#On the Account
"Debts unpaid cannot rise." — Verdict of the Bureau of Doctrine, on a Strasbourg parish in arrears of ash
Every grace is purchased. The Dialectic of Power establishes the point at length, and I decline to establish it twice. The reader who skipped that entry is directed back to it, and to whatever penance the Bureau of Rites prescribes for reading out of order. This office concerns itself with what remains afterward.
A miracle is paid for when it is worked, in whatever coin the working demands: a fast, a tithe, a service, a vow. That is expenditure. The Bureau records it as calmly as a quartermaster records boots. Devotional debt is the portion that was owed and went unpaid, a deficit against the soul's credit. The Lore Book puts it plainly: when repayment fails, the deficits accumulate.
The difference matters more to clerks than to congregations. Expenditure is a hungry afternoon. Debt is what the parish carries into the next quarter and the quarter after that, with no date of discharge written anywhere I have been permitted to read. The bill also has poor aim. A company blesses its ration loaf and marches a mile further, and somewhere behind the lines a clerk doubles over with a hunger he never earned. Grace draws on the faithful as one body. Each individual is a line item.
#On What Grace Takes
The cost climbs as the working climbs. First the stomach pays, and then the limbs, with the marrow-deep fatigue that follows a tolled bell even as courage floods in behind it. Sleep pays next, fraying until the nights wear through. After sleep goes memory: a name, a face, a daughter's birthday. At the summit of the ladder the faithful pay in years, shaved from choirs and processions who stood, sang and fasted until their bodies had nothing more to offer.
Synodal doctrine holds that this is the whole of the price. The miracle charges the faithful and the world is preserved, while sorcery charges Creation itself and leaves the land east of the Sagittal Line to rot. I record the doctrine as given. I also record that a soldier who forgets his daughter's face shows the same symptom whether the cause was a licensed relic or the Great Deceiver's theft. The forgetting cannot tell you its source. The Bureau settles the question by checking who was licensed to pray nearby.
Earlier editions of this Codex described miracles as "not breaking reality at all."
Corrected pursuant to the Bureau of Records, Fourth Revision. The approved formula is "breaking without blemish." This office regrets the earlier wording and notes, for the benefit of grey-faced readers, that the blemish was never claimed to be absent from them.
The exemplum the Bureaus prefer is old. In the Year Without Dawn, A.S. 32, roosters forgot their office and infants were born eyeless. That year was thirteen years before the Sundering and nearly sixty before there was any Synod to file the result. To stop a plague marching west, Calistus shut a district of Lyon into its ration-halls for forty nights without bread. The plague halted. When the doors were opened, the fasters had eaten their own tongues.
The Hollow Fast worked. I set that sentence down first because the Bureaus always do. Lyon still whistles its hymns. The Lore Book adds that no descendant of that district has a full voice, a claim I can repeat but cannot certify. Nobody measured a balance in A.S. 32. No form existed to hold one. Every later judgment of the Fast as an acceptable investment was made by clerks who were born long after the doors were unlocked.
#On the Symptoms
The Bureau of Rites lists three symptoms, and they are not figures of speech. Clerks have taken them down, word for word, from parishioners who had no talent for figures of speech.
Dulled taste. Bread tastes like ash. Wine loses its warmth and salt its savour. The sufferer goes on eating out of duty and gets no pleasure from it. Mothers report cooking the same pottage three nights running, because the household could no longer say whether it was good.
Insomnia hymns. At night the ears ring with phantom bells. The accounts do not agree on the pattern. Some sufferers hear a peal they half recognise, others a ringing that matches no melody the Bureau can name, and the Bureau's own reports have described it more than one way. The common observation is the bell and the wakefulness. I offer no score.
Brittle joy. Laughter breaks like glass in the throat. The jest still lands, and the mirth starts to rise, and then it cracks partway up. Parishioners describe a sharp catch, followed by silence and embarrassment. Children learn to stop laughing before the break.
Put the three together across a district and you get the condition the parent entries call grey-faced. Whole streets of people walk about unable to enjoy their rations. They are fed and still not satisfied. They are rested and still not asleep. They are amused and cannot finish the laugh.
The Bureau reports that the communities which pray hardest show the most dulled taste. It reports more insomnia hymns in garrisons quartered near first-class relics, and its heaviest debt along the Sagittal Line, where miracles are worked most often. These are the Bureau's patterns, drawn from the Bureau's returns. They do not prove that every orison opens a fresh account. They do explain why the frontier sleeps so badly.
#On Assessment
Every quarter each parish files a Form 14-C, and the Bureau grades it on a seven-point scale. The ends of the scale are Spiritually Solvent and Devotionally Overdrawn. Provisionally Indebted is the fourth grade. The Bureau has not released the names of the intermediate grades to this office, and I will not invent them to make a tidier table. Liturgist-Primus Corvin Marche would find the forgery inexact, and that would trouble him more than the dishonesty.
A parish graded into the qualifying ranks receives its prescription. Three supplementary masses a week. A penitential procession every month. Once a year, an audit by the Sub-Priors of Form, who arrive with ledgers and brass scales and weigh the congregation's collective credit against what it has spent on liturgy. The quarterly return and the annual visit are separate obligations. The parish meets both.
The Bureau also recommends further fasting, filed under its doctrine of the "devotional maturation curve." Hunger, it argues, distresses a tongue less once that tongue can no longer taste bread. I have searched the returns for evidence that the curve ends anywhere. The returns are silent, so I am silent too.
Readers will have noticed that the treatment consists of more masses, more processions and more fasts, which is to say more observance. Whether that observance pays the old account or opens a new one is something no document I hold explains. The Bureau prescribes it regardless. This is less contradictory than it looks, since the Bureau does not claim to cure anyone.
I once asked Marche whether devotional debt could be forgiven. He took nine seconds over it and answered: "Debt is the structure of grace. To forgive the debt is to collapse the structure. The Bureau does not forgive. The Bureau balances."
That is the policy. It does not prove that the Creator could not remit the debt. It proves only that the Bureau will not.
#On the Allotment
Grace reaches the front as rations. Units are issued bell-hour chits, saint-shares and indulgence slips, tallied as carefully as cartridges. A soldier might draw three bell-hours for courage, or a share in Saint Isidore's ash against fever. The Bureau of Tithes collects. The Bureau of Bells enters each bell-hour as a debit. When a parish misses its tithe, its allotment is suspended. There is no light in the trench and no absolution in the Great Ledger.
The confusions that follow are common enough that I will correct them here. A tithe is a levy owed to the Bureau, and paying it keeps the allotment open. It is not repayment of the soul's deficit at any published rate. An indulgence slip is a licensed issue that answers to its own office, and it does nothing for a man's taste. Devotional debt has nothing to do with the clauses that Greed's agents write into the marrow of their debtors, and the soldier who confuses the two should be told so, gently, before a Purity officer tells him less gently. No ledger in the Dominion gives a price for getting taste back, or memory, or a year of life. No such ledger has ever been drawn up.
That leaves the garrison in a position I can describe exactly. A company already in debt still has to hold its section of trench. Holding the trench takes bell-hours. Bell-hours are grace. Grace has to be paid for. The Bureau of War has not asked where this arithmetic ends, because the trench needs holding tomorrow too.
#On Repayment
There are two texts, and they do not agree. The Lore Book speaks of repayment, and implies that obligations met in time keep the account from growing. The Bureau speaks of balance, and by balance it means assessment, prescription and audit, renewed every quarter. Neither text names the day a grey district tastes its bread again.
I will not invent that day. Nor will I invent the opposite, a balance that grows forever. The archive contains parishes reassessed, parishes re-graded and parishes re-audited. As far as this office can find, it contains no form that records a symptom ending.
What the archive does show is the whistled hymn at Lyon. It shows clerks entering Provisionally Indebted against the names of people who no longer laugh at weddings. And it shows a Liturgist-Primus who has never claimed that his Bureau forgives anything. I serve the same Ledger, and I have sealed my share of these returns. My penmanship on them is excellent.