Thennokien
Nine parts of any lodge is Thennokien, and they are the ones who do the work. At dusk they come out along the mouldings with a taper and light, trim, fuel and put out every lamp, lantern, sconce and hearth-light in the house, every night, without being asked, without being seen and without payment.
Coarse dark coat, huge ears, and the most extreme of the long fingers. Their reputation among the other two kin is of being dull, punctual and irreplaceable, and they agree with all three.
Body
Coarse dark coat, huge ears, and the most extreme of the long fingers, thin as a knitting pin and jointed to bend backwards, which trims a wick without pinching it and which digs grubs out of a beam by tapping the wood and listening to what the tap comes back as.
The rest is the shared body: eyes that throw lamplight back as two flat coin-bright discs and see in almost no light and are half blind by day, no colour at all in the world they see, a hand whose tendons lock at the joint under load so that hanging costs nothing, and a padded silent foot. A Thennokien knows the household by the tread on a particular stair and could not tell you what any of them were wearing.
Society
They light the house and they hold the routes. The routes are the internal map of the whole building and take nine years to learn, and a child is out on the ledges at six and does its first solo circuit at eleven, and that night it is given its lodge-name.
A lodge that is one lamp late has failed. The oath is to hold the wick, sworn with the long finger through a flame, and every adult carries the scar of it on the same joint. The compact is read aloud in full in the wall-crèche every year on the anniversary of its making, so that every child knows the terms before it knows the routes.
Frailty
Soot kills most of them, because a lamp-tender spends a life at the top of every flame in a large house in spaces with no draught, and the lung blackens by the second century. Lodge oil is blended smokeless for exactly this reason and is a medicine before it is a convenience.
The long finger is thin as a pin and it breaks, and a broken third finger sets crooked, will not trim a wick, and ends a tender's working life at whatever age it happens. A lodge carries its broken-handed as watchers and as readers of the book. Burns take the young in their first year on the ledges, and falls inside a cavity wall are neither survivable nor reachable.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- What a lamp-tender's circuit is worth in a house that pays nothing
- Whether a Thennokien has ever left a lodge and lived
- How the routes of a house are recorded, if they are recorded at all
- What happens to a lodge whose house burns