The Lamplighters

A night on the Senn Reach, in the Age of Lanterns

The guild had one rule, and it was engraved inside every ring its members wore: no window dark that wants to be lit.

There were four hundred and six public lanterns on the Senn Reach, strung along the sea wall and up the switchback stairs to the upper town, and the lamplighters knew every one of them by name. They fed them at dusk from brine-jars carried on poles. They taught them their sequences. When a lantern sickened, a lamplighter sat with it through the night and sang to it, because the lanterns could feel the rhythm of a voice, and it steadied them.

Taesa was eleven turns old when the guild took her. She was too short to reach the high hooks and too quick to be trusted with the jars, so for her first year she was given the only job an apprentice was ever given: she walked behind the lamplighters and counted.

Four hundred and six, every night. If the count was short, someone went back.

The storm came in the ninth month of her second year. The records call it the Long Wind; the Senn Reach called it nothing, because no one who was there wanted to say its name again. It came off the southern sea in the dark, and it came fast, and by the time the bells rang the first lanterns on the sea wall were already failing — not blown out, because a living lantern cannot be blown out, but frightened. A frightened lantern dims itself to nothing and waits.

The lamplighters went out in pairs. They were supposed to go in pairs. Taesa went alone, with a jar on her back and a lamp-hook taller than she was, because the count on the sea wall had come back short by thirty-one and there was no one left to send.

I did not relight them. You cannot relight a lantern. I only told them the count. I said: there are four hundred and six of you, and I can see thirty-one, and I am going to stay until I can see four hundred and six.

She walked the wall all night. She stood in front of each dark lantern and spoke its name and its number, over and over, into the wind. One by one they came back. Not bright — a lantern that has been frightened is never quite as bright again — but lit. By morning the wall was whole, and so was the girl, which surprised everyone more.

The guild made her a full lamplighter at thirteen, which it had never done before and never did again. The ring they gave her is in the Archive. The oath inside it is worn almost smooth where her thumb turned it.

Ossa Who Waits

Taesa lived to be very old. In her last years she tended a single household lantern that had outlived its family: Ossa, who had been taught one sequence — come home — by a fisherman who never did. The guild had wanted to retire Ossa for decades. Taesa would not allow it.

“She is not waiting for him,” Taesa told the younger lamplighters. “She knows he is not coming. She is waiting so that the window stays lit. That is a different thing, and it is our whole job.”

When Taesa died, the guild placed her ring beside Ossa’s glass. Fifty-eight thousand years later, when the Ithra chose what to send into the dark, both went into the Choir together. The Institute received them on the same dish, a few hours apart.

No window dark that wants to be lit.