Sect Year 5 · eighth month · night of day 30 · the fiftieth life: the Glass Shelf, his thirty-eighth year
The Anchor’s lamp had been cut twice at the count, as Brisa had told him to cut it, and it had begun to smoke again since. It had to be cut once more before the last watch, and Brisa had said that Heddo was to do it himself. “Two cuts,” she had told him at dusk, “and then go as far as the lamp.” He hadn’t understood her then. He understood her now, with the knife in one hand and the lamp’s cold brass under his other palm, because the glass was clouding from the bottom up and the seeing was going soft at its edges.
The lamp sat low on a shelf of black stone at the foot of the frame, so that a watcher on the stool had to lean down to see the seeing properly. Heddo leaned. He turned the wick-winder with his thumb and took off the first charred edge with the point of the knife. The flame stood up clean and yellow, and then he took off the second edge, the thin grey crust that the first trim always left behind. The light went out through the pane in one long unbroken spread. The seeing came up through it, bright and close, as if someone had wiped a window from the inside.
