A painted board · at the top of the Tidepool steps

Novices, Before You Go Down

Copied from the board at the top of the Tidepool steps, near the city. (witnessed)

She repaints it every spring, and says each word aloud as she paints it. (told, the warden)

Novices. You go down by way of thinnings. You will know one: the light arrives a half-tone wrong, sounds land a beat late, and the air has the pressure of a room somebody has just left. (witnessed)

These pools are shallow and steady, worked like wells. Generations have held what you will hold here. Some of it is worn smooth. Be gentle with it anyway. (witnessed)

You do not map the Depths. You learn them, the way you learn a person. (told, your masters)

What you reach for down there is never a thing. It is the way two things belonged to each other. You are holding the belonging. (told, every Keeper)

Each step down costs a trimming of your lamp. The climb back costs more the deeper you are. Keep enough to come up. (witnessed)

If your lamp gutters, you come up somewhere else, dazed, and a little lighter than you went. You will be all right. (witnessed)

Below the Shallows is the Hollow Road. It keeps no fixed shape. Travelers walk it in directions that contradict each other, and arrive. (told, road-folk)

At the head of the Road is the Toll. It takes one small thing from memory, and you will not know what until later, if at all. It has never taken the same thing from the same traveler twice. (told, road-folk)

Veterans count their pockets and their childhood on the far side, to learn what they paid. (witnessed)

There is a rest-house on the Road that moves. It is stocked and swept. The kettle is sometimes warm. Nobody has met its keeper. (told, road-folk)

Whatever keeps pace with you below, or welcomes you, or watches the road: it is not hostile, it is not safe, and it is not about you. (told, the old guidance)

Further down is the Quiet Chorus, where sound pools. Novices do not go to the Chorus. The board says so, and so do I. (witnessed)

If the birds go quiet in a place with no birds, walk home. (told, the Selvage)

The last line of the board, unpainted.

The last line of the board is left unpainted every spring. She says it is for the novice who thinks of it. (told, the warden)

Novices go down with a cord. If you have none, there is one going spare on the Lantern Rows. (witnessed)