The Lantern-Wardens

The Lantern-Wardens are the Reach's only sworn order of Unquiet-hunters, and the only body of armed men and women whom every lord, choir and charter-house permits to cross a border without leave. They carry lanterns in which, they say, they keep a written record of who they are, because the Unquiet feed on forgetting. Whether this is doctrine, habit or something older, the wardens themselves decline to explain; ask one and you will be told, politely, that the record is the record.

Origins

The order was founded in 31 AS, in the worst of the Grey Years, by a warden remembered only as the Lamplighter. The archive has no record of the Lamplighter's true name, sex, or origin; the earliest Lamphouse rolls list the founder simply as she who lit the way, and later copies preserve even less. What is agreed is that the first wardens were Hask villagers, grave-burners and road-watchmen gathered into a single company, and that the Lamplighter gave them two things that have never changed: the lantern, and the oath of neutrality. Within forty years the order had houses in Varrow and along the Drowned Coast; the Pale See has never admitted one.

I am written down. I am not forgotten. I do not serve your house, your crown, or your god. I serve the road and the dead upon it.

Organisation

The order's chapter-houses are called Lamphouses: stone-built, always with a light kept burning at the gate, always built beside a road, a grave-field or a ford rather than within a town. The oldest stand in the Hask, where the order is respected as a neighbour; the newest and busiest stand on Varrow's northern marches, where risings have grown common since the Long Winter. The wardens' seat and archive is the Lamphouse of Hrafnvik, and the order's senior officer, styled Preceptor, is at present Corvin Hale, an ageing Varrowman of whom the archive knows little beyond his handwriting, which appears on contracts as far apart as Saverra and the Whitefells.

Practices

A warden's work is plain and poorly paid. They answer contracts: a village with a rising, a lord with an unquiet grandfather in the chapel, a merchant whose burned caravan has started walking. The fee is agreed beforehand — the order is famous for it — and the warden does not haggle afterwards, whatever the work costs. Wardens travel alone or in pairs, in grey, with the lantern always lit at nightfall. Inside each lantern, folded behind the panes, is the warden's own record: name, kin, the roads walked, the things done, added to year by year in a cramped hand. When a warden dies, the lantern is hung in the gate-hall of the nearest Lamphouse, and the record is read aloud once, on the third night, before the body is burned. The order burns its own without exception.

Wardens will not use ashcraft, and will not travel with the Hollowed if they can help it. The order's rule on this is absolute and its reason unrecorded. Wardens also refuse certain work: they will not hunt a risen thing that has done no harm, and they will not enter the Glassmere at any price, a refusal written into their contracts in the Preceptor's own hand.

Relations with others

By oath the wardens take no side. They have served every house of the Regency in turn and offended each in turn; the Pale Choir calls them grave-robbers and refuses them entry to the Pale See, though Cantors on the marches have been glad enough of a warden's lantern on a bad road. In the Hask they are kin to everyone and answerable to no moot. In the League they are hired like masons and paid like them. Lords distrust them, because a warden will report what a rising was and where it rose, and some lords would rather that were not written down.

Rumours

It is said — the archive repeats this as rumour only — that the Lamplighter's own lantern still burns at Hrafnvik, and that its record panes are empty, the paper within folded but blank. It is said that wardens on the western roads have orders concerning the Grey Pilgrims, though what those orders are no warden will say. And the Hask tell, around their own fires, that a warden's lantern has never once gone out of itself, even in the deep cold of the Long Winter — a claim the archive cannot verify, and notes that the wardens themselves, when asked, only say that they keep their wicks trimmed.