The Recantation

I. Prefatory Note to a Book I Have Recanted

I write this two years and four months after the Antifire and forty-one days after the Long Hearth.

I write it in the same book that I declared false before four thousand people. The book I laid in the fire that day was a transcript. It burned as paper burns, and the people watched, and it worked.

Whoever finds this will first think that I lied, and then he will think that I lied twice: once at the Long Hearth, when I said the fire was a symbol, and once here, where I write the opposite. I cannot take that from him. I can only say in what order it happened, and what I knew at the moment in which I did it.

Chapter Master Auren Drak-Soln has permitted me to make this entry, and he has permitted me to seal it. I asked him why. He said: "Because in two hundred years I shall need someone who knows how it happened, and because that someone will not be you."

It is a good reason. It is the same reason for which he ordered me, back then, in the Chamber of Silence, to share the book.

I carried out the order. Everything else follows from that.

II. Share It

The Chapter Master said: "Share it." I said: "Yes, Chapter Master."

I did not ask at the time with whom. That was the first mistake, and it was so small that for two years I did not recognise it as a mistake.

I had nine transcripts made. Nine is no holy number; nine was the number of brothers of whom I assumed that they would read the book without afterwards either admiring me or avoiding me. I was wrong in four cases, and I was wrong, as it turned out, in both directions.

Captain Lyeth Vor'an read it in one night and gave it back to me the next morning, in passing, with the sentence: "It explains why you never come along." That was no criticism. Vor'an talks like that.

Librarian Dreth Koss'valan read it three times and wrote in the margin. His marginal notes are the cleverest thing ever said about the book, and the longest of them runs: Here you describe a behaviour and call it a being. Between the two lies the whole difference, and you do not make it. I have found no answer to that. I have not found one to this day.

Chaplain Hask Tamm'un read it and came to me on the seventh day and said three sentences, which I reproduce here in full, because in the outcome he was proved right and because I want that written down:

"You say the fire lives. A brother who hears that hears a doctrine. A man who hears that hears a permission. In thirty years you have never spoken with people, Voss'aran, you have only spoken to them."

I told him that I knew the difference.

I did not know it.

III. Onnek

There was an open question in the Chapter at the time, and no one wanted to decide it, and so it landed with me, as all questions land for which there is no procedure.

The question was: what happens to the old smith.

His name was Onnek. He was of the Valdek tribe, about seventy-five years old, a man with a crippled left thumb and the hands of someone who has handled hot metal all his life. He had stood at the First Stone and had begun to chisel in a sequence of signs he could not read, because a stranger who called himself Keth had told him it was a blessing for his tribe.

The stranger was a Harrowmaster of the Alpha Legion. The sequence of signs was an anchor, and had it been finished, everything on this world that is bound to our blood would have gone out in a single afternoon.

The man had known nothing of it. He had worked at a stone because someone had asked him to, and because in fifty-seven years he had never known anyone to ask him for something evil.

The second commandment of the Kessler Protocol runs: The tribes are the Chapter. It is no image. We recruit from them, we garrison among them, we eat at their hearths, and if a Dragon Warden may say one good thing about himself in four hundred years, then this: on Varanthos we have never wiped out a settlement because it would have been easier.

So the question was not whether we kill him. The question was what we tell him.

I went alone. I took off the helm, which I almost never do, and I sat for nine hours in the low room of his house while outside the forest dripped, and the old man talked, and what he said was always the same in different words:

"I did it. I did not know. Both are true. What do I do with that now?"

I know that question. It is the only religious question there is; everything else is administration. I have heard it for thirty-two years from brothers who had carried out an order that was wrong, or had not carried out one that was right. I have always answered it, and my answer was always the same, and it always helped.

I gave it to him.

"The fire does not ask who you were. It asks only whether you burn."

Onnek looked at me. He did not weep; the old of the Valdek do not weep before strangers. He simply sat there and let the sentence fall into him like a stone into a shaft, and I watched him and was satisfied with myself.

The next morning he asked whether he might write the sentence down.

I did not only permit him that. I left him a transcript.

I want it to stand here that no one pressed me to it. The Chapter Master had said: share it. I had assumed he meant the Chapter. I decided that he meant the tribes as well. The decision was mine, it was made in thirty seconds, and it was the most consequential of my life.

IV. The Long Hearth

Eighteen months later Scout Vel'har came to me and reported something for which she had no word.

She is nineteen, of the Vas'kara tribe, and she did not learn the heat perception but brought it with her — with her it is not a sense of the blood but something her family has had for four generations and holds to be ordinary. She is therefore the only human being on this world who notices things first.

"Chaplain. Among the Valdek a fire burns that does not stop."

"Fires stop when there is no wood left."

"Yes," she said. "That is why I am reporting it."

I went there three days later.

They had built it between the settlement and the river, on the only open ground the Valdek tribe possesses: a channel of basalt blocks, forty paces long, knee-high, with a fireplace at each end and a continuous bed of embers between. They called it the Long Hearth. It looked like what it was: a very large cooking place, built by people who had never built anything but cooking places.

At the hearth that afternoon sat about eighty people. Two children were laying on wood. A woman I did not know was reading with her finger from a booklet, aloud, slowly, with the errors of someone who learned to read late.

She was reading from my book.

I want to be exact, because at this point everyone who has told it since becomes inexact. It was no cult. There was no priest. There was no sign. There were no sacrifices, no mutilation, no invocation of anything that was not the Emperor or the Primarch. They began with the Imperial morning prayer, as they had learned it from our garrison patrols, and they ended it correctly, and afterwards the woman read from the third section of my book, in which it stands that fire breathes and eats and grows.

And then they all said the sentence together.

I stood at the edge of the wood, a hundred paces off, in full armour, with the bone mask before my face, and heard eighty-four people speak a sentence that I had given to a single old man as comfort.

I felt nothing evil in that moment. That is the most important sentence of this entry, and I set it down without apology: I felt nothing. I saw a village that prayed, and the praying was orthodox, and the fire was warm, and an old man with a crippled thumb sat at the upper end and watched and for the first time in two years was not alone.

I went over and blessed it.

V. What I Saw, and What I Did Not Measure

I stayed two days.

Onnek showed me everything with the pride of a craftsman. How they had aligned the channel so that the wind does not blow into it. How they hand over the embers, from family to family, a different one each night, so that no one owns the fire. How they do not throw the ash away but carry it into the fields.

"We have invented nothing," he said. "We do what we have always done. We only do it all together."

That was true. That was the disquieting thing, if I am to say in hindsight when something ought first to have struck me. It was the most ordinary thing on this world, only drawn out large.

On the second evening a woman asked me whether the fire could hear her.

I said: "No."

I said that. It stands in no report, because I wrote no report, but I said it, and I said it honestly, and I felt sure while saying it.

And then she asked: "Then why does it do what stands in the book?"

I answered her that it was the other way round: the book describes what fire does, and therefore the two agree, the way a map agrees with the land.

She nodded. She was satisfied. I was satisfied.

I ordered not a single measurement that evening. I had a Librarian in the Chapter who two years earlier had found beneath the ground of this world an object that none of us could explain, and I did not call him, because here there was nothing to explain.

Chaplain Hask Tamm'un asked me later why not. I told him: because there was no occasion.

That was true, and it was an evasion, and both at once is the form in which I said most of my sentences that year.

The real reason was simpler. For thirty-two years I had written a theology that no one shared, and for the first time people sat around a fire and lived it, and it was beautiful, and I did not want to be the man who brings a measuring device.

VI. Hask Tamm'un

There are four of us Chaplains among the Dragon Wardens. There were always four; no one knows any longer why.

Hask Tamm'un is the eldest. He has served forty-seven years, he grew up among the Arun, and he has never stepped into the Circle of Flame. Not out of fear — he once showed me the inside of his forearm, which from wrist to elbow is one single old burn scar, and said: "I am not afraid of fire. I am afraid of men who stand in fire and preach while doing it."

He came into my cell eleven days after my visit to the Valdek and laid something on the table.

It was a booklet. Handwritten, very neat, in the language of the Valdek. On the first page stood my sentence.

"Where did you get that?"

"From a boy of the Fourteenth who was with his mother." Tamm'un did not sit down. "He brought it to me because he did not know whether it is permitted. Eighteen years old, an Initiate in his second year, and he knew better than you and I together."

"It is a transcript of my third section."

"It is a selection from your third section," said Tamm'un. "Read it."

I read it.

There were nine paragraphs. All nine stood exactly so in my book. None was falsified, none was rearranged, none was added.

But the third section has forty paragraphs, and the other thirty-one are the ones in which I qualify. In which I write that the statement about the life of fire is an analogy and no ascription of will. In which I say expressly that fire does not hear, does not answer, wants nothing. In which I warn against precisely what I hoped a brother would think along with me while reading in any case.

The thirty-one were missing. Not because someone had suppressed them. Because no one had copied them out. A woman who learned to read late and scoops paper out of the river does not copy out the qualifications. She copies out what carries.

"I did not want this," I said.

"No," said Tamm'un. "You wrote it. Wanting is for people with less reach."

He went to the door and stopped there, as they all do.

"I demand that we burn it out. The hearth, not the people. Today. And that we collect every transcript, and that you say in person in every settlement that it was an error."

"On what basis?"

"On none at all," said Hask Tamm'un. "That is my point. We have no basis, and we shall never have one, because there is nothing one could measure until there is something one can measure. And then it is too late. That is why one does it beforehand."

I refused.

I refused with the best argument I had, and it was a good argument, and I stand by it to this day that it was good: one does not extinguish the prayer of four thousand people because a Chaplain has an uneasy feeling. Whoever does that has the Ecclesiarchy in his head and not the Emperor, and we are not the Ecclesiarchy, and on Varanthos no one has ever died for a feeling.

Hask Tamm'un listened to it.

Then he said: "You are right. And you will do it in the end all the same, and then it will be dearer."

VII. Nine Days of Wood

The first finding did not come from us. It came from the tribe.

Onnek sent me word by a garrison patrol that they had cut too much wood in the last cycle and that the men of the Vas'kara were making fun of them about it.

I did not understand the report. I had it queried.

The answer was: they had cut wood for the Long Hearth for nine days, as in every cycle. On the ninth day there was still wood for six days lying there.

In the next cycle they cut less. On the ninth day there was still wood for eight days lying there.

Now I called Koss'valan.

He came with two adepts and stayed eleven days, and he did what he always does: he measured first the obvious and then what no one would think of. He weighed the wood. He measured the temperature at forty points. He measured the draught, the ash yield, the moisture content of the basalt blocks, the composition of the smoke.

On the twelfth day he sat opposite me in the Chamber of Silence, three levels below the main tower, at the only place in the fortress-monastery where no fire burns.

"I shall begin with what is good," he said. "The ash yield is correct. What burns, burns completely and normally. There is no residue, there are no foreign substances, it smells of nothing it should not."

"And the rest?"

"The rest is the quantity of heat." Koss'valan laid his hands flat on the table, because when reckoning he has to keep his hands still. "The quantity of heat this hearth gives off exceeds the quantity of heat contained in the wood they put into it. For about seven months. At first by a few parts in a hundred. In the last cycle by forty-one."

I said nothing.

"Mekhar." He called me that very rarely. "I have calculated it three times, and the third time I deliberately rounded to my own disadvantage. The hearth gives more than it receives."

"From where?"

"That is the question I have been sitting over for four days, and I have an answer I do not like." He looked at me, and his eyes are white and without irises and glow faintly in the dark, and in the Chamber of Silence, where there is no fire, they are the brightest thing in the room. "There is in this universe exactly one known kind of order that gives off more than one puts in, and that leaves no traces in the material while doing it. It is not physics. It is the other."

"Say it out."

"The Warp," said Dreth Koss'valan. "It is warp-fed. For about seven months."

VIII. Iska

I must at this point write about a child, and I needed twenty-eight days to bring myself to it.

Her name is Iska. She is Onnek's granddaughter, she was nine at the time, and the summer before she had fallen into the forge — not into the fire, into the hot wall beside it, which is worse, because one sticks there. She had lost the right shoulder and half the right side of her face. Our garrison had done what a field medic can do. It had been enough for her to live.

When I saw her again in the sixth month after my first visit, the skin was smooth.

Not better. Not scarred. Smooth, in the colour of the rest, with pores and with fine down, the way the skin of a nine-year-old child looks that has never hung in a forge.

I thereupon did something I am not ashamed of and that I must nevertheless record here: for three hours I searched for another explanation. I had the medical report sent for. I questioned the patrol that had brought her in at the time. I asked the child to show me the shoulder, and I looked at it with what our brothers call Fire-Sight — the heat sense our gene-seed brings with it and that the tribes of this world take for sorcery. The tissue was evenly perfused, as healthy tissue simply is.

There was no other explanation.

I asked her how it had happened.

She said: "I slept by the hearth because it was cold. And then it was gone."

I asked her whether she had prayed.

She said: "I slept."

That is the place at which everyone who reads this entry will think the same as I thought then, and I do not want to leave it out, because the leaving out would be the real lie. I thought: It is good. Not as a test result, not as theology, not as an official act. I saw a nine-year-old with whole skin standing before me and thought that something good had happened.

I am a Chaplain of the Adeptus Astartes. In thirty-two years I have analysed more expressions in faces than most. I know the procedures. I know that the things born in the Warp show themselves first as a gift and then as a condition and last as possession. I have taught that to brothers.

And I stood in a village and was glad.

Whoever finds this entry and wants to know how it happens: that is how it happens. Not with a pact. With a whole child.

IX. The Test

I stayed at the Long Hearth that night.

I sent the patrol back and said I had business in the settlement, and that was the second lie I have needed in this matter, and it was small, and I note it all the same.

Towards the third hour no one was there any more. The three families who live by the hearth were asleep. The forest dripped, as it drips for six hours after every rain. The embers lay in the channel over forty paces and were at no place brighter than at another.

I stepped in.

I want that to stand there exactly, because I know how it sounds: I, a Chaplain of the Dragon Wardens, in full armour, climbed at night into a fire that a village had built, without reporting it, without witnesses and without orders.

I did it because I wanted to test, and I had no procedure with which to test it, because there is none. The Ordo has procedures for possession, for corruption, for mutation, for presence. For the question whether a fire looks at one, no one has a procedure, because by the understanding of the Imperium the question may not be asked.

So I stood in it and did what I have done every morning for thirty years, and then I stopped doing it and instead put a question.

I put it aloud. I put it in such a way that it was answerable in only one manner, and I chose something that no living man but me knew: the name of the brother who introduced me into my office and who died eighteen years ago in proceedings about which nothing stands in our books, because the Chapter Master of that time decided that nothing should stand in them.

I asked the fire what he was called.

Nothing happened.

I stayed two hours.

Nothing happened. The embers lay there. The forest dripped. In the settlement a child coughed. Towards the fifth hour it began to grow light, and I stepped out of the hearth and knew what I wanted to know, and was relieved.

I was relieved for thirty-nine days.

On the fortieth day Vel'har brought me the garrison patrol's report on the Valdek, which she writes every four weeks, a single sheet on harvest yield, illnesses, disputes and births. At the very bottom stood, as in every one of these reports, a line with the names of the newborn, because our recruitment draws on it in fifteen years' time.

In the four weeks before, eleven children had been born among the Valdek.

Three of them bore the name I had asked about.

It is no rare name. I checked that at once: it occurs in four tribes on this world, it is two syllables long, and in the last nine years six children among the Valdek bear it out of three hundred and forty births. Six in nine years. Three in four weeks.

That is no proof. It is not even near a proof. I have worked it through three times and three times come to the same result: it is improbable, and improbable things happen unceasingly and everywhere, and whoever infers a cause from a cluster has stopped being one who tests.

I reported it to no one. Not to Koss'valan, not to the Chapter Master, not to Hask Tamm'un. I report it here, for the first time, forty-one days afterwards, to a reader who does not yet exist.

And I write with it what I thought in the moment in which I read the three names, for that is the only thing left of the whole affair:

I did not think: It has answered.

I thought: It heard me, and it needed forty days to build an answer that I cannot report as an answer.

And then I laid the sheet aside and went to evening devotions and spoke to the Fourth Company about duty.

X. The Source

That night I took out the book and read the first entry, which I had written twenty-two years before.

In number one I recorded how the book began, and I recorded it deliberately incompletely at the time, and that is the one conscious omission of my life.

The complete version is this.

Twenty-two years ago, on a moon whose name I do not write here because the proceedings against the cell there are still running, a dying man lay before me. He was a cultist. He had burned forty-one people in a cistern and had said while doing it something that the survivors had heard and passed on, and I had been sent there because the formulation was theological and because such things come to us.

He lay there with a shot-through hip and looked at me, and he said:

"The fire does not ask who you were."

I killed him. That was right, and I have never regretted it.

Then I searched for four years for where the sentence came from, because I knew it, and because I did not know from where, and because that is an unbearable condition.

I found it on the third shelf of the Reclusiam of Drak'Varanthos, in a transcript of the Fire Sermons of our first Chapter Master, Tho'mar Vesh, written some time in the thirty-first millennium, when the Chapter was not yet a hundred years old.

The complete sentence in Vesh runs:

The fire does not ask who you were. It asks only whether you burn. Ask you, then, who they were, for you are no fire.

The cultist had had the first part.

I had had the first two in my book.

The third has stood in no version in twenty-two years, in no transcript, in no sermon, and I did not leave it out because it was inconvenient. I left it out because in my view it weakened the picture.

That is the finding I have lived with since, and it has nothing to do with the Warp and nothing to do with the Valdek. The man who burned forty-one people and I read the same text and both struck out the same line.

XI. What It Was

We assembled in the Chamber of Silence: the Chapter Master, Vor'an, Voln-Kaar, Koss'valan, Hask Tamm'un, myself. Ravan Keth stood at the door, because he always stands at doors.

And Keth-Morr sat at the table.

He has been sitting at our tables for two years. He wears armour without insignia, he has no rank, and the Chapter Master has made a decision about him that to this day he has communicated to no one. He is the only man in this fortress-monastery who has nothing to lose, and that makes him more valuable in council than three captains.

Koss'valan laid it out.

"It is warp-fed, and it is new." He said that without any drama, the way he says numbers. "It has no sign, no name, no signature attributable to one of the Four. I have searched for six weeks. There is nothing. What is there has no origin outside this world."

"Then say what it is," said Drak-Soln.

"It is a shape made of agreement," said Koss'valan. "Four thousand people say the same sentence every evening over the same fire. They mean it sincerely, they mean the same thing, they do it for a long time, and they do it at a place where fire has been holy for twelve thousand years. In the Immaterium that is not piety. That is a building plan."

"A daemon," said Voln-Kaar.

"If you like. I would not call it that, and that is no quibbling." Koss'valan raised his gaze. "A daemon is a piece of a god. This here is a piece of them. It has no will it brought with it. It has the one they gave it. And what they gave it stands in the third section of a book that six of the eight present in this room have read."

No one looked at me. That was worse than if they had.

Captain Rath Voln-Kaar said: "I ask the question no one asks. What if it is of use to us?"

No one answered at once. Voln-Kaar is no fool; he asks such questions because he knows that they are in the room, and because he holds it more dangerous if they remain unasked.

"Fourteen months," he said. "Better harvest, more children, fewer sick, and a quantity of heat that comes out of nothing. If I saw that on a map and it was called an ore vein, we would build a shaft over it."

"It is no ore vein," said Koss'valan.

"No. It is better. It grows." Voln-Kaar looked round the circle. "I am not saying we should keep it. I am saying that everyone in this room has already had the thought, and that I would rather be the one who says it out than the one who takes it home."

"It is the right question," said Drak-Soln. "Librarian, answer it."

"I cannot answer it," said Koss'valan, "and that is the answer. I cannot say what it will want in ten years, because it does not know that itself. It has no character. It has a state, and the state changes with what those praying put into it, and those praying change, because people change. If in four years a harvest fails and four thousand people ask at a hearth for rain instead of giving thanks for warmth, then something else stands there than today, and no one will be able to say when it changed."

"And what does it want?" asked Vor'an.

"It wants what fire wants," said Koss'valan. "It breathes, it eats, it grows. Literally. For seven months it lived on what they put into it, and for seven months that has not been enough for it, and so it takes the difference from elsewhere. So far from the Immaterium, which is cheap, because there it is new and belongs to no one. That will change. It always changes."

"When," said the Chapter Master.

"I do not know. A year. Ten. It does not grow evenly; it grows with the number of those praying, and the number of those praying has risen in eight months from eighty to four thousand two hundred." He paused. "Chapter Master, I have to say one more thing, and I say it unwillingly, because it sounds like theology and I am a Librarian and not a Chaplain."

"Say it."

"It is not evil," said Dreth Koss'valan. "I have searched for that. There is no corruption in that village. No mutation, no illness, no dreams, no voices, none of the nineteen signs. The people are healthier than the regional average. The harvest is good. The number of children has risen. A child with a third-degree burn has been healed." He looked at his hands. "If I were to write a report without the heat balance, it would say: the Valdek have had a very good year."

Hask Tamm'un said, very quietly: "And that is the reason we have to kill it tonight."

XII. The Man Who Is Nothing

After the council I stayed sitting, and Keth-Morr stayed sitting too, and Ravan Keth went out and closed the door.

"You want to ask me something," I said.

"No." Keth-Morr sat as he always sits, forearms on his knees, half turned away. "I want to tell you something, and you will hate it, and you will need it all the same, because otherwise no one here will do you the favour."

"Then say it."

"I have your book." He said it without emphasis. "You gave it to me, in a cave, with a broken shoulder. I have read it six times. For thirty-two years I have infiltrated communities of faith, Voss'aran. I have seen eighteen cults from the inside and founded four of them myself, because it is the fastest way into a closed society. I know how such a thing is built."

"And?"

"And yours is better built than all eighteen." He looked at me for the first time. "That is no reproach. It is an observation, and it is important. The cults I founded were lies, and lies hold for three years, because at one place they do not fit reality and someone eventually looks there. Your book is no lie. It fits everywhere. And that is why it does not stop of itself."

I said nothing for a long time.

"You are saying it is true."

"I am saying it works like something true, and I cannot measure the difference, and neither can you, and neither can the Librarian." Keth-Morr leaned back. "I shall tell you what I have learned in thirty years, and then I shall go and you may hate me. The difference between a faith that carries a people and a faith that eats a people does not lie in the content. It lies in whether someone is there who is allowed to contradict. Your Valdek are not allowed to contradict. Not because you forbade it. Because you did not give them the paragraphs in which you contradict yourself."

"I left a transcript. The complete one."

"Yes," said Keth-Morr. "And they copied nine paragraphs out of it. That is no malice. That is what people do with texts. Every text you give out of your hand is shortened, and what remains is always what carries, and never what brakes."

He stood up.

"One more thing. You are about to begin working out how to undo this without anyone dying. There is no such way. There are only ways in which others die, and one in which you die. Not bodily. Choose that one all the same."

XIII. What a Chapter Decides

Two days later the Chapter Master had me come alone into the Circle Chamber, in which since Tho'mar Vesh a fire has burned that has never gone out.

He stood beside it and looked into it. I stood behind him.

"Three ways," he said. "I shall list them, and with each you will tell me what it costs."

"Chapter Master."

"The first. We kill the hearth and the four settlements that hang on it. Two thousand six hundred people. It is clean, it is quick, and it is what the Ordo Hereticus would do if it learned of this in four years, and then it would be four thousand two hundred and the garrison besides."

"The price is the Chapter," I said. "Not figuratively. The tribes are the Chapter. If we burn them because they prayed too well, in two generations we shall recruit no one who gives us his hand."

"The second. We do nothing and watch. Koss'valan keeps it under observation, we report it to no one, and we see what becomes of it."

"The price is time," I said. "It grows with the number of those praying. We would be watching over a being that grows stronger every year, with means that stay the same every year. And at some point the point would be reached at which the first way no longer costs two thousand six hundred, but everything."

"The third." Drak-Soln turned round. "We take from it what it lives on."

I said nothing.

"Say the price, Chaplain."

"It is not the hearth it lives on," I said. "It is the agreement. One cannot forbid agreement; a prohibition creates it. One can only destroy it by taking from the people the reason for which they agree. The reason is a sentence, and the sentence is mine, and I am the only one they will believe when he takes it back."

"Yes."

"And I should not have to qualify it, but declare it false. Completely. Before everyone. And I should have to make it credible to them that I lied to them, because otherwise they will think I was forced — and if they think that, the faith does not become smaller but secret, and secret agreement is denser than open."

"Yes," said the Chapter Master. "And the price?"

At this point I did the one thing I did rightly in this whole affair: I did not answer at once.

"The price is that afterwards they have nothing," I said finally. "Not the fire. They had nothing before, and they endured it. Afterwards they will have somewhat less than nothing, because they will know that they once had something and that a man in black armour came and took it away from them, with words, and that they listened to him while he did it."

"And the price for you?"

"That is not important."

"It is," said Auren Drak-Soln. "It is. I have three Chaplains who could speak this recantation without its costing them anything, and none of them would be believed. You will be believed because it costs you something, and people hear that. So I am ordering you to do something of which I know what it does. I want at least one of us two to have said that aloud."

I said: "Afterwards I shall no longer be able to preach."

"No," he said. "You will not."

"Then I shall do it."

XIV. The Recantation

There were four thousand two hundred, and they came because I had them called.

That is the part I must write down most exactly, because it is the only one about which everyone else has since said that they looked away.

I had the Long Hearth burn high. I did not have it put out; I had four days' rations of wood laid into it, because I wanted it to be bright, and because I wanted them to be watching it.

I stepped into the Circle of Flame, as I have done for thirty years. I took off the bone mask, which I almost never do, and I laid it beside me in the embers, where everyone could see it.

And then I lied.

I said that twenty-two years ago I had begun a book because I had been ambitious. That was true, and I said it first, because a lie that begins with a truth sounds like a confession.

I said that in it I had claimed that the fire lives. I said that I had never tested that, but had only found it beautiful. I said that a Chaplain who finds something beautiful and writes it down is no longer a priest but a singer, and a singer must not teach.

I said that fire does not live.

I said that fire hears nothing and wants nothing and looks at no one and heals no one. I said that it burns oxygen and leaves carbon behind and nothing further, and that I had always known that and had nevertheless written something else, because I had wanted the world to look larger than it is.

I said that the Emperor is not in their fire. I said that he is on Terra, on a throne, very far away, and that he has never heard of their hearth and never will hear of it, and that every prayer they had spoken here had arrived nowhere.

That was the sentence at which a woman in the third row began to weep, and I saw it and went on, because I had aimed at precisely that.

I named the child's name. I said that she had not been healed but was young, and that young skin heals, and that a medic of our garrison had done good work, and that they had ascribed the good work of a mortal to a fire because it pleased them better.

I named Onnek's name. I said that I had given an old man who had taken guilt upon himself a sentence out of convenience instead of laying a penance upon him, and that everything standing here had grown out of my convenience and not out of his faith.

I looked at him while doing it. He stood at the upper end, where he always stood.

I looked at them while speaking. That is part of it; a Chaplain who looks over heads while speaking is not believed, and that evening I needed every tool I had.

That is why I know where Iska stood. She stood in the second row, to the left of the upper end, because her grandfather stood there, and she had the right shoulder bare, as all the children did that summer, and the skin was smooth.

I named her name while looking at her, and I said that she had not been healed, and I looked at the healed shoulder while doing it.

It cost me nothing. That is the finding I wrote down for myself, that same night, with an unsteady hand, and that has stood in my book since: It cost me nothing. For thirty-two years I believed that a man who says something false feels something while doing it, and that this feeling is the remnant of the Emperor in us. That feeling does not exist. There is practice.

A man in the fourth or fifth row called out something. I did not understand what, and I did not ask, and the people around him silenced him without my having to do anything. That is the thing one must know about people and that I learned too late: they defend a faith against strangers and they give it up when the man who brought it takes it back. There is no third possibility. A faith is an object that someone had in his hand.

And then I took the transcript, held it up so that four thousand two hundred people saw what it was, and laid it in the hearth.

The paper curled, turned brown and went up all at once, as paper does.

I had reckoned that something would happen. I had even secretly reckoned that it would resist — that the flame would lash out, that it would grow cold, that a voice would come, some sign by which four thousand people and I myself could have read off that something was here and that it was now dying.

Nothing happened. It never resisted. It never, as far as I can judge, did anything at all but warm, and that was the only thing they had asked of it.

I stood in the Circle of Flame until it was finished, and then I said the one sentence I had prepared beforehand and revised four times, because it was the actual tool:

"Go home and cook on it."

In thirty years I have taught men how to break a formation. One does not break it at the strongest place. One breaks it where it does not take itself seriously.

The next evening two hundred came. On the third, sixty. On the ninth no one came, apart from the three families who live by the hearth and who make their food there in any case.

On the eleventh day Koss'valan measured the quantity of heat, and it agreed with the wood.

XV. Eleven Days

I stayed.

It was obedience, not courage: the Chapter Master had ordered that I stay, because a Chaplain who speaks a recantation and then flies away is in the eyes of the people a messenger and not a witness, and a messenger takes his message with him when he goes.

So for eleven days I stood every evening at the Long Hearth and watched a faith die to plan.

On the first evening almost all of them came. Not to pray — to look at me. Four thousand people who twenty-four hours earlier had spoken a sentence together stood in groups at the channel and watched an Astartes who sat on a basalt block and did nothing. Little was said. Children ran about between them, as children do, and were fetched back.

On the second evening about a thousand came, and someone began to cook. That was the moment in which I knew that it would work. The smell of meat over fire is the opposite of a liturgy; one cannot kneel at a hearth on which cooking is being done.

I had brought that about with full intent, with a sentence of five words, and I stood there and smelled it and was proud of my work, and I set that down here so that it stands there.

On the third evening the woman who had read aloud came.

Her name is Naimi, she is about forty, she learned to read at thirty-four because a garrison medic taught her, and for fourteen months she had been the one every evening who read from the booklet. She placed herself before me, with the booklet in her hand, and one could see that she had practised all day what she wanted to say.

"You said it never arrived."

"Yes."

"The morning prayer too?"

And there, at exactly that place, I could have saved everything that was to be saved. The morning prayer is Imperial. It is orthodox, it is prescribed, it is spoken on a million worlds, and it had no more to do with the thing in their fire than the rain. I could have said: the prayer arrived. Only the other did not.

I did not say it.

I did not say it because in that moment I was reckoning, as I had been reckoning for eleven days: if I leave her the morning prayer, I leave her the praying, and if I leave her the praying, a congregation remains, and a congregation finds a new sentence.

I said: "That too did not."

Naimi looked at me. Then she laid the booklet on the basalt, not into the fire but beside it, and went.

She did not come again. She is still alive. I have asked. For forty-one days she has not gone to the garrison's devotions, and the field medic reports that she has twice sent him away.

That evening I spoiled reading for a woman who had learned to read late, and I did it because the reckoning demanded it, and the reckoning was right.

From the fourth evening on it grew easier, and that is the most repellent thing about the whole affair. Six hundred. Two hundred. Ninety. On the ninth evening three families sat at their cooking place and ate, and a woman scolded her husband about wood, and no one spoke a sentence, and no one looked over at me.

On the eleventh day Koss'valan came with the scales and measured, and in the evening he told me the figure, and the figure agreed with the wood, and then it was over.

He packed his instruments himself, which he otherwise lets the adepts do.

"Do you want to know what you have done?" he asked.

"I know what I have done."

"No," said Dreth Koss'valan. "You know what you have achieved. That is something else, and you will notice the difference in about a year, and then come to me."

XVI. What Remained Afterwards

The rest is short, and I write it without circumlocution.

Onnek went into the hearth on the night of the third day. Not into the embers between the stones, but into the fireplace at the upper end where he had always sat. He did it quietly. He was found in the morning, and the woman who found him did not scream but first sent the children away, because she is a Valdek and because on this world that is what one does first.

I was in Drak'Varanthos writing a report.

The child's wound came back after nineteen days.

I asked Koss'valan whether that was possible, and after four days he answered that it was not possible and that it had happened and that he could tell me nothing further about it without inventing something. The scar today is as it was before: the right shoulder and half the right side of the face. The field medic says it is the same tissue, at the same place, in the same extent, as though someone had cut eighteen months out.

I went there. I owe it to the entry to write that down, though I would rather not.

She sat before the house of her grandfather, who was no longer there, and she was not afraid of me, because she has never been afraid of me.

She asked: "Why does the fire not like us any more?"

I had three answers. The first was the truth, and the truth would have destroyed the whole work of the eleven days. The second was the lie of the Long Hearth, and I could not bring it over my lips before a nine-year-old child, which shows me that I had said something before four thousand people that I could not say before one.

I took the third.

I said: "It never liked anything, Iska. It is fire."

She nodded and did not ask again.

XVII. Hask Tamm'un, a Second Time

He came into my cell four days after my return, and I stood up, because I assumed that he had a right to it.

"Sit down," he said. "I have not come to be right."

"You were right."

"I was right in the outcome and wrong in the ground, and that is the worst way to be right, because one learns nothing from it." He sat down heavily. "I wanted to burn the hearth out because I was afraid. You talked it to death because you reckoned. Mine would have been quicker and would have cost the Chapter. Yours worked and cost an old man and a child. We should both stop pretending that either of us has a lesson from it."

I told him that I could no longer preach.

He asked whether I had tried. I said: three times, before the Fourth, before the Second, before the Initiates of the third year. I said that each time I had noticed exactly at which place the sentence would take hold, and that at exactly that place I could no longer say it, because since the Long Hearth I know what it feels like when it takes hold.

"Then do not preach," said Hask Tamm'un. "We are four. We were always four, and no one knows why, and for forty-seven years I have suspected that it is because one of us is always out of service."

"That is no comfort."

"No. It is a duty roster." He stood up. "You have a task, Voss'aran, and it is no longer that of the preacher. You are the only man in this Chapter who knows how such a thing is built without wanting it. Write it down. Not the theology. The process. How long it takes. What one sees first. Why the wood does not catch the eye and the harvest does. In two hundred years a young Chaplain will stand before a village that prays too well, and then everything will hang on whether he has read that."

At the door he stopped, because they all do.

"And Voss'aran. The child. If she is fifteen and wants to come to us — do not say no because you are ashamed. That would be the only mistake you can still make in this affair."

XVIII. The Twenty-Second Entry

I still pray in the Circle of Flame. I stand in it, in the mornings, as I have for thirty years.

I no longer speak in it.

At first I took that for penance and then for defiance, and by now I know that it is neither: since the Long Hearth I know that a sentence I say aloud does something, and I have no procedure by which I could establish beforehand what. That is neither piety nor caution. That is the condition of a tool one has laid aside because one can no longer judge the force with which it bites.

I have written down three things, and with them I close.

The first: there was never a moment at which I could have said, here the heresy begins. I have searched for it, backwards, week by week. The old man to whom a priest gives comfort — no. A village that prays together — no. A book that a Chapter Master releases — no. A child that becomes well — no. There is no threshold. There is a gradient, and one notices it only when one turns round and looks down.

The second: at the Long Hearth I said nothing that was false, except one thing. I said that I had never tested it and had only found it beautiful. That is the lie. I tested for twenty-two years. Everything else I said there, that fire does not hear, does not want, looks at no one, was the teaching of the Imperium, and I delivered it correctly, and I did not believe it, and four thousand two hundred people took it from me.

One can strike a faith dead with the truth. That stands in none of our books, and it should stand in them.

The third is the sentence, and I write it out here in full, as Tho'mar Vesh wrote it, with the part I suppressed for twenty-two years:

The fire does not ask who you were. It asks only whether you burn. Ask you, then, who they were, for you are no fire.

I gave the first part to an old man and killed him with it.

I gave the second part to four thousand people and took it from them again.

The third I gave to no one, and it is the only one that would have been of any use.

I do not recant this entry.

— Mekhar Voss'aran, Chaplain of the Dragon Wardens, Drak'Varanthos. Sealed by order of the Chapter Master. To be opened when it begins again.