At the bottom of the deepest ravine of White-Bone Ridge runs a road. The living cannot see it, cannot set foot on it. It is a reach of the nether road — the newly departed, loosed from their bodies, sight the lamplight, descend into the ravine, and walk it to the end, where there is a ferry-landing, and an escort, and only after that, rebirth.
I am the lamplighter of this reach.
The office is old. How old? My predecessor's predecessor took the post to the sound of the bells of high antiquity. A lamplighter does not ask a soul's history and does not weigh its good and evil — that is the magistrates' business. Our charge is one thing only: the lamps stay lit. Let one stretch go dark and souls will stray; and a strayed soul either frays away into the gloom-walls, or is picked up by things that should never touch one.
The lamplighter's oath is six words long: lamps lit, road whole, keeper present.
Before three hundred years ago, this road was a busy one. New souls came down every night — old ones, young ones, timid and stubborn — walking the line of my lamps. And at the road's end, every seventh day, the escort procession came to collect: white banners before, paper horses behind, the registrar-envoys checking the rolls name by name, and then leading them on. The procession's lanterns were a warm yellow. They softened the whole nether road.
On that night three hundred years ago, the procession did not come.
The first seventh-day, I assumed delay. Souls pooled at the landing; I trimmed the lamps brighter and soothed them to wait. The second seventh-day: nothing. The third… I will not hide it: that first year I went to the landing every night to watch, and in the end I cut a length from my own lamp-wick and raised an ever-burning lamp on the pier — so that if the procession came, they would know this side had never stopped keeping watch.
The procession never came again.
The souls never stopped coming down.
Do the arithmetic: new souls every night; a landing that only receives and never releases; three hundred years. The backlog at the end of my road now stretches for tens of li — a queue without a visible end. They do not riot. Souls on the nether road grow very quiet. They stand in line. They wait. Every seventh day the whole queue turns as one to look toward the landing — three hundred years of looking, worn into a habit.
One lamplighter cannot take over the escort's work. All I can do is widen my own: lamps now run from the road out to the landing, and from the landing back along the depth of the queue. I bring the long-waiting souls news of the world above — dialects little brother Mountain Wraith has mimicked, tidings the ferry raven carries. And at festival times I teach them to fold paper lanterns, until the whole ravine glows soft for tens of li: our own private lantern festival.
A soul once asked me: lamplighter, will the procession still come?
I said: it will. While the lamps burn, they can find the way.
I have said it for three hundred years. The first hundred, I believed it. The second hundred, I maintained it. This last hundred — I no longer dare not say it.
Why did the procession stop? What happened on the far shore of the landing? Is the wheel of rebirth full? Sealed? Or is it… also queuing? A lamp-trimmer has no one to ask. And the law of the nether road binds its lamplighter to the road — I lack even the standing to cross and look.
The medicine-basket boy fell into my ravine by accident, through the underworks of the Grudge-Bone Altar. A living foot on the nether road — the first in three hundred years. By law I should have returned him at once. But when I raised my lamp to his face, the queue of three hundred years stirred —
not in fear. It pressed forward. Tens of li of souls, rank upon rank, bowing toward him.
Souls see more than we keepers do. What they recognized, I cannot say. I know only that for the first time in three hundred years, something other than the landing was worth their bow.
When I guided the boy back to the sunlit world, I took down the ever-burning lamp from the pier and gave it into his hands.
Lamps lit, road whole. But this road, now, must be mended from the living end backward.
Boy — ask the west, on my behalf:
the soul-escort procession, three hundred years ago — what was the last order it received?