The Last Lamp

POV: Josiah

The flash burned through the Dome like a blow, and in the white silence after it Josiah Pruitt did the only thing a trained man can do. He counted exits.

The service door. The stair. Seventeen steps to the landing. Then the long turn.

He had one arm round Roz's shoulders and the other flung up over both their faces. His eyes were shut. Through the lids the world was a red furnace. Below the choir loft someone was screaming without words, and a rank of blinded men in blue had begun to stumble into the chairs, and the great pipes of the organ, shaken by the Heart, hummed on one long falling note like a ship's horn.

"Roz," he said. "Can you walk?"

"I can walk."

"We must go. The loft is exposed. Whoever is on the far gallery has had a clear line to this rail for six minutes, and I do not think the flash has troubled him." He drew a breath. "He wore a hat with a brim. He will have had his eyes lowered."

"I know," said Roz. "I could hear him lower them."

She was gray in the face. Tears had cut two clean tracks through the soot on her cheeks. She had been listening for six minutes to a rifle, and a man, and a heart that beat at fifty-two, and he knew it had cost her. But she got up. She took his hand. Her grip was dry and steady.

Brave, he thought. She is the bravest woman I have ever met.

They ran for the stair.

…

It was twelve paces from the rail to the door.

Afterward he would go over it, again and again, with the dreadful clarity of a man replaying a drill. He would see it in slow motion. Twelve paces, along the curve of the gallery, past the silver pipes of the organ, past a music stand and an overturned chair. Dim blue light. Dust. The faint shifting grayness of the smoke rolling up from below. He had her by the left hand. He was a pace ahead, with his body turned a little to cover her side.

He heard the shot.

He did not hear it, in fact. A shot you hear is a shot that has missed. What he knew was a change in the world: a tiny shift in the pressure of the air, a half-heard hiss, a sense like a hand laid between his shoulder-blades. And a sound from the far side of the Dome, flat and dry and unremarkable, like a man cracking a plank over his knee.

He did not decide.

That was the thing he would remember, if he remembered anything. He did not think I will save her. He had no thought at all. There was only a body that had been trained for twenty-seven years to put itself between a thing and a person, and a stretch of space exactly one man wide.

He stepped sideways and put himself in it.

…

It struck him in the chest, a hand's breadth left of the breastbone.

It was not like being hit. It was like being taken. The world's whole weight came into one point under his ribs and stayed there. His boots left the floor. For one long, silent, extraordinary moment he seemed to hang in the air, with the dim blue gallery spread out around him, and the faces of the organ pipes, and Roz's hand dragging out of his. Then the floor came up to meet him. The back of his head struck the carpet. He lay looking at the ceiling.

It was a very high ceiling. It was painted blue and gold, with stars.

How curious, thought Josiah. I did not notice that before.

There was a roaring in his ears. Somewhere beyond the roar, as if from the bottom of a well, a small flat crack sounded from the opposite side of the hall. It was not the first shot. This was lower, and heavier, and followed by a long ugly clatter, as of a man falling a great way down a flight of stairs.

Hollis, he thought, quite clearly. Good man.

Then Roz's face came into the sky.

…

"No," said Roz.

She was on her knees beside him, on the carpet. Her hands were on his chest, pressing. They were wet. He saw her face over him, upside down, very close, white and enormous, framed in a tangle of dark hair, with her eyes blazing. She was saying something. He could not hear all of it. Stay. Stay with me. Don't you dare. Josiah. Look at me.

"I am looking," he said.

It came out as a whisper. His mouth tasted of copper.

"Good," said Roz. "Keep looking."

She bent over him. She put her ear to his chest, on the right side, away from the wound, and shut her eyes. He felt her go quiet. He knew that stillness now. He'd seen it in the cellar and in the nave: the intent, withdrawn, listening look of a woman gone down into a deep place to find a thing.

"It's the artery," she said. Her voice was thin and flat and steady. "It's torn. I can feel it. It's going out of you faster than I can—" She stopped. "I can slow it. I can slow your heart to ten a minute. Maybe less. I can hold you. I can hold you long enough for—"

"For what?"

"For somebody. For anybody. For a surgeon. Ma Tilly. Someone."

"There is no one."

"There's always someone."

"Roz."

He lifted his hand. It took a great effort. It seemed to weigh a hundred pounds, and when it finally came off the floor he saw that it was shaking. He put it over hers. Her fingers were small and cold and slick.

"Do not waste your Gift on me," said Josiah.

…

"No."

"You said you would decide."

"I am deciding." Her voice cracked. "I'm deciding to keep you."

"At what cost?"

She did not answer.

"I can hear it, you know," he said. "I have learned how. When you are about to pay, your heart gets very quiet." He smiled, with difficulty. "What would it take? The next thing? Your mother's song? The voice of the girl you used to be?"

"I don't care."

"I do."

"Josiah—"

"You told me, in the cellar, that you were angrier than your mother." The words came slowly. He had to take a breath between each. "I thought it was the most hopeful thing I had ever heard. A woman who is angry will not lie down. A woman who is angry will go on. And there is so much, Roz. There are so many children. They will need an angry woman who can hear." His fingers closed on hers. "I would rather be a thing you remember than a thing you spent."

Her face crumpled.

"That's not fair."

"No."

"That's the most unfair thing anyone has ever said to me."

"I know," said Josiah. "I am sorry. I have always been a stiff man. It is my only talent."

She laughed. It was a horrible, helpless, broken sound, half a sob. Tears fell on his face. He felt them, hot and salt. He wished very much that he could lift his hand and wipe them away.

"Roz," he said. "Remember me as a man who chose."

"You're not—"

"Not as the one who served the warrants. Not as the one who drank the lamp. As a man who stood in a doorway, once, and chose." He drew a long, slow, rattling breath. "It was very late. But I did. That is all I want."

For a long time she did not speak.

Then, very slowly, she took her hand out from under his, and laid her palm flat against his cheek.

"I'll remember," said Roz.

…

Boots were pounding on the service stair.

He heard them as from a great distance, a rush and clatter, and a rough hoarse voice shouting his name. Pruitt! Lieutenant Pruitt! The door crashed open. A heavy shape knelt on the carpet at his other side, with a smell of leather and gun-oil and spilt lamp-spirit. He rolled his eyes with an effort and saw a broad face, flat and gray and set, with eyes like wet slate.

"Dray," said Josiah.

"Sir."

"I am no longer your superior."

"No, sir," said Dray. "That's why I'm saying it." His jaw worked. "Christ, Josiah. Christ."

"You held the gate."

"Aye."

"Thank you."

"Don't." The Captain's big scarred hand came down on his shoulder and gripped it, hard. Behind him, in the doorway, a dozen men in blue stood with their caps in their hands, blinking and gray-faced, as men blink who have been woken from a long sleep. "Don't thank me. We held it because you read the book. Do you hear? We held it."

"Good," said Josiah.

He found he was very tired.

…

The light was changing.

He lay on his back on the carpet of the choir loft with the heads of the people he loved bent over him like trees, and he looked up past them at the blue and gold ceiling, and the light was moving on it. It was thin and clear and yellow. It was coming through the oculus in a slow descending shaft, sliding down the wall, pouring itself over the carved rail, over the silver pipes, over the dark carpet, over his hand.

The sun, he thought.

It is coming back.

He was not afraid. That was the astonishing thing. He had expected to be. He had imagined it often, in the cell at the Palisade, in the long nights without the lamp. He had pictured a cold black door and a terrible silence on the other side. He had thought that when the time came, he would pray, and that the prayers would taste of ash.

He tried to say the old words.

Light is peace, he began, in his head. It came without effort, in the familiar sunny cadence, in the voice of a man he had trusted. Darkness is doubt. And what do we do with doubt?

We set it down.

He turned the phrase over, for a moment, in the failing light.

It was not true. He knew that now. He had learned it, in a cellar, in a church, in the green dusk of a stairwell with a woman's hand in his. Doubt was not a weight to be set down. It was a lamp. It was the only one he had ever really owned. It had burned in him through all those years in the dark, small and stubborn and unregarded, while the great gold lamp of the Order shone over his head and told him he was safe.

I was never in the light, thought Josiah. I was only asleep. And I woke.

He framed the words again, slowly, changing them one by one, as a man mends a coat.

Dark is only dark.

And I have loved it, being awake.

May the dark be kind.

…

He saw the children, then.

They came one at a time. Not the faces: he had never seen the faces. He had seen only names, in a clerk's neat hand, on green-ruled paper. Margaret Doyle, six. Thomas Wicks, nine. Anne-Marie Lenoir, seven. Seven hundred and twelve of them, in long columns, looking at him with the patient eyes of the very young. He had signed them away. And now, through the great roaring rain of silver that still fell from the roof of the Dome, they were going home.

Go on, he thought. Go on. I'm sorry. Go home.

They went by him in a stream, like leaves.

He felt a hand on his hair. It was Roz's. He felt her fingers moving, slowly, back from his forehead. He felt her breath on his cheek. She was saying something, over and over. It was low and unsteady and he thought it was his name.

He listened for it.

He could not hear it. But he could hear something else. It was a small steady sound, very near, going on and on in the dark like a clock in a quiet room. It was not his own heart. His had grown faint and slow and distant, a muffled tap, tap, tap, behind a thick door. It was a stronger, brighter, quicker pulse. It was a heart that beat, not for itself, but in time with another.

Hers, thought Josiah.

It was the loveliest thing he had ever heard.

Tap, said his own heart, softly. Tap.

Tap.

Roz bent her head and laid her ear against his chest, over the place where the wound was, over the last faint flutter beneath the bone. She shut her eyes. He felt the warmth of her hair against his throat, and the weight of her cheek, and the quiet in her like a held breath.

Tap.

The sunlight had reached his face. It lay warm upon his closed eyelids, a long soft gold, like a hand. He had never felt it so. He had spent twenty-seven years in its shadow, and he had never once, he thought, simply lain still, and let it fall on him.

Tap.

He did not need to pray for it.

It was only there.

…

Roz did not cry out.

She had thought she would. She had thought, in some distant corner of herself, that when the moment came she would scream, or break something, or fall to pieces on the carpet like the women in the penny novels. She did none of these things. She stayed where she was, with her ear against his breast, and listened, as she had listened at ten thousand bedsides, to the last of it.

She heard his heart falter.

She heard it check. Catch. Go on, one beat, two, three, with a long pause between each. She heard the gap widen. She heard a final soft tap, no more than a knuckle on a door.

Then she heard nothing.

She stayed where she was.

She did not move for a long time. Dray, kneeling on the other side, with his big hands hanging between his knees, looked away. The men in the doorway bowed their heads, one by one, and took off their caps. Far below, the Heart went on beating its slow gold beat, and the silver rain fell, and the light from the oculus lay across the carpet in a clean warm bar.

He was lying in the middle of it, with his eyes shut and his face turned a little to one side, as if listening for something. He looked, she thought, extraordinarily peaceful. The long hard line between his brows had smoothed out. The scar down his cheek stood out white against the skin. His mouth was just curved at one corner.

He looked like a man who had been given, at last, something he did not have to earn.

The sun lay on his face.

It was the first light he had ever had that he had not needed to pray for.