The Pending Roll

The Reconciliation

The Chancery knew no night, only shifts, and Ilsabet Krell had learned to stop missing the difference.

Sixteen hours at the desk. Then six on a cot in a chamber she shared with three other Subadjutrices, two of whom she had never seen awake. Then sixteen again. The Ordinat Vhess had hung in high orbit above Belthane for two hundred years, reckoning up the war that others had fought. It reckoned slowly. It reckoned thoroughly. It had never finished.

Before her, in the second row of the East Wing, the Sable Reach campaign stood stacked in ninety-seven volumes.

Ilsabet opened volume forty-one and began.

It was simple work, once one understood the trick of it. On the left the requisitions: what a regiment had drawn from the Munitorum. On the right the casualty reports: how many of them were still alive to consume it. Between the two one drew a line, and if the figures balanced, one set the seal and laid the volume on the outgoing pile. If they did not balance, one wrote an annotation and sent the volume two floors up, where someone with a longer title dealt with it.

Ilsabet set forty seals a shift on average. She rarely wrote annotations. Annotations were an admission that one had not got the better of the figures, and the figures were the only thing in this place one could get the better of.

Around the eleventh hour she came upon the Forty-First.

41st Belthane Trench Rifles. A regiment from the world beneath them, raised in the year 812, shipped to the Sable Reach, deployed there against — the volume left open what they had been deployed against in the Sable Reach. That happened. Some enemy designations were expunged after the fact, and one learned early to look at the blacked-out places not as a question but as a wall.

Left: requisitions. Rations, ammunition, filter masks, winter kit, rations again. A neat, even column, quarter after quarter, all the way down to the current year.

Right: casualty reports.

Ilsabet read the right-hand column twice. Then she laid down the pen.

Two thousand eight hundred men had been shipped to the Sable Reach. Two thousand eight hundred had fallen. The last casualty report bore the date 819.M41 and the signature of a commissar whose name had been smudged so thoroughly that only the rank remained.

And beneath it, for twenty-eight years, without interruption, without a single missing quarterly item: rations. Ammunition. Filter masks. Winter kit.

A regiment that had not been a regiment for twenty-eight years had gone on eating.

Three Counter-Checks

She did not write the annotation at once.

First she fetched the volume from the year 819 and checked whether someone had misfiled the casualty report — it happened that reports slipped into the wrong campaign, and then something was missing in one place that lay twice in another. The report was filed correctly. She checked whether a replacement contingent had been raised that would have carried on the old regimental number. None had been raised. She checked whether the requisitions might have been submitted by a neighbouring unit under the wrong number, and for that she went to the West Wing and had a servitor lift down three volumes that no one had touched in fourteen years. The dust on them lay evenly.

There was no neighbouring unit. The Sable Reach had swallowed the Forty-First and nothing else, because nothing else had been there.

When she came back to her desk, her lamp had been put out and lit again by someone, and the volume lay two finger-widths further left than she had left it.

Ilsabet sat down very slowly.

Then she took the pen and wrote the annotation.

First Ordinator Meer

First Ordinator Callax Meer let her wait half a day, which, as she understood later, was meant kindly.

His office lay in the core of the station, where the walls did not sweat. He was old in the way administrative people grew old — not worn out, but shelved. Before him on the desk lay her volume, open at exactly the place.

"Subadjutrix Krell." He did not look up. "You have worked cleanly."

"Ordinator."

"That is not a compliment. It is a finding." He turned the volume round so that she saw her own handwriting upside down before her. "You made three counter-checks before you wrote. Most make none. Most see the gap and write, and then the volume comes to me, and I send it back, because in truth only one report was misfiled. Yours is not coming back."

Something in Ilsabet's chest loosened, and for the space of a breath she was proud.

"And that is why," said Meer, "I must now explain to you what you have done."

He stood and went to the viewport. Belthane lay below, brown and veined, a world that had been raising its sons for nine centuries and getting them back in volumes like this one.

"What happens if I pass your annotation on? Tell me. You know the official channels."

She knew them. "The Forty-First are struck from the pending roll. The regiment is deemed extinct. The requisitions of the last twenty-eight years are declared unlawfully drawn."

"And then?"

"Then someone looks for who drew them."

"No." Meer said it without sharpness. "That is the mistake you are making, and it is a decent mistake, which is why I do not hold it against you. You think there is a thief. A quartermaster who for twenty-eight years has drawn rations for a dead regiment and sold them on. That would be a story with a culprit in it, and stories with culprits are bearable."

He turned round.

"There is no thief. The rations really were loaded. They really were flown to the Sable Reach. They really were set down there, quarter after quarter, for twenty-eight years, on a world where no Imperial Guardsman stands any more."

Ilsabet opened her mouth and found nothing in it.

"We call it a dead-draw," said Meer. "A supply line that keeps running after whatever hung at its end has ceased to exist. They do not arise through malice. They arise because no one is authorised to stop them."

"But the casualty report —"

"Was received. Was filed. Was never processed." He came back to the desk and tapped the volume. "To strike the Forty-First, it takes a continuance annotation with a negative ruling. That is signed by the sector's Reconciliation Board. The Board sits when the Sector Lord Commander convenes it. The Sector Lord Commander convenes it when a campaign is submitted to him for final assessment. The Sable Reach campaign has never been submitted for final assessment."

"Why not?"

Meer looked at her, and for the first time he seemed tired rather than shelved.

"Because it got lost. Not the campaign — the campaign was lost, that is something else and happens often. The campaign itself got lost. It appears in no register the Board keeps. It stands in ninety-seven volumes in our East Wing and in not one single document that a person with authority ever sets eyes on. And as long as it is not finally assessed, the Forty-First remain on the pending roll. And as long as they are on the pending roll, they are entitled to supply. That is not fraud, Subadjutrix. That is the regulation working exactly as it was written."

The Chancery hummed around them, ten thousand pens on ten thousand volumes.

"Then one corrects the regulation," said Ilsabet.

"Yes," said Meer. "That is the point everyone arrives at. That is why I am going to sit down now and tell you what comes after it, and you will listen until I am finished."

Adjutrix Secunda Sarn

He told her of Adjutrix Secunda Haleth Sarn, who forty-three years before her had sat at a desk in the East Wing and found the same sort of gap. Not the Forty-First — the Nineteenth, an armoured detachment, eleven thousand tonnes of fuel a quarter to a place where nothing drove any more.

Sarn had written the annotation. Sarn had, when the annotation ran into the sand, written a second. Sarn had, when that one ran into the sand too, left the official channels and addressed a petition to the Sector Commissariat.

"What happened to her?" Ilsabet asked.

"Nothing." Meer held her gaze. "That is the answer, and I know you expected a different one. No one came for her. No one shot her. The petition was received, examined, and answered with the ruling that the circumstances described disclosed no violation. Which is correct. It was no violation."

"And then?"

"And then she went on working. Twenty-six years. She set forty seals a shift, like you, and she never wrote an annotation again, because she had learned that writing costs nothing and achieves nothing, and that is worse than either on its own. She died seventeen years ago. In her chamber. In her sleep."

He pushed the volume a finger-width towards her.

"Her Nineteenth are still on the pending roll. Fuel is still going out."

The Muster Rolls

She did not go to sleep.

On the lowest floor of the East Wing the muster rolls were stored, and because muster rolls interested no one — they contained no figures that could be reconciled — only every fourth lamp burned there. Ilsabet carried her own.

The roll of the Forty-First filled two cases. She lifted the first onto the floor, sat down beside it and opened it.

Names.

She had known it would be names. In eight years of service she had never read one.

Belthane levy 812, District Eastwall-Nine. Vergen, Tobas, son of Vergen, Tobas. Age nineteen. Trade: deep-pump keeper. No writing, no reading.

Salt, Meriel. Age seventeen. Trade: none given. Levy-master's note: brings a sister with her, will not go without. Sister turned away.

Kolb, Anselm. Age forty-four. Trade: bandage weaver. Levy-master's note: over levy age, volunteers, states that his three sons were levied in 809 and he wishes to look for them.

Ilsabet read for an hour. Then two. The handwriting changed every few pages, because the levying went faster than a scribe could write, and somewhere around page four hundred one of the scribes stopped noting the trades, and after that there were only names and ages, names and ages, to the end of the second case.

She shut the case and stayed sitting.

Meer had been right, and that was the unbearable thing about it. There was no thief. There was no treason, no conspiracy, no face one could have accused of anything. There was a regulation that worked exactly as it had been written, and at its one end a levy-master in District Eastwall-Nine had turned away a seventeen-year-old girl's sister, and at its other end, twenty-eight years later, a freighter landed on an empty world.

In between lay nothing. No villain. Only procedure.

She had always believed the Imperium was cruel. On the floor between two cases, around the twenty-second hour, she understood that it was not. Cruelty presupposed that somewhere, someone was looking. This did not look. This had never looked, and it was two thousand eight hundred men deep.

It came to her that she had written the annotation for the wrong reason. She had written it because the columns did not add up.

Eleven Names

Ilsabet Krell came back to the East Wing the following morning around the fourth hour, because her shift began around the fourth hour and because there was nowhere else she could go.

Volume forty-one lay at her desk. Her annotation lay beside it, furnished with a clean line through it and a marginal note in Meer's hand: For resubmission upon reconvening of the Board. The Board had not been convened for one hundred and thirty years.

She sat before it for a long time.

Then she did the only thing left to her, and it was so small that she was ashamed of it while she did it.

She took a blank sheet.

She did not write 41st Belthane Trench Rifles. She did not write the number two thousand eight hundred. This place had figures enough, and figures were exactly what kept the Forty-First alive.

She wrote: Vergen, Tobas. Nineteen. Deep-pump keeper.

Beneath it: Salt, Meriel. Seventeen. Would not go without her sister.

Beneath it: Kolb, Anselm. Forty-four. Was looking for his sons.

She wrote eleven names, as many as she could still gather from memory, and at the twelfth she noticed she was inventing it, and stopped. It was not an annotation, not a petition, not an application. It was not a document. A document would have needed a number and a column it fitted into.

It was a list, and it was nobody's business.

Then she went to the West Wing, to the three volumes with the even dust, and laid the sheet inside, where someone would find it who also made three counter-checks before writing.

And then she sat down at her desk and began on volume forty-two, because the shift had sixteen hours and because eleven names on a sheet that was not a document were more than none.

Around the eleventh hour she set her fortieth seal.

Beneath her Belthane turned and raised its sons, and somewhere in the Sable Reach, on a world without a name in a register without a reader, a freighter landed punctually at the turn of the quarter and set down rations for two thousand eight hundred men, and no one came to collect them, and the freighter turned and flew back, to come again next quarter.

The Imperium did not forget its dead.

It had simply never learned to stop supplying them.