'My name is Glevedan Bulk. I hold the rank of Rubricator, Third Grade, at the Consignment Officio of the Ossuary of Viella Twice-Sainted, in Selpetua, on Hecate, in the Arinna System, in the Aphelion Vantage. It is my professional obligation and duty before the Golden Throne of Terra to record irregularities and to see that the record is kept. What follows is a record of the greatest irregularity I have encountered in my career, and I set it down in full, because that is what I was trained to do, and because I do not know who else will.'
The sound came up through the floor in the hours before dawn, and Glevedan, who had not slept, lay on his narrow bed and felt it in his spine.
It was not the music. The music was above him — in the air, in the throats of those who could not stop humming it, in the stones of the walls where the frequency Nyme had described had taken hold. This was something else, something below even that. A vibration, rhythmic, deep, with the slow regularity of a heartbeat. It rose through the floorboards, through the mattress, through him, and it had the quality of something very large breathing in a space not built to contain it.
He dressed by the light of a candle stub and looked out his window at the lane below. The red cloth hung motionless in the still pre-dawn air. The bone carts were not running. The streets, when he looked, were not empty — they were simply moving in one direction.
He found Nyme already at the foot of the stairs, her coat done up, her satchel on her shoulder, her jaw set in the particular way that meant she had already had the argument with herself and concluded it.
Kessa was behind the bar with her shutters closed. She had put out bread and what remained of last night's stew and two more cups of her fermenting-mushroom concoction, and she said nothing when they sat. From above came the careful, deliberate sounds of a large man who does not wish to wake anyone but cannot help it, and presently Jaro descended the back stairs in his working coat and his flat cap and the expression of a man who has prepared himself very well for something he has no intention of doing.
'Right,' said Jaro, and sat down, and ate bread.
Nyme put the Vigil Absolute pamphlet on the table. She had been holding it since Glevedan gave it to her the night before. She turned it over to the map. The processional routes, in red, converging.
No one spoke. They had said what there was to say, and the morning had not produced any new information requiring further discussion.
After a short time, Kessa untied her apron, rolled it up, and stowed it under the bar. She put on her own coat. When she looked at them it was the look of a woman who has made her calculations and arrived at a number she doesn't care for but will stand behind.
'Well,' she said. 'Get up, then.'
Selpetua on the morning of the Vigil Absolute was Selpetua as it had always wanted to be: purposeful, unified, moving as one. The irony of this was not lost on Glevedan, who had spent his career in service to a city that could not agree on the correct procedure for filling out duplicate forms but could apparently arrange, without visible coordination, to march in unison toward its own damnation.
The rake-knights were everywhere.
They had ceased to employ the polite intermediary fiction of salon attendants and masked Circle Benevolent representatives. They moved in the open streets with uncanny, familiar ease, and the crowds they shepherded were larger than any drawn by the tableaux vivant or virtuosi. From the end of a lane, Glevedan watched a rake-knight move along a row of tenements, and the tenement residents came out of their doors as it passed with that inward, placid quality he had first seen in the revellers what felt like years ago and was only days. They joined the flow in the street, and the flow moved toward the upper city, and the rake-knight moved with it.
One man did not come out. An old fellow, heavy-built, who stood on his doorstep with one hand gripping the frame and looked at the procession with a furrowed brow. Two rake-knights stepped to either side of him. Glevedan watched the man’s objection leave him - not violently, not with any observable mechanism. The posture simply changed. The hand released the doorframe. The old man stepped down from his doorstep and joined the procession, as naturally as if he had planned to do so all along.
Glevedan looked away.
‘How are we going?’ Jaro asked, his voice very quiet.
‘Through the lower port lanes,’ Nyme said. She had been studying the pamphlet map through the night, noting routes and ways that would divert them from where the lines of red crossed the city.
‘We don’t know what’s down there,’ Kessa said.
‘We know what’s up there,’ Nyme replied.
They went.
The sound from below was not constant, but it was consistent. It rose and fell with the slow rhythm of the heartbeat Glevedan had felt through the floor before dawn, and it came up through the cobblestones and the flags and the centuries of compressed, accumulated Selpetuan stone beneath their feet. Wherever the city was thinnest above its catacomb layers - the low areas near the river, where the vault ceilings were old and not always trustworthy - the sound was strongest. In those places, the cobbles and masonry vibrated faintly. Birds did not land in those places. Hounds, of which Whelvertail had never been short, were nowhere to be seen.
Above: the Vigil Absolute was reaching its preparation. The bells of the upper chapelhouses had stopped their customary patterns and adopted a new one - a rolling, sequential peal that spread from the shriner districts down through the city in waves, as if the whole of Selpetua’s percussion had been reassigned to a new score. The , ambient for days, had become structural. It was in the walls, in the vibration of the air, in the bones of the buildings, and maybe other bones too.
It was, Glevedan thought, exactly what Nyme had said it would be. The architecture of sound. A bell buried certain fathoms in the earth, struck at the correct frequency.
He kept walking.
They heard the batteries before they understood what they were hearing.
Mount Temeret stood above the city on its eastern slope, visible on a clear day as a dark mass against the sky - permanent, geological, unremarkable. Glevedan had known, in the abstract way one knows facts about one’s city without quite believing them, that Temeret’s slopes bore ancient surface-to-orbit weapons batteries, installed in some earlier, more martial age and maintained by the Departmento Munitorum and planetary defense force for contingencies of the kind that had never, in Glevedan’s memory, actually arisen.
They had arisen now.
The first shot came as a sound he had no category for: not the crack of las-discharge, not the percussion of conventional ordnance, but a deep, tearing resonance that moved through the atmosphere as a visible concussion. The projectile’s trace was a streak of superheated air, impossibly fast, rising from somewhere on the mountain’s middle slope.
The tithe ship - which Glevedan had been tracking all morning as it descended from high anchor to a low orbit for its scheduled collections - took the hit amidships. The impact was visible from the ground: a bloom of venting atmosphere and secondary fire along the great ship’s flank. It rolled, very slowly, with the ponderous resignation of a thing the mind insisted could not be wholly at the mercy of physics. A second streak erupted from Temeret’s slope.
The ship fell in a long, burning arc beyond the city, trailing fire and the glitter of escaping atmosphere in a line that stretched for kilometers.
The sound of it striking the Kalastikon Delta reached them as a rolling impact, felt in the feet before it was heard. A geyser of displaced water and river mud, more vast than even the largest basilicae, erupted above the delta treeline and far walls of the city.
Glevedan stood in the street and looked at the titanic plume of smoke gouting into the horizon, and felt the inadequacy of everything he had ever done.
Some of the people in the streets around them smiled. Others did not react at all.
Information was their scarcest resource. Public vox-lines were down, of course, and they had no hand-vox, no contacts in the port districts Jaro would attest to, no reliable sense of what parts of the city remained in any recognizable order. Jaro’s knowledge of the streets in the low port and quays was their map. Nyme’s knowledge of where not to be was their compass. Rill, who had somehow produced from his coat a small revolving cartridge gun in the night, attested to be their insurance, buoyed by Kessa, who had tucked a battered old barkeep’s Tronsvasse trouble piece into her belt. They navigated by the negative space of what they were avoiding, taking lanes that ran against the processional grain, pressing into doorways when a rake-knight’s silhouette crossed an intersection ahead.
The lower port lanes were quieter than the shriner districts, but not empty. There were people barricaded in upper floors who watched from windows, evaluating their city and concluding that every choice available to them was equally poor. There were shell casings on a street they crossed near the old dock registry offices, and the smell of ozone and carbon and fyceline. A door hung from one hinge. A handcart lay on its side in a puddle of something dark.
They reached a wide commercial boulevard that ran east along the port’s edge, and stopped at the mouth of a lane to assess it.
The boulevard was a cordon. Or had been a cordon. The double row of sandbags ran across its width at two points, augmented with prefabricated rockcrete barriers of the sort deployed by PDF engineers. The barriers were intact. The sandbags were intact. The position was abandoned. Shell casings across the full width of the boulevard. Overturned equipment. An elaborate sallet helm, bearing a crest in the raptor standard of the Adeptus Arbites, cracked across the crown, discarded in another puddle of something that was not rain. From behind one of the barriers, an arm in full Arbites carapace slumped, unmoving.
‘We cross,’ Nyme said.
They started across.
The first shots came from their right: three quick bolts of lasfire snapping overhead, close enough that Glevedan felt the heat on the back of his neck. From behind the rubble of a half-demolished storefront, the blue-white flash of returning fire - Arbites, still standing, two of them, pinned in ruins and exchanging fire with something at the far end of the boulevard.
Glevedan pressed back into the lane mouth and watched.
The rake-knights were advancing from the boulevard’s eastern end. Three of them, in that lockstep precision, halberds at the diagonal, closing at a pace that had no urgency in it because urgency implies uncertainty about the outcome. Scattered behind them, man-sized figures in black and red, snapping off lasbolts from behind whatever sparse cover they could find.
The Arbites were good. They were, Glevedan recognized, even ignorant as he was to any kind of fighting, very good: controlled fire, proper cover discipline, one laying down a spray of heavy slugs while the other shifted position. The shots hit. He could see the impacts on the rake-knights’ armor - the flash of impact, the spray of ablated metal.
The rake-knights did not slow.
They closed the distance with patience, because they were things that could not be hurt in any way the Arbites had provision for. At thirty meters, one of the Arbites rose from cover for a better angle, and the nearest rake-knight’s halberd moved in a single sweeping arc that covered the distance between them in a way the halberd’s physical length did not account for. The Arbites officer went down in a spray of gore. What followed was brief, and it was wrong, and it was the most efficiently horrible thing Glevedan had ever seen, and he had worked beside the bone carts for many years. The second officer was good enough and brave enough to keep firing until the last possible moment, and it did not matter. The rake-knights reformed. Glevedan felt sure one of them fixed its gaze on him, counting three long seconds, and then they were gone, moving away.
The boulevard was quiet again.
Kessa was looking at the middle distance with a look suggesting she was releasing a great many prior certainties. Jaro was balling his hands into fists, unbunching them, balling them back up. Nyme had her eyes closed and her lips were moving, and Glevedan thought for a moment she was praying, until he realized she was humming - and she stopped herself a moment later, and pressed her mouth tight shut.
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‘Other way,’ Jaro said.
They came out eventually on a raised embankment that looked over the lower quays and beyond them, the Kalastikon River Delta. On the far banks, the ruins of the kilometers long tithe-ship were settling into the mud, still bleeding inferno where the batteries of Temeret split it asunder.
And there, in the cobbled square below the embankment, an ossuary entrance.
It was a pair of iron gates set into the road surface itself - the old kind, the deep kind, a gateway to the undercity vaults that pre-dated the current layout of the streets above by three centuries. The gates were locked. They had always been locked; one required an Ecclesiarchy permit and a vault guide and a written request submitted no fewer than twelve months in advance to access the sub-ossuaries at this depth.
The gates were vibrating.
Not violently - not a shaking. The tremor was a frequency, steady and rhythmic. The iron of the frames transmitted it as a faint shimmer, the way a struck bell’s metal transmits resonance when it has been struck. From below the gates came a sound that had no human register: no longer merely music, something deeper than harmonies and root notes. It pressed up through the iron and the stone and through the soles of their boots with the patient certainty of a tide coming in.
Glevedan stood at the gates and felt his rubricator’s mind complete the ledger. The long-format ledger. The one he had been building without quite knowing it since the morning of Lot 771. The missing pages from the disposition index - hundreds of entries, perhaps thousands, excised with care. The geometric patterns on those pale bodies in Merethine House, and the musical scores, and the virtuosi. The processional routes on the pamphlet converging on every major catacomb access point. What Nyme had overheard in the corridor: The Circle Benevolent spending how many years in Selpetua, and Urdis Hecuba spending some of them cultivating every church official and officio attendant and dockside ganger who might need to be cultivated.
The blessed dead disinterred from consecrated vaults, deconsecrated, sent to Merethine, and elsewhere even, like an arrangement, like the lines on the charts. With geometric precision, as components of an instrument.
The catacombs of Selpetua were not merely a repository, he was sure at that moment. They were, in the deep ancient strata below the shrineworld’s recorded history, something else. Something had been put there in an epoch before the city above existed, and the city had been built above it with intention - not merely piety, but purpose. The deep vaults were a seal. The ossuary traditions, the careful arrangement of the holy bones, the consecration, the anoetic wards, the rites and rituals of the sainted Selpetuan cults - these had been, at their origin, a maintenance protocol. The honor of the Lectionary was real, but Glevedan was certain that his city was not a place for the dead to find rest, but instead to form a lock.
Urdis Hecuba had spent years learning the combination.
Glevedan did not say any of this. He said, ‘We should keep moving.’
Jaro was already pulling him by the arm.
They lost Jaro at the Serica Crossing.
It was a narrow bridge, one of the Kalastikon’s smaller tributary crossings, and not wide enough to cross abreast. They went in file - Kessa first, then Nyme, then Glevedan, then Rill and Jaro - and the crowd of people passing on the adjacent street was orderly and unhurried and humming in that low collective register.
Glevedan was three steps from the far bank when he turned, and Jaro was not behind him.
He saw him some meters back, before the bridge, caught in the crowd’s strange inertia. Jaro was big enough that the passing bodies had not simply swept him away - he was visible above many of those around him, turning to look for them with alarmed focus. Their eyes met for a moment.
Then a rake-knight stepped over from the southern approach, and the crowd adjusted its course to accommodate it, and Jaro’s face was gone behind moving bodies and the procession’s unhurried flow.
Kessa called his name. Nyme caught her arm.
They couldn’t go back. They could not fight the thing that had been a knight. They kept moving.
They lost Rill four streets later, on a lane that fed another of the minor ossuary gates. He lagged behind, into the crowd - not at the periphery, not enraptured and spirited away by a rake-knight, but in it, fully, with his cartridge gun forgotten and his print-stained hands relaxed at his sides and his face wearing that distant interior contentment Glevedan had seen on all the other faces. He was humming.
Nyme saw him first. She went toward him without hesitating, pushing through the moving bodies until she reached his arm. She grabbed it. She said his name.
He turned.
There was a moment - one moment, long enough to be cruel - in which Glevedan saw Rill’s eyes clear. Not entirely, not to the full brightness of his usual self, but enough. The way a lamp, nearly extinguished, will sometimes catch a draft and briefly resume. Rill looked at Nyme. He looked at her as if she were very far away, and he was attempting to shout across the distance. His lips moved. The shape of her name.
Then the rake-knight was there.
It had not been visible two seconds before. It was simply present, sliding into an absent space, like a sudden shadow cast by a cloud moving across the sun. It loomed between Nyme and Rill, nearly three meters of bone-wrought plate armor and distended limbs and jagged edges facing them in the full, unflinching light of day.
Its helm turned. The eye-slits found Glevedan.
Three seconds. Always three seconds.
He stood and let himself be looked at. He had no other option. The three seconds passed, and he had no desire to understand what that precision meant. Then the helm turned away, and Kessa had Nyme by the back of her coat and was hauling her backward, and the rake-knight was gone, and Rill was gone, walking into the crowd, still humming, and the lamp in him - if it had ever truly relit - was dark.
They came within sight of the docks as another ship died.
The Imperial tithe ship was already bleeding to death in the Kalastikon delta. This was a freighter of some kind, for the hauling of cargo to ships in orbit, berthed at one of the deep-water quays, making a run for it: engines lit, running lights frantic, rising from the dock berths already shedding a trailing edge of umbilical equipment it had not detached correctly in its haste. It climbed fast for its size, already above the city’s skyline, already accelerating, already nearly clear.
The battery on Temeret’s slope spoke a second time.
The ship came apart above the delta in two distinct phases: first the aft section, which simply ceased to exist; then the forward section, which continued upward for a fraction of a second before physics reasserted itself and then described a long, terrible arc into the river estuary.
The sound took three seconds to reach them after the flash.
Glevedan counted without intending to. Three seconds. He thought of the rake-knights, and the same interval, and then he stopped thinking about that particular coincidence because it was not a useful avenue of thought.
‘The port won’t save us,’ Kessa said, clutching her stubgun with both hands like it was a rosary.
‘No,’ said Glevedan.
There was a pause. Nyme was watching the smoke above the estuary. She had been very quiet since Rill, and Glevedan could see in her a great desire to never have understood what was happening around them.
‘The dock authority might still be holding the port gates,’ she said, eventually. ‘It’s defensible. People inside gates are better off than people outside them.’
‘Yes,’ said Glevedan.
Nyme heard it then, in his voice. She turned to look at him.
‘No,’ she said.
‘The gates are defensible,’ Glevedan said. ‘You’re right. Go.’
‘Glevedan—’
His hand went to his coat, pressing flat against the bulk of the notebook and the carbons beneath the fabric, confirming they were still there. They were. They had been there all day, a weight against his ribs so constant he had almost stopped noticing it until now. Now he noticed. He thought of the sub-basement of the Consignment Officio - the room three floors below street level, behind a door that appeared on no current directory he knew of, with iron shelves and the old accumulated filings of centuries.
He thought of the waterproofed document satchels. He thought of the self-contained atmospherics, which might preserve any record so long as a forgotten room remained forgotten.
‘Urdis Hecuba,’ he said. “Merethene House. The Circle Benevolent. Lightburn Estate. The disposition index, the Annex of Abjuration and Reconciliation at the Basilica of Viella Twice-Sainted - pages removed, binding rethreaded; whoever looks will see the fray at the spine. Sub-Registrar Marlet. Lot 771, Gates Two and Four, the Ossuary Consignment Officio, the weight was sixteen hundred and sixty-two. The music is propagated through the architecture of the city itself, the bone vaults amplify it. They are waking something up.’ He stopped, breathed. ‘You have all that?’
Nyme was crying. She did not appear to have noticed. ‘Glevedan, you have to come with us.’
‘You have all of it,’ he said. It was not a question.
She wiped her face with the back of her hand, furious at the extravagance of tears, and looked at him with an expression that contained, in rapid and visible succession, comprehension, denial, and the bitter surrender of the latter to the former.
Kessa stepped forward and put a hand briefly on Glevedan’s shoulder, the first time in all the years he had known her. It was brief, and it was unprecedented, and it contained the whole of what remained to be said between them. Then she withdrew it, and beckoned for Nyme to come with her.
The Consignment Officio at the Ossuary of Viella Twice-Sainted admitted Glevedan through its side entrance, as it always had, because he had the key, and one kept one’s keys. The building was empty and dim, and it had the quality of all emptied official buildings: a faint presence of the people who had lately occupied it, the ghosts of routine in the bolted desks and the stamps and folios and wall–mounted edicts, and that special silence reserved for empty places usually accustomed to conversation.
Though, Glevedan had to admit to himself, it was not silence. Not fully. He had entertained the hope the pulse resonating from beneath Selpetua would be perhaps be mitigated by familiarity, but it served only to skew his whole sense of the place, to put it at odds with his senses.
He went through the working floor without stopping, past his own desk - the one whose wood bore the shape of his forearms - and through the filing room and down the first stairs, and then the second, and then the third, which were narrow and steep and lit by no phosphor lamp. He went by touch and memory, hand on the wall. The door at the bottom was iron, heavy, braced in its frame but not locked. He put his shoulder to it, and though Glevedan Bulk was not as his name might imply a large man, it yielded to him with the complaint of old metal, and the sub-basement admitted him.
The smell was right. Old parchment and ink, and that faint mineral-salt undertone of Selpetua’s undercity that permeated everything below the first floor. He produced from a table near the door a small candle, and a striker, and set it alight. The light reached perhaps three meters in each direction and committed to nothing beyond. Where light fell, he saw shelving units laden with binders and folios and waxed satchels. Sheafs of vellum piled high, and even ancient data slates, under a fine patina of undisturbed dust.
He used the raw edge of the striker handle to unbolt the heaviest shelving unit from the floor - it took time, but there was no way to quantify time’s passage in this place - and set it with some great effort against the door. Then the second, angled, braced. It would not stop the rake-knights, not those things which could be where they had not been seconds before, like the mythical hounds that slip between unseen angles. But it was something.
He found, at the back of the chamber, the emergency kit, for flooding. Why emergency measures for flooding had been left three levels below street level, Glevedan could not even begin to speculate. From it he fetched more candles, and a sealed tin of starch rations dated for expiry a century prior. From the times he had been forced to rely on the municipal ration queues, in his apprenticeship, he did not suspect expiration would much degrade the experience of consuming starch rations, wretched as it already was.
He set two candles in iron holders, careful to position them away from the ancient records, and lit them as well.
He cleared a space on the central viewing table, sat down, and opened his coat.
From the inner pocket: the notebook, the carbon copies, the pamphlet. He laid them out before him. He uncapped his pen.
He wrote, in the clean, even hand of an Imperial clerk:
Tone and structure were not considerations. The document had been writing itself in his head for days — in the sleepless hours, on the long walks between his lodging and Kessa's and back, in the moments at his desk when his pen moved through the day's routine while his mind worked on something else entirely. He knew what it needed to contain and the order in which to contain it. He was a rubricator. He had been trained for exactly this, though not quite this.
Above him, the city was dying. He could hear it: transmitted through stone, conducted through the building’s bones and up through the sub-basement floor. Distantly, the bells had changed their tone again. The harmonic resonance that was not quite music and not quite silence was no longer faint. It pressed against the walls of the room with a gentle, implacable persistence, like floodwater at a sealed door, not violent, no fury, merely present, merely patient.
He wrote.
The candles burned at their customary pace. He wrote the lot number and the weight and the stamp and Marlet’s name, and the carbon copies laid out beside his notebook for reference. He wrote Urdis Hecuba and Lightburn Estate. He wrote the Circle Benevolent, and the treacherous geometries of Merethine House, and the diagrams and classifications and the things that had been sainted knights. He wrote Nyme Etzebar, chorister at the Belverine Chapelhouse, who had heard the music in the walls and what she had overheard in the corridor. He wrote what he had seen in the streets: the salon nights and the spreading of the tune and the red cloth and the processional routes and the procession and the Rake-Knights and the crowd that did not resist because it no longer had any capacity or notion of resistance.
He wrote Jaro’s name, Rill’s name and Kessa’s name.
Once, a new sound rose from below the sub-basement - below the foundation stones, from somewhere in the basalt layers of deep catacombs - that was not the resonance. It was a voice, or it had a voice at its surface, the shape of vocalization, which contained something greater and older as effectively as a bottle might contain the sea. It rose and held and the candle flames guttered sideways in still air and the dust on the table surface shivered and coalesced into familiar patterns, and Glevedan pressed his pen harder to the page and wrote another sentence.
The shadows at the edge of his candlelight had been behaving unusually for some time.
He was aware of it as one is aware of the weather at a distance: present in the peripheral field, noted, not attended to. The shadows creeping across the far shelving had a quality of intentions that shadows should not exhibit - a kind of directionality, as though they were not merely the absence of light but the procession of something with weight. The candle flames guttered again, in the still air, and when they resumed, the shadows had edged closer.
He did not look up.
Any sensible man would have looked up, or else fled in fright. Glevedan was not in this final particular, a sensible man. He was a rubricator, and the record was not yet complete, and it was now his only purpose. That was the whole of it, so he turned the page and wrote.
The shadows reached the table sometime before he reached the end of the page. The candle flames gave less and less light, until what remained were only feeble blue points in the dark, and any memory of warmth left the room, and then his hands, and still he wrote.
The last line he set down was whole, and neat, and properly punctuated. He ordered his papers and set his pen down carefully, neatly aligned, because that was how one left a desk. He folded the completed pages into a waxed leather folio and pressed it shut.
Then he looked up.
The candles went out.
