Sect Year 5 · eighth month · night of day 30 · the fiftieth life: the Glass Shelf, his thirty-eighth year
The note of the bell was still in the glass when Heddo reached the frame. He stood with the knife in his hand and did not kneel to the lamp. The brass slip above it had gone green along one edge, and the frame was dark-wooded and old, with the brass worn bright where a great many fingers had rested on it. He didn’t touch it. He had been told that the count did not begin here.
“Wait,” said Brisa. She had stayed at the head of the walk all along, with the lamp-book under her arm and the chalk in her fist. Her voice carried down the glass without effort, the way it had carried all night. “It begins at the stair. It always has. The names go down the wall in order, or the lamps don’t know which one is theirs. Come back and bring the knife.”
The chalk strokes on the sills went by them one after another in the dark, small and white, each one a place where a name had already been said. At the head of the wall Brisa opened the lamp-book on the rail beside the first pane. She had kept the names in it for forty years, in a hand that leaned forward as if it were walking into a wind. She didn’t need to look at the page to know…
