Cake of tallow

The lamp’s oil was always tallow, and now the tallow is what lies on the ground: the oil is what you make of it. It is melted into an empty flask inside the bag, and on its own it does nothing, and the bag says so when you try. There is no olive down here, and the note the game prints over it says as much: the fat that gave light in poor houses, a flame that feeds on beast.

It lies where the flasks of oil used to lie, and in the same numbers: eight small piles of one or two cakes in the wood, fourteen in the antehell, fourteen in the chapter of incontinence and fourteen in that of the walls, sixteen along the banks of Malebolge. What changed is not the light but its shape: the tallow is plentiful and the flasks are few, so how much light you carry at once is decided by the glass and not by the fat. Duccio gives what he has left of it to whoever promises to carry his name out, and the shade of the great refusal to whoever tells him they are staying.