#The Abacus in the Hierarchy
"Though mocked as quill-pushers, their reach is vast." — the standing description of the Synodical Hierarchy
Read the catalogue of offices in the Bureaucratic Synod from the top, as it is meant to be read. You pass the white and crimson of the Inner Circle, the iron cassocks of the Wardens, the motto over every interrogation door and the confessional screen of the parish. Then, after the Confessor-Penals, where the reader's eye has begun to wander toward supper, come the Procurators of the Minor Orders. Scribes. Counters. Record-keepers. Their insignia is an abacus, worn in the place where a lesser imagination would have hung a cross.
Strasbourg calls them quill-pushers. I have called them worse, generally to their faces, generally when a folio comes up from the counting-tables with a date entered in the wrong reckoning. A Hieromnemon of Strasbourg is entitled to his contempt. He is less entitled to his independence. Every sealed thing that crosses my desk in the Bureau of Doctrine reached me on a line that some minor Procurator ruled, and I have never ruled one myself. The beads click in the lower rooms from Matins to curfew. Upstairs we call the sound diligence when we hear it and insubordination when it stops.
Their place in the catalogue tells you their standing. It is modest, unadorned and seldom invited to processions. The catalogue is a description and not a chart. It says nothing of who appoints them, who promotes them, or to whom a given clerk answers in a given archive. I will not draw a chart the record has declined to draw. The Church already has more charts than it has walls to pin them on.
#The Work of the Entry
The standing account puts their hand on three things: the Index Damnatus, the rolls of forbidden songs and the archives of heretical bloodlines. Mark the word hand. The Index belongs to the Bureau of Purity, which maintains it and enforces it with white cloaks and writs of cleansing. The condemnations are Purity's to pronounce and the vault is Purity's to guard. The minor Procurator's share is smaller and, in its way, worse. He makes the condemnation usable.
A prohibition in an Inquisitor's mouth is a threat. Copied clean, numbered, cross-entered and tallied, the same prohibition becomes an instrument. A condemned title has to be spelled identically in a provincial bookseller's inspection and in the Strasbourg copy, or the bookseller walks free on an orthography. A condemned relic needs a description that the next examiner can match against the object in his hand. All of this is copying, counting and identifying. It is tedious. It is also the reason anything further happens to anyone.
The song rolls are the strangest of the three. A clerk entering a forbidden melody must set it down exactly enough that a stranger could recognise it on hearing, and he must do so in a building where humming it would be an offence. The Church has found men capable of this. It prizes them and it does not promote them, which in Strasbourg is the usual way of showing esteem.
The archives of heretical bloodlines are the gravest work. An entry there classes a family as heretical by descent, and the classification travels through the records as reliably as a surname. What descent means before the Creator is for Doctrine to rule, and the counting-tables are not asked. In the archive a bloodline is a column of names joined by ruled lines in a clerk's ink. Grandchildren inherit the entry together with the name. Many of them learn of it on the same day.
#Matthaios and the Smudged Register
Every clerk in the lower rooms learns this case, usually before he has learned the abacus. Procurator Matthaios of Padua excommunicated an entire village because its baptismal records were smudged beyond legibility.
That is the whole of the account. It gives no year. It does not name the village, count its souls, explain the smudge or say what came afterward, and I add none of it. A man who invents a flood to make an excommunication more sympathetic has misunderstood the excommunication.
Consider what lay in front of Matthaios. A baptismal register is the Church's evidence that a soul has entered it, and every later office relies on that evidence: the confessor, the tithe-assessor, the parish clerk recording a marriage, the sexton with his burial roll. The Creator, one assumes, knows which infants were carried to that font. The register no longer did, and Matthaios had been charged with the register. A line that cannot be read cannot be certified. An uncertified baptism is, to every office downstream, a baptism in doubt. He was asked to vouch for a village. The ink refused, and he refused with it.
I have heard the case told as a scandal and I have heard it told as a joke. I tell it as a matter of professional standards, and I am the only one of the three tellers who has ever had to certify a register. Exactness is the office. A Procurator who guesses at a smudge will guess at a name on the Index, and then the white cloaks are at the wrong door holding the right writ. Matthaios was consistent. The register was smudged and the village was excommunicated.
Presumably someone in that village had carried a child to the font in good faith and could recite the date, the priest and the weather. Her memory was not ink.
The sentence the account records is excommunication, meaning severance from the Church's sacraments. Erasure from the Ledger is a separate penalty, and so are execution and disappearance. The account claims none of them for this village, and a reader who supplies them is writing a different case. The case also confers no general power. It records one Procurator and one village, and they are remembered because they are notorious.
The Codex entry on the Bureaucratic Synod introduces this case with the words "In Padua, Procurator Matthaios excommunicated an entire village."
Corrected. The account identifies the officer as Matthaios of Padua. It does not locate the village. Padua was not the excommunicated village, and the city's name is not to be entered against it in any further ledger. The smudge belongs to the village and the address belongs to the man.
#The Reach of a Minor Office
How does an office that is mocked, unadorned and listed after the confessors reach all the way to a village font? By way of the archives, ledgers and baptismal records of the whole Theocracy, where its hand is found from Strasbourg's vaults to the parish vestry. The Bureau of Records keeps the Great Ledger of Souls, which lists each adherent with baptism, parish, occupation, tithe status and record of obedience. To be struck from it is to lose rations, housing and burial. The minor Procurator does not own that Ledger, and he does not pronounce every penalty attached to it. The Ledger is still assembled from entries of the kind he keeps, and when the ration clerk looks for a name that was never entered, he finds nothing.
Set the office beside its neighbours. The Confessor-Penal hears sins and suspicions in the parish and sends his reports on. Purity prohibits. Records preserves. The minor Procurator makes each of these legible to the others. Which of them he answers to, in which archive, is a question the Holy Bureaus answer differently depending on who is asking. I decline to answer on their behalf. They have clerks for that.
Provincial correspondents persist in confusing these men with the Procurators of Strasbourg. Those are senior regional administrators, appointed by Concordat Hall, who hold civil and doctrinal authority over whole regions. The two share a title. No published ladder leads from one to the other, and no common superior has been certified over both. The regional Procurator seals over a province and the minor Procurator seals over a column. Do not send a minor Procurator a petition about a cathedral, and do not send a regional Procurator a smudge.
#Present Application
This survey describes the office as it stands in A.S. 201. Its founding year has not been published, and the survey does not require one.
In the record-rooms beneath Strasbourg and in parish vestries across the Heartlands, men with abaci are doing what the office has always done. A register arrives from some parish with its wax still soft. The clerk reads every line, and he reads it at the pace of a man who expects to be wrong. He tallies the quarter's baptisms against the last count. He checks a family name against the archive of bloodlines, a title against the Index and a tune against the song rolls. If the ink holds, he rules a line under the day's work. Somewhere above him the bells ring vespers. He does not look up. The beads have not finished.
In the catalogue the office still stands below everyone else, and in the records it still stands under everyone's name. The white cloaks act on what the clerks make findable, and the Ledger holds what they have entered. Neither Bureau mentions them in its encyclicals.
To the parish clergy of the Church, from the Hieromnemon of Strasbourg: blot your ink and dry your pages. Write each infant's name as though a man with an abacus will one day read it without mercy, because one will.