Forty Days

I. The Thirty-Sixth Day

There are two books a Chaplain keeps, and only one of them is made of paper.

The one of paper is the Chronicle. It is kept in the Reliquarium, in the three rock chambers whose shelves are two-thirds empty, and every Chaplain of the Fire Wardens writes into it what the Chapter is to know about itself: campaigns, the fallen, decisions, with the date. The other book is the one he keeps in his head, and there is more in it, and nobody reads it.

On the morning of the thirty-sixth day Vel'Schwur stood on the rampart walk above Gate Two and began to write in both.

Below lay Salzgrund. The graduation towers were trickling; you saw it in the sheen on the wood. In the alleys the lights sat, and for some days now they had not been sitting in the alleys but standing in the streets, in rows that led to the Boiling Square and on from there, through the gap in the fence, out onto the plain, where somebody had drawn lines into the salt with chalk or ash. From up here you could not read what the lines meant. You could see that they ran out towards something, and that it had a direction, and that the direction was the sky.

Four days.

Bre'kar stood ten paces further on, as he did every morning, and said the number, to nobody. The captain had said it every morning since the twelfth day, and Vel'Schwur had listened every morning, and in the book that was made of paper it would stand: The captain held the Ring for forty days. In the other one it stood that he looked down every morning and that he said the number so that he would have something to say.

Sixty brothers. Vollrath's city guard, eighteen thousand, because in the third week the Rauhgraters had begun firing up at the rampart walk from below, with no intention of taking the wall, only to show that they could, and because Vollrath's men fired back, and because between the two lay a lower city in which people were sitting. In the upper city one million three hundred and seventy thousand, with stores for another forty days if you reckoned tightly, and Vollrath reckoned tightly. In Salzgrund twenty-three thousand. Fewer. Twenty-one had come up, through a hand's width, singly, and stood in Dra'kaan's register. Some had died. Nobody knew how many.

And on the plain, around all of it, a camp that was waiting for the fortieth day, the way the wall was waiting for it.

"He knows," said Bre'kar without turning round.

"Yes."

"Since the man on the rope."

"Since the man on the rope." Vel'Schwur looked at the lines in the salt. "He is dressing them. He is drawing them up for the day the Golden Wall lands. He wants Vel'Kaddar's brothers to climb out of their landing craft and see, first of all, twenty-three thousand people with candles, between themselves and us."

Bre'kar nodded. He had seen it himself; he did not need to be told. But some things have to be said even when they change nothing. That was his sentence, and Vel'Schwur had borrowed it years ago and never given it back.

II. What a Chaplain Writes

In three hundred years he had learned that the Chronicle does not lie and still does not say everything, and that the difference is the office.

Into the Chronicle would go: that Captain Bre'kar gave up the lower city of Salzgrund on the tenth day in order to hold the Ring, and that he wrote it in his book with the date. That Apothecary Dra'kaan opened Gate Three a hand's width on the fourteenth day, by the captain's order. That Brother Tar'gan fell on the twenty-third day by the hand of his Apothecary, according to the procedures. That a sealed case with a name on it was brought to the Reliquarium whose contents are not catalogued. All of that was true, and it would stand.

Not into the Chronicle would go: that the captain had said on the second day, we leave nobody behind, and that Vel'Schwur had asked him to say it twice. That a champion of the traitors in front of Gate One had known his own sentence, the sentence about a Chaplain at every place, and that ever since Vel'Schwur had tested at night whether he could still speak it without his voice betraying something. That in the nineteenth night he had refused a door to an Apothecary with a dying man in his arms, and that it had been the right thing, and that it did not let him sleep, although Astartes sleep little.

The other book carried that. That was what it was for.

On the evening of the thirty-sixth day he wrote the first entry for the Chronicle, in the small chamber in the east wing of the command post that Vollrath had given him, on the paper Marrit Rieck had fetched him out of a salt merchant's counting house, because the Reliquarium was far away and a Chaplain does not wait until he is home to write.

Siege of Hollbrunn, Eschenwerth, thirty-sixth day. The Ring stands. The company numbers sixty. The enemy is drawing up the converts of the lower city in rows, facing the plain. Relief is promised for the fortieth day.

He looked at the lines. Then he added one, because otherwise he would not have been able to write it when the time came:

The captain has not yet decided what will happen on the fortieth day. I believe he has.

III. The Man on the Rope

The man had gone down from the rampart walk on a rope in the night before the twenty-ninth day, a soldier of the city guard, twenty-two years old, from the third platoon on the eastern section, and nobody had stopped him, because nobody had reckoned with one going down of his own accord.

Vollrath had reported it in the morning, in a steady voice, and Bre'kar had nodded, and Vel'Schwur had visited the platoon, because that was his task, and had asked the men what the man had said before he went. They had told him, hesitantly. That he could not count any more. That he looked down every day and counted the lights and could not bear the number any longer. That he wanted to know what the ones down there saw.

"And you?" Vel'Schwur had asked.

They had looked at the floor. One of them, a corporal with a grey face, had said at last, "We look too, lord. Every day. But we are up here."

Vel'Schwur had nodded and gone, and had written that in the other book, and he thought of it on the thirty-seventh day as he walked the rampart walk and saw the men of the city guard looking down at the plain, at the lines in the salt, at the rows of lights that formed up every evening, and not looking away any more.

The enemy had never attacked the wall. He had undermined it, with candles.

On the evening of the thirty-seventh day Dra'kaan stood with him, with the case, the sealed one, which he left nowhere, and said that Or'dun had got up. Ten paces, with one hand on the wall. That in three days he could hold a bolter, if nobody was watching him.

"He wants to go down," said the Apothecary. "He asked whether we are going down."

"What did you say?"

"That the captain has not said so."

Vel'Schwur looked at the plain. "What do you believe?"

Dra'kaan was silent for a while. Then he said the sentence that Vel'Schwur later wrote into the Chronicle, because it was true and because it could stand: "I believe that he has known since the eleventh day and is waiting until there is a reason that is not his own."

IV. The Lights Form Ranks

On the thirty-eighth day you could see it by day as well.

They were standing. No longer in the alleys, no longer on the Boiling Square, but outside, on the plain, between the fence and the camp, in rows that aligned themselves to the lines in the salt, and every row stood a hundred paces from the next, and in each of them people stood with candles that burned by day and looked up. It was not all of them. Vel'Schwur estimated fourteen thousand. The rest sat in the alleys, or lay in the houses, or stood at a canal.

Between the rows the Rauhgraters walked, without rifles. They brought water. They brought bread. They made the rows good again when somebody fell, and carried the one who had fallen back into the alleys, and then the rows stood again. At the edge of the plain, where the salt went over into the camp, stood three red suits of armour, big, still, and in the middle, in front of the first row, with his back to the city, stood the fourth, bigger than the three, looking in the direction the ships would come from.

Vollrath stood beside Vel'Schwur at the rampart. She had gone grey in thirty-eight days, not in the hair, in the face.

"What is that?" she said.

"A testimony." Vel'Schwur looked at the rows. "He is drawing them up so that the Golden Wall has to see them before it sees anything else. Fourteen thousand citizens of the Imperium whom their Emperor has not looked at in six years and whom we gave up, with candles, between the landing craft and the wall. And then he asks the Golden Wall what their law says to that."

"What does it say?"

"Not one centimetre back." He said it without emphasis. "The Golden Wall will attack whatever stands between it and the fortress it is to relieve. That is their law, and they have broken it only once, on Ossilar, and have carried it ever since." He looked across at Bre'kar, who stood ten paces further on and looked down. "Unless something else stands between them."

Vollrath looked at him. Then she looked at Bre'kar, and then at the plain, and Vel'Schwur saw her grasp it, and that she did not say it aloud, because it was not her decision and because in thirty-eight days she had learned whose it was.

"And the red ones," she said instead. "There are eight down there. I see four."

"Four are not going with him," said Vel'Schwur. "The one with the axe and three who follow him. They are standing in the camp. They are not standing in the rows." He had seen them in the morning, with the auspex, at the rear edge of the camp, by the transports, with weapons. "The champion has fourteen thousand witnesses and eight brothers, and half his brothers no longer believe him. That is the number he has not dressed."

In the evening he found the captain in the gate chamber of Gate Three, where Bre'kar had not been since the eleventh day. He stood in front of the portcullis, which was closed but for the gap Dra'kaan kept open, and looked through the bars down at the climb, at the bundles that lay there, and at the candles that had been left standing and had long since gone out.

"She will fire," said Bre'kar without turning round. "The Golden Wall. Not out of anger. Because their law has no sentence for candles. Threnn broke it once, for Skara, and I saw what it cost him. I cannot ask him to break it twice."

"No."

"So something else must stand between them." He laid his hand on one of the bars, where on the eleventh day a smaller hand had lain, on the wrong side. "I said that we would not come down again."

"You have said a great many things."

Bre'kar turned round. Vel'Schwur looked into his face, in which for forty days there had been nothing that could be read, except that he looked down, and saw that the captain was waiting for something that was not agreement and not contradiction.

"Say it aloud," said Vel'Schwur. "So that it is said before you write it."

"We are going down."

Vel'Schwur nodded, slowly, as on the first night on the rampart walk, and somewhere in the book he kept in his head an entry came into being, with place and with hour, and he found that it was the first in forty days that he was glad to write.

V. The Book

In the night before the fortieth day the captain called the Chaplain, the Apothecary and the sergeant onto the rampart walk above Gate Three, and drew the book out of his hip pocket, and read out what he had written, because he wanted three of them to hear it before it happened.

Fortieth day. The relief of the Golden Wall is expected at daybreak. The converts of Salzgrund stand on the plain between the landing zone and the Ring. At daybreak the company goes down through all three gates and places itself between the Golden Wall and the converts. The city guard holds the Ring. Objective: the traitor Astartes. Not the converts. The converts will not be attacked and not defended. They will be covered. Decision: Captain Bre'kar. Witnessed: Chaplain Vel'Schwur.

He closed it.

"You said we would not come down again," said Ashek. In twenty-eight days the sergeant had barely spoken to the captain, not out of anger, out of something older than anger and closer to shame, and Vel'Schwur knew that the hand on the winch of Gate Three stood between them like a third person.

"Yes."

"And now we are going down."

"Yes. Both stand." Bre'kar looked at him. "On the second day I said we leave nobody behind, and on the tenth that we are doing it, and on the eleventh that we are not coming down, and tomorrow we come down. All four sentences are in this book, with the date, and none of them is struck out. If the Golden Wall asks what I have done, I will read them all four."

Ashek was silent. Then he said, "I go with the first squad."

"You go with me."

"I go with the first squad, captain. On the eleventh day I did not pull. Tomorrow I go first through the gate you pulled shut." Ashek held the look. "That will be in your book too."

Bre'kar looked at him for a long moment. Then he nodded, once, the nod of a man who has seen the reckoning.

"Dra'kaan."

"I stay at the gate, with my hand in the gap," said the Apothecary. "Whoever wants to come up, comes up. Tomorrow as well. Or'dun stands beside me; he holds a bolter when nobody is watching. The case stays in the magazine, sealed, and if I do not come back, the Chaplain knows what is written on it."

"The Chaplain goes with me," said Bre'kar. "As far as the red one who stands in front of the rows."

Vel'Schwur nodded. He had expected nothing else.

"A Chaplain at every place," said the captain, and it was the first time Vel'Schwur had heard the sentence out of another mouth that was not a traitor's, and he found that it gave him his voice back.

VI. The Fortieth Day

They fell out of the Warp as the sky over the plain was turning grey, three ships, gold, so large that you saw them with the naked eye as stars that moved, and then as shapes, and then as what they were.

The Ashen Watch reported it first, and after that nobody reported it, because you could see it. Vel'Schwur stood with the captain in the gate chamber of Gate One, with thirty brothers, and heard over the vox how the cruiser's astropath received a message and passed it on without having to pull it out of the noise, because the noise fell silent for a moment: Golden Wall to Ring. We are landing west of the city, outside the camp. Hold.

"They will see the rows first," said Bre'kar.

"Yes."

"Then we go now."

The three gates opened at once, not a hand's width, fully, with a sound Salzgrund had not heard in forty days, and the Fire Wardens of Nocturne went down.

Ashek first. Vel'Schwur saw it over the vox of the gate chamber, because Dra'kaan kept the vision slit open: the sergeant stood in front of the winch at which he had not moved his hand on the eleventh day, and pulled the lever himself, and the portcullis rose, grinding, a hundred years of salt in the guides, all the way up, and Ashek went under it, first, and stopped for a moment on the other side. Then he went down the climb, with the first squad, past the bundles that had lain there since the eleventh day, and at one place he stopped once more, where a candle stood in the salt, gone out, and Vel'Schwur did not know what he saw there, and never asked him. Bre'kar through Gate One, with Vel'Schwur at his side. The rest through Gate Two, down the Trickle Slope. Sixty green suits of armour, less three who lay in the magazine, and less Dra'kaan, who knelt in the gate chamber with his hand in the gap, although the gap was now an open gate, because that was how he had said it.

In the alleys the Rauhgraters stood and watched. They did not raise their rifles. They had orders not to raise them; you saw it in the way they held them, crosswise in both hands, like something you may neither drop nor use. A captain with a miner's face stood at the Boiling Square and looked at Bre'kar as he went past, and Bre'kar looked back, and neither said anything.

At the middle bridge stood a small man with a bent back, turning a wheel. He did not look up as sixty Astartes went past him. Vel'Schwur looked at him in passing and thought of the four lines he had not yet written.

Then they were through the fence, on the salt, in the morning.

The rows stood. Fourteen thousand, with candles, in lines that ran out westwards, where three golden ships were coming down and the first landing craft were detaching. And in front of the first row stood the champion, with his back to them, and two red ones beside him, and he did not turn round as the Fire Wardens came. He knew that they were coming. He had built on it.

Bre'kar led the company along the rows, not through them, westwards, onto the salt between the rows and the place where the craft would land, and drew it up there, in a line sixty paces wide, with its back to the candles and its face to the Golden Wall.

And waited.

VII. Not One Centimetre

The first craft set down three hundred paces to the west, and the Golden Wall climbed out, in gold, in the order in which it did everything: first the assault squads, who secured the perimeter, then the Bastionaries, who dug in where there was nothing to dig into, then the Slingstones, who went forward. Vel'Schwur knew the companies. He knew the man who walked between them, in gold, with the chainsword at his side, and who stopped when he saw what lay in front of him.

Threnn Vel'Kaddar had learned on Ossilar what his law cost. He saw it now once more: fourteen thousand people with candles, in rows, between him and the fortress he was to relieve, and behind them the enemy's camp, and at the edge of the camp four red suits of armour with weapons he could not reach without going through the rows. And in front of the rows a line of green.

The vox crackled. Bre'kar had kept the frequency open since the first day, for this morning.

"Bre'kar."

"Threnn."

It was quiet for a long time. Vel'Schwur heard the wind go across the salt, and behind him, out of the rows, a sound he did not place at once and then did: fourteen thousand people breathing and saying nothing.

"What is that which stands between me and your wall?" asked Vel'Kaddar.

"Citizens of the Imperium. Fourteen thousand. They have candles."

"That I can see. I am asking what they are."

"People nobody looked at for six years and whom we left behind on the eleventh day in order to hold the Ring." Bre'kar's voice was as it was when he stood. "Behind them stands a champion of the Word Bearers who drew them up so that you would ask him what your law says to it. I am standing here so that you do not have to ask."

Silence again. Then: "You know what my law says."

"I know it. I saw it broken on Ossilar, for three hundred thousand, and afterwards I told you that that was not weakness." Bre'kar looked straight ahead, at the gold. "I am not asking you to break it, Threnn. I am asking you not to have to apply it. The enemy are eight Astartes and a camp. Not the candles. Let me fetch the eight. The candles stand behind me, and what stands behind me is my responsibility, not subject to your law."

Vel'Schwur looked across at the Golden Wall. The Slingstones stood. The Bastionaries stood. A sergeant whom he recognised as Kell stood one step behind his captain, as he had for decades, and waited for a word.

"For Ossilar," said Vel'Kaddar at last, and it was neither a promise nor an order. It was a handshake across three hundred paces of salt. "Fetch your eight. I will hold. If one of them sets a foot on my salt, he is mine."

"Agreed."

The vox closed. Bre'kar turned to Vel'Schwur.

"Now," he said.

VIII. Malkor

The one with the axe did not wait for somebody to come and fetch him.

Vel'Schwur saw it from the end of the line: the four red suits of armour at the rear edge of the camp, detaching, not towards the Fire Wardens, not towards the rows, but westwards, around the camp, at the gold. They did not walk. They ran, the way Astartes run when they mean it, and the one with the axe ran in front, and behind them came Rauhgraters, two hundred, three hundred, with rifles that they raised, the only ones that morning who raised them.

It was Malkor's testimony. Vel'Schwur knew his name from Bre'kar, from Gate Two, and he knew what the champion must have said about him, because he saw it in the way the champion stood in front of the rows and did not turn round as the four ran: like a man who has seen something coming and could not stop it and has decided not to look at it.

"Vel'Kaddar," said Bre'kar into the vox. "Four red ones, from the south, with Rauhgraters. They are yours."

"I see them."

The Golden Wall did what it was. The Bastionaries raised their bolters, the Slingstones went forward, and the edge of the salt, three hundred paces to the west, became what it had been on Ossilar: a line behind which not one centimetre was given. The Rauhgraters came into the fire like miners into a shaft that is collapsing, and stayed lying there, and the four red ones came through them, because Astartes come through almost anything, and then they were among the Slingstones.

Vel'Schwur saw Malkor raise the axe. He saw it fall, once, twice, and gold fall, and then he saw Vel'Kaddar going to meet him, with the chainsword, and Kell at his side, and then it was too far and too crowded to make out single figures.

It did not take long. It never took long when four stood against a hundred, even when the four had had ten thousand years to learn killing, and it was only not shorter because Malkor did not fall when he should have fallen, and went on, burning, with the axe, as he had gone through Bre'kar's fire at Gate Two, and only stopped when the chainsword of the Slingstones' captain stood in his helmet, which had never been a helmet.

Over the vox that Bre'kar kept open, Vel'Schwur heard Vel'Kaddar breathing. Then: "Four. And the ones who came with them. Seven of mine."

"I saw it."

"Fetch the rest, Bre'kar. I will hold."

Behind the Fire Wardens, in the rows, the people with the candles had watched. They had turned their heads westwards, away from the sky, for the first time that morning, and Vel'Schwur saw some of them let the candles sink, not many, a few dozen in fourteen thousand, and saw that the Rauhgraters in the rows did not come to set them upright again, because the Rauhgraters in the rows had been watching too.

IX. The Boiling Square

The champion stood where he had stood, with his back to the salt and his face to the first row, and the three red ones beside him.

Bre'kar walked towards him with twenty brothers and Vel'Schwur, and left the rest of the company in the line, facing the gold, because a line is a line even when it stands only against a law that is holding back. The champion saw them coming. He raised no weapon. He had none.

Two of the red ones raised one. One of them was younger than the champion, in the sense of the Legion, with a face that was still a face, and he stepped forward with a bolter and said something in the old tongue that sounded like a question, and the champion did not answer, and the red one fired, and the second beside him fired with him.

It was short. Vel'Schwur saw Bre'kar's flamer, from ten metres, and the two red ones who burned and went on firing, and two brothers of the squad fall, and then Bre'kar's blade, twice, and then the two lay in the salt, and the champion had not moved, and the third red one, the one on his right, had not moved either and looked at the dead and said, quietly, a word that Vel'Schwur did not understand and whose meaning he understood: a number.

"Sethmar," said the champion. "Orsaan." Only that.

Bre'kar stopped ten paces in front of him. The flamer lowered, not ready. He said nothing. He had listened to a heretic on Sordenval, and in front of Gate One, and years ago he had explained to the Chaplain that you have to know an enemy before you kill him, and Vel'Schwur could see that he knew him now and that it made nothing easier.

"Captain," said the champion. The voice was as it was at close quarters. "You came down."

"Yes."

"You said you would not come."

"I said four things. They are all in my book."

The champion nodded, and it was the concession of two craftsmen that Vel'Schwur had seen once before, in front of Gate One, and that had shaken him then and did not now, because by now he knew that it was genuine and that the genuine thing in an enemy is the worst thing.

"I built on it," said the champion. "I built on your coming down and placing yourself between them and the gold. I wanted them to see that: the sons of Vulkan who left them behind and who came back to cover them. That is the testimony. Not the gold. You." He turned his head, slowly, and for the first time that morning looked not at the sky but at Vel'Schwur. "And you, priest. Bear witness to it."

X. What Saw Beneath the Jaw

Vel'Schwur stepped forward.

He did not do it because the champion had demanded it. He did it because it was his office to stand at every place where a decision was made that bore the name of the Chapter, and because one would be made here, and because in forty days he had learned that the sentence did not belong to him but to the place.

He stood in front of the champion, close enough to see the plates over the armour, the chitin that did not belong to it, and under it the face, broad, old, and under the right jaw the Other, small, black, moving. It was not looking at Vel'Schwur. It was looking up. Since the Fire Wardens had come through the fence it had been looking up, at the pale seam in the grey sky, and it was looking still, and Vel'Schwur found that the champion knew it and that it mattered to him.

"I have seen," said the champion, and it was not the voice from the vox. It was quieter. "I am telling you, priest, because you write it down. I have seen that the gods answered and Lorgar did not. I have seen that fourteen thousand looked up and that what looked back was not the gods." He raised his hand, slowly, towards the jaw, without touching the Other. "It has been looking up since you came. It sees what they see. For three hundred years I did not ask what it sees. This morning I asked."

"And?"

"It sees itself."

It was quiet. The rows behind them breathed. The third red one stood beside his champion and counted nothing.

"I cannot grant you absolution," said Vel'Schwur. He said it as he had said it on Sordenval, to a man who had killed his daughter, and he heard for himself that it was not the same and that the words were nevertheless the only ones his office gave. "But I can bear testimony to what you have done."

"That is all I ever wanted," said the champion, and then he did the thing Vel'Schwur did not write into the Chronicle.

He knelt.

Not before Vel'Schwur. Not before Bre'kar. He knelt on the salt, with his face to the first row, to the fourteen thousand who were looking at him, and said in their language, loudly, so that the first rows heard it and the next ones carried it on, "You have seen. It is enough. Go home."

They did not move.

He said it again. Vel'Schwur saw that the rows stood, with the candles, and that they were looking up, not at the champion, and that what they saw did not listen to him, because it had never been him they had listened to. He saw the champion grasp it. He saw it in the broad, old face, and he saw that what stood in it was not despair but something he knew only from a man who has just finished a calculation and knows that it is correct.

"Then bear witness to that as well," said the champion without turning round. "That I said it. And that they did not hear it."

And then, to Bre'kar, "Captain. I have no weapon. I have never carried one since the Chalice. If you do not kill a man who carries none, then the priest does. He has an office for it."

Bre'kar looked at him. Vel'Schwur looked at the captain and knew what was going on in him, because he would have known it himself: that a son of Vulkan does not fire on the unarmed, and that this man had built on that from the first day, and that he was now building on somebody else doing it.

"No," said Bre'kar.

The champion nodded. He had expected it. Then he looked at Vel'Schwur, with the upper eyes, while the Other went on looking up, and in that look there was something Vel'Schwur could not get rid of for a long time afterwards, because it was gratitude.

Vel'Schwur raised the crozius.

XI. Nine

He did not do it quickly. He did it as he had killed a creature on Sordenval that had once been a man: with a word he did not say aloud, and with the weight of the weapon that was his office, and the champion of the Witnesses of the Wound knelt on the salt of Eschenwerth and looked at him until the crozius struck him, and his face did not smile. Vel'Schwur wrote that down later, because it was true and because it contradicted what would stand in the report somebody somewhere would write: he did not smile. He looked like a man who has seen something and does not want to see it any more.

The Other under the jaw stopped looking up. Vel'Schwur saw it. The small black eyes closed, slowly, like the eyes of an animal falling asleep, and then there was nothing under the jaw but skin, old, with plates over it that did not belong there.

Behind him, in the rows, a sound went through the fourteen thousand that Vel'Schwur did not write into the Chronicle, because he had no word for it. It was not a cry. It was the sound a room makes when many people breathe out at once. And then, here and there, first singly, then in whole rows, they set the candles down. Not all of them. Not half. But thousands, who stood the candles in the salt in front of them the way you set down something you have carried a long time, and then they stood there with empty hands and looked up, and Vel'Schwur saw that they saw nothing. That they saw the sky, grey, with a seam in it, and that it did not look back. He did not know whether that was good. He knew that it was true.

The third red one was still standing beside the dead man.

He had not moved. He had watched his champion kneel and die, with a face that showed nothing but the attentiveness of a man keeping count, and now he looked at Vel'Schwur and then at Bre'kar and said, in a Gothic that sounded ten thousand years old, "Eight."

"What is your name?" asked Bre'kar.

"Nekhal." He looked down at the dead man. "I count. I have always counted. Dhorvak at the gate. Sethmar and Orsaan here. Malkor and three at the gold. Thagoth." He looked up. "Eight. One short of the number that will stand in the report. I know how the reports read. For ten thousand years we pulled reports out of the noise."

"Put down your weapon," said Bre'kar.

"I have raised none." Nekhal turned, slowly, and looked west, where the Golden Wall stood, three hundred paces off, in gold, with bolters raised, and the edge of their salt was a line behind which not one centimetre was given. "You do not fire on the unarmed, captain. The priest has done his office; he does not do it twice in one morning. But those over there have a law, and I have looked at it from the camp for forty days. It is a good law. It does not count."

He went.

He went west, across the salt, with open hands, without hurrying, past the line of the Fire Wardens, who looked at him and let him go because their captain said nothing, and Vel'Schwur watched him go and knew what he was doing and did not call him back, because there was no word that would have called him back. Nekhal walked until he reached the edge of the golden salt, the one centimetre, and set a foot on it.

The Golden Wall did what it was.

"Nine," said Vel'Schwur, quietly, on the salt, to nobody, and found that he had counted it because somebody had to count, and that it was the last thing he could do for this man, and that it went into no book.

XII. What the Lights Did

The Rauhgraters laid down their weapons.

Not all of them, not at once. But at midday on the fortieth day the captain with the miner's face came across the salt to Bre'kar, alone, without a rifle, and stopped ten paces in front of him and said that his name was Bodo Wehle and that he had commanded the planetary defence force of Rauhgrat and that he commanded it still, what was left of it, thirty thousand, and that they were surrendering. He did not say to whom. He said that they were surrendering.

Bre'kar looked at him. Then he said into the vox, to Vel'Kaddar, "Thirty thousand Rauhgraters are laying down their weapons. I am accepting them."

"They are traitors."

"They are miners whom somebody looked at. What they are is not decided by your law and not by my doctrine. That is decided by the Imperium, when it comes. It always comes." Bre'kar kept his eyes on Wehle. "Sometimes too late."

It was quiet over the vox for a long time. Then Vel'Kaddar said, "I will have it written in the Book of Oaths that you accepted them. Not I."

"That is correct," said Bre'kar, and Vel'Schwur heard that he had borrowed the phrase from an Apothecary and would not be giving it back either.

Wehle was still standing. He looked past Bre'kar, at the rows, at the candles in the salt, at the people standing in front of them with empty hands or still holding the candles or sitting down because they had stood for forty days, and he said, without anybody having asked him, "He said they should go home."

"I heard it."

"They are not going. They do not know where. Rauhgrat is a world without a tithe that has not answered for a year. Salzgrund is a lower city that was given up." Wehle looked at Bre'kar, with the miner's face that hid nothing. "Where do people go who have seen that nobody looks in on them, captain? He did not give them a place. He gave them a sky. And it is empty; I saw that this morning."

Bre'kar did not answer at once. He looked at the rows, which were dissolving, slowly, not towards the camp and not towards the city, but simply, like salt on salt.

"Back into the alleys," he said then. "Under the roof that is there. The canal runs. The boiling houses are burning. That is not much. It is a place." He looked at Vel'Schwur. "Chaplain. Go with them. Not as a judge."

Vel'Schwur went.

He went through the rows that were rows no longer, past people who looked at him the way he had been looked at on no world: not with fear, not with awe, with the tiredness of people who have seen something and no longer see it, and who watch a black giant with a crozius go past with something still sticking to it, and who know whose it is. He said nothing. He had no office for what would have needed saying here, and he knew it, and went so that somebody went whom they could follow if they wanted to.

Some went. Not many. A few hundred, who left their candles in the salt, into the alleys, behind him, under the roof that was there.

At the middle bridge stood the small man with the bent back, turning a wheel. He looked up when the Chaplain came, for the first time, and then past him, up the climb, where the gates stood open, all three, and where a young woman in a boiler's apron was coming down, slowly, past the bundles.

Vel'Schwur stopped a few paces short of the bridge, because there were things at which a Chaplain did not stand, and watched.

The woman came down the alley and stopped in front of the bridge, and the old man finished turning the wheel, a quarter turn, because the second pan was just getting its measure, and then he looked at her. Neither of them said anything. She stepped onto the bridge, laid her hand on the wheel, beside his, not to turn it, and stood like that, and the old man left his hand where it was. Below, the brine ran.

"The canal runs," said the old man, to nobody, and then, to her, "You can smell the brine. It is heavier today."

"I know," she said. "The fourth bridge needs half a turn."

He nodded, and they went to the fourth bridge together, and Vel'Schwur went on, through the alleys, under the roof that was there, and wrote it in the other book, because it went into no other.

XIII. Four Lines

On the forty-first day Vollrath counted, because somebody had to count, and Vel'Schwur stood by and wrote it down with her.

Fire Wardens of Nocturne: fifty-four. Six on the fortieth day, on the salt, four to the Rauhgraters who had run with Malkor, two to Sethmar and Orsaan. Their names stood with the others, said aloud once, and their gene-seed with Dra'kaan's phials, twenty-three now, and a case that nobody counted.

Golden Wall: seven, all at the edge of their salt. Vel'Kaddar named the names over the vox, and Vel'Schwur wrote them down, because the chain had held and because a Chaplain writes down what has held.

Witnesses of the Wound: nine. All of them. Dhorvak in the gate arch of Gate Three, on the eleventh day; Malkor, Vashtor, Vhorne, Sarrun at the edge of the golden salt; Sethmar and Orsaan in front of the first row; Ur-Thagoth in front of the first row; Nekhal at the edge of the golden salt. Vel'Schwur knew their names from one who had counted, and he wrote them down, in the other book, because they went into no other.

Rauhgraters: Vollrath estimated twenty-eight thousand who had laid down their weapons, and three hundred who had run with Malkor, and the number of those who had been left in the graduation towers and at the gates and on the Trickle Slope in forty days she did not name, because nobody had counted them.

People from Salzgrund, on the plain, on the fortieth day: two hundred and sixty, in the fire of the Golden Wall, when Malkor ran through the rows. Vollrath named the number steadily. Vel'Schwur wrote it down steadily.

People from Salzgrund, in the alleys, on the forty-first day: twenty-two thousand, approximately, under the roof that was there. The canal was running.

In the evening Vel'Schwur went alone to the place in front of the first row, which was a row no longer, where the Rauhgraters had carried the two red ones away, properly, without anybody having told them to, and where the imprint of two knees still stood in the salt, large, and in front of it a candle that somebody had left standing and that was no longer burning.

He did not kneel. He had done it on Sordenval, at the ashes of a man who could no longer keep his sin and his salvation apart, and he had told nobody, and he stood now in front of the imprint in the salt and found that this time he would not do it, not because it would have been wrong, but because this man would have built on it, and because that was the last thing Vel'Schwur could still refuse him.

Instead he wrote, standing, on the paper from the counting house, four lines, as Vel'shar had written them ten thousand years ago and Dra'kaan on Morthis IV, and as the Martyrology keeps them, for those whose names are not known:

We left you behind, with the date. We came back, with the date. That is more than we said, and less than we owe. The truth is the least that is owed you, and the truth is: the sky was empty, and you looked up all the same, and we did not.

He read them. Then he did not strike out the last word, although it was not true. They had looked up. Every morning, for forty days, from a rampart walk, and had said the number. But it was also true, and he let it stand, because four lines are not there to be true but to be carried.

XIV. The Chronicle

What Vel'Schwur wrote into the Chronicle, in the small chamber in the east wing of the command post, in the night before the forty-second day, before the Ashen Watch took the company aboard and the Golden Wall took over the city and the Imperium began to come, in the form of an astropath who sent a message that would at some point somewhere be pulled out of the noise:

Siege of Hollbrunn, Eschenwerth, 005.M42, forty days. Captain Bre'kar held the Ring with seventy-eight brothers, of whom fifty-four returned. The lower city of Salzgrund was given up on the eleventh day in order to hold the Ring, and re-entered on the fortieth day. The enemy, a warband of the Word Bearers under a Gal-Vorbak champion named Ur-Thagoth, nine Astartes, with some forty thousand apostate defence forces of the world Rauhgrat, was completely destroyed on the fortieth day in concert with a force of the Golden Wall under Captain Threnn Vel'Kaddar. The champion fell by the hand of the Chaplain. The converts of the lower city, some twenty-three thousand, were not attacked. Two hundred and sixty of them fell in the fighting at the edge of the landing zone. Twenty-eight thousand Rauhgraters laid down their weapons and were handed over to the planetary defence until the Imperium decides. The chain to the Golden Wall held; seven brothers of the Golden Wall fell for it. A sealed case was conveyed to the Reliquarium.

He read it. It was true. It did not say that the champion had knelt. It did not say that he had smiled, because he had not, and Vel'Schwur knew that the report that would be pulled out of the noise would say it differently, with a kind of triumphant devotion, because reports do that, and that somewhere a Dark Apostle on a ship that was a coffin would believe it and hold a memorial ceremony, small, after the oldest traditions, and that there was nothing Vel'Schwur could do about it except write it in the other book.

It did not say that a bridge-warden had held the canal, because a canal does not belong in a Chapter chronicle, and Vel'Schwur wrote it underneath all the same, small, as a marginal note, because in forty days he had learned that there were things to which no office could bear testimony and to which somebody had to bear witness.

It did not say that the captain had said four sentences that all stood. But that stood in another book, with the date, and would still stand there when it became inconvenient, and it was already inconvenient, and the captain stood on the rampart walk every morning and no longer said a number, because there was none any more, and looked down all the same.

Vel'Schwur laid the pen down. Outside, morning was going across the plain, white, and in Salzgrund the graduation towers were trickling, and you saw it in the sheen on the wood if you knew where to look.

He knew now. That went into no book either.