Choir Beneath

#On the Name

The Choir Beneath keeps no roster. It answers to no captain and has never collected a ration since A.S. 172. It has a sound, the name the faithful gave that sound, and a file at the Bureau of Records that no clerk wishes to keep.

The sound rises from under the Blightmarsh, where Debrecen used to stand. Perimeter men report a hymn heard through packed mud. It is muffled and choral, and it is off-tempo, as though the singers lost the beat some years ago and saw no reason to stop. The faithful attribute it to the Litany-Engineers who fired the last charge of the Mire Collapse of Debrecen and did not come back.

Official usage prefers "acoustic after-effect." The Bureau of Engineering's posthumous action note includes a list of approved terms and a list of forbidden ones, and the vernacular name sits on the second list, between "burial alive" and "successful screaming." That list governs the wording of a single record. It has never governed the mouths of sentries, which fall under a separate administration and a lower standard of hygiene.

I file the Choir among the factions. In the Ledger, a faction is any body of persons held together by a purpose and beyond the reach of a summons. The engineers meet both conditions.

#On the Last Engineering Work

In A.S. 172 the Blightmarsh opened under a forward observation regiment, along the street plan of a city that Kargath had eaten on the night of the Sundering. The regiment had three assignments: observation, boundary measurement and engineer support. The third concerns us. The first two were finished within the hour, because there was suddenly a great deal to observe and the boundary had come to them.

Things came up out of the fissures. Their classification has been unstable ever since. The forms list Maw-Born, sub-surface variant and Category Unassigned, and the soldiery have shorter names that I will not print. I decline to certify any allegiance beyond the ground they rose from, which belongs to the Glutton. For the engineers that was enough.

A Litany-Engineer is trained to treat calculation and sanctioned chant as a single discipline. Load and slope are spoken as liturgy, ignition is timed to the interval of a psalm, and the ear is kept open for any machine that starts to answer back. Doctrine holds that the litany brings the wall down. The furnace men hold that the powder does it and that Doctrine may keep its poetry. I have read the citations, and I am satisfied that the engineers at Debrecen were not willing to rely on either one alone.

They had a mile of trench and almost no time. They laid fuses end to end along it. When ink would not hold on wet clay, they cut their hands and wrote psalms into the mud in blood. They consecrated the entire mile under the feet of a regiment that was being eaten.

At Vespers they lit the final charge. The mire heaved and fell inward, and the emergence stopped. Enemy and engineer went down together.

None of the engineers returned. I cannot tell you how many there were. No roster of the detachment survives in any file I have been allowed to open, and I have been allowed to open a great many. The words of the last hymn are missing as well. Whatever they sang, they took the only fair copy down with them.

#On What Is Heard

First there was fire. According to the incident account, the marsh threw up fire on the three nights after the detonation: blue on the first, yellow on the second, colourless on the third. The Blightmarsh has burped fire at intervals ever since, on no schedule that the Bureau has managed to enforce.

Then there was the hymn, and here the chronology turns rude. The regiment's last complete report was written before the charge, and among "sub-surface strain," "vertical bubbling" and "bread-smell from eastern fissures" it lists faint choral return. Something was already singing under Debrecen before the engineers went under it. Anyone who says the Choir was born at Vespers in A.S. 172 has to explain that line. Anyone who says the engineers joined an older choir has to explain how he knows. I can do neither, and I am paid handsomely to do both.

The marsh produces other sounds as well. Survey teams sent close enough to confirm that the fissures had closed came back reporting the smell of bread, street noise and market bells from below. One team heard a child calling prices in pre-Sundering Hungarian. Another heard a sergeant of the lost regiment asking whether the line had advanced. These things belong to the exclusion zone. On present evidence they do not belong to the Choir. A market has no tempo to lose. What sets the hymn apart is order: many voices holding a psalm at work, out of step and still keeping at it. The other noises may be the city, the marsh's memory of the city, or the Great Deceiver doing impressions for a captive audience. Nobody has shown any of these voices to be genuine. Nobody has shown that Debrecen carries on beneath the mud like a parish with the lid nailed down.

As for the singers themselves, the Ledger records nothing. Whether they are alive, whether they are dead, whether they are aware, whether they are saved or held somewhere, whether they are present at all or only remembered by the clay: the Bureau of Doctrine has preached on every one of these questions. I have written several of the sermons. None of us has been down to check.

#On the Official Return

On paper, the Bureau of War lost a regiment of eight hundred nominal effectives in six hours and halted an emergence with a single charge. It entered both facts in the same register, in the same ink. The Bureau of Engineering awarded posthumous recognition, praising "consecration under collapse conditions," a phrase as bloodless as a saint's accounting table. I delivered a memorial at Bastion-Constantinople in which sacrifice sealed the breach. That was true. It was also the least that could be said.

The difficulty is that the Church has decorated the engineers for their hymn and then quarantines anyone who hums it. We praise the work and refuse the noise. The citation hangs in a frame. The sound hangs over a marsh that no one may approach. Both refer to the same men, and only one of them can be filed away.

The accounts also need separating. The eight hundred are the regiment's loss. They are not the Choir's membership, and nobody has counted them among the singers except grieving widows and the occasional bad hymnwriter. Some perimeter men lived to give evidence. One cartographer was brought out alive and lasted nineteen hours. "None returned" refers to the engineers, and the Ledger will not let it be stretched to cover anyone else.

#On Listening Discipline

The site is a permanent exclusion zone. Its edge is marked with black stakes, and every post carries three seals, since one seal has never yet impressed the Blightmarsh. The fissures fill with mud, settle flat, and open again after rain along lines the Bureau of Records will not reprint in case someone uses them as directions.

Nobody has fixed the distance at which the Choir becomes audible. The incident register says it varies with weather, fasting status and guilt, and the Bureau of War has not found a way to stake out any of the three. Patrols are told to stay beyond the listening distance. They are not told where that is, because nobody knows. They find out the way soldiers find out most things, which is too late and by ear.

Each step of the procedure is short, and the steps escalate. A man who hears the Choir is rotated west for examination by whichever physicians the Bureau of Medicine can spare. A man who hums with it is quarantined. A man who answers it is struck from the duty sheets.

The striking is purely administrative. The sheet records only that the man is no longer on it. It does not say where he went, what happened to him, or whether he answered in his own voice. I have asked. I was given a fresh copy of the sheet, and his name was not on it.

The engineers sang to stop an emergence, and the emergence stopped. Twenty-nine years later the Church guards the place where they went down with stakes, seals and a duty roster that can make a man vanish with a single stroke of the pen. On damp nights, when the wind comes in from the east, the men on the perimeter take the plugs out of their ears and put them back in again.