“Match” Morrick

#On His Station

"Match" Morrick serves among the Scour crews of Bastion-Shipka, under Captain Varik, in the yards behind the east bastion where the Order of Ash keeps its fuel. He is old and heavily scarred. The Shipka account puts his burns at sixty parts in the hundred of his body. I give the figure exactly because a percentage is the only kind of pity the Bureaus accept without a countersignature.

The record gives him no first name, no birthplace, no age and no date of enlistment. It does not say who first called him Match. I decline to supply any of these. A dossier that invents a man's childhood to make him more sympathetic is a forgery.

He speaks rarely. When he speaks, Varik listens. When Varik speaks, Morrick listens. Between two men who handle prepared fire for a living, that exchange is as close to a treaty as the yards permit.

Lately he has been waking in those yards, beside the sealed caches, with a match in his hand.

The match is unlit. Every report says so. I shall say so as often as the reports do.

#On the Reed-Road Sleepfire

Decades before this survey, the Reed-Road Sleepfire took the outlying stilt settlements of the Shipka marsh. Marsh fire and a sleep outbreak arrived together. Watchers on the ladders reported whole households standing in their burning homes with their clothing alight, swaying gently and making no move to flee. Ash officers on inspection demanded Scour of the entire quadrant. The engineer-captains chose water instead. They opened sluices and pumps along the Reed Road, cut the burning hamlets off from the timing grid, pulled down what had to come down and drowned what would drown.

Dozens died, and the stilt villages were burned down to charred ribs. The main quarter did not burn, and the Scour was never lit against Shipka's own habitations. That distinction matters a great deal to the rail quarter. In the stilts it matters to no one.

Morrick survived.

That is the whole of what the record says of his part. It does not place him at a sluice, on a ladder or in a doorway. It does not say whether he stood there as soldier or villager, or which flame reached him. I have left the space empty. Empty space in a file is honest, and a rescue invented to fill it would not be.

The dates are worse. The local ledger assigns the Sleepfire a year that has not yet occurred, which is ambitious even for Shipka. I leave the event at "decades" and refuse to let a frightened copyist date a man's injury in the future.

The official finding says no permanent stillness lingered among the survivors. That finding was a judgment on the survivors as they were then. It is no warranty for an old man's nights now.

#On His Authority Among the Crews

A Scour company trains on maps, masks and red ink. Recruits trained only on maps come to think of fire as a line drawn by someone senior, and the institution has learned this the hard way. Morrick corrects them without opening his mouth. A new trooper looks once at the old man and understands that the sprayer on his own back holds the same substance. Doctrine teaches that fire cleanses. Morrick's skin adds the footnote, and it is written in the one ink Shipka cannot redact.

The Bureaus value this. War counts him as a trooper. Purity, I suspect, counts him as a deterrent against softness, since a burned man who still serves the fire makes a fine sermon for serving it. In short, he is used as evidence of what the Scour costs. Nobody asked whether he wished to be the exhibit.

Varik counts him differently. I have no record of their conversations and will not manufacture one. I have only the listening, in both directions, and I find it more persuasive than any oath of friendship. Oaths are cheap. Attention in a fuel yard is expensive. The record makes Morrick neither Varik's mentor nor his conscience, and I will not promote him to either. It is enough that a careful captain hears an old trooper's rare remarks to the end. Nothing in the file says they agree about every use of fire. Men who listen that closely seldom do.

#On the Scour Yards

The yards hold the Order's barracks, where murals of famous burnings teach recruits to admire them and veterans learn not to look. They hold the testing ground, its earth glassed in patches by years of practice blazes, and they hold the stores. Drums of accelerant wait in locked culverts and fuses wait in wax-sealed tubes. The crews' equipment hangs in rows: oil-slicked canvas, hooded masks with mica lenses, layered gloves, sprayers and ignition lances. The prepared channels run from here into the rail quarter and out along the Reed Road. Every household in Shipka lives somewhere on a map drawn in red.

Morrick walks this ground at night.

Two other reports concern the same ground. The caches have shown warmth, faint vibration and seal-wax softening with no ambient cause, and Varik has increased inspections without classifying the anomaly. Sister-Confessor Pyne, chaplain to the crews, has found small private devotions spoken over the caches and fears a martyr complex forming in the company. Neither report names Morrick. I set them beside his file because they share an address. An address is not an accomplice.

#On His Unremembered Walks

The facts come first, in the order a tribunal would want them.

Morrick goes to sleep in his quarters. He wakes in the Scour yards, standing at or over the sealed caches. He holds a match, and the match is unlit. He does not remember the walk.

Everything after that is interpretation, and I shall label it.

Morrick's own interpretation is fear. By his account, he believes he was marked by whatever was burned in the Sleepfire and is being prepared for some purpose he did not choose. That belief is his. I enter it as testimony, not as my finding. A man who survived fire, serves fire and now wakes holding its smallest instrument has every reason to reach for the word "marked." Fear makes a poor theologian and an honest witness.

The demonologists' interpretation is restricted. Syrion commands the Vales of Stagnance beyond the marsh and works through exhaustion, delay and the slow, agreeable surrender of the will. Doctrine is explicit that within Synod territory no demon may possess a man, compel his body or remove his choice. Whatever brings Morrick to the caches, nobody is working him on strings. If the Great Deceiver takes an interest, he must offer and whisper like every other salesman. The feet that walk are Morrick's, and on every night of record the match has stayed unlit.

The administrative interpretation is the worst of the three because it is the most useful. A sleepwalking Scour veteran found at the caches is a gift to any official who wants a threshold crossed. One stamp reading "sleep-contagion vector, Scour yards" would bring the fire closer to every door on the red map. Varik knows this. So, I suspect, does Morrick.

The walks have produced no fire, no recovered memory, no culprit and no cure.

#On His Present Condition

This dossier is a current survey, sealed in A.S. 201. The year belongs to my inspection, not to any event in Morrick's life. At that inspection he remains on the company's rolls, in the yards, under Varik. No order of confinement has been filed, and no inquiry has concluded. Shipka's own habitations remain unburned, as they did through the Slumber-Hulk engagement of A.S. 194. The record gives Morrick no part in that engagement.

The institution wanted a burned man as proof of the Scour's price, and it has one. It now has the added discomfort of a burned man who fears he may become the next fire's instrument and says so plainly. That is more candour than the caches have offered. Doctrine will be informed when a fact arrives, and not before.