#On the Unwatched Air
An instrument of the Bureau of War, connected by every surviving account to A.S. 168. Its text is not reproduced here.
By A.S. 167 the Bosphorus was the most thoroughly defended water in the Church's keeping. The Harbor of Chains closed the surface with consecrated chain-booms. Mine-barges sat in the channel like penitents told to wait. The ravelin guns of Bastion-Constantinople, southern anchor of the Sagittal Line, covered every approach a hull could take. Anything that came by water was counted, challenged and, where required, sunk.
The grain convoys still arrived short.
Kargath the Devourer does not storm a granary when he can spoil it, empty it, and leave the sacks for the quartermaster to count. The convoys passed every chain and every gun. The garrison audits recorded no breach at any of them, and the bread ration at the southern anchor went on shrinking all the same. The Bureau had fortified the water and the shore with exemplary diligence. Above the masts it had fortified nothing. Gluttony is patient, and it had noticed.
In A.S. 167 the Bureau of War took the matter into closed session. What came out of it was Operational Directive 774-C, and with it the shortest answer the Bureau has ever given to a theological question: the Bureau of War guards the sky.
#On the Commission
In A.S. 168, under 774-C, the Bureau of War commissioned the Vigil Ark Saint Barachiel. She rose from the Foundry Quarter drydocks at Bastion-Constantinople and took permanent station above the strait. Gate-Warden Petra Valenne oversaw her integration with the Bosphorus defenses, tying the Ark's signals to the chain-booms below and the ravelin watch-faces beside them, so that a gunner on the Ravelin of Vigilance and a signals officer five thousand feet above him could be wrong about the same thing at the same moment. The Gate-Warden did not write the directive. She made it work, and in the Bureau of War that is a separate profession with less honour attached.
The Bureau had reason to care where it flew. Twenty-one years earlier, in A.S. 147, the Sanctissima Vox had gone out over the Blightmarsh with a sermon in her horns and come down into the grey mud with her lanterns still burning. The lesson War drew from this was geographical. The Marsh had eaten an Ark because the Ark had flown over the Marsh. A strait under consecrated chains was a different country of air. The Barachiel would patrol water the Church already held, above guns the Church already manned, and her task was narrow: watch the convoys, cover the gap above the masts, and answer whatever came through it.
I will not pretend to quote what the directive said in order to bring this about. I can say what it produced. It produced an armed dirigible on permanent patrol: a working chapel slung beneath a ribbed envelope, eleven crew, four Sermon-horns, racks of incendiary censers, and a relic in a niche large enough to embarrass its own one-sentence hagiography. Whether 774-C specified any of this, or simply licensed the Bureau of War to obtain something that would answer the question, the surviving paperwork declines to say. The Ark has never consulted the paperwork before rising.
#On the Division of Responsibility
Filed under the seal of War, ratified by Bells, consecrated by Rites.
The Bureau of War commissioned the Ark and does not fly her. She is operated by the Bureau of Bells, Catechetical Division, Aerial Wing, the one office of the Synod with a standing claim on anything that makes noise from a height. The Bureau of Rites consecrated her. The Bureau of Engineering built her and keeps the technical account of why she stays up: buoyancy is credited to Compound 7, and lift at altitudes Engineering calls "otherwise impermissible" is credited to the relic. The Bureau of Doctrine supplies the sermons, one per patrol, from the daily roster.
Five bureaus, one hull. Her eleven crew answer to whichever bureau the hour and the question require.
To the uninstructed this looks like a committee that forgot to adjourn. It is the only arrangement under which the Ark could have been paid for. A weapon draws on War's accounts, and in the Constantinople theater those accounts answer first to chains and powder. A pulpit is Bells' concern, and Bells counts its returns in souls within earshot. An Ark preaching over the Bosphorus has every soldier on the booms within earshot, along with every fisherman in the outer anchorage and, by Bells' own acoustic survey, every fish to a depth of forty feet. War commissioned a weapon and Bells accepted a pulpit, so both bureaus received the same vessel. Neither has ever refused the credit.
The chapel holds the arrangement together. It sanctifies the air the Ark passes through, and the Bellway it leaves behind can be crossed by the Great Deceiver's creatures only at a cost. A tower stays where it is built and a bell where it is hung, and a gun kills what it hits without blessing any of it. The Bureau of War asked for the gun, and what it got also consecrates the sky it fires through.
What came out of it was Operational Directive 774-C, and with it the shortest answer the Bureau has ever given to a theological question: the Bureau of War guards the sky.
The Bureau of War commissioned the asset. The Bureau of Bells flies it. Rites consecrated it, Engineering keeps it aloft, and Doctrine decides what it says. The sky above the Bosphorus is guarded by all five, which is the Synod's usual way of saying it is guarded by nobody in particular. The shorter answer is withdrawn as insufficiently expensive.
#On the Directive's Custody
The Barachiel has flown since A.S. 168. The document that put her in the air has had a more irregular career.
774-C was classified, declassified, and reclassified. Then it was lost, which the Bureau of Records distinguishes from classification: a classified document is one nobody may read, and a lost document is one nobody can. The distinction matters to the Bureau even though it makes no difference to the reader. It was later recovered from the wrong filing cabinet, and then ratified, retroactively, as having always been policy.
New clerks ask me under what authority the Ark flew while her authority sat in the wrong drawer. She flew under 774-C, as she did before and after, because a directive that has always been policy cannot have been missing from anything. The ratification did not restore the commission. It informed the commission that it had never been interrupted. The Ark, which did not come down for the occasion, took the news without remark.
Nobody has given me the dates of these reversals, the name of the clerk who found the directive, or the cabinet that ought to have held it and did not. I have not supplied them myself. I keep the Ledger, and the Ledger has a long memory and very little patience for embellishment.
#On Its Continuing Application
The commission was narrow. Its consequences have not been.
In A.S. 179 the Catechetical Division loaded the Barachiel with the complete Lenten Exhortation, footnotes included, fourteen hours of it, and she ran out of fuel over the strait at two in the morning. The restriction that followed, that no Ark shall carry a sermon longer than she can preach before nightfall, is an operating rule, made eleven years after the commission in answer to an embarrassment its authors could not have foreseen. It is no clause of 774-C. Clerks who cite it as one are corrected, and then corrected again.
In A.S. 182 the Vigil Ark of Saint Gabriel was commissioned for the northern Bellway once the Barachiel had proved the model. In A.S. 191 the Vigil Ark of Saint Uriel was authorized for the southern Bellway, and she has sat in the Foundry Quarter ever since, assembled, consecrated and grounded. The Ledger does not say whether either was raised under 774-C, under some extension of it, or under instruments of their own, and this entry will not guess. The directive commissioned one Ark. The theater now has three hulls, two of which fly.
On the 3rd of Argent, A.S. 199, the Barachiel's four Sermon-horns carried a voice that belonged to none of her crew for eleven minutes and forty-three seconds. Witnesses called it an apology. Its content lies under the Hierarch's Seal and has no place in an entry about procurement. I record only that the Bureau of War did not recall the vessel. The third crew was replaced and the Ark stayed up. A commission issued thirty-one years earlier had not provided for the Broadcast, and no amendment answering it appears in any record I am permitted to cite.
Kargath still presses on the strait. The convoys still come down to Bastion-Constantinople under the Ark's horns, and the Sky-Sermon Attendance Auditors still log, sector by sector, who on the ground was made to listen. As of A.S. 201 the Saint Barachiel remains on active patrol, thirty-three years after her commission. The Bureau of War has never needed a document to be legible as long as the asset it authorized is airborne.