‘And in Selpetua, each soul shall be my defender, each life a silver to be spent in the defense of these, our most honored martyrs. Let every man, woman, and child from the Kalastikon to the slopes of Temeret be my knights, and thus shall the Archenemy find no purchase here, for Selpetua belongs to the blessed dead.’
From Antiphon, First Movement of the Lectionary
In the Tomb City of Selpetua, upon the Kalastikon River Delta, which is on the continent of Peregrine, on the shrineworld Hecate, orbiting the star Arinna, in the Aphelion Vantage.
It is the 42nd Year of the 42nd Millenium, by Imperial reckoning.
In Selpetua there were, broadly speaking, two populations: the living who were tolerated so long as they kept to their schedules and did not create difficulty; and the dead, who were revered, catalogued, and generally the center of attention.
The consignment officio at the Ossuary of Viella Twice-Sainted was concerned, almost wholly, with the latter. It stood where the shriner districts began to yield to the port’s newer masonry, as if the city, having raised its spires for saints and sepulchres, must also stoop at last to accommodate the ugly necessity of those bitter twins, import and export. The building was modest by Selpetuan standards - only two storeys, and neither aspiring to beauty - yet it spoke to significance, and the heavy, airless dignity of age.
Within, the room was arranged for the business of clerical work. Desks were bolted down in two rigid ranks. A rail bisected the length of the chamber, so that petitioners might approach, present their documents, and be sent away again, all without the dangerous confusion of familiarity. Upon the walls hung framed edicts regarding the proper handling of sacred remains, each written in the tone of a parent who has long since ceased to expect improvement from the child.
Glevedan had occupied his allotted desk so many years that the wood bore the shape of his forearms, where he had worn away the finish in his labours. He was not a man of great ambitions, nor of great vices; Selpetua did not, historically, encourage either among the clerical sort. He was simply competent, which in the tomb city was a kind of virtue.
Before him lay the morning’s manifests, tied in their ecclesial cords and sealed with wax that had once been red and now appeared the colour of old blood left too long upon a stone. To his right were the stamps: CLEAR FOR TRANSFER, SANCTIFICATION REQUIRED, HOLD FOR INSPECTION. The last sat a little apart, as though ostracized by the others for some contagious moral disease.
The bell at the yard gate rang - metal upon metal, the impatient sound of the day’s affairs attempting to imitate the great prayer chimes of the city’s many basilicae - and with it came, as always, the faint roar of Selpetua beyond: carts, prayers, arguments, hymns, the small daily catastrophes of a city perpetually preparing for a larger one.
Glevedan broke the seal upon the first packet with the practised reluctance of a man who knew that every paper he opened was a potential accusation - of mishandling the remains of a war hero loved one, of delays in processing a new intake or locating the correct vault for a pilgrim to visit a long-dead ancestor. But the manifest within was proper enough: twelve caskets, each described in the measured, pious language of institutions that must speak of corpses without admitting they are corpses.
Osseous fragments, sanctified, assorted. Relic-grade.
He copied the lot numbers into the ledger, careful as a monk illuminating a margin - though there was no illumination in his work. He checked the seals on the next packets against the registry plate chained to his desk. Two impressions were ordinary: the slight blur at the edge where a thumb had hesitated, the shallow crescent where wax had cooled too soon.
The third, however, had an unnerving perfection, like when a portraitist has rendered their subject too unblemished, and uncanny.
It was, in its way, a trifling thing - precisely the sort of trifling thing that allowed a life to continue as it was, so long as one refused to assign it any meaning at all.
A shadow fell across the desk. A face appeared at the rail, wind-reddened and evidently quite amused by the very notion of Glevedan, a man who spent his day arguing with parchment.
‘Morning, Glev,’ said Jaro, with the careless intimacy of one who hauled dead people around for a living and therefore felt he had earned the right to levity in all things. Catacomb dust clung to his gloves, pale as flour. ‘If you’ve a blessing to spare, I’ll take it. The lotmaster is snarling like a groxhound over the consignment for Gate Two.’
Glevedan did not look up at once. It was not unkindness, it was a habit, adopted in recent years, as the district’s manner had changed with so many new arrivals from Droctulf.
‘Consignment for Gate Two, Lot 771,’ Glevedan said, echoing Jaro, sliding the packet toward the rail. ‘Twelve.’
‘Twelve,’ Jaro repeated, as if the repetition might diminish the burden of the task before him. ‘That’s merciful, I suppose. Come on then - stamp me through before he sends someone with a club after me, eh?’
Glevedan’s eyes returned to the too-clean seal on the other packet.
‘Who loaded the carts today?’ he asked.
Jaro’s smile faltered in the smallest possible way, the way a man’s mouth will betray him before his words do. ‘Yard lads from the stevedore’s hall,’ he said. ‘Same as ever.’
‘Names?’
‘You know I don’t collect names,’ Jaro muttered, and then, with an attempt at humor and a wince at something in his back: ‘I collect a few sore spots though.’
Glevedan glanced at the packet he had slid toward Jaro, his attention caught not by anything of note, but rather the absence of a thing.
‘There should be a weight slip.’
Jaro blinked. ‘A what?’
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
‘A weight slip,’ Glevedan repeated, and heard his own voice sharpen, because Jaro had worked for the consignment officio even longer than Glevedan had. ‘Twelve caskets. Relic-grade fragments for an offworld consignment. There is always a weight slip.’
‘They didn’t give me one.’
Glevedan stared at him, and in that silence was contained the whole social order of Seleptua: the clerk, who could be correct and still powerless; the carter who could be blameless and still punished; and those who were neither correct nor blameless, and yet remained untouchable.
‘Before I can discharge this, you need to bring the cart to the weighstation,’ Glevedan said.
Jaro exhaled through his teeth. ‘Glev,’ he began, pleading and scolding in the same breath, ‘it’s bloody tithing time. The ship is–’
‘I know it’s tithing time,’ Glevedan said softly. ‘Bring it to the scales.’
There was a moment in which Jaro seemed to calculate the fortitude of friendship against the price of disobedience, and as in most such calculations in the Imperium, the answer was not flattering. At last he nodded once, sharply, and vanished through a set of broad double doors to the warehouse chambers and loading docks with the grim resignation of a man marching to be blamed.
When the cart rolled in, it brought with it the smell of the yard: rain-damp moss, sodden lumber, the bitter tang of whelver fat lanterns. The caskets were uniform, dark wood, iron banding, each tied with a strip of devotional cloth that sought to proclaim eternal sanctity by the act of repeating the declaration many times in fine painted script.
With the help of a couple of yard boys, Jaro maneuvered the cart across the far end of the room, to the weighstation in the corner, and its dour attendants. The first petitioners of the morning, in line for other desks, grumbled and grunted as their queues had to stagger and shift to accommodate the cart’s passage. With unusual effort, they coaxed the cart onto the sheetmetal platform of the scales, and the attendant balanced the weights against the standardized mass of the cart. The meter for the scales, a sulking antique, took its time making its assessment, the wrought iron hand swaying back and forth between low gothic numerals picked out in red paint.
The needle trembled, wavered, and finally steadied. Glevedan read the number from his desk and felt, not surprise, but a kind of weary confirmation - as though his day had simply decided to stop pretending before even lunch time.
Sixteen hundred and sixty-two.
Jaro let out a low sound. ‘They’ve gone and packed it with rocks, haven’t they?’ he said, looking peevish.
Glevedan stood from his stool and pushed through the wooden rail gate, brushing past a row of petitioners to study the caskets of Lot 771. At least one of the caskets he could see showed a sort of darkening at the seam, like a dampness where there should have been only dry wood. He could have explained it away. He could have done so easily. Much of Selpetua was built upon such explanations.
Behind him, one of the yard lads coughed with the offended tone of someone about to try to invoke correct procedure.
‘Ser rubricator, ser, we’re not supposed to take carts off the loading docks when they’ve been assigned a gate.’
‘And yet here it is,’ Glevedan replied, mildly; and then, because he had already begun and could not seem to stop himself: ‘And I haven’t assigned a gate. So, politely, get over it. Who signed for the discharge order receipt?’
The lad’s eyes narrowed. ‘Lotmaster Marn.’
‘Marn signs in a cursive script,’ Glevedan said, absently, almost by reflex. ‘He doesn’t print his Low Gothic.’
That was the moment - small, almost nothing - in which the air in the consignment officio changed. Not with thunder, nor with daemonic laughter; simply with the quiet shift of attention, like a taverna becomes aware of the worst drunks before the first bottle breaks.
Glevedan returned to his ledger, hands steady by training alone, and flipped to the previous week’s consignments. He found the line he feared he would find, precisely where he feared he might find it.
Lot 771.
Cleared, sanctified, and shipped to the port.
He stared at it until the ink seemed to float above the page like a stain in water.
‘Jaro,’ he said, and his voice was no longer possessed of its customary clerical drone. ‘Lot 771 already left Selpetua. By ship, last week.’
Jaro’s face went blank in the way of a man who understood that he was standing too close to something very expensive and fragile, or else very dangerous.
Before Glevedan could reach for the HOLD FOR INSPECTION stamp, a hand came down on his desk with a sharpness that made the ink pot jump.
Sub-Registrar Glefa Marlet stood over him, small and severe, hair pinned as tightly as her principles had once been. Her eyes flicked from the scales to the cart to the ledger on Glevedan’s desk, and then back to the cart. Glevedan watched, with a strange pity, the instant she recognized the same wrongness he had - and measured what it would cost her to acknowledge it.
‘What are you doing,’ she said, low.
‘Secondary verification,’ Glevedan answered, because he was still trying to pretend this was merely procedure.
Marlet leaned in, close enough that her breath warmed his neck. ‘The first of the tithe ships is at high anchor,’ she murmured through clenched teeth. ‘Do you understand what that means? Do you understand what will happen to this office if a cargo is delayed because you’ve decided to become righteous?’
‘It’s not–” Glevedan said, ‘It’s… incorrect, ma’am.’
Marlet’s mouth tightened at that. She looked almost amused, and the amusement was cruel.
‘Incorrect,’ she echoed. ‘Charming. Listen to me, Rubricator Glevedan Bulk. You are plainly exhausted from the demands of tithing time. You’ve miscopied a number. A transliteration error, obviously. You will clear the cart and resume the business of the day.’
Glevedan’s fingers curled around the stamp handle. He could feel, absurdly, the grain of the wood. He could feel the whole weight of Selpetua in that cheap instrument: how easily lies became ink, and ink became truth.
‘If I clear it,’ he said, ‘and it is wrong–’
‘If you hold it,’ Marlet interrupted, ‘and it is wrong, you will die with a stamp in your hand because I will dash your brains out in this very room with the chair you sit on, before someone from the District Officio does it for me.’
They looked at one another across the desk, rubricator and sub-registrar, both of them perfectly aware that this was how worlds changed: not with conviction, but with the smooth collaboration of frightened, practical people.
At last Marlet’s gaze flicked, almost imperceptibly, toward the carbon sheets in the bottom shelf of Glevedan’s desk - an indulgence a conscientious clerk kept for accounting and records, and which the office would swear did not exist.
‘Do something useful,’ she said, and there was, underneath the harshness, a thin filament of mercy. ‘Make your copy, and you can validate it in a few weeks for peace of mind. The port will have a paper trail. Then clear the damn cart. Yes?’
Glevedan’s hand moved as thought it belonged to someone else. He slid a carbon beneath the manifest and traced the lines hard enough to bruise the paper. Then, with a steadiness that felt like treason, he lifted the CLEAR FOR TRANSFER stamp and brought it down.
The ink bloomed, red as blood.
Outside, the yard bell rang again; the cart rolled away; Selpetua continued its morning, and the dead - always more patient than the living - waited to be sent wherever the paperwork declared they were wanted.
Glevedan sat very still, the carbon copy hidden under his ledger like a sin, and watched the HOLD stamp at the end of his desk as if it were a relic of some older, more honest age of mankind.
Somewhere above the clouded skies, a tithe ship hung at high anchor, and Selpetua pretended - for a little while longer - that it still belonged to the same empire it had belonged to yesterday.
