#On the Departure
"The hymn-choir sang the Canticle of Assured Return." — departure account, Commission 73-C
On the morning of the 14th of Martius, A.S. 73, at Forward Staging Point Kessler, sixteen voices sang a hymn whose title made a promise. Kessler was a trench-depot three miles behind the wire, south of Bastion-Irongate. The surviving account does not give the hymn's words. It gives the title, the number of singers, and the reason the commission's writ carried them: spiritual protection. Nine presbyters blessed the commission's compasses, its chains, its brass protractors and its blank mapping folios, and the blessing took four hours. The account does not say whether the Canticle came before those hours, during them or after them, and I have not improved it.
The offices also need a word. In A.S. 73 no Synod had yet been constituted to sing for. The Church held its frontier through a provisional council and a growing body of offices, and the names I give those offices here (Doctrine, Records, Bells) are names the archive attached to them later. The archive likes to attach names.
Commission 73-C departed under the Synod, which had by then held the Sagittal Line for eight years, on a writ countersigned by the Bureau of War.
The formal Synod was constituted at Strasbourg in A.S. 90, seventeen years after Kessler. The Sagittal Line had become defensible some years before the departure but was still incomplete, and no clerk may certify eight years of uniform hold. The Bureau of War received its charter in A.S. 105. Where this Codex gives Bureau names to the offices of A.S. 73, it uses retrospective archival terms. The Canticle was sung under the developing government of the Church, which is what the Bureau of Records has always meant.
The day was cold and clear, with fog beyond the defended ground. At the sixth bell the commission crossed Gate Nineteen in the Irongate Southern Sector: three hundred souls on the authorized roll, every instrument blessed, and the Canticle already sung behind them.
#On the Assurance
A hymn may beseech, lament, or ask the Creator to remember the traveller. This one assures. Assured is a participle of completed action, so the return is spoken as though it were already entered. In the Ledger's grammar, an assured return is a return on file that waits only for the man to arrive.
Nothing about the performance itself would surprise a soldier of the Church. The Church sends its soldiers to war with oiled helmets, engraved rifles and choirs going ahead of the assault. Sound is how the Church keeps cadence, gives commands and holds a frightened line in step. Sometimes it does more than that, which is why the Bureau of Orison and Song now licenses who may sing what, and where. A sixteen-voice choir at a survey muster belongs to that practice. What the Canticle does beyond it, and by what means, the record does not say.
The record is missing a great deal more. It names no composer, no year of composition and no first performance, and it gives no patron, no language, no count of verses, no mode, no tempo, no part-writing and no revisions. Sixteen voices do not prove sixteen parts. I have read no line of the text and I will not supply one. A missing text is simply missing. It has not been sealed, burned or hidden for anyone's benefit, so far as I know, and I make no mystery of it.
What the record does show is a habit older than this hymn. When a campaign of the Church fails, the failure is never laid at the feet of its arms. It is laid at the feet of its ritual: too little sacrifice, worship too timid. The Bureau of Doctrine holds the interpretation of every rite the way a notary holds his seal, and it has never seen cause to break that habit. A promise of return, sung by people who are themselves answerable for whether it works, suits the habit very well.
#On the Returns
I have been told (and I set the telling down exactly as I received it) that the Canticle of Assured Return has been sung before one hundred and fourteen Bureau expeditions beyond the wire. Twenty-nine of those expeditions returned with their full complement. Eleven returned with a reduced complement. Seventy-four did not return.
The arithmetic is plain. Forty expeditions came back in some form, and seventy-four did not. A little over one in four came back whole. These figures count expeditions and say nothing about how many people were in each. An expedition of three hundred and an expedition of twelve each count as one in the column.
Doctrine calls this success rate "doctrinally sufficient," and it attributes the failures to "insufficient sincerity of recitation." The formula is elegant, and I admire it as a locksmith admires a lock. It moves the cause of failure out of the fog and into the choir-stall. The singers stood behind the wire, while the missing walked past it, and weeks later and miles east the people who stayed behind are held answerable for what the fog did to the people who went. Nobody can audit insincerity after the fact. It can only be inferred from the empty column. On this reading, every expedition that comes back confirms the rite and every one that vanishes convicts the choir.
I have found no hearing, no verdict and no letter of censure against any chorister. The formula needs none. It convicts in general terms and spares the clerk the work of writing names. Sixteen people sang at Kessler and were then sent wherever choirs are sent. None of them can be shown to have mumbled.
The middle column needs attention too. "Reduced complement" sets no lower limit. One man coming home out of three hundred is a reduced complement. On that taxonomy, a disaster with a single survivor counts toward the sufficient rate, and Doctrine's arithmetic grows more generous the more disasters it has to absorb.
#On Commission 73-C
Three hundred were authorized. They went east into fog, where geography stops agreeing with itself. In Syrion's country, the Vales of Stagnance and the grey ground around them, maps contradict one another, distances change between one survey and the next, and clocks stop. Travellers who come back cannot agree on what they saw or how long they were gone. The commission's own instruments were blessed for four hours, and they disagreed with each other within days.
Fourteen came back through Gate Nineteen on the 2nd of Aprilis, A.S. 73. They carried their surveys, and in the margins of those surveys was a face that none of the fourteen remembered drawing. Doctrine later identified it with Syrion. The maps were burned on the 9th of Aprilis, while a separate rite, the Rite of Profitable Forgetting, was sung over the fire. In A.S. 74 the commission's records were reclassified from Amber to Obsidian. The fourteen were posted to the Office of Bells, which the archive now files as the Bureau of Bells, and set to bell-mapping: charting peals, the routes they travel and the hours they keep. They had been sent out to measure ground, and they were brought home to measure sound.
Whether Commission 73-C is among the hundred and fourteen, my informant did not say. If it is, it belongs among the eleven. It was a reduced complement and a return in some form, and it counts toward sufficiency. Fourteen of three hundred would be entered on the same side of the ledger as the twenty-nine that came home whole.
The record supports no causal sentence about the Canticle. It does not show that the hymn brought fourteen people home, and it does not show that a failure of sincerity left two hundred and eighty-six in the fog. It does not show that the singing at Kessler had anything to do with the face drawn in the margins. Syrion's ground bends time in ways the Church has never mapped, and that is no promise that the missing will one day walk back in. The commission went out, the fog did what it does, and fourteen came back. Doctrine's explanation was waiting for them whatever the count turned out to be.
#On the Record
The title survives. The assessment survives as a position attributed to Doctrine and reported to me. I have not established whether choirs still sing the Canticle at the wire in A.S. 201. I have not asked. A Warden who asks what a hymn is currently used for is assumed to be planning a transfer.
Whatever its merits as music, the Canticle of Assured Return is a well-built document. It makes a promise in the past participle. It leaves the cause of failure with sixteen people standing safely behind the wire. It counts a single survivor as a return. Seventy-four expeditions of a hundred and fourteen never came home, and nothing in the hymn's title has had to change.