The Last Lantern on the Wall
Sabine
The stone was hungry again.
Sabine Lark felt it before she saw it. A thin ache started in her right palm, crawled up the inside of her wrist, and settled behind her eyes like the beginning of a fever. Then the light in the cage sputtered. The tall column of violet crystal in the center of the lantern room went from bright to dim to bright again, like a heart missing beats.
“I know,” she told it. “I know. I’m here.”
She pressed her hand flat against the bronze rail that circled the cage. There were four palm prints worn into that rail, one at each side, polished smooth by three hundred years of hands. Hers sat at the east side, facing the city. The other three faced north, west and south. Nobody had touched those three in thirty years. Bronze held cold the way a grave held cold, and on long nights Sabine could feel it from where she stood.
She closed her eyes and gave the stone what she had.
It was not a spell. Sabine had never learned a spell in her life. Keepers did not cast. Keepers fed. She let the warmth run out of her chest and down her arm and into the bronze, and the bronze carried it to the crystal, and the crystal drank. The light steadied. Through the four tall windows of the lantern room, the violet glow pushed outward, over the parapet, over the black trees of the Bleeding Woods, and up to the place where the great dome of Morvath met the western wall.
The dome had a hem. Most people in the city never thought about it. They looked up and saw a sky of pale purple light, and they assumed it went down to the ground everywhere like a bowl turned over a table. It did not. At the edges, where it touched stone, it thinned. It frayed. On the western side, over the woods where the Void pressed hardest, it had always needed help.
That help was the lanterns. Once there had been nine of them along the western wall. Now there was one.
Below her, far across the city, the Dying Bell rang from the Obsidian Keep. One slow stroke, then silence. It had rung once every hour for eleven days, ever since King Alaric took to his bed. Sabine had stopped counting the strokes on the fourth day. She had not stopped hearing them.
“He’s been holding it for forty years,” she said to the stone. “You can hold on for one more night.”
The light flickered. She pushed harder.
Her grandmother would have laughed at her for talking to it. Then Oda Lark would have talked to it herself, in the soft rough voice she used for frightened dogs and sick children. A lantern takes three, little wick. Three hands and a keeper. She had said it every night of Sabine’s childhood, sitting on the low stool by the cage with her pipe going cold between her teeth. It was an old wall saying. Every keeper’s family had one. Nobody had believed it in Oda’s lifetime. Oda had kept this lantern for forty years, the last thirty of them alone.
Then Sabine had kept it alone for six.
The sound came from below.
It was small at first, a dry tick-tick-tick against the outer wall, like a fingernail tapping a window. Sabine’s breath stopped in her throat. She knew that sound. Everyone who lived in the Wick knew that sound, even if they pretended they did not.
She lifted her hand from the rail and went to the western window.
The tower stood on the wall just south of the Western Gate, two hundred and twelve steps from the street to the lantern. From the window she could see the long curtain of grey stone running north and south, the walkway along its top, the dark slot of the gate, and beyond it the Bleeding Woods. The trees were black and twisted, and their leaves were the color of old blood even in the violet light. Mist sat between their trunks like milk in a bowl.
Something moved in the mist at the foot of the wall.
It was the size of a cart horse, and it had six legs. Its body was covered in black plates that shone like oil on water. It had no eyes. Where a face should have been, it had a cluster of clicking mandibles, and its two front legs were long curved blades. A Void-Stalker. It was climbing.
Its scythes found cracks in the old stone, and it pulled itself up, one slow body length at a time. Tick-tick-tick.
Sabine ran back to the cage.
She did not think. Thinking was for afterward. She slapped both hands onto the rail, over her own palm print and beside it, and she pulled every scrap of warmth she had up out of her belly and her chest and shoved it into the bronze.
The heart-stone blazed.
The lantern room went white-violet. Light poured out of the western window in a solid beam, down the face of the wall, and struck the Stalker full on its plated back. It screamed. The sound was high and grinding, like metal dragged over glass, and it went straight through Sabine’s teeth. The plates on its back began to smoke. It lost its grip with one scythe, then the other, and it fell away from the wall and crashed into the mist below.
The scream went on for a long moment. Then it stopped.
Sabine let go of the rail.
Her legs folded. She sat down hard on the stone floor with her back against Oda’s old stool and waited for the room to stop turning. Something warm ran over her upper lip. She wiped it with her sleeve and looked at the dark smear of blood without surprise. Her hands were shaking. Her heart was banging against her ribs like a fist on a door.
The light in the cage dropped back to a weak, uneven glow.
“That’s three this week,” she told the stone. Her voice came out thin. “Last month it was one. The year before that, I could go a whole season.”
The stone did not answer. It never did.
She sat there long enough for the Dying Bell to ring again. Then somebody knocked on the tower door.
Nobody knocked on the tower door after dark. The bread boy came at dawn. The oil cart came every tenth day at noon. Wall Command sent a runner twice a year with a sealed letter that said, in different words each time, that the West Lantern was too expensive and Keeper Lark should consider retirement. Sabine burned those letters in the stove.
The knock came again. Three heavy strikes, patient and certain.
She went down the long stair with a lamp in one hand and her grandmother’s iron poker in the other. She did not know what she meant to do with the poker. It made her feel better.
At the bottom, she pulled back the bolt and opened the door the width of her face.
Three men stood on her step in the violet dark.
The one in front filled the doorway. He was tall and broad through the chest, with a soldier’s cropped brown hair going grey at the temples, and a short beard that did not hide the old burn along the left side of his jaw. The scar was shiny and pale, the kind Void fog left when it touched skin. He wore a wall patrol coat that had once had sergeant’s stripes on the sleeves. Someone had cut them off. The threads still showed. On his back he carried a long plain sword in a worn scabbard.
To his right stood a younger man with dark curls, a scatter of freckles across his nose, and a small silver ring in one ear. He was leaning on the doorframe as if he had been invited. He smiled at her like they were old friends who had not seen each other in a while.
To the big man’s left stood the third, very tall and very thin, with a long braid of dark red hair over one shoulder and grey eyes that were not looking at her at all. They were looking up, past her head, at the stairs. He had ink on the middle finger of his right hand. He was holding a book against his chest with both arms, as if someone might take it.
“Keeper Lark,” the big man said. His voice was low and rough. He held up a folded paper with a blue wax seal. “Garrick Stane. Wall Command sends its regards.”
“Wall Command never sends its regards,” Sabine said. “Wall Command sends letters telling me to retire.”
“Not this time.”
She took the paper and held it to her lamp. The seal was Marshal Brannock’s. The writing was a clerk’s, neat and bored.
By order of the Marshal of the Walls: the following men are assigned to the West Lantern as wardens until further notice, in the place of punishment for offenses recorded. Garrick Stane, formerly sergeant, Iron Vanguard. Lucan Merrow, smuggler, sentenced to one year of wall service. Emrys Corwin, formerly of the University, sentenced to practical penance. The Keeper will house and feed them from the lantern stores.
Sabine read it twice. Then she looked up.
“No,” she said.
The curly-haired one, Lucan Merrow, grinned wider. “We haven’t asked anything yet.”
“I asked Wall Command for oil and bread. I asked for a new rope for the shutters and a cartload of coal before the cold season. I did not ask for three criminals.”
“Two criminals,” Lucan said. “Garrick is just unpopular.”
“I am a criminal,” the tall scholar said, still looking up the stairs. “The University was very clear about it.”
Garrick Stane did not smile. He did not move either. He stood on her step like a part of the wall that had decided to stand upright.
“The writ says we stay,” he said.
“Then the writ can sleep on the step.”
“Keeper.” He said it quietly. “I’ve been on the western wall for nine years. I know what a Stalker sounds like when it climbs. I heard one on this tower not a quarter hour ago. And I saw what came out of your window.” His eyes moved over her face, slowly, to the blood still drying on her lip. “You can send us away. We’ll sleep on the step, if that’s how you want it. But we won’t leave.”
Sabine opened her mouth to tell him exactly where he could sleep.
The scholar walked past her.
He did not push. He simply turned sideways and slipped through the gap between her shoulder and the doorframe, and he was on the stairs before she could catch his sleeve.
“Hey!” She spun. “You can’t go up there!”
He was already climbing, fast, his long legs taking the steps two at a time. Sabine dropped the poker and ran after him with the lamp swinging in her hand. She heard the other two come in behind her and heard the door bolt slide home. She did not have the breath to shout about it.
Two hundred and twelve steps. Her thighs burned. The scholar did not slow down once.
When she reached the lantern room, gasping, he was standing at the cage with his ink-stained hand flat on the bronze. Not on her palm print. On the western one. The one that had been cold for thirty years.
“Take your hand off that,” Sabine said. Her voice shook, and she hated it.
He did not seem to hear her. His grey eyes were fixed on the crystal. The light inside it flickered under his palm, weak and uneven.
“It’s starving,” he said softly. “You’ve been feeding it from your own body. For years. Alone.” He turned his head and looked at her for the first time, and his gaze was so direct that she felt it like a hand on her chest. “Keeper, this stone is dying. You have two weeks before it goes dark. Perhaps less.”
“I know,” Sabine said.
Behind her, she heard the other two men reach the top of the stairs. Lucan was breathing hard. Garrick was not.
“Then why,” the scholar asked, “are you still doing it alone?”
Sabine looked at the cage. At the four palm prints in the bronze. Her own, warm and worn. The three others, cold for thirty years.
Then she looked at the three men standing in her lantern room, and the Dying Bell rang out over the city, and for the first time in six years she did not have an answer.
Three Men Nobody Wanted
Garrick
She let them sleep in the store room in the end. Garrick suspected it was less about kindness and more about not wanting to step over three bodies every time she went down for water.
The store room was on the second level of the tower, round like every room in it, with one narrow window and shelves of oil jars, coal sacks and rope. It smelled of lamp oil and old wool. Lucan claimed the coal sacks because they were softest. Emrys did not sleep at all. He sat by the window with his book open on his knees and wrote by the violet light that came down the stairwell from the lantern above. Garrick lay on the floor with his sword beside him and listened to the Keeper moving around above him.
She did not sleep much either. He heard her climb to the lantern four times before dawn. Each time, he heard the faint hum of the stone change pitch when she touched it. Each time, it took a little longer to settle.
In the morning, she made porridge for four.
She complained the whole time. She told the pot it was a waste of oats. She told Lucan to get his boots off her table. She told Emrys that if he touched her grandmother’s logbook again she would throw him down the stairs, all two hundred and twelve of them, and count. But she filled four bowls, and she put the honey jar in the middle of the table where everyone could reach it.
Garrick watched her over the rim of his bowl.
She was small, the top of her head barely reaching his shoulder. Her black hair was cut straight at the jaw, the way the keepers wore it so it would not catch in the shutters. There was one streak of silver in it at her left temple, bright as a thread of wire. Her forearms were hard and corded from years of hauling on the shutter ropes. Her eyes were dark brown and tired, with grey shadows under them that sleep would not fix.
He had seen eyes like that before. On the western wall last winter, in the men who had stood three days and three nights behind the General while the Void came through.
“You’re staring,” she said without looking up.
“Yes,” Garrick said.
She did look up then. She seemed surprised that he had not denied it. A little color came into her cheeks, and she frowned to cover it.
“Well, stop.”
He did not stop. He did go back to eating.
Lucan leaned across the table and stole the honey spoon out of Emrys’s hand. “Garrick doesn’t lie,” he told her cheerfully. “It’s why he’s here. Ask him why he lost his stripes.”
“I don’t care why he lost his stripes.”
“He broke a man’s jaw in the Copper Kettle.”
“Lucan,” Garrick said.
“A Chancellor’s clerk,” Lucan went on, waving the spoon. “Little fellow with ink on his collar. He stood on a table and called General Malachai the Butcher of Iron Pass. Garrick asked him to sit down. He didn’t. So Garrick sat him down.”
Sabine put her spoon in her bowl. She studied Garrick across the table, carefully, as if she were reading the writ again.
“You served under him,” she said. “The General.”
“I was on the wall behind him,” Garrick said. “For the three days he held the Western Breach. I passed him bolts and water and held a torch. I watched him fight things I still see when I close my eyes.” He set his bowl down. “I wasn’t at Iron Pass when the rest happened. I don’t know what he saw there. I know what I saw on the wall. That clerk didn’t see anything at all.”
The kitchen was quiet. Even Lucan had stopped smiling.
“And they sent you here for it,” Sabine said slowly. “To the worst post on the wall.”
“They sent all three of us here,” Emrys said from the end of the table. He had not lifted his eyes from his book. “The worst post on the wall, for the three worst men available. It was meant as an insult. Your Marshal Brannock has a sense of humor.”
Sabine stood up and gathered the bowls. At the basin, with her back to them, she said, “It isn’t the worst post.”
“No?” Lucan said.
“It’s the last one.” She scrubbed a bowl harder than it needed. “There’s a difference.”
The shutter rope on the north window was frayed through in two places. Garrick saw it that first morning. By noon he had cut a new length from the coil in the store room, climbed out on the narrow ledge outside the lantern room with the wind tugging at his coat, and threaded it back through the pulleys.
Sabine came up the stairs as he was swinging in through the window.
“I didn’t ask you to do that,” she said.
“I know.”
“I was going to do it tomorrow.”
“On that ledge? In this wind?” He tied off the rope and tested it. The shutter rose smooth and fell smooth. “You’d have done it. I don’t doubt it. You’d also have been tired, because you didn’t sleep. Tired people fall.”
She crossed her arms. “And you don’t get tired.”
“I get tired. I just weigh more. The wind has to work harder.”
For a second he thought she might laugh. Her mouth twitched at one corner. Then she turned to the cage and put her hand on the bronze, and the hum of the stone changed, and the moment was gone.
Across the room, Emrys was crouched by the base of the cage with a small brass instrument in his hand. It looked like a compass with too many needles. He had been there for an hour. Every few minutes he wrote something in his book.
“How bad?” Garrick asked him.
Emrys did not look up. “Worse than yesterday. Better than tomorrow.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It is the only honest one.” Emrys tapped the brass with one long finger. “The dome is losing strength everywhere. You can feel it in the city, if you are paying attention. The fungus lamps on the streets are dimming. The thunder comes with no clouds. The King is dying, and the Seal is dying with him. The lanterns were built to hold the edges when the center grew weak. That is exactly what is happening now. And this is the only one left.”
Sabine said nothing. Her hand stayed flat on the rail.
Garrick looked at the three cold palm prints in the bronze. He had noticed them last night. He noticed everything in a room he might have to fight in.
“What are those for?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Sabine said. “Not anymore.”
At dusk she walked the wall, and he walked it with her.
She did not invite him. He did not ask. She came down from the lantern with a lamp and a crowbar, and he took his sword off the store room floor and followed her out of the tower door and up the short stair to the wall walk. She gave him one sharp look and then ignored him.
The wall walk ran north toward the Western Gate and south toward the bend where the old wall met the newer stone of the Keep road. Every few hundred paces there was the stump of a tower, roofless and dark, with rusted bronze showing through the rubble at the top.
“The Fourth Lantern,” Sabine said, as they passed one. “Closed when I was seven. The Fifth closed when I was twelve. My grandmother went to every closing. She said somebody should be there when the light went out, so it wouldn’t go out alone.” She pushed the crowbar into a crack in the walkway and levered out a loose stone, then tossed it over the parapet into the woods. “They told her the dome was strong. The King was strong. One lantern was enough.”
“And she believed them?”
“She said, ‘One lantern is enough until the night it isn’t.’” Sabine looked out at the Bleeding Woods. The mist was rising between the trees, thicker than it had been at noon. “Then she died, and I was the one lantern.”
The wind came off the woods cold and damp, smelling of wet bark and something sour underneath, like stagnant water. Sabine shivered. She tried to hide it by turning up her collar.
Garrick shrugged out of his coat and held it out.
“No,” she said.
“You’re cold.”
“I’m always cold. It’s the stone. It takes the heat out of you.” She looked at the coat, then at him. “You’ll freeze.”
“I was born in the Wick in the middle of the cold season. My mother said I came out warm.” He kept holding the coat. “Take it, Keeper. Or I’ll put it on you, and you’ll hit me with that crowbar, and then I’ll have to explain to Wall Command how a woman half my size broke my nose.”
That time she did laugh. It came out of her short and surprised, as if she had forgotten how. She took the coat and pulled it around her shoulders. It hung to her knees. She held it closed at her throat with one hand, and he watched her breathe in without meaning to, the way people do when something is warm and smells of someone else.
“Sabine,” she said. “Not Keeper. If you’re going to eat my porridge and fix my ropes, you can use my name.”
“Sabine,” he said.
She looked at him for a moment too long. Then she turned away and walked on, and he followed, and neither of them said anything else until the tower door.
The first Stalker came an hour before midnight.
Garrick was on the stairs between the store room and the kitchen when he felt the tower shiver. It was not a sound. It was the stone itself, a deep tremor that came up through his boots. Above him, the hum of the lantern rose to a whine.
He took the stairs three at a time.
In the lantern room, Sabine was already at the cage with both hands on the rail. The crystal was blazing. Violet light poured out of the western window, and below it, on the face of the wall, something screamed.
Lucan came up behind Garrick with a crossbow he had found somewhere in the store room. Emrys was already there, pressed against the north window with his book held to his chest.
“How many?” Garrick said.
“Four,” Emrys said. “Four on the wall. More in the trees.”
Garrick looked out of the western window. In the light from the lantern, he saw them. Black plated shapes, each one the size of a horse, climbing the stone on long jointed legs. One was burning. As he watched, it peeled away and fell into the mist. Three still came. Tick-tick-tick. Their blades bit the old stone and pulled.
Behind him, Sabine made a small sound. It was barely a breath. It was the sound a person makes when they lift something too heavy.
Garrick turned.
Her face was white. Blood was running from her nose, over her lip, onto her chin. Her arms were shaking from shoulder to wrist. The light in the cage pulsed once, huge and bright.
Then it went out.
The lantern room dropped into darkness. The only light was the faint purple glow of the dome above, far away and thin as smoke. Sabine’s knees gave, and Garrick caught her before she hit the floor. She was cold all the way through, as cold as the bronze.
“Light it,” Lucan said. His voice cracked. “Sabine, light it again.”
“I can’t,” she whispered against Garrick’s chest. “There’s nothing left.”
Below the western window, in the dark, the clicking grew louder.
Garrick set her down gently against the cage. He stood. He drew his sword, and the long blade whispered out of its scabbard in the dark. He went to the window and looked down.
Three black shapes were climbing the wall. They were halfway up the tower. And they were not slowing down.
