‘The dead are orderly. If disorder appears among them, search first the living.’
By evening the consignment officio had relinquished him - reluctantly, like a miser parting with a coin - and Selpetua received him again with its usual damp indifference. The sea winds came in over the port districts with the smell of salt and iron and prometheum, and with it that ever-present undertone peculiar to the tomb city: preservative resins, whelver tallow, and a sort of faint, mineral-slicked tang that rose up from the undercity catacombs to permeate the atmosphere throughout Selpetua.
Glevedan walked as he always did when he was unsettled: not quickly - quickness invited suspicion - but with the exactness of a man determined to arrive somewhere without appearing to have fled from anywhere. Beneath his coat the copied carbon lay flat against his ribs, tucked into an inner pocket which usually stowed nothing more incriminating than catechism tracts and spare coins for the bar. The carbon was light, but the knowledge of it made him heavy.
Kessa’s place sat on a crooked lane that ran toward the shriner districts, in a crease between older row houses and newer, meaner tenements thrown up to house the cultural pilgrims from Droctulf. The sign above the door - painted by someone who might have once possessed greater artistic ambitions than signage - depicted a wreath and a lantern, though the lantern had been retouched so many times now by less skilled hands that it looked more like a bruise than a light. Inside, the room was long, low-ceilinged, and warmed by a stove that occasionally belched out great clouds of smoke in protest of its daily duty.
The clientele was ordinary for the Whelvertail district: stevedores and teamsters and carters with split-knuckles and lips cracked by the salt winds. Chapelhouse runners with bell-rope calluses and pockets full of drinking money certainly never pilfered from offering bowls. Hospice hands from the Missionaria, smelling faintly of carbolic and candle smoke, quiet even when they laughed. Shipping accountants in ink-stained, brocaded jackets, thin men who could recite tariffs more readily than any hymn.
There were fishwives from the lower quay, their baskets long since emptied, still damp at the hems from brine and afternoon rain. Ragpickers and ash-sifters from the common kilns, grey as their trade, picking at their cups with the same care they afforded midden heaps. A pair of auxiliaries from the Templum Shrinewatch in mismatched uniform jackets - men too old for soldiering and too proud for begging, so they clubbed beggars off the temple steps for a pittance from the priests - drinking in silence with their caps on their knees. A group of ‘prentices from Fraternity of Throne-Bonded Printsetters, hands blackened by their trade, whispering over a pile of penny pamphlets with an enthusiasm that suggested they were not church tracts, but perhaps something licentious in nature. A baker’s wife with a baby asleep against her collarbone, swaying slightly to keep the child stilled while she argued with a kitchen cook about the price of the loaves she’d brought to sell.
And scattered among them like grit in flour, pilgrims: sunburnt offworlders with their badges pinned too proudly to bright-coloured coats and cowled cloaks stitched with fantastic patterns, flaunted with the cheerful stubbornness of those who are convinced gaudiness is a kind of wealth; wide-eyed youths who had known no world besides the arid valleys and ranges of the planet Droctulf. When they went about the city, they made their pilgrimages not to the great basilicae or the catacombs beneath them, but to the cardrooms and salons and theatres that seemed to spring up now on every block and corner in Whelvertail district, and elsewhere besides.
In one corner, under the window that never quite shut right, a knot of Temerii hillfolk kept to themselves - three families compressed around a single table, faces tight with that particular vigilance of displaced people, as if they expected any kindness to be followed by a demand. They spoke in low voices, attention divided between their business and the room around them.
It was, in short, a room full mostly of those who did the city’s work without ever being recognized for it: the people who lifted and carried, copied and cleaned, soothed and buried; who kept Selpetua running day after day, year after year, in its great work of interment and preservation. They drank fermented fungal brews and called it warmth, and they spoke of tithing time the way they used to speak of weather - inevitable, inconvenient, and best survived by keeping one’s head down.
As Glevedan regarded the room from near the doorway, jostled by passersby, his eyes found Kessa’s, behind the bar, and he elbowed his way toward her.
‘You’re late,’ she said. Her sleeves were rolled and her hair was bound up in a practical-looking wrap, free of decoration. She did not smile when she saw Glevedan - Kessa was tightfisted with her good favor - but she tilted her chin in acknowledgment and set a cup aside before he had even reached the counter. ‘Tithe work?’
‘Not even that,’ Glevedan exhaled with unconcealed exasperation. He accepted the cup as though it were an official document, lifting it carefully to his lips to sip before speaking again. The ‘wine’ brewed from a particular fungus was thin and bitter and would have offended any connoisseur; it was merely hot and intoxicating, and those were its sole virtues. ‘There’s all manner of dealmaking happening with the first ship to arrive. Merchant concerns, Ecclesiarchy business. Anyone who has bulk cargo to move offworld. They’re all trying to buy hold space.’
Kessa glanced at his face with the quick, experienced appraisal of any veteran tavern-keeper. ‘That was a lot of words. You look as though you’ve swallowed a nail.’
‘A nail would be straightforward,’ he said. ‘Either it kills me, or I shit it out, and probably it still kills me in the process.’
Kessa made a sound - half scoff, half sympathy - and turned away to bark at a man who was attempting to recover a handful of the coins he’d left out to pay for his drinking. Glevedan took his cup toward the back of the room, where their usual table sat beneath a window that had once allowed a view of the lane, and now offered only the blurred reflection of lamplight from the sheer tenement face less than a meter away.
Jaro was already there, somehow, nursing his own cup with both hands. His posture and movements constrained by the stiffness of those afflicted with lives of hard labour, and he merely lifted his eyes when Glevedan approached; the humor he had worn that morning had been put away, and what remained was a wary neutrality.
‘Well?’ Jaro asked.
Glevedan set his cup down. He did not immediately sit. Standing allowed him to feel less like an accomplice.
‘Well. Well, well. You were there. You heard Marlet. It cleared.’
Jaro exhaled, a small gust of relief that seemed almost shameful. ‘Aye, good.’
‘It shouldn’t have,’ Glevedan added.
Jaro’s mouth tightened. ‘Glev…’
‘Don’t,’ Glevedan said, and found himself surprised by the sharpness of it. He lowered his voice, glancing about himself. ‘I know what you’re about to say. I know it’s tithing time. I know the ship is at high anchor, and I know what happens when a parchment-pusher makes trouble for the port.’
‘Then you know,’ Jaro said, just as quietly, ‘what happens when makes trouble for people like us.’
Glevedan sat, resigned, though it felt like a small, personal surrender to something he could not put a name to.
Rill arrived a moment later, late as usual and apologetic only in the way of someone who has long ago learned that apologies are cheaper than self-improvement. He brought with him the familiar smell of ink, and of parchment pulp, and his hands were stained to the wrists like they’d been thrust into a pot of pitch or lampblack.
He dropped onto the bench with ungraceful ease.
‘If I ever meet the saint of schedules,’ he announced, ‘I will punch him in the mouth.’
‘Or her,’ offered Jaro, a hint of joviality creeping back into his expression.
Kessa passed behind Rill and boxed him hard on the ear as she set down another cup. ‘Mind your blasphemy in my house.’
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‘It’s not blasphemy,’ Rill said, rubbing his ear with theatrical injury. ‘Blasphemy implies conviction - something I am utterly devoid of, I recall you saying.’
Kessa offered some jab in response, but she was already moving away to another table, and her words slipped away in the noise of the room, unheard.
Rill sipped at his cup, winced, then glanced between the two other men. ‘You look like you’ve been to a funeral, Glev.’
‘I work in an ossuary.’
‘Oh, come off it,’ Rill snorted, before taking a too-large gulp of his steaming brew and nearly choking on it as it burned his tongue.
Glevedan stared into his cup as if answers might rise up out of it instead of the little curling wisps of steam. The simplest thing would have been to say nothing. Selpetua loved that sort of silence, it was a tomb city after all.
Instead, he found himself speaking.
‘We had a shipment,’ he said. ‘Offworld consignment, some Templum relic transfer. They’d booked passage on the tithe ship for relic-grade remains, you know, like when some saint’s earbone gets sent off for the consecration of a new shrine on Galanyre or the like.’
‘Ears don’t have bones,’ Jaro said. ‘And we work the consignment office. You stamp shipments more often than Rill pleasures himself to stained-glass saints.’
‘It was wrong,’ Glevedan said, over exaggerated sounds of protest from Rill.
Jaro’s gaze snapped to him. ‘Glev.’
Glevedan ignored the warning note in Jaro’s voice. There was relief in saying it aloud, even just to his friends. ‘No weight slip. Lot number duplicated. The scales said it weighed–’ he hesitated, because even now his mind twisted itself into new and exotic anxieties, and because the exact number was less important than the fact that the discrepancy had been incontrovertible.
‘Heavy,’ he finished, inadequately.
Rill blinked. ‘So? Someone packed the wrong caskets. That happens. Bit of a surplus of bones in ‘ol Selpetua, you know? It happens all the time. Last week we got pallets of hymnal paper, yeah? For our chapelhouse orders? But I pop them open, you know what they’re full of?’
Jaro, seeing Glevedan’s impassive expression, dutifully raised an eyebrow at Rill.
‘Ah, anatomical drawings. You know.’ He tilted his head toward the far table full of jeering ‘prentices. ‘That’s all it is, yeah? It’s Once in a generation, Glev! Everyone panics. Everyone cuts corners. Everyone finds someone else to blame, and the Emperor receives his due and we receive–’ he lifted his cup, examined the contents with mock reverence, ‘–this.’
Glevedan’s fingers tightened around his cup. ‘It isn’t only the corners.’
It was Rill’s turn to raise his brows. ‘Oh? Is it edges now too?’
Glevedan looked from one face to the next, and realized with a faint sourness that he had expected more alarm. Not because his friends were foolish, but because the human heart always expects its private fear to be recognized as extraordinary.
‘It was stamped through,’ he said.
‘Of course it was,’ Jaro said, too quickly. ‘It was always going to be. And I got the boys and I hauled the whole consignment out to Gate Two and we washed our hands of it, Glev, all of us. The alternative is being made an example in front of the lads, and that’s no good.’
‘What about the lotmaster? Marn?’ Glevedan asked, because he truly could not help himself.
Jaro’s jaw worked once, hard. ‘Leave Marn out of your paranoia, Glev. He’s a proper shit, but he just does what the paperwork says, same as us.
Rill, who had spent the last moments quietly nursing his drink with an affected disinterest, leaned in a fraction, the facade slipping. ‘So it wasn’t a dockhand trick,’ he murmured. ‘Not a yard lad trucking stuff around for one of the cartels. It came down from the desks, I’d bet.’
Glevedan heard his own voice go thin with nerves. ‘Sub-Registrar Marlet.’
Rill let out a soft breath - not quite a whistle, not quite a laugh. ‘Marlet,’ he said, as if tasting the name. ‘You’ve whined about her enough I feel like I know her myself. I thought she was all propriety and protocol. Very by the book.’
‘She used to be. But that’s just the thing,’ Glevedan said, and heard how it sounded - like a man trying to indict the whole structure of the world over a missing slip of paper. ‘She saw it. She knew it was wrong. It was on her shift, she’s as liable as I am. And she cleared it anyway.’
Kessa returned at that moment with a plate of something that had once been meat. She set it down with a clack. ‘If you’re going to gossip about your betters, do it quieter. There’s inspectors from the Prefecture in the district this week and I’m not paying another indecency fine because you’ve discovered a conscience.’
‘Inspectors?’ Rill queried. ‘For what?’
Kessa’s eyes flicked toward the front of the tavern, where two men in the cleanest coats in the room sat with the rigid posture of those who wished to make their sobriety among drunkards very apparent. They had not ordered food. Their cups were untouched. They scanned the room with the wary eye of someone intent on finding fault.
Kessa said, and the words were a curse. ‘For and Pick one. They come up with shit every time.’
‘Moral disorder,’ Jaro said under his breath. ‘In Selpetua. Imagine.’
Rill frowned. ‘That’s new. They didn’t bother you last year.’
‘Last year,’ Kessa said, wiping her hands on her apron as if she wished she could wipe the memory away, ‘we didn’t have half of Droctulf trying to sleep in my back room for two crowns a night. We didn’t have the shriners putting on street revels and calling it the Emperor’s Mass. We didn’t have fatfaced up-district droggers slumming it and trying to pay for their drinks with indulgence chits from chapelhouses that don’t exist.’
Rill lifted his stained hands. ‘Speaking of which–’
He reached into his satchel and drew out a roll of printed sheets bound with twine. He laid them on the table with the care of a man who loved paper the way one might love their spouse.
‘This,’ he said, with weary disgust and a faint professional pride, ‘is what I have been printing for three days without sleep.’
Glevedan glanced at the top sheet. It was a notice - bold type, decorative border - announcing some new civic observance. The words were pious enough: a a an The sort of thing Selpetua produced by habit, as if an infinite amount of printed copy might ward off entropy.
But the borderwork was new. Not the usual spire-and-wreath motifs. This was… cleaner. More stylized. A pattern of repeated masks, perhaps, or merely faces rendered as abstract ovals. Something fashionable, as Kessa had said - piety made modern.
‘They wanted it “fresh,”’ Rill said, with a note of bitterness that suggested he had been told this by someone who could afford to be ‘Not so… old-fashioned. Times really a’changing, yeah?’
Nyme arrived while he was speaking, slipping into the tavern like a quiet confession. She wore a plain coat with the choir-house badge half-hidden beneath the lapel, and she had the pinched, over-tired look and red-rimmed eyes of someone who had spent long hours in rooms full of too much incense.
‘You’re all talking too loud,’ she said immediately, taking the seat at the end of the bench. Then, catching herself, she added, more gently: ‘Good evening.’
Glevedan nodded to her. Jaro offered a muttered greeting. Rill smiled and tried, unsuccessfully, to look less like a man who had not slept in three days.
Nyme’s eyes went to the printed sheets. She did not touch them. ‘Those are everywhere,’ she said.
‘They’re paying for them,’ Rill replied defensively, as if payment absolved him of any culpability. ‘That’s more than I can say for your bloody chapelhouse.’
Nyme’s mouth tightened. ‘They’re using them to announce new revels.’
‘New revels?’ asked Glevedan, swirling his drink. ‘Have they not run out of things to be… revelrous… about?
‘They’re calling this one a vigil,’ she said, and her voice took on that peculiar mixture of duty and doubt that came from being devoted to an institution while suspecting it of cowardice. ‘I’ve heard them practicing their songs. Not approved hymns. I asked the choirmaster, he said they’re old arrangements, recovered. A “renewal.”’
Rill scoffed at that. ‘Everything’s “renewed” now. It’s what you say when you want people to stop asking what’s being replaced.’
Jaro toyed with one of the pamphlets. ‘It’s tithing time. Of course they’re doing a big vigil. The ships come. The world panics. We light candles. We sing louder. Then we go back to being wet and miserable.’
Nyme stared at Jaro for a long moment, looking as if she might speak, but said nothing.
There was a pause. The tavern noise filled it: a laugh too bright, a chair scraping, a belch from the stove, and then a stevedore. From the front table the clean-coated men shifted, and Glevedan felt their attention turn like a lantern beam.
Jaro’s fingers tapped once against the side of his cup: a small warning.
Glevedan forced himself to relax his shoulders. He had, abruptly, the sense that his private worry was no longer private. That his day’s clerical anomaly had not been contained to that parchment on his desk at all, but had spilled out into the city for all to inspect.
Rill cleared his throat and attempted levity again, as if humor could drag their spirits back from the grave.
‘Listen,’ he said, raising his cup. ‘To tithing time. To the blessed dead. To the living - tolerated, as our city so kindly permits. May we all keep our heads down and our names off the wrong lips.’
‘Hear, hear,’ Kessa interjected, pausing as she passed to set a pitcher of water on the table. She looked anywhere but at the inspectors at the front. She did not sound amused.
They drank. The brew was as bitter as ever. The warmth did not reach where it needed to.
Glevedan looked at the pamphlet again - the too-clean linework, the fashionable faces in the border - and had the inconvenient thought that he had seen something similar, not in a chapel, but on a shuttered storefront near the shriner districts, chalked there like a child’s doodle or knifegang graffiti.
He banished the thought, perhaps the first time he’d done so successfully that day. He told himself he had come here to vent, to be soothed by the ordinariness of his friends and their complaints about their mundane problems. Instead, he found the ordinary world had begun to answer him with patterns he found he very much did not like.
When he rose to leave - earlier, under the excuse of fatigue - Kessa slid a small parcel across the bar without a word: two ration cakes wrapped in paper, payment deferred, a quiet kindness that did not ask to be thanked. Glevedan nodded and tucked them away, careful not to disturb the carbon copy beneath his coat.
Outside, Selpetua’s lanes were slick with rain and lamplight. Somewhere, off toward the shriner districts, he heard singing - not the booming of a basilica choir and its vox-amplified pipe organ, but a thinner, nearer sound: voices in the street, shouting, chanting, repeating verses even when they stumbled over the words.
Glevedan kept walking, hands in his pockets, shoulders drawn in, doing what every sensible citizen did when the air changed: behaving as though he had not noticed.
