‘When those starved for true faith begin to hunger for sweetness, they will forgive any source of it. Therefore, keep your palate humble, lest you take poison gladly for the comfort of tasting something new.’
It was an old Selpetuan belief - older than the most of the buildings, older than certain saints - that night did not properly upon the tomb city so much as it was it, like a cloth over a corpse. Nightfall was not an event here, so much as a habit. The gaslamps came alight, the shutters closed, the prayer chimes changed their tone, and the dead slept on, oblivious to the motions of planets and stars.
Glevedan Bulk had long since learned to take comfort in that timeless routine, the evening wind-down to rest and sleep, which he felt was the one daily occasion in which both Selpetua’s living and dead residents all united in one shared endeavor. Comfort rarely came in other forms in the city of bones, except perhaps in dreams, though Glevedan supposed the dead were denied even that small escape.
At least the interred might put their toils behind them, or above them, as it were.
That evening, when the officio at least released him, he stepped out into the courtyard strung taut with a sensation of vigilance, one which had kept him ramrod straight and wracked with nerves the whole of the day. There was a powerful odor of brine, and fish-stink, snatched up from the lower quays and hurled into Whelvertail by the same coastal winds driving the fog to blanket Selpetua.
Glevedan fixated on decrees of the new additions to the office wall as he plodded through the soupy dreamland of the district’s fogbound lanes. He felt, even now, as though an unwelcome gaze fixated upon his every step. He could feel the sharp corners of the folded carbon in his pocket jabbing into his breast like a splinter, small, precise, impossible to ignore.
There were routes he ordinarily took home, routes that were chosen for their efficiency and their dullness. Whelvertail was reasonably safe at night, but in recent months the streets were not so quiet as they had been, and so Glevedan was glad to have ways which steered clear of any opportunity for unwelcome engagements.
But when he reached the next corner and saw, posted on a wall where only notices about fees and penalties ordinarily lived, a fresh printed sheet with a border of little faces, he paused.
The print announced, in large type:
Beneath that, in smaller print, was the name of an intersection, and a list of more names - patrons, donors, benefactors - set out like a litany. Glevedan recognized none of them, and yet he recognized the of them, that casual certainty with which wealth declares itself a public good.
He read the notice once, and told himself it had nothing to do with him. He read it again, because it was difficult not to look at a thing that had been placed so boldly in the path of ordinary life. He wondered, with a bitter flicker of humor, whether Rill had set this very sheet in type, and whether he had done it with the same weary disgust he had shown over Kessa’s table.
A small crowd moved past him - clerks, a pair of portworkers, a woman with a basket of yellowed bones, muttering catechisms under her breath - none of them pausing to read. They were Selpetuans, and the labours of the day had driven curiosity from them, especially for wrong things.
And yet the wrong things, lately, seemed determined to be noticed.
Glevedan turned his heel on the cobbles, making for Vellum Row, where the old parchmenters who could not compete with the offworld press mills of the Adeptus Mechanicus had yielded and made way for the first wave of migrants from Droctulf. He intended to keep to the quieter lanes near the seawalls, where the only entertainments were arguments overheard from tenement windows. Even there, the sound of revelry reached him, carried over rooftops. Laughter, applause, flutists and strings.
He paused, faltered in his pace for a moment, feeling very suddenly as if he had lost his bearings, which was quite impossible on a narrow lane wedged between walls and structures. He felt an annoyance, mostly at himself, shook his head, and set forth again.
He emerged onto the avenue at the end of Vellum Row to find the district changed. The lane opened onto a broader street that wove a ponderous course through old shrines and charnel houses, and more reluctantly, the port’s ugly necessities. Ordinarily, the avenue belonged to foot traffic, vending stalls, the hurried and hungry. Tonight, it seemed to belong to another world entirely.
There were lanterns strung not for light, but rather effect. Lamps of scented whelver fat, shaded with thin cloth in varying hues of red, dangled from chains strung this way and that across the street. They cast their wound-light glow into the fog, and across the rain-slicked cobbles in broken patches that looked too much to Glevedan’s eye like blood. The air was thick with a heady mixture of perfumes, roasting meat, and petrichor.
The crowd itself was a study in contradiction. There were the ones draped in finery, who stood with the casual ease of wealth, clustered beneath balconies and awnings, coats tailored, hands clean. They wore the latest up-district fashions - flowing capes, high collars, baggy sleeves that ruffled and rustled like curtains - in charcoal velvets and carmine silks. Many of them had other affectations in red as well - a scarf, or a ribbon on the lapel, or a lacquered opera mask, or a single red glove.
There were the poor as well, and not merely as servants. The dockworkers stood shoulder to shoulder with the ragpickers, and there were a great number of Droctulf pilgrims, in their bright motley, and tailors and grocers and more. A large group of men in uniforms Glevedan recognized as of the Prefecture, off duty and plainly uncertain what to do with themselves, lurked at the edge of the gathering.
Glevedan saw, with a small shock, faces he recognized. Grim, pale men from the counting house - for bones, not currency - who as a sort of prerequisite of their trade were among the more traditionally pious in Selpetua. One of them clapped when the crowd clapped, and the expression of wonder he wore suggested it to be genuine applause.
Above them, on balconies and terraces, yet more of the wealthy watched with goblets and glasses in hand, or else made their own contributions to the fog with ornamented water pipes, and sticks of lho and obscura. Obscura, right there in the streets, in plain view of Prefecture men! And yet not a soul present seemed to take any special note, except Glevedan.
He slowed. He did not wish to stop, and yet to push through the crowd, he felt, would be to draw a sort of attention he did not care for. He had an inexplicable sense that to do so would be a form of self-harm.
In the center of the street, on a raised platform of planks laid hastily over the cobbles and flagstones, stood the first
At first, Glevedan thought it a statue. It had the stillness of stone and the pallor of carved marble, a stark face of chalk-white with a smear of red for the lips, like a wound. It stood with arms lifted in a gesture that suggested either blessing or surrender, draped in wispy crimson cloth that fell in graceful folds. A circlet of something - wire perhaps, gilded to look gold - rested on its head, and in the lantern light it flashed like a saint’s halo.
Then the statue blinked.
The movement was so small. Had he imagined it?
The crowd murmured. Someone sighed, audibly, as though witnessing holiness.
Glevedan’s skin prickled. The performer - because that was what it must be, however odd the word felt - did not shift their weight or scratch an itch. They did not glance around, or twitch with discomfort, or make an apology for breaking the illusion, however briefly. They simply resumed their stillness, the quiet rebellions of biology forgotten or discarded in the name of this new art.
Glevedan shuffled carefully past onlookers, and saw that beside the figure stood a framed placard on a post, printed in the same crisp type as the handbill Glevedan had read earlier.
Glevedan could not recall any Saint Setrivar of that description. Selpetua had a surfeit of saints; one could hardly be expected to memorize them all. Though, like any faithful Imperial citizen, Glevedan had been schooled in the Imperial Creed, and the Movements of the Lectionary, and and the others, which carried down the foretellings and decrees of those first early acolytes of the City of Bones. Yet the ease with which the placard made its claim - the certainty of this invention - was familiar to Glevedan. It was the same ease with which a rectification packet might declare the prior day to be wholly different than it had been.
Then, beyond, a second platform held another figure. It posed, as if knelt in prayer, head bowed, hands clasped. The back of the figure’s neck was exposed, and in the red lantern light, Glevedan saw the knotty tissue of scars, the rough and ruined flesh that was the hallmark of a collared penitent.
A third platform held two more pale figures whose gender he could not discern, entwined in a composition that suggested devotion, or loss, or love. Glevedan could not help but admit to himself they were beautiful. There was that particular quality of fine art, which was not merely pleasing to behold, but arranged with such precision that no detail was left to happenstance. The longer Glevedan looked, however, the more unsettled he became. The way limbs wrapped around one another, the way bodies pressed together - it all began to suggest to him something less pious than tragic devotion.
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He felt a flush in his cheeks, but moved closer despite himself, and caught snatches of conversation.
‘It’s not like the old chapel services,’ a woman in a plain robe said to her companion, her voice hushed with excitement. ‘It’s… it’s It makes you feel like you’re part of it.’
‘Saints preserve us,’ her companion replied, with the tone of a man agreeing politely while thinking of something else.
In another exchange, a young fellow, cheeks flushed with drink or fervor, pointed one of the grander balconies out to his friend. ‘That’s the Circle,’ he declared. ‘They paid for all of this, for They bring the
The friend seemed less awed, repeating ‘ with a derisive sound.
‘It’s good,’ the lad insisted, with some stubbornness. ‘It’s better than… you know.’ He gestured vaguely, encompassing the whole of Whelvertail’s usual ugliness with the motion. ‘It makes it feel–’ he searched and found the phrase with the satisfied air of one person quoting another ‘-like we’re not just… tolerated.’
Glevedan felt, with an unpleasant clarity, how easily such a hunger could be used. People who were fed on scraps would cheer for anything that tasted like sugar.
The applause rose again, and this time it was louder. Glevedan followed the crowd’s attention.
A new figure had been brought into place - carried, he realized, on a litter by four attendants dressed in long tailcoats of dark fabric, faces concealed behind enameled half-masks. They moved with an odd precision: not the practiced coordination of portside teamsters who had hauled cargo together for years, but something more exact, more deliberate. Each step was matched. Each turn occurred at precisely the same angle and timing. They might, Glevedan thought with a chill, have been one creature with four bodies.
The litter held a figure draped entirely in red, face cowled. When the attendants set it down upon a vacant platform, they stepped back with the same synchronized grace and stood with hands folded at their waists, heads bowed, as if awaiting instruction.
A hush fell over the street.
Then, slowly, the red-draped figure lifted its arms, and the cloth fell away from its face. It wore another mask, a perfect oval rendered with a human likeness that was both stylized and yet rendered simple. It was, like the masks of many of the revel’s patrons, a thing of perfect polished lacquerwork, the rich red color of lifegiving blood.
Glevedan’s throat tightened, though he could not explain why. There was nothing explicitly forbidden in a mask. Selpetua had always used masks, in certain rites, in certain plays, as symbols of authority dating back to ancient times, under the rule of the old Hakhans of Galanyre.
A voice - male, educated, performatively resonant - spoke from somewhere in the balconies above.
‘Behold,’ it said, with an odd tenderness, ‘the Martyr Unbidden.’
Something seemed to move through the crowd at those words, a shiver, or a shudder, something Glevedan could not wholly identify.
The masked figure, the , did not speak. It did not move beyond the careful, deliberate gesture of turning its head from left to right, perfectly slow, to regard everyone, or nobody at all. Red light played across red lacquer, and the revelers seemed utterly entranced by the small motion.
And then applause broke again, and this time it had the quality of release. Men laughed. Women pressed hands to their mouths as if overwhelmed. A child on someone’s shoulders clapped with frantic delight.
Glevedan stood in the midst of it and felt, with a growing discomfort, that he was witnessing not merely some new form of devotion, but a kind of collective decision: the decision to find this acceptable, admirable, desirable. There would be no riot against it. There would be no outrage. Selpetua, which could be stirred to violence over frater guild disputes as easily as bread shortages or disagreements of dogmatism, was being gently coaxed into reverence for something it had not yet understood.
He turned his head, searching, looking for anything, an anchor to ground himself in his city, and saw another Prefecture patrol pushing its way slowly along the street’s edge.
Four men, the same coats as the rest of the inspectors, boots polished, with polite, understated stubguns hanging from belts beside studded batons and manacles and the other trappings of authority through violence. At their head walked an officer with high cap and polished epaulet badges, with the unique expression of one who has just stumbled into a social affair to which they were not invited. His eyes flicked over the crowd, over the platforms, over the balcony patrons. They lingered, briefly, on the red mask of the Martyr Unbidden.
Glevedan felt his jaw working, and a strong anticipation, almost eagerness, for these men to find something to start shouting and clubbing Selpetua back into the city he recognized.
The officer did nothing.
Glevedan watched the patrol pass by a clump of applauding dockworkers, and watched those dockworkers glance at the Prefecture badges and continue applauding anyway, with odd confidence rather than any passive defiance. By chance, the lead officer met Glevedan’s gaze for a moment - brief, uncomfortable recognition between two men who understood something was happening they were not equipped to name.
Then the officer looked away and kept walking.
There was no statute against this, Glevedan realized. No ecclesiastic decree, nor officio wall edict to banish piety through beauty. If anything, the city’s religious apparatus might welcome it, such were the ailing fortunes of any number of chapelhouses and basilicae once buoyed by the tithed coinage of devotional pilgrims from across the subsector. This was, by its own account, a celebration of the Blessed Dead, even if Glevedan could not name the saints it celebrated.
And so the Prefecture which existed to enforce what was written and codified and mandated and decreed could only stand by like a polite escort to this societal rot as it spread.
Glevedan edged away from the densest part of the crowd, to a narrower side lane, where the lamps were fewer and the smell of damp and time reasserted their primacy.
Another group, more young men, leaned against a wall, laughing softly among themselves. They wore those Droctulf-styled cloaks, with the big shoulders and long hems, but in a traditional Selpetuan black. Still, each had a red ribbon pinned to his lapel. One twirled a slender cane with a hooked handle, playing at the affectation of an up-district dandy with the tools of a shepherd. Their faces were half-masked, like many others, and their eyes glittered with a kind of pleased intelligence.
They did not look like criminals so much as the sons of middling commercia merchants - not the true upper crust of Selpetuan civic life, but certainly raised with such comforts that they’d never known the mortal pains of hunger or hard labour. Their laughter had a careless cruelty to it, but it was the cruelty of the comfortable, rather than the consciously malevolent.
One of them noticed Glevedan watching and gave him a smile - polite, almost kind, and which seemed to declare he had promptly assessed Glevedan and classified him as harmless.
‘Evening,’ the young man said.
Glevedan inclined his head, stiffly. He kept walking.
Behind him, he heard one of them murmur, with amusement, ‘Look at him go. A little parchment-pusher ghost, seen and gone in a moment.’
The others laughed again, and Glevedan felt his ears warm with the small humiliation they inflicted with their casual disregard. He was indeed a ghost, it seemed, of ink and parchment, doomed to observe the decline but incapable of actioning any sort of material change in the world he haunted. He went about his days and nights making marks, being marked, and yet could not quite decipher the means to make himself into something solid.
Glevedan turned onto yet another street, one he knew to run parallel to the main gathering, hoping to escape the sound. The applause faded, but the voices remained, and now they had taken up another song of sorts.
It was not a hymn Glevedan recognized. Selpetuan hymns were, by tradition, heavy things - slow, mournful dirges constructed like sepulchral stonework. This tune was lighter, still making exhortations and exaltations to this strange caste of saints, but jilted, repeating in a pattern that made it easy to learn and hard to banish from memory, and he heard a deluge of voices take it up in fragments and then all together.
Glevedan found that his own mind began to echo it. He had no talent for music. He did not know why his thoughts should cling to any tune, let alone this one. Yet it lingered insistently, like an earworm, slipping past a lifetime’s careful cultivation of a mind too small for doubt, as the catechists would say.
He passed another printed handbill. Then another. The same masks, the same crisp type.
A woman stood on a doorstep reading one, her lips moving silently as she traced the words. She looked up at Glevedan as he passed and smiled, shyly.
‘Isn’t it… lovely?’ she asked, as though they were co-conspirators in delight.
Glevedan hesitated. He did not know how to answer this stranger’s hopeful voice.
‘It’s… new,’ he said, which was the safest word he could find.
‘Yes,’ she breathed, as if that word alone were a salve. ‘New. And not–’ she gestured helplessly at the street, at the fogbound greyness ‘-not only ’
He nodded once and continued on, his stomach tight.
As he walked, he saw how the salon night had spread like a stain through Whelvertail. Not every lane held a platform, not every corner had a living statue, but everywhere there were small signs he had failed to pick out in daylight. Red ribbons pinned to coats, masks tucked beneath arms or into handbags, clusters of people discussing with feverish intimacy not the tribulations of their daily lives, but the devotional beauty of the of the genius of the and of the good grace of the Circle Benevolent.
And, perhaps most disturbing of all, the people who had once been skeptical by necessity - those whose lives did not permit the luxury of frivolity - were not resisting. They were participants, as wholly as the well-to-do benefactors on those balconies and terraces.
A pair of kiln-ward women, greyed with ash, stood on tenement steps, arms linked, swaying to the rhythm of the revelers’ music. One wiped tears from her eyes.
A port lad, one of the orphan boys who might hang around the fraternity halls in hopes of admission, stood placidly under a dim lamp, slack-jawed with a look of bliss settled into his youthful features.
A - an actual priest, beholden to some minor shrine and recognizable by the embroidery of his robes and the self-important tilt of his chin - stood near a small streetside devotional and nodding along approvingly.
Glevedan hurried past, and felt as though he had been perhaps stolen from sleep by some faerie queen, and spirited away to the dreams of other men. He turned down the last lane toward his lodging, grateful to see the familiar ugliness of chipped stone and damp plaster. Here, at least, the street was narrow enough to discourage gatherings, and the only patrons were rats and the occasional drunkard staggering back to bed from a late-night cardroom.
And yet even here, however, he could not entirely escape.
From a window above, someone had hung a strip of red cloth like a banner. It fluttered weakly in the evening breeze, and looked, absurdly, like a tongue.
From another window came the sound of humming - soft, aimless, yet undeniably the same tune from the revelers.
Glevedan stopped beneath that window and felt his skin prickle again. He looked up to see an elderly woman watching him with an uncanny smile. She seemed to fixate on him for long moments, with that unmoving smile.
Then she withdrew, closing the shutter.
Glevedan stood alone on the cobbles. The tune lingered in his head. The folded carbon pressed against his ribs. The red glow from the revels, faint now, still stained the low banks of fog above the city, as if Selpetua had been lit from below by some kind of infernal engine.
He went up the stairs to his lodging and barred the door behind him with determined precision.
Inside, the room was as it had always been. Narrow bed, small stove, a shelf with prayer cards and battered cups and dishes. The walls were stained with the sweaty ague of inescapable damp, and the window admitted only the most miserly light, even at midday.
Glevedan sat on the edge of the bed and took the carbon copy from his pocket.
He unfolded it slowly, smoothing it on his knee. The letters and numbers were faint, but legible, reducing the truth to a convenient square of contraband.
He stared at it until the lines began to blur. He told himself, as he had told himself all day, and the day before, that this was only a thing that happened in a consignment office. A small wrongness. A clerical discomfort to gnaw and scratch at his conscience until it was forgotten.
Outside, he could still hear that tune.
Glevedan folded the carbon, and tucked it away carefully beneath the loose floorboard where he kept his meagre savings. He did not know what he was saving it for, the carbon, or the coin for that matter. Only that to discard the carbons would be his final consent, his total acquiescence to the lie.
He lay down without undressing.
And in the darkness of his small room, with the music caught in his thoughts like a hook, Glevedan stewed in the quiet horror of realization that whatever was happening to Selpetua, whatever was to this place - the city was enjoying it.
He did not sleep.
Not really.
