Sect Year 5 · eighth month · night of day 30 · the fiftieth life: the Glass Shelf, his thirty-eighth year
Three months went into the stone before the turn came. Days on the shelf measured themselves not by the sun, which never reached the black floor, but by the slow breathing of the glass. The lamps brought up in copper trays at dusk, the wicks trimmed and spitting, the dark panes heating until the oil smoke thinned and the frames hummed in their sockets. By the third hour of each night the room was heavy with animal fat and soot. By the seventh the glass cooled and heat-softened in the draft from the sea slit, its black surface hardening into cold mirror while salt mist silvered the stone. Lin sat through those ninety nights on the watcher’s bench, his left hand stiff in his lap. He watched the Anchor’s lamp burn steady under Ardon’s pane while Pei rubbed soot from the chimneys with a wool rag and kept the animal fat tallies. He had lost the cat’s name to the void, and each night the blank place where the name had been felt like a missing tooth, but the glass asked only for eyes and not for remembering. When the eighth month reached its last night and the wick under the Anchor began to gutter, Lin lay down on the cot in the black room, calm and willing.
