Ottavia Serra
Lamplighter-General
Ottavia holds the lamp right of Gnomon, and she knows what that means better than the people who gave it to her: every lamp she licenses is a shadow somebody can cast tonight, and every shadow is cred...
Lamplighter-General
Ottavia holds the lamp right of Gnomon, and she knows what that means better than the people who gave it to her: every lamp she licenses is a shadow somebody can cast tonight, and every shadow is cred...
Keeper of the Border Lamp
Jonas measures everyone who comes to Gnomon and sees almost nobody go. He stands at the post with his chain and his tables, marks the length of a shadow on the flagstones at the ninth hour or works it...
Keeper of the Great Gnomon
Benedek keeps the tower whose shadow is the city's clock, and he rings the bell that gives Gnomon its noon. Every day at the stroke he watches the tower's shadow shrink to nothing beneath its own base...
Justice of the Hours
Honoria sits the Court of Hours, where a shadow can testify and a sentence is given in lamp-hours, and she is the fairest person in Gnomon by the simplest measure: she has never once given a verdict t...
Builder of the Great Mirror
Livia is building a second sun. On Mirror Hill, on a scaffold as high as a church, a bowl of polished bronze segments is going up, eleven of the hundred and twenty in place, each the size of a door; w...
Shadow-Tailor and Master of the Scrapers' Yard
Rafael alters shadows and lifts stains, and he is the best at both that the city has had, which he says modestly and which is true. On a Court writ he scrapes a stain from a house and lifts it whole o...
Preacher of Noon
Anselm has had no shadow for eleven years, and he preaches at noon, when nobody has one. His chapel has no window and no lamp, only a square hole in the roof, and for four minutes a day the sun comes ...
Registrar of Shadows
Absalom keeps the Ledger, and he keeps it the way a man keeps a promise he does not fully understand. Three volumes, green cloth, steel pen, gloves: every shadow in Gnomon stands in it with its owner,...
Broker of the Night Market
Tamsin lets shadows by the night. Her stall is the third from the arch, a white screen and a lamp, and her own penny shadows are the stock: at dusk she stands before the canvas and they fan out behind...
Reader-Major of the College
Ilse reads shadows and stains, and she is the best reader Gnomon has had in a century, which she says is not a compliment to her but a complaint about the century. Lay a shadow on her white table unde...
Master Cutter of the Noon Table
Hesper cuts shadows, and she works four minutes a day. From dawn she sharpens: the obsidian leaves, each the size of a hand and thinner than a fingernail, honed on wet slate until the edge is a line o...
Lamp-trimmer of the Shadowless Hostel
Oda was born at noon, in the Four Minutes, and has never cast a shadow in her life. The Ledger has no line for her; the Registrar keeps a blank page, clean, in the third volume, and turns it when he p...