#On the Chambers
Behind the Assessment Halls of the Gilded Chasm, past the ledges cut into gold-veined rock and into galleries no surveyor has finished drawing, lie the Hollow Vaults. They are treasure chambers. That classification is complete, and it is also the whole of the problem.
Each chamber is larger than any building that could hold it. Coin lies in drifts against the walls and in banks across the floor, heaped in ridges taller than a chapter house. Plate, ingot, reliquary silver, signet, bracelet, buckle and button lie together without regard to rank, because the Vaults keep without sorting. The gold shines the way a coin shines when a moneylender turns it in his fingers. According to every account the Bureau has bothered to file, the gold watches back.
It is still insufficient. The Doctrine classification of Velmora's territory says so with an economy I envy: wealth beyond counting, and still not enough. Doctrine files that sentence under design.
Note the plural. The Vaults are documented in concentration within the Chasm, and the Bureau's survey of her dominion names them among its principal institutions. No one has mapped them all, and no one has shown that they connect. They are not to be confused with the Vault of Ten Thousand Keys. That Vault is singular, it is her palace, and it is kept in a separate file in a separate drawer, for reasons the reader will appreciate.
#On Their Enlargement
The Vaults grow. The classification adds that they must, in the flat tone of a man reading the lesson at a funeral.
They grow by taking what lies beside them: old mine tunnels, the mansions of the men who owned the mines, the streets those mansions faced, the administrative annexes where someone once kept a register of who owned what. Nothing is demolished. Each space is absorbed whole, and the hoard spreads into it the way floodwater spreads into a cellar.
The swallowed things keep their shape. A stair-rail survives with coin banked to the third step. A run of shopfronts stands along a gallery wall with the shutters down and the painted trade-signs still legible, and ingot lies over the paving. An annex keeps its pigeonholes, and every one is stuffed with rings. A door-frame stands in a heap of plate with no wall left on either side. Somebody lived here. Somebody filed here. The Vault has not bothered to remove the evidence, because evidence is also property.
The Chasm dossier records how the wider canyon enlarges. A town falls into debt, a parish sells its bell, a crack opens under the counting-house, and the district's foundations reassess themselves. It is tempting to apply that sequence to each Vault and call it law. I decline, which happens less often than the reader might hope. The pattern was observed in the Chasm. It has not been tested chamber by chamber, and no one the Bureau would willingly send has measured how fast a single Vault eats a street. What is established is narrower, and worse. They grow, they keep what they take, and what they take does not satisfy them.
#On the Counting
The Vaults are not empty of persons. Caretakers move through the treasure, and the caretakers count.
What they are, the Bureau cannot say with a straight face. They have no recorded names, no known appointment and no established species. Persons of good office have been tempted to identify them with the Ledger-Keepers: either the demons who record every transaction within Velmora's reach, or the human rank of that title in the cult of the Ten Thousand Keys. That temptation is administrative laziness. Ledger-Keepers write. Caretakers count. A filing system that cannot tell a pen from an abacus deserves the enemy it gets.
The Chasm dossier reports caretakers who have counted for decades. Some have lost every word except numerals. Some have counted past known arithmetic and carry on in languages that, the dossier says, smell of hot coin. They move through the drifts in silence or in a low mutter of tally. They lift, set down, move on and begin again.
Why they count is disputed, and the two accounts must be entered side by side.
The Doctrine classification of her territory holds that they count because something terrible will happen if they stop, and that they have forgotten what. The fear has outlived its object. It is kept on deposit and draws no interest.
My own entry on Velmora gives another reason. Stopping would mean admitting that the number is never high enough, that the Vault cannot be measured, and that it therefore cannot be owned. A caretaker who stopped would find himself the custodian of something he can never possess.
Both accounts agree on the behaviour. Neither names a penalty. No report in the Bureau's keeping records a caretaker who stopped, so none records what followed. I will not invent one for the curious.
#On the Collection
Doctrine teaches that under Velmora, ownership flows backward. The possessor is possessed. A man begins by keeping a hoard and ends as something the hoard keeps. He checks it and guards it. He cannot release a single coin of it, and he cannot think of himself as anything but its custodian. In the Vaults, that teaching acquires walls.
Wealth alone has never been the charge. The Church keeps treasuries. I keep a modest purse. The grain-sellers of Sibiu give fair weight every morning, and Hell takes no particular notice. The corruption lies in conversion: affection, loyalty, years and self reduced to quantities, then acquired, retained and counted.
As classified, the consequences of Velmoran corruption reach the body in the extreme cases. The skin takes on a metallic cast. The joints stiffen. The eyes go to glass. The victim roots in place among his treasures and becomes one more object in a vault, one more precious thing to be counted. He remains aware and still wants more, and he can never acquire anything again. The Bureau of Rites keeps seven such terminal cases under observation within Synod records.
Here I must be exact, because exactness is the only charity the Bureau permits me. These consequences belong to Velmoran corruption in general. No source establishes that every caretaker suffers them, or that every person so transformed was deposited in these chambers. A gilded man found rooted in a Moldavian counting-house is a Velmoran casualty. Nothing further can be entered against his name without further evidence.
He is also still a man. Doctrine is plain on this point, plainer than I would choose to be in a document the Bureau of Tithes will read. A body can be imprisoned, chained, mutated and set among the gold like a candlestick, and the will inside it remains its own. The capacity to choose differently cannot be repossessed. The Bureau knows of no cure and records no rescue from a Vault. It records only that the choosing has not been taken.
Earlier editions of this Codex identified Velmora's primary sorcery as "cursed coinage."
Corrected to Contract Theurgy. The correction governs this entry. If the gold itself were the curse, a Vault could be emptied with a cart and a furnace. The binding lives in the flesh of the signatory, and no cart will haul that away.
#On the Surrounding Accounts
The Vaults have neighbours, and the neighbours are not interchangeable. The Binding Markets exchange contracts. The Assessment Halls determine value and record it. The Debt Warrens under the old Danube cities house those who owe more than they can pay. The Counting Kingdoms keep a whole society of transaction trading in the ruins of the Balkan cities. The Vaults hoard. Deeper in the Chasm stands her palace, and its keys, doors and silences belong to its own file.
Readers fond of tidy diagrams have asked me to show how a man passes from market to hall to vault to palace. No controlling source establishes such a route. I decline to draw one, and I note that the enemy has never needed one.
This much can be said. The Chasm's wealth makes war on Bastion-Sibiu. Its gold arms her, buys quartermasters and toll-clerks, and turns up in the coat pockets of hungry men below the Transylvanian passes. The Bureau cannot say whether any particular coin passed through a Hollow Vault on its way west, and no ledger the Bureau trusts records a shipment out of one. For the war, the Vaults matter as something the garrison can see: a hoard that grows by eating the street beside it. It is the plainest statement Velmora will ever make of her intentions for Sibiu.
#On the Present Condition
As of A.S. 201, the Hollow Vaults of the Chasm lie in Velmoran demonic territory east and southeast of Sibiu, in the Charnel Lands of Zone 6, beyond reclamation. The Bureau of Tithes sent parties to audit the Chasm in A.S. 114 and A.S. 180. Neither party inspected a Vault. The Bureau's later ruling against assessing the Chasm by any levy whatever has spared it the embarrassment of another attempt.
The available countermeasures are the ones that apply to Velmora everywhere. Have two clerks read every contract. Refuse any gift more generous than the giver's station allows. Detachment, whether the Value Fast or the Mark of Poverty, may loosen her hooks. In practice the Fast has mostly handed her agents a fortnight of concentrated desperation, and the vow of poverty leaves a man faithful but unfit to keep a quartermaster's books.
Alms given without account irritate her machinery. I have said so in print, and I stand by it. No one has shown that such alms shrink a Vault by a single street or release a single caretaker from the count.