Sect Year 5 · eighth month · night of day 30 · the fiftieth life: the Glass Shelf, his thirty-eighth year
The watchers went down the shelf road in ones and twos after the count, carrying their empty purses and their lamps turned low. Above the cliffs the high country showed its pale edge against a sky with no moon in it. The wind that came off them was thin and dry, the kind that finds the gap at the collar and stays there. Heddo stood at the top of the stair and watched the watchers go until the last light dropped below the cliff. None of them looked back at the glass. Brisa had told him that they never did. The ones who looked back, she said, were the ones who came up again the next season, and the glass had no need of more of them.
He had the trimming knife in his belt and the empty tin of wicks under his arm. He meant to take them down to the oil-store at the foot of the stair. There, the lamp-house kept its jars behind a door that never quite shut. He had gone three steps down when Dimmo Ross came up past him, two at a time, with a lantern held high in one hand and the tally under the other arm. Behind him, on the wet black steps, came a man in a dark coat.
