Mercy Quota System

#On the Origin

"Mercy is counted, not felt." (Handlers' saying, current in the departure yards)

In the vocabulary of the Bureau of Pilgrimage, a mercy is a unit, and it comes in three forms. Water is issued by the cup. Rest is issued by the minute. Bandaging is issued by the strip, torn from grey cloth that travels in the Handler's pack beside the forms nobody wishes to fill out. Each unit has a recipient, a tag number and a line on a slate. A cup of water that is written down counts as a mercy. The Bureau has spent the better part of a lifetime trying to name a cup of water that is never written down, and the name it has settled on is theft.

The system exists because Handlers sold relief. Over three Jubilee seasons on the Munich–Sibiu corridor, a ring of Pilgrim-Chain Handlers traded water, rest, bandage cloth and softer shackles for coin, for flesh and for family heirlooms. The Road-Mercy Scandal broke in A.S. 136. The Bureau of Purity burned fourteen Handlers and sent the others to haul corpses from the trenches. The investigation has its own entry, and its own vault.

This tract concerns the remedy. The Synod looked at a market in mercy and concluded, with the serene logic of an institution that has never once been thirsty, that the fault lay in mercy being unmeasured. A Handler could sell a cup because no one had decided how many cups existed. So the cups were decided. Every unit of water, every minute of rest and every strip of bandage would be pre-allocated by formula, entered on the tally slate and verified at the shrines. Selling relief became a discrepancy. Relief itself stayed exactly as scarce as the formula required.

#On the Formula

The formula takes four inputs: column size, route distance, season, and a fourth figure. The Bureau of Pilgrimage enters that last figure in its manuals as the "spiritual resilience coefficient." Every Handler I have met calls it "how many we expect to lose."

The first three are the honest arithmetic of a march. More mouths need more water, more miles need more rest, and summer drains a column faster than autumn. A clerk of no particular gifts could set them. The fourth is theology. It holds that a penitent's endurance is a spiritual quantity, measurable before departure, and that a column of the properly contrite will need less relief than a column of the hardened. The Bureau of Pilgrimage chose the term. As drafting it is poor work, because it names resilience and is used to budget for its absence. The Handlers read it correctly. A coefficient that lowers the allowance is a coefficient that anticipates the ditch.

I will not reproduce the equation, and its inputs are enough. The formula produces an allotment, which is the quantity a Handler is permitted to issue. It is a ceiling given the solemnity of a floor. Nowhere is anything entered about the gap between that ceiling and what four hundred chained people need on a given afternoon, because the slate has no column for need.

The formula's last documented revision dates from A.S. 141. Since then the routes have lengthened and the columns have swollen. It still allocates mercy for a road that no longer exists, to a column smaller than the one that departs.

#On the Issue of Mercy

Mercy begins with a prayer. At the Bell of Prime the Handler recites the morning orders in liturgical form: the route, the destination shrine, the cadence and the day's mercy quota, meaning so many water stops, so many rest pauses and so many issues of cloth. Before the column hears anything else, it hears its allowance spoken aloud.

The instruments are few. The mercy gourd hangs at the Handler's hip. The tally slate is ruled into lines keyed to route-tag numbers, and every wrist cuff carries a tag whose number answers to one of those lines. The tag identifies the body. Lawful movement is a matter for the route token, which the Route-Stamper checks on its own account. Many Handlers also wear a brass mercy ring and notch it once for each issue. An intact ring with clean notches is the nearest thing the profession has to a decoration.

Water goes down the chain in stages. The Handlers' rule is never to let the whole chain drink at once, because a whole chain lunging toward one gourd is a chain that falls. The Handler walks the line, pouring and marking (cup, tag number, cup, tag number), while the wrists on either side of the drinking pilgrim are held level by iron. Bandage strips are torn and logged against a tag. Rest is logged against the column, because a chain rests together or not at all.

At each shrine the slate is surrendered. The Route-Stamper counts heads, reads the entries and asks the only question his office recognises: do they agree? Confession is gathered at the same halt by the shrine-priest. The Handler is a custodian and has no authority to absolve. The slate records who knelt and who refused.

#On Compliance

A Handler is measured on delivery rate, count accuracy, keeping to the bell-hours and mercy quota compliance. Auditors cross-check slates against shrine logs, order surprise headcounts and question pilgrims at random about whether their treatment has been consistent. A pilgrim who is asked that has every reason to answer carefully.

Since the Bellway Harmonisation of A.S. 148, the quota has lived inside a timetable that the Bureau of Bells can hear. A rest pause costs minutes, and so does a water stop. Any minute spent at the gourd is a minute not spent reaching the next shrine-post before its bell falls silent. The allotment tells the Handler how much relief is permitted, and the bell tells the Handler how much can be afforded. The slowest pilgrims make up the difference, because they need the most and cost the most time.

Selling has not stopped. It has moved down the ranks, into checkpoint arrangements and into shrinekeepers paid to sign a count without counting. Beside it runs the practice the profession calls a silent mercy: unrecorded water, poured to keep a column from dying fast enough to draw an audit. A silent mercy is compassion and self-preservation at once, and on the face of the slate it looks exactly like theft. The Bureau has never published a method for telling them apart.

When an off-ledger cup is discovered, somebody must have poured it. The Handler holds the master keys and has the auditor's ear. The Link-Runner hauls the water.

#On Those Who Cannot Walk

In the Jubilee of A.S. 188 I walked as an observer with Column 7-North on the Strasbourg–Przemyśl corridor, under Handler Maren Kessler, 3rd Class. Four hundred and twelve souls departed. Three hundred and seventy-nine were counted at the first checkpoint, and three hundred and seventy-nine at every checkpoint after it. The filed delivery rate was one hundred per cent.

The record does not say what became of the thirty-three, and I will not pretend that it does. What it shows is that the measure worked. Kessler's slate agreed with her count at every shrine. She complied with her quota and met her bell-windows. By every instrument the Bureau has built for examining a Handler, she was flawless.

I asked her how she chose when the quota ran short. She said she gave the water to those who could still walk. No line of the formula instructs this. The formula issues an allotment and the march does the rest. A pilgrim who cannot keep pace slows the chain, a slowed chain spends minutes, and spent minutes threaten the bell. A cup given to the failing is a cup the walking may need tomorrow. Every Handler who has run short has made Kessler's choice. Few have admitted it so plainly.

The pilgrim who drops out of that arithmetic passes into another document. Form 17-C, Cessation of Ambulatory Penitence, records a death on the road and asks one question about it: whether it occurred "within scheduled parameters." The form does not define those parameters. At delivery the Bureau of Records files it with the slate, so the cup that was never poured and the form that was signed lie in the same folio, and neither mentions the other.

The Handlers pay as well, in hoarded vessels and compulsive counting. The Bureau of Mercy does not recognise the condition, and it lies outside this tract.

#On the Present Application

The formula of A.S. 141 governs the Jubilee roads in A.S. 201. Its four inputs are unchanged, and its coefficient still prices the contrition of people it has never met. No one has asked the Bureau of Doctrine, which I serve, to revisit the term, and it has not offered to.

Successful delivery means agreement: between slate and count, between count and bell, and between the number recorded at the first shrine and the number recorded at the last. By that definition the quota system is the most successful reform the Jubilee has undergone. Selling off the ledger is rarer than it was in A.S. 136, and discrepancy is rarer still.