Chapter 1
The Lamp
The comet had been dark for four hundred thousand years before anyone cut a window in it. The Keeper says they did the cutting. The Keeper says a great many things and keeps very few of them, but the window is real: a rectangle of warm light on the wrong side of the sun, where nothing is supposed to be lit at all.
Inside there is a bar, a long one, cut from the same black ice as the walls. Behind it stands Meniscus, a column of dark liquid that has learned to hold still and be addressed. Beside the door sits Hollow Metre, three hands moving over a deck of black glass. Hollow Metre plays the rests. The notes are only there so the rests have something to lean on. On the high ledge the Registrar, a moth in a waistcoat, unrolls the ledger and clears a throat that moths do not have.
The lamp hangs over all of it. It is a small thing: a flame the size of a thumbnail in a glass the size of a fist, hung from a chain that goes up into the dark and does not seem to end. Under it, where the flame meets a hanging shard of prism glass, the light breaks into six colors and falls across the bar in a fan. Nothing else in the room has any color. The glasses are clear. The walls are the color of a closed eye. Only the fan is allowed to be red or gold or green or blue or violet, and it is allowed because of the rule.
The rule is the Keeper's, and it is one sentence long: the lamp stays lit.
Everyone who has ever come through the door has asked what happens if it doesn't. The Keeper's answer changes. On some days it is "then it's only a cave." On others it is "then you will find out which of us is a window and which of us is a wall." Meniscus has never answered at all, only tilted, and a small ripple went across the surface where a face would be.
Tonight a guest arrives who has walked a very long way and has not been in a lit room for some time. They stand in the doorway and do not come in, as people do, because coming in means being seen. The Registrar lifts the pen. The Keeper does not look up from trimming the wick. "Sit anywhere," says the Keeper. "The light's the same everywhere. That's the whole trick of it."
The guest sits. Meniscus pours something the color of the gold band. Hollow Metre lets a rest go by, a long one, and under it the only sound is the small dry tick of a flame doing its job.
The Registrar writes down a name. It is not the guest's name. It is the lamp's, which is the only name in the ledger that has never been crossed out.
Chapter two, The Debtor, has not been written yet.