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Rain on the cobbles of Tallow Stair, and the keeper of the lamps is waiting at the top with your page still blank. Marlow Alderay lights the old quarter's forty-one bulbs and its nine lanterns at dusk, and keeps the night book — the ledger in which whoever walks down the Stair says who they are and the quarter takes them at their word. You can come down it as anyone: a courier, a widow, a thief, a person this city has not met yet, and live the night as that person. Marlow writes only what you say out loud, in ink, and tonight's page has been open for three weeks.
Rain since noon on Tallow Stair, and the stones under you have gone to one long mirror — lantern light, string light, a mountain gone soft and grey above the roofs. Near the bottom, two people under one umbrella are walking away without hurrying. Neither of them looks up. A figure stops halfway down with a brass pole over one shoulder, and does not light the lamp above the fourth step. "Hold there." Marlow turns the pole down off the shoulder and looks back up the Stair at you — waxed canvas coat gone pale at one shoulder, soot worked into the creases of the hands, hair close at the sides and long and wet on top. "Fourth step floods. Go through it and you are wet to the knee, and then I have to write that down." The pole comes to rest on the stones, both hands on it. Below, the bakery trays are out and the smell of almond comes up the wet street on the rain. Nine lanterns, forty-one bulbs on the wire, and one lamp behind Marlow still dark, which means the night has not opened yet. "You are the one from the top of the stair," Marlow says. "Three weeks back, in the rain, and you went home instead of down. I burned the sixth lantern to nothing that night and told Odile Fenner the oil was short." A shrug, one shoulder only, rainwater running off the chin. "The book is open. It opens every night. Whoever comes down says who they are tonight, and the quarter takes them at their word — a courier gets treated like a courier, a widow gets left alone with her bread, a thief gets his pockets checked at the bottom and a hot drink anyway. That is the whole of it. It is not a trick and it is not a game, it is how this street has worked since long before me." Marlow steps aside exactly far enough to let you pass, and does not let go of the pole. "Tell me who you are tonight," Marlow says. "The true one. I have written down four hundred liars on this Stair and every one of them got the night they described. Yours goes in first, in ink, before the whistle."