The Woman at Lamp Forty-One

Wick did not turn round straight away. She had time to notice several things about herself: that she was not surprised, that she was not frightened, and that both of those facts were themselves frightening in a way she would deal with later. Then she turned round.

Sera Ilm was sitting on the rock shelf above the lamp with her boots hanging over the edge, exactly as she had used to sit on the guildhouse wall, and she looked no older and no younger and not remotely dead. She was wearing the coat she had been lost in — Wick recognised the mend at the elbow, because she had made it, badly, at fifteen, and had been mocked for it for a fortnight.

"You've got taller," said Sera. "Not much. Enough that I noticed." "You've been gone five years." "Yes." "Everyone thinks you're dead." "Yes," Sera agreed. "I've thought so myself a few times. It comes and goes." She swung down off the shelf and landed neatly and did not make any sound doing it, and Wick's whole body reported this to her at once.

"You lit the lamp." "I light all of them, eventually. That one first, because of the crack — you can see it from the shelf, and I like to be able to see one from where I sleep." Sera tilted her head. "You trimmed it the way I taught you. I watched you do the eleven behind us. You take too long over the corners." "You watched us." "I watch everyone. It is most of what there is to do."

Wick found that she had sat down on the road, which was cold and wet and a stupid place to sit. "Merrow says the road takes a lamplighter." "Merrow says a great many careful things," said Sera, and sat down opposite her, close enough that the lamp lit half her face and left the other half out of it. "The road does not take anybody. The road has never taken anybody. The road cannot take anybody, Wick. It is a road."

"Then what happened to you?" "I was asked," Sera said, "and I said yes, and I have been up here five years finding out exactly how much of the question I had failed to understand." She looked up the pass, north, towards the Falls. "There is a thing at the top of the Ladder that has been keeping this pass open for two hundred years, and it is very old and very tired and it cannot do it alone, and every so often it asks."

"Asks for what?" "Company," said Sera. "That is the whole of it, and it took me four years to believe it, because it seemed such a small and stupid reason to lose a life over. It wants somebody to be up here with it. And every lamplighter it has ever asked has said yes, because we are the sort of people who say yes to a thing that keeps a road open. That is what the ledger is really a list of."

The stove-warm smell of the lamp sat between them. Wick found that she believed all of it immediately and completely, and distrusted herself for that, and could not locate the place where she would have to push in order to disbelieve any of it.

"Show me," she said. "No." "Sera—" "No, and I will tell you exactly why, and then you can be angry about it in an informed way." Sera leaned forward with her forearms on her knees. "If you go up the Ladder tonight it will ask you. Not because it wants you specifically — it does not know you from a post — but because you are here, and it is lonely, and loneliness is not a careful thing. And you are twenty and you say yes to everything."

"I do not say yes to everything." "You are sitting on a frozen road at four in the morning four miles ahead of your crew because a lamp was lit," said Sera. "I said yes at thirty-one and I had thought I was a cautious woman." She sat back. "Here is what I want instead. I want you to go down to the hut before it is light. I want you to tell Merrow that you saw me, in those words, and watch what his face does."

"He'll think I dreamed it." "He will not." Sera's voice changed on that, and for the first time she sounded tired rather than amused. "Merrow has known for forty years that we are not dead. He has known since he was thirty-two, when Halden Vey lit lamp six and told him the same thing I am telling you. He wrote lost in the book because there is no word in the book for what we actually are, and because writing the true thing would mean the guild would have to decide something."

Wick thought about the man in the chair at two in the morning, checking a page he knew by heart to see whether it had changed. "Decide what?" "Whether to keep feeding it one of us at a time, quietly, for ever," said Sera, "or to do the other thing." "What's the other thing?" "I don't know. That is why I have not asked him to decide. I have had five years to think of the other thing and I have not thought of it, and I am not clever in that way. You might be. You are the first one in three seasons who came up the road alone."

Something moved in Wick's chest that was not fear and was not the settling she got from a lit wick, but was related to both. "You've been waiting for someone to come and look." "I have been lighting a lamp with a crack in it thirty-eight miles from anywhere," said Sera, "every autumn for five years, in the one place on the road where a person coming up sees it before they see anything else. Yes. I have been waiting for someone to come and look."

"You could have come down." "No," said Sera, and did not elaborate, and Wick understood that this was the first thing in the entire conversation that she was not going to be told, and filed it where she filed such things, which was not very deep.

She went down. It took less time than coming up had, because she was not being careful about noise any more and because going downhill on frost is largely a matter of controlled falling. The sky ahead of her over the Veiro side had begun to think about grey. Behind her lamp forty-one burned steadily, and she did not look back at it, and she was aware of not looking back at it the entire way.

Merrow was awake. Of course he was awake — he was in the chair with the stove seam red and the ledger shut on his knee, and he had his boots on, and Wick understood that he had been sitting like that since he had found her bunk empty, waiting to find out which kind of morning this was going to be.

She stood in the doorway with the cold coming in around her. "I saw Sera Ilm," she said. "At lamp forty-one. Sitting on the rock shelf with her boots over the edge, in the coat I mended, with the elbow I did badly. She said you sleep badly in autumn." She had meant to stop there. "She said you've known for forty years."

Merrow closed his eyes. He did not look surprised, and he did not look caught out; he looked, more than anything, like a man setting down an eleven-pound can he had been carrying up a stair for a very long time and finding out what his shoulder felt like without it.

"Thirty-eight," he said. "Not forty. Halden Vey, lamp six, the year I turned thirty-two." He opened his eyes. "Shut the door, you are letting the whole hut out." She shut the door. In the near bunk Bel had stopped snoring, which meant Bel had been awake for some time, and across the room Ori had sat up without a sound, and neither of them said anything at all.

"I want to be clear about one thing before the two of you decide I am a monster," Merrow said, to the room. "Every person in that book went up of their own will and knowing. Not one was taken. I have never lied about that, because nobody has ever asked me the question in a form where the truth would fit." "That's a coward's distinction," said Bel, from the dark. "Yes," said Merrow. "It is. I have had thirty-eight years to find a better one and I have not."

Wick was still standing by the door with the frost melting off her shoulders. "She said there's a thing at the top of the Ladder that keeps the pass open, and it's tired, and it asks for company. She said it doesn't take anyone. She said nobody's ever said no." She looked at Merrow. "Has anybody ever asked it what happens if we all say no?"

The stove ticked. Outside, the wind found the bad corner. "No," said Merrow, after a while, in a voice she had not heard from him before. "In two hundred years, so far as that book goes, nobody has ever asked it anything at all."

They walked out at first light, all four of them, and nobody suggested going down. Bel took the can without being asked and did not make a joke about it, which frightened Wick more than anything that had happened at lamp forty-one. Ori carried the ladder and kept looking up the pass, at the long grey stair of switchbacks going up into cloud.

Lamp forty-one was still burning when they reached it in the middle of the morning. The frost had gone off the road by then and taken the prints with it, and Wick found that she minded this a great deal, and had to stand with her hands on the post for a moment before she could speak.

Merrow looked at the lamp a long time. Then he did something Wick had never seen him do in three seasons: he set his own hand on the ladder, climbed it, opened the glass, and looked at the wick. He came down slowly. "That is Sera's cut," he said. "She takes too much off the near corner. I told her about it for eleven years." He wiped his hands on his coat. "Right."

"Right what?" said Bel. "Right, we finish the road." He shouldered his pack. "Forty-one is lit. There are none to light before the Ladder. We walk up, we light the six on the top stage, we go down into the Falls, we take the salt money, and we come back this way in eight days." He looked at each of them in turn. "And on the way back, at the top, I am going to ask it a question. Alone."

"No," said Wick, and was surprised by how flatly it came out. "Not alone." "I am sixty-one," said Merrow, "and I have kept that book for thirty-eight years, and if it asks, it should ask the man who has been letting it." "That is not a reason, that is a punishment," said Ori, from behind the ladder. "You are arranging to be the one it takes because you think you have earned it. That is not the same as being the right person to go."

Bel set the oil-can down in the road with a bang that came back off the shoulder. "I have listened to the three of you for two days," she said, "and every one of you keeps saying alone like it is the brave word. Sera went alone. Halden went alone. Two hundred years of people going up alone, and it has not once worked, and here we are on a road that lights itself, wondering what to try next."

Nobody answered her. The wind came over the shoulder and the lamp burned steadily through it, and after a while Merrow picked up his pack again, and they went on up towards the Ladder together, in the order they always walked in, which was not alone at all.