The Lanternkeepers

In the hill-city of Wickerhold, the night was not simply dark. It was hungry.

Everyone knew this. Babies knew it before they could talk, the way they knew that milk was warm and that stairs were for falling down. When the sun went down behind the Brassback Mountains, a grey fog rose out of the valleys below the city. It crept up the cobbled streets like a cat hunting a mouse. It slid under doors. It curled around chimneys. The old people called it the Long Dark, and they said that anything it touched for too long simply forgot how to be.

That was why Wickerhold had lanterns.

Thousands of them. They hung from every corner and every bridge, from shop signs and window boxes and the bells of the Clockspire, the tallest tower in the city. Each lantern held a little captured piece of daylight, as gold as honey, and wherever that light fell, the Long Dark could not go.

Pim Farrow was eleven years old, small for her age, and the newest apprentice of the Lanternkeepers' Guild. She was also, as far as she could tell, the worst.

"You've spilled sunwax on the Master's boots again," said Odessa Quill, not looking up from her maps.

Pim looked down. There was a golden splash across two very expensive, very polished boots, which were attached to two very long legs, which were attached to Master Oyelaran, head of the Guild, who was frowning at her from beneath a hat shaped like an upside-down bucket.

"Sorry, Master," Pim said. "The ladle slipped."

"The ladle," said Master Oyelaran, "has slipped eleven times this week." But the corner of his mouth twitched, which meant he was not truly angry. The Master was never truly angry. He had the kind of face that looked stern for a moment and then gave up.

The Guild Hall was Pim's favourite place in the whole world. It was a huge round room at the bottom of the Clockspire, full of shelves that went up and up until they vanished into shadow. The shelves held lanterns of every kind: brass ones and glass ones, lanterns shaped like birds and fish and teapots, tiny lanterns small enough to wear as rings, and one enormous lantern in a cage that was said to have lit the city for a hundred years before it was retired.

Every morning the apprentices climbed ladders to polish them. Every afternoon they melted sunwax, which was how daylight was caught and kept. And every evening, just before sunset, they walked the streets of Wickerhold in their grey coats with their long brass poles, checking that every single lantern was burning bright.

Pim loved it. She loved the smell of hot wax and the clink of the poles and the way the city glowed like a jewel box once the lamps were lit. She even loved the evenings when the fog pressed right up against the edge of the light, grey and patient, and she could hear it breathing.

She did not love being the worst.

"Don't worry," Odessa said kindly, once the Master had gone to find a cloth. "Everyone's clumsy in their first year. I was."

"You were not."

"I was very clumsy," Odessa said. "I just did it neatly."

Odessa was twelve, the daughter of the city's mapmaker, and she drew maps the way other people breathed. She had drawn a map of the Guild Hall, a map of every lantern on Cinder Lane, and a map of the freckles on Pim's left arm, which she said looked like the Southern Isles. She wore her pencils in her hair like a crown.

"Pim," she said now, very quietly. "Look at the big lantern."

Pim looked.

The enormous old lantern in its cage — the one that had lit the city for a hundred years — was flickering.

It had not flickered in living memory. It was retired. It was supposed to be only a keepsake, a thing for visitors to point at. But as Pim watched, its gold light stuttered like a candle in a draft. Once. Twice.

And then it went out.