The Weight of Light

In the Veinlands, light flows from mountain fell catchments through nine great dams, filling rivers and lighting cities. The Concord has managed this system for three hundred years. But Sera Vann, a guild lamplighter maintaining ninety-two lamps on Andressa's Strand, feels something that should not be in the data: forty thousand inner lumens extinguishing at once, ninety miles away, as the city of Solyet freezes dark. Following the feeling to its source, she finds Brenn Okale, a dismissed engineer whose eight years of cross-referenced data tell an impossible story. The dams' refinement coefficient is not three percent. It is eleven. And the light being processed is not mineral accumulation. It is the released lumen of the dead. The Concord has been burning the dead for three hundred years. And the Ledger of Ashes sealed in the First Dam's foundation vault since the Concord's founding proves the founders knew it all along. Joined by a truth-keeping priest, a Tidewright whose executed brother started what they must finish and pursued by a Registry Inquirer who cannot reconcile his assignment with what he discovers at the dam's railing, Sera and Brenn must reach the Lumenarch before the truth can be suppressed again. The fell catchments have twenty-six years. The world must know. The Weight of Light is a literary fantasy novel about what light actually costs; about institutions that manage difficult truths until the management becomes catastrophe; and about a lamplighter who follows a feeling to its source and finds that naming the problem accurately, however late, is still the most important thing she has ever done.