Category Epsilon

#On the Classification

"Category Epsilon: Involuntary Sorcerous Emission, Auditory Variant." — Standing Order 14-B(Revised), A.S. 187

"Category Epsilon: Combat-Modified Auxiliaries, Ranged-Assault Subtype." — current designation of the Gore-Slinger, A.S. 194

Two formulas share one Greek letter, and seven years separate them. That is all the documentary foundation there is. Category Epsilon appears in the Synodal record attached to two enemy auxiliaries, the Pale Chanters and the Gore-Slingers, and each time the letter is followed by a different account of itself. I have asked the Bureau of Records for a charter, a defining memorandum, or the founding minute in which some clerk of the Bureau of Doctrine wrote down what the letter was meant to hold. Records produced a receipt for my request and nothing else. This survey therefore describes how the letter has been used. Readers who wanted a definition will have to make do with a pattern.

The pattern is simple to state. Both creatures were once human beings. The Shadow Court remade both into something that makes a weapon out of its own substance: a sac of blood in one case, a voice in the other. The letter marks the product. The person who produces it goes into the file as a note of origin, the way a foundry's name is stamped on the base of a shell.

#On the Body Entered as Materiel

The Shadow Court wastes nothing that is human. Its mortal apparatus uses bodies as labour, fuel, walls and weapons, and the Synod has a register for almost every use. The unenhanced conscripts driven at our guns are Ash-Fodder, Category 1-F, Hostile Mortal Materiel, Expendable Tier. The women kept in the maternal cells are Ash-Mothers, entered by Records under Classification 7-F, Reproductive Infrastructure, Hostile. These registers are kept by separate offices. 1-F is not a rung below Epsilon, and 7-F is not a rung beside it. The only thing linking the three is the clerk who sometimes files all of them before lunch.

In both of its attested uses, Epsilon records specialisation. Ash-Fodder are spent as they are found. A Gore-Slinger has been worked on until its arms are a launching frame and its veins a magazine. A Pale Chanter has been worked on until its ruined throat produces something the Bureau will not call music. Captured civilians, prisoners of war and a minority of cult volunteers have all been identified among the Gore-Slingers. The category therefore records what a body does now. It says nothing about what the person once chose.

Three offices read the same body in three different ways. The Bureau of War reads a range and a payload. The Bureau of Medicine reads tissue. The Bureau of Mercy reads a parishioner who went missing behind the enemy front and came back wrong. No decree has reconciled the three readings, and nobody has asked for one.

#On the Recorded Forms

The Ranged-Assault Subtype is ordnance in the plainest sense. Sustained demonic exposure swells the veins of the arms and torso and pools the blood into membranous sacs under the skin. The arms lengthen and the hands splay into throwing paddles, and the subject hurls its sacs across ninety to one hundred and forty metres. When a sac bursts, its contents turn to vapour within about four seconds. The aerosol blinds and sickens, and it carries the sorcerous despair the trenches call the drop. The visible cloud is called the red curtain. Medicine handles the condensate under Field Autopsy Protocol 14-D of A.S. 193 and lists it as a Category Three Biological Hazard. That is a medical register, and it has nothing to do with Epsilon apart from sharing the same body.

The Auditory Variant is harder to pin down. Pale Chanters are skeletal, with ruined throats and ulcerated tongues, and out of that wreckage comes the counter-hymn. The Lore Book states plainly that the sound drains vitality from every mortal nearby, friend or foe, and the enemy's own Thralls fall beside Covenant infantry. Survivors report losing their sense of purpose, receiving orders that mean nothing, and finding that prayers will not take. In A.S. 193 the Bureau of Engineering set instruments along the Irongate sector. The readings pointed to transmission through trench walls and through the listener's own bones, and they were classified at once. No range has been confirmed. Some claim the voices are what keep the dead upright. That claim is speculation, and the dossier labels it as such.

At Prague in A.S. 167, a regiment of Fusiliers stood with loaded rifles while forty-three of their number died before a single volley was fired. The incident came twenty years before the earliest attested use of the letter, and nearly every argument in its favour cites it.

The Ranged-Assault Subtype is further divided by patron. Seven variants are on file, one for each of the Seven Sin-Generals. Maldrake's sacs ignite, and the trenches of Constantinople know them best. Kargath's cloud brings sudden hunger and rots rations on contact. Velmora's breeds covetousness and distrust, and three incidents at Sibiu in A.S. 197 were traced to it. Morwen's cloud gives soldiers their own voices back, altered, and men at Irongate have taken their comrades for impostors. Syrion's brings sleep, and Shipka loses more men to it than to anything else. Velkara's leaves a wanting that nothing satisfies. Atheron's, met along the pressure before Przemyśl, produces delusions of invulnerability and superiority. The Bureau of War admits its records on the last two are thin. Seven variants are seven entries under one subtype. They are not seven Epsilons. The full treatment belongs to the parent dossier.

#On Names and Revisions

The Gore-Slinger has carried four official names. The first dates from A.S. 168 and is lost: Records misplaced it, and War declined to reconstruct it. "Modified Thrall, Projectile Variant" was retired in A.S. 187. "Corrupted Ranged Auxiliary, Type Seven" was retired in A.S. 194 for the present designation. The soldiers said Gore-Slinger the whole time, and the Bureau has lately started saying it too.

The dates are worth noticing. The Gore-Slinger is the better-known Epsilon, but it arrived late. By A.S. 187, Doctrine had already put the Pale Chanters under the letter, while the Gore-Slinger spent another seven years as a Type Seven. The auditory application is the elder.

In the same year, Standing Order 14-B(Revised) laid down that the Chanters do not sing. Their output was to be called the counter-hymn. The soldiers' word, unhymn, was banned because its prefix implied a sacred original and so flattered the enemy. Bone-whistle was banned along with it.

The correction was filed under Gore-Slingers. It applies only to the Ranged-Assault Subtype, and it is the only revision to Epsilon's contents that anyone has bothered to stamp.

#On Field Application

The Gore-Slinger reaches a soldier through his lungs, his skin and his clothing, and it keeps doing so after it is dead. Standing Order 71-G answers each of these routes.

According to Medicine's estimate, the brine masks cut inhalation by about sixty per cent. That figure measures inhalation only. It does not measure survival, recovery or the drop. A Gore-Slinger set alight by incendiary fire often keeps advancing, and some reach the parapet before they fall. The reliquary ward required by the order is supplied by the Bureau of Relics, provided Relics can spare it.

The Chanter reaches a soldier through his ears and, if Engineering's readings are right, through his skeleton. The first defence is the counter-peal of the Bureau of Bells. At Vienna in A.S. 190 the peal failed, and the bells were melted down and recast a quarter-tone sharp. They worked. Nobody has explained why. A field protocol of A.S. 191 orders reliquary wax in both ears and communication by gesture and written order only. Wax blocks the ear and does nothing for the bone. The Bureau of Orison and Song adds saint-dust to its broadcasts and keeps asking for more dust than Tithes will grant.

None of these measures crosses over. Brine has no recorded effect on a voice, and wax has none on a cloud. Commanders on the Sagittal Line who face both in one assault carry both kits and hope the order of arrival is kind to them. No measure protects against Epsilon as a whole, and no cure for either subtype is on record.

#On the Person Remaining

Some Gore-Slingers have reached the autopsy table. Under Protocol 14-D, Medicine opened their skulls and found brain tissue that was damaged but still functional, with pathways firing in patterns consistent with consciousness. Whoever was taken into the pens is still there. They aim, they march, and they feel the sacs swell.

No Pale Chanter has reached the table alive. Every one restrained by field teams has died within minutes. The voice stops and the body collapses into bones and rags. Medicine describes the remains as inconsistent with sustained biological function, and goes no further. How the transformation is made, and whether anyone remains inside it, are questions still open. Medicine's finding on the Gore-Slingers is not evidence about the Chanters, and I will not let a clerk use it as such.

The mutation does not reverse. Whatever happens to the will inside the body, the arms stay long and the throat stays ruined. Doctrine calls the person tactically irrelevant. Mercy calls them pastorally relevant. The ledger has a column for Range and a column for Payload, and nowhere to write a name.