. Bassoon read softly and slowly, like a pawn ticket freshly issued. "I have seen much homesickness in my time, Mr. Vane. But your one strand is different. Every home to which every other person longs to return exists somewhere in this world. The one you long for..."
The plump proprietor's smile deepened.
"It is on no map, in no register, and upon no sea. Unique."
"I have taken pledges for thirty years, waiting for one piece worthy of the master vault," he said slowly. "At slack tide tomorrow morning, our theatre weighs anchor and sails north. Thirty-seven ports, only a few remaining. When our collection is complete, this shipload of homesickness will be carried somewhere for settlement. Your uncle travelled in that same direction—ah, but you know that already."
"I shall not invite you to accompany us. The invitation would be wasted." Mr. Bassoon rose and gave Sharlo a perfect formal salute, every courtesy observed. "I shall merely wait for you there. The northern sea is cold, Mr. Curtainbreaker. You search for your home, and I collect my accounts. Let us see which comes first: you reach home..."
"Or I open the scales."
The wind of the small hours was blowing hard when Sharlo descended from the third ship.
The three crimson vessels had already begun preparations to weigh anchor, their grey lanterns coming down string by string. From the quay, he looked back at the city upon the slope. Its lamps had not gone out. Tier after tier, warm golden light covered the ground to the foot of Dawn Tower like a tide that would not ebb.
He raised a hand and touched the top of his head. There was nothing to feel. But he knew Bassoon had not lied.
He wanted to go home.
Which home? Standing upon the harbour of his second homeland across two lives, he asked himself and found no answer.
Far away in the sea wind, a few voices still sang from the direction of the fish market. It was the final line:
"Your parents ask not how far you've roamed, but how many bowls to set at home."