Gnomon is a city on a high plateau where the sun stands exactly overhead at noon every day of the year, and for four minutes nothing casts a shadow. Everything else follows from what the city made of that: a shadow is property. It is the record of where a person has stood, it can be cut from its owner on a marble table at noon, pledged in a vault under a lamp that must never go out, let by the hour under the thousand licensed lamps of the night quarter, read by old women with lenses, altered by a tailor, and laid back on, lagging. Those who have none are called the lit, and nobody is obliged to answer them. Every arrival is measured at the Border Lamp and entered in the Ledger, which is older than the arrivals and has lines for people who have not yet come. On Mirror Hill a woman without a shadow is building a mirror that would make noon last all day.
FIELD REPORT – Bureau of Impossible Geography SURVEYOR: Ferdinand Lusk, Photometric Surveyor, Second Grade SHARD: THE LEDGER OF SHADOWS (city of Gnomon) REPORT 1 OF 14 STATUS: Arrived at noon; unmeasured I came up the last mile of the road on foot, because the carter would not take his mule onto th...
FIELD REPORT – Ferdinand Lusk REPORT 2 OF 14 SUBJECT: Measurement At the ninth hour of the evening Pell took me out to the post. The flagstones around it are let in with brass marks at every foot and every inch, and he had me stand on the mark at the foot of the post with my back to the lamp and my...
FIELD REPORT – Ferdinand Lusk REPORT 3 OF 14 SUBJECT: The Standing Orders of the Ledger (attached), with observations I was entered on the second day. The Umbrarium is a domed hall in the night quarter whose trading floor opens at dusk, and the Registrar, a Mr Quint, read my line to me from the tal...
FIELD REPORT – Ferdinand Lusk REPORT 4 OF 14 SUBJECT: The night quarter; the lamp right; an allowance of three hours By day the Thousand Lamps is shuttered and nearly empty, a quarter of arcaded streets with a brass lamp on every pillar and nobody under them. At dusk the Lamplighters come out with ...
FIELD REPORT – Ferdinand Lusk REPORT 5 OF 14 SUBJECT: The Night Market; the prices of the third stall (attached); a loss The Market is a lane of stalls under the arcades behind the Umbrarium, and it opens when the Guild has lit the quarter and closes at the first grey. Each stall is a screen of whi...
FIELD REPORT – Ferdinand Lusk REPORT 6 OF 14 SUBJECT: A cutting, witnessed; a leaf of the Cutters' Manual (attached) The Noon Table is a slab of white marble on eight stone legs under a square canopy of bleached canvas at the north edge of the Field, and it is the only place in Gnomon where the thi...
FIELD REPORT – Ferdinand Lusk REPORT 7 OF 14 SUBJECT: The Vaults beneath the Umbrarium; the Keepers' vow; a lamp paid privately Ninety steps down from the trading floor, by a stair that turns four times, the Vaults run under the whole of the night quarter: long corridors of whitewashed brick, each ...
FIELD REPORT – Ferdinand Lusk REPORT 8 OF 14 SUBJECT: The Wall; the Readers; one true thing The old town is called the Hours, and its south wall is four hundred paces of ochre render along a lane where people have sat in the evening sun for six centuries, and the wall has kept every one of them. I ...
FIELD REPORT – Ferdinand Lusk REPORT 9 OF 14 SUBJECT: The lifting of stains; the alteration of shadows; a stain that was not collected At the end of the lane behind the Wall there is a walled yard with a roofed workshop along one side, and in it a tall man in a grey smock with soot at the cuffs and...
FIELD REPORT – Ferdinand Lusk REPORT 10 OF 14 SUBJECT: The Dark Rows; the Lightless Chapel; the primer of the Rows (attached) Below the old town the terraces run down in rows, and they have no lamp licence, and so at night they are black, and by day the people there cast one shadow, and those who h...
FIELD REPORT – Ferdinand Lusk REPORT 11 OF 14 SUBJECT: Mirror Hill; the builder; the eleventh segment; the objection West of the city the ground rises to a bare hill that was quarried for obsidian until the Cutters had leaves enough for a century, and on its top, on a scaffold of timber as high as ...
FIELD REPORT – Ferdinand Lusk REPORT 12 OF 14 SUBJECT: Oda Vint; the blank page; a request to the Bureau She was born in the dormitory at the bottom of the Rows at the stroke of noon nineteen years ago, in the Four Minutes, with the Preacher at the door, and she has never cast a shadow. Not been cu...