The Lamp Order Divides

POV: Josiah

The old uniform still smelled faintly of lamp-oil, and Josiah Pruitt had never been so afraid of a smell in his life.

He stood at the foot of the eastern steps of the Meridian Dome, in the thin weird light of the eclipse's first quarter, with his gloves on and his cap straight and a heavy green-clothed ledger under his arm. It was a quarter past eleven. The sun was a pale cut coin in the sky. Around him the white stone of the Dome rose, tier on tier, up to the great copper curve of the roof, and at the head of the stair, in a double rank, with their carbines grounded and their faces to the morning, stood forty men in blue.

He knew every one of them. He had drilled half. He had stood beside the rest at funerals.

Beside him, a pace behind, in the plain gray dress and apron of a Dome scullery maid, stood Roz. She did not speak. Her hand was on his sleeve. He could feel the thin warm pressure of her fingers through the cloth, and it was the only thing in the world that was keeping his knees from shaking.

"I will go first," he said, very low.

"I know."

"You are to keep close to the wall. If it comes to blows—"

"Josiah." Her voice was quiet. "I can hear your heart from here. It's like a drum. Walk."

He walked.

…

They had not yet seen him. That was the first mercy. The ranks stood fixed and facing, in the strange chill light, and at their head, on the topmost stair, with his hands behind his back and his gray temples shining, stood Colonel Ezekiel Hargrave.

Josiah had served under him eight years. He had worshipped him, in the plain, helpless way a boy worships a lighthouse. He knew the set of those wide shoulders. He knew the golden voice. He knew the deep calm peace that radiated from the man like heat from a stove, that made a room go quiet when he entered, that made a frightened conscript sleep.

That is the Lamp, he thought. He drinks it before dawn. Every day. He has for twenty years.

On a trestle table at the Colonel's side stood a copper urn, wreathed in steam, with a rack of small tin cups. A priest in a gray robe ladled something pale and golden. It was the Evening Lamp, a morning dose, he saw, double-strength, for the Rite. One by one the soldiers broke ranks, took their cups, and drank.

"Light is peace," said Hargrave, in his sunny voice.

"Light is peace," said the ranks.

Josiah climbed the first step.

His boots rang on the stone. At the sound, forty heads turned. He saw the recognition move through them, a ripple of widening eyes, a murmur, a hand on a rifle-sling. A man in the front rank said, "Pruitt," in a startled whisper, as one says the name of a ghost.

He climbed the second step. The third. He stopped, ten paces from the Colonel, in the open, in the full white light, and clicked his heels together, and saluted.

"Colonel."

"Lieutenant Pruitt." Hargrave's face did not change. The smile did not waver. "You are far from your post."

"I am, sir."

"I had understood that you were dead."

"I regret to say, sir, that I am not."

A faint laugh ran down the ranks, uneasy, like wind through grass.

"The posters," said Hargrave pleasantly, "call you a traitor. Ten thousand dollars. I confess I thought it a little steep." He tilted his head. "But I never believed it. I said to the Chairman, Pruitt is a sound man. He has merely taken ill. Have you come to be cured, Josiah?"

"No, sir."

"Ah."

"I have come to read."

…

He opened the ledger.

His hands did not shake. That surprised him. They were steady and dry as a clerk's, and he held the green-bound book open on his forearm as he'd once held the warrants, with the spine against his elbow, and cleared his throat.

"This is the book of Orphan Tithes, Quarter Four," said Josiah. His voice carried. It had been trained to. "It was kept in the Archive beneath this Dome by the Council of Merrick Bay. It records the names of seven hundred and twelve children, aged five to fourteen. It records the date of each Tithe, the name of the officer who served the warrant, and what was taken."

"Lieutenant—"

"Entry one." He did not raise his voice. "Margaret Doyle. Aged six. Taken from Mercer Lane, third of March, eighteen eighty-eight. The memory of her mother's name. Served by Lieutenant J. Pruitt."

A silence fell across the steps.

"Entry two. Thomas Wicks, nine. Taken from the Sugar Exchange. The memory of his father's face. Served by Lieutenant J. Pruitt. Entry three."

"That's enough," said Hargrave.

"Entry three. Anne-Marie Lenoir, seven." His throat closed. He forced it open. "The memory of a song. Served by Lieutenant J. Pruitt."

"Enough."

"I served forty-one of them," said Josiah. "I have read every one. I signed my name to them, in my own hand, and drank a cup of that, afterwards"—he nodded at the urn—"and slept like a child. That is what I came to tell you. I slept."

He looked down the ranks.

They were staring at him. All of them, forty faces in a double row, pale as milk in the gray light. The expressions were blank and mild, pools of dead water. But here and there, he saw, a ripple moved on the surface. A twitch at a lip. A pair of eyes that had gone dark.

"Evening Lamp is not a medicine," said Josiah. "It is a Tithe. A small one. It takes from you a little every night, the part that doubts. The part that remembers what it cost. I did not know it until three weeks ago. I had been drinking it eight years. I would not have believed it, if I had been told." He closed the ledger. "I do not ask you to believe it now. I ask you to do a very small thing. I ask you to put down your cup."

Nobody moved.

…

It was Dray who broke the silence.

He stood in the second rank, on the left, a thick-set, hard-faced figure with eyes like wet slate. He held a tin cup in his right hand, full to the brim. A thread of steam rose from it. He had been holding it for a minute and a half without drinking. His face betrayed nothing at all.

He stepped out of line.

The ranks stirred. A sergeant said, "Captain—" in a low warning voice. Dray did not look round. He walked, four slow paces, across the open stone, until he stood in front of the trestle table. The priest in the gray robe stared at him with his ladle in the air.

Dray turned the cup upside down.

It poured. A bright pale gold stream spilled over the lip and spattered on the white flagstones, and ran in a small shining rivulet between the cracks. The smell rose, sweet and heavy, like warm honey and burnt sugar. He held the cup out at arm's length until the last drop fell. Then he set it, quite gently, on the stone at his feet.

"I find," he said, in a clear parade-ground voice, "that I'm not thirsty."

It was a very small sound. A tin cup on the flags. But it rang like a bell in the cold air.

Another man stepped out of the rank.

He was a young one, a corporal with a pockmarked face and a nervous tic. He had drunk his, already. He stood there, swaying slightly, with his empty cup in his hand, and Josiah saw his lips move. Then, awkwardly, he knelt, and ran his finger through the spilled gold, and wiped it on the stone.

"I had a sister," he said hoarsely, to nobody. "Hadn't I? I'd a sister."

A third man followed. A fourth. A gray-bearded private with trembling hands poured his cup into the gutter. A boy of nineteen pitched his over his shoulder, and ran, and was sick behind a pillar. They came out of the ranks in ones and twos, then in knots. The gold ran in streams. The tin cups rang on the paving like a hail of coin. In a minute it had become a rout, a slow, silent, shaken tide of men breaking from the line to stand behind Dray. Josiah counted them without meaning to. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty.

Twenty-one, of the forty.

The other nineteen stood where they were.

…

"Seize him," said Colonel Hargrave.

He had not raised his voice. He did not need to. It was the same warm, sunny, reasonable voice, and it fell on the stair like a command from heaven. The loyal half stiffened as one. Rifles came up. Bayonets clicked into place. Nineteen muzzles swung to bear, and across ten paces of open stone, twenty-one answering rifles came up to meet them.

Nobody fired.

For one long breath the two halves of the Lamp Order faced each other on the steps of the Meridian Dome, with their breath smoking in the strange chill, and the black bite widening on the sun above. Josiah could hear his pulse. He could hear a bird, very far away. He could hear the creak of leather as a young man's finger tightened on a trigger.

Rule three, he thought. Please.

"Gentlemen," said Dray.

He did not raise his rifle. He stood between the two ranks with his hands open at his sides and his heavy face quite calm. "We have all done things we're not proud of. We are going to do one more. We are going to stand here. All of us. For the next fifty minutes. And nobody is going to fire a shot."

"Captain Dray," said the Colonel. "You are relieved."

"Yes, sir. I expect I am."

"I shall have you broken."

"I'd count it an honor, sir." Dray smiled thinly. "But I don't think you'll be wanting to start a battle on the Dome steps in front of five thousand citizens. Not an hour before your great Rite."

A long silence.

Josiah saw the Colonel's face for the first time clearly. It was still smiling. But the smile had gone fixed, like paint on a mask, and in the eyes behind it he saw something he had never seen there in eight years. A small, cold, bewildered flicker, like a man who has reached for a stair and found it missing.

He does not know what to do, thought Josiah. No one has ever disobeyed him.

"Lieutenant," said Dray, without turning his head. "The service door is on your left. I'd go now."

…

They went.

It was a narrow door of iron-bound oak at the side of the east stair, set low in the wall beneath a stone gargoyle. Roz was through it first. Josiah caught one last glimpse of the steps behind him, the two ranks facing across the stone, the glittering stream of spilt gold, the Colonel's still bright smile. Then the door shut. The light cut off. He heard his own boots ring in the dark.

They climbed.

The stair was a spiral of worn stone, no wider than a man's shoulders, lit by a slit window every ten turns. The air was cold and smelled of old mortar. Their steps echoed up and down the shaft. Roz went ahead, holding her skirt up with one hand and trailing the other along the wall. He heard her breathing. He heard her heart. It was going hard and fast and steady.

On the fifth landing she stopped, and turned, and put her hand flat on his chest.

"Don't die," she said.

"I do not intend to."

"I'm serious."

"So am I. I intend," said Josiah, "to be extremely inconvenient."

She laughed. It was a short, startled, broken sound. In the dim light from the slit window he saw her eyes shine, and her face, tired and fierce and beautiful, tilted up to his.

"You are the stiffest man in the state of Maine," said Roz.

"I am from Connecticut."

"I don't care."

"I should like—" He stopped. He began again, with difficulty. "Roz. If I do not—I should like you to know. That whatever comes, I would not have chosen any other—"

"Oh, be quiet," said Roz, and kissed him.

It was not graceful. His cap fell off. Her nose bumped his cheekbone, and his arm went round her at the wrong angle, and for a second neither of them seemed to know where to put their hands. But then she made a small soft sound against his mouth, and something in him that had been clenched for twenty-seven years opened like a fist.

He kissed her back.

He had never done so in his life. He had no practice at it. He did it with the same grave, thorough, heart-stopping attention he gave to everything, and she melted against him and laughed into his collar, and the whole narrow dark stairwell seemed full of light.

When they drew apart, he found that his hands were trembling.

"Well," said Roz, breathless.

"Yes."

"That was a bad kiss."

"I am aware."

"We'll practice."

"Yes," said Josiah. "I should like that very much."

…

The choir loft was a long curved gallery under the dome, hung with blue velvet, and empty.

He had expected an organ. There was one, a vast silver-piped affair at the far end, but nobody sat at it. A row of high-backed chairs stood against the rail. A music stand. A brass lamp. And over the edge of the balustrade, forty feet below, the whole great hall of the Dome opened like an enormous white flower.

He stood at the rail.

They were all there. He could see them from above, in tier on tier of gilt chairs, in a ring round a circle of black stone. The Houses of Merrick Bay in their silks and diamonds. Black-clad Council clerks. Priests of the Lamp. A thousand upturned faces, wearing smoked glasses, looking at the dark sky in the oculus. A column of cold white daylight fell through the roof, and struck the dais at the center, and in the middle of the light two men stood facing each other.

One was tall and silver-haired, in black. One was young and lame, in a coat too small for him, with a cane.

Dex, thought Josiah.

He saw the boy's head bow. He saw Whitcomb's hand come out, and touch his sleeve. He thought: he is so very small.

Above them the sun was half gone.

The light was strange. It was cold and flat and metallic, with no warmth in it, and it made all the colors in the hall go gray. The faces below were the faces of the dead. The shadows of the pillars lay long and black on the marble. Somewhere high in the dome a pigeon fluttered and cooed in confusion, and was still.

Roz had come up beside him. She leaned her palm against the rail, with her eyes half-shut. He felt her listening.

"Three hundred and twelve," she murmured. "Three hundred and twelve hearts. Fast." Her brow creased. "Whitcomb's is steady. Always steady." A pause. "Dex's is slow. He's counting."

"Is it holding?"

"It's holding."

He nodded. He let his eyes travel round the great curve of the hall, over the pale gallery, from pillar to pillar, as he had been trained, looking for the shape of a threat. A footman by the door. A priest. A cluster of Councillors, tense and white. The brass mirrors, standing like sentinels round the dais. The dim cavernous gallery on the opposite side of the Dome, with its blue curtain and its rail.

There was a man in it.

He was standing very still, in the deepest shadow of the far loft. At first Josiah took him for a curtain. Then the light shifted, and he saw the edge of a gray coat, the glint of a lens, the thin dark line of a barrel resting on the balustrade.

It was not Lamp Order. No blue. No brass. He wore a plain black frock coat, like a lawyer's, and a flat-crowned hat, and his face was a smooth white blur. He held a long-barreled rifle, a sporting piece, a sniper's gun, with a telescopic sight. It was not pointed at the dais.

It was pointed across the hall.

Josiah's blood went cold.

A hired man. Meridian Trust. He knew the type. He had trained a dozen. Whitcomb would not rely on the Order alone; he would want a second line, a private one, a man who answered to nobody. A man whose single duty was to see that, whatever happened on the stage, a certain thing was finished.

He knew how they were taught to choose a target.

He felt his mouth go dry. He remembered a drill-yard, a gray sergeant with a long moustache, and a voice that he had thought he'd forgotten.

When there are many, lad, you do not shoot the dangerous one. You shoot the loudest.

The one whose pulse a man might hear across a room.

The biggest heart.

He turned his head, very slowly, and looked at the woman at his side, with her eyes closed and her palm on the rail, listening to three hundred and twelve hearts.

The biggest heart in the choir loft was hers.