‘And know this also: the Archenemy is patient. He does not first come with flame and pike, but with a gentle voice that says, Therefore let Selpetua’s faithful be many, and quiet, and of one breath; for a city survives not by the courage of one man, but by the restraint of ten thousand.’
If Selpetua had been a city governed by truth, there would, Glevedan felt, have been some visible difference the next morning: perhaps banners hung at half-mast, or a mourning bell, or a street preacher interrupting his own homily to admit to the dread Glevedan was sure everyone must feel, because he felt it, so oppressive and total. But it was tithing time, and so Selpetua was governed, first and foremost, by schedules. It therefore proceeded precisely as it had proceeded the day before, and the day before that; and if anything had changed in the night, it had done so in the manner of a revised rubric - quietly, cleanly, filed away where none might look too closely.
The consignment officio at the Ossuary of Viella-Twice-Sainted received Glevedan early. He had not so much woken as ceased, at some indefinable hour, to be able to remain asleep; there are nights in which rest is granted only to those with the advantage of innocence, and it had been such a night. He came through the front door while most of the desks were still empty, and the queues consisted only of two old women with shawls pulled tight, a pilgrim whose eyes had that fixed wonder peculiar to the newly arrived, and a boy clutching a folded paper as if it were a golden aquila.
The office wore the morning as a face wears powder: it looked, at a glance, as it ought. Desks remained bolted in their two rigid ranks. The rail maintained its moral division between clerk and frustrated petitioner. The framed edicts on the wall still spoke, in their weary parental tone, of sanctity and procedure and penalties. Yet there was a tidied air to everything - the sort of tidiness that follows a disturbance, when those who cannot afford scandal attempt to rectify not the cause, but the impression left in the dust.
Glevedan stuffed his coat under his desk with deliberate care. He felt it an ugly fact that he had gone his whole life without committing any great crime, and yet now felt so ruined by concealing small ones. Beneath the bundled coat, in the inner pocket, was the carbon copy he had taken the day before.
At his desk, the stamps sat in their accustomed line. HOLD sat slightly apart, as it always had. The one difference to catch Glevedan’s attention was a new edict, frame bolted up to the wall alongside the others. The text was brief, meant to be obeyed:
ALL DUPLICATE RECORDS AND UNAUTHORIZED COPYING FORBIDDEN.
ALL DISPATCH DOCUMENTS MUST REMAIN ON-SITE.
COMPLIANCE IS NEXT TO HOLINESS.
It was the sort of instruction that pretends to be general, while addressing itself with perfect intimacy to a particular person.
Glevedan tried not to think about it. He had just sat down - just dipped his pen and put out his ledgers with that little ritual of arrangement by which clerks persuade themselves they possess some kind of agency - when Glefa Marlet appeared at his shoulder. She kept exhibiting the unique talent of arriving without the vulgarity of a visible approach, and it was doing no favors for Glevedan’s nerves.
‘Rubricator Bulk,’ she said. ‘Before you begin.’
She set a packet on his desk. The parchment was fresh, crisp, newly pressed and cut. Glevedan read the cover sheet and felt his stomach do that small, private turn it had acquired in the last twenty-four hours.
RECTIFICATION OF ENTRY: RUBRICATOR GLEVEDAN BULK
RE: LOT 771, GATE TWO DISPATCH, SAINT VIELLA’S
He did not touch it at once.
Marlet watched him, and when she spoke again her voice was lower, pitched to what amounts for privacy at a desk in a room full of ears.
‘You made the carbon I told you to make.’
It was not a question.
Glevedan’s fingers tightened on his pen. ‘Yes, mum.’
‘Wherever you’ve hidden it, keep it hidden. Do not ever bring it here.’
He swallowed and looked up. ‘What’s happened?’
‘What always happens,’ Marlet said, and the faintest bitterness crept through her composure. ‘People in high places remembered we exist.’
She tapped the rectification packet with one blunt finger. ‘This is the record of what happened yesterday. You were fatigued. You misheard the master of weights. You miscopied an entry.’
‘Mum-’
Marlet cut him off with a look. ‘I told you to make the copy because you were frightened, and frightened clerks are not very useful.
Her gaze wandered briefly about the room. ‘There will be an inspection - today, or tomorrow, or whenever it pleases them.’
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
Glevedan swallowed. ‘And the packet? The original?’
‘What packet, Bulk?’ Marlet sighed through her nostrils. ‘Sign and date the rectification. Make sure it is filed. Go back to being invisible.’
He frowned down at the packet, and turned the cover sheet.
The lot designation had been altered. It was no longer It was now , with a neat little explanation that the original number had been ‘improperly entered’ and that the suffix was ‘per revised categorization’.
Beneath that, affixed like a purity seal on the armor of a holy crusader, was what he had asked for yesterday and been told did not exist.
A weight slip.
Glevedan’s eyes went straight to the number.
It was… plausible.
Not sixteen hundred and sixty-two. Not a figure so grotesque as that. It was the sort of weight one might expect from twelve caskets of relic-grade fragments of dead people.
Marlet’s voice, when it came again, sounded like someone explaining arithmetic to a child. ‘You see. It was a miscopy. The master of weights misread the dial. You misheard. There was too much noise from the docks. These things happen.’
Glevedan stared at the slip. The ink was too fresh. The stamp impression too crisp. The corners of the paper too sharp. It looked like it had been prepared just this morning. And yet on paper, it was yesterday.
‘No more of this, Bulk. Sign it and be done. This office is full of junior rubricators who would like nothing more than to find something to incriminate you with and take your desk and your salary.’
She tapped the form where the initials were required. ‘Attend to it.’
And she moved away, already rebuking another clerk for setting his blotter at a slovenly angle, as though crooked paper were the root of heresy.
Glevedan sat very still. The room around him woke in its ordinary manner: the scratch of pens, the shifting of petitioners at the rail, the low murmur of names being mispronounced and corrected. Outside, the bell rang at the yard gate, and the corpse carts began to move, and men began to be shouted at for the crime of existing slower than the schedules demanded.
An offworlder at the rail was explaining, for the third time, in rough, Ataric-accented Low Gothic, that the remains he sought were those of his father’s father’s father, a man who had died in a war which sounded vitally important to the petitioner, and of which the clerk plainly had no notion at all. The clerk at, who had heard variations of this story every day of his life, nodded with the practiced vacancy of the employed and demanded documentation.
Glevedan resolved to be strong, and as Marlet had said, invisible. He spent the next three hours trying unsuccessfully to focus on the petitions brought before him, the consignments to be validated or denied or amended.
When he felt he had exhausted his willpower for the endeavor at normalcy, he rose and crossed to the filing shelves behind the rows of bolted desks. He felt a sort of excitement, which was a surprise to him. He had no authority to do what he was doing, which made the doing of it a kind of power.
The drawer marked GATE TWO DISPATCHES resisted him as old drawers do - petty, stubborn, indignant at being disturbed - and then yielded with a groan.
Inside, the packets hung on little wire hangers in neat chronological order, each tied and sealed. He found the tab for yesterday.
He drew out the packet. The cord was new. The wax was new. The seal impression was unnervingly perfect.
He broke it open.
The manifest within matched the rectification packet precisely. A weight slip lay appended to the bottom, nothing amiss. There was even a fine, cursive signature bearing Lotmaster Marn’s scrawl. The paper had been improved in all the places Glevedan’s memory wanted it to be rough.
It was, in short, the record that have existed.
And that, precisely, was the trouble.
He turned the pages slowly. In the margin of the manifest, where yesterday there had been a small smudge - his own thumbprint, he remembered - there was nothing. The corner that yesterday had been slightly dog-eared now sat crisp and square. At the end of the packet, an attached memorandum.
ALL DISCREPANCIES RESOLVED. NO FURTHER COMMENT REQUIRED.
He stared at that line until it began to feel less like commentary than a threat.
From the yard came a muffled shout - Jaro’s voice, perhaps, or some other man with the same weary cadence - and the clatter of a cart wheel striking a mislaid stone. Glevedan had the sudden image of Lot 771, yesterday’s wrongness, already being rolled somewhere deep into the bowels of one of the immense ships that hauled cargo between Selpetua and the voidport cities across the ocean.
He retied the packet carefully, so the seal would look intact at a glance, and returned it to its place. He did not slam the drawer, which would advertise he was possessed of .
Back at his desk, the rectification form waited.
On the bench nearest the wall, a junior clerk - barely out of his apprenticeship - was being spoken to in that low voice Marlet reserved for private humiliations. Glevedan caught only fragments: ‘unauthorized carbons… indulgence… this is my drogging office, not your mother’s pantry… you will surrender them…’
The boy’s face had the disbelieving, stunned look of someone discovering that the world contains rules he cannot see until they are leveraged against him.
Glevedan looked away, feeling a heightened sense of self preservation, and took up his pen.
The form required only his initials. Two letters. A curve. A line. A child might make the same mark by careless happenstance. Yet in those small movements lay an entire civic ritual, by which falsehoods would be made immutable, put to parchment, and accepted into the record.
He pressed the nib to the paper, and for a moment he did nothing. He thought of all the eyes that might inspect the packet, the hands that might page through it, oblivious to the memorialized lies they held. He swallowed down a bitterness worse than Kessa’s brews.
He initialed the rectification.
Then - without any change in expression, without any movement that might be construed by wandering eyes as furtive - Glevedan slid a carbon sheet beneath the form. He pressed down with his pen hard enough to bruise the paper, until it was done. He slid the carbon out, and folded it once beneath his desk, and then again, and once more, until it became a small, innocent square of densely compacted parchment.
A sin, reduced to convenient pocket size.
He slipped it into a pocket and opened his ledgers once more.
At the rail, the Ataric offworlder finally produced a document sufficient to satisfy the clerk’s appetite for proof. The clerk stamped it with a thud that sounded for all the world to Glevedan like the clatter of a gallows drop.
Outside, the bell rang again to mark the hour. The queues moved. Far overhead, the first of the tithe ships still hid in high orbit, veiled by clouds and atmosphere, patient as any creditor.
And Selpetua continued its day, having amended the record, found a neck low enough to step on, and filed the whole affair away under
Only Glevedan, with his private papers secreted away like contraband and his conscience tucked into that shrinking pocket behind his ribs, understood the particular cruelty of the arrangement: that yesterday’s truth had not been erased at all.
