What Is Not Catalogued

I. The Salt Magazine

Fifteen phials. Dra'kaan counted them every morning, although the number had not changed since the twelfth day, because counting was the only act concerning them that was left to him.

They stood in a plasteel case in the rearmost niche of the salt magazine that Vollrath's people had cleared for him under the rampart walk of Gate Two: a vault of the dome's salt stone in which the city had stored its salt for twelve hundred years, until no ship came to collect it any more, and which was now empty but for the smell. The salt had kept the stone dry. It now kept his wounded dry, and that was more than he could say of most of the infirmaries he had worked in over fifty-six years.

Eleven brothers lay in the magazine. Nine of them would get up, in days or in a week; ceramite had caught most of it, and what it had not caught, the bodies they had been given had caught. About two of them he was not sure, and one of those two was Or'dun.

The sergeant lay on the plasteel table the boiling folk had carried up out of a boiling house and looked at the ceiling. He did not speak much. He had not spoken much at Gate Three when he put himself in the way of the singing Astartes, and he did not speak much now, with a wound that ran from the left shoulder to the hip and would not close.

"Tell me," said Or'dun.

"The Larraman cells are working. The edge is clotting as it should. But under the edge something is going on that I cannot see." Dra'kaan lifted the narthecium's blade off the tissue and considered what it showed: a seam, thin as a thread, black, that went out from the wound and ran under the skin into the chest, like a vein that did not exist there. "It is not putrefaction. It is nothing I have catalogued."

"The stranger was singing," said Or'dun. "When he cut me. He did not stop singing."

"I know."

"His sword glowed. Without a field."

"I know that too." Dra'kaan closed the blade. He had seen the sword. It lay in the gate arch of Gate Three, beside the dead man nobody touched, and it had not glowed since the head that belonged to it had lain under Vel'Schwur's crozius. But it had glowed when it cut Or'dun, and the brother beside him, Tar'gan, who now lay on the second table and slept and spoke in his sleep, in a language Dra'kaan did not know.

He went back to the fifteen phials, because the morning had not yet been counted. Fifteen brothers, fifteen names, each said aloud once. Sha'vek, who as he fell had brought his bolter up. The four from the first night. The two from the Trickle Slope. The gene-seed was undamaged. That was the only thing in this war that was undamaged, and Dra'kaan guarded it the way the smiths of Nocturne guarded their best tools: stored, dry, counted.

Above him, on the rampart walk, Vel'Schwur was making his round. Dra'kaan knew the step. The Chaplain made no noise, but he walked the same stretch every night, and the stone of the magazine carried it down like a pulse.

II. A Hand's Width

On the fourteenth day a man stood on the Salt Climb.

Dra'kaan saw him from the rampart walk, because at the morning hour he always stood there to look at Salzgrund, which he was no longer allowed to enter: one man alone, without a bundle, coming up the climb, slowly, who stopped thirty paces in front of Gate Three and waited. Down in the alleys the Rauhgraters watched him and did nothing. The stranger had said that he let go up whoever wanted to go up. The man was the first to test it.

Bre'kar had said that the company would not come down again. He had said it to the Chaplain, on the rampart walk, with the book in his hand, and Dra'kaan had heard it and said nothing in reply, because in such moments you said nothing in reply to the captain. The captain had not said that nobody was to come up any more.

Dra'kaan went down the steps into the gate chamber, where four soldiers of the PDF stood at the winch and looked at the man through the vision slits, and where the dead Astartes still lay in the arch, because Dra'kaan had ordered that he not be touched before he knew what was in him.

"Leaf a hand's width," he said. "Portcullis far enough for a man to crawl under. No further."

The platoon commander looked at him. "The captain said—"

"The captain said that we do not go down. I am not going down." Dra'kaan took off his helmet. "A hand's width."

They did it. The leaf swung a hand's width open, the portcullis rose, grinding, barely a metre, and Dra'kaan knelt in the gap and looked at the man who stood twenty paces off and did not know what he was seeing: a black-skinned, red-eyed giant in green ceramite, on his knees, with his hand held out.

"Come," said Dra'kaan.

The man came. He stooped, crawled, and Dra'kaan took him by the arm and pulled, and then he was inside, in the gate chamber, and the portcullis fell, and the leaf closed, and the man stood among the soldiers and shook and said over and over that he had not seen. That he had not looked up. That he had only not known where else to go.

"That is enough," said Dra'kaan, and handed him to the soldiers.

In the evening Bre'kar came to the magazine. He came seldom; he had reports given to him, standing, up on the rampart walk, and kept out of the infirmary, because a captain among the wounded cannot be a captain. This time he came, placed himself beside the table on which Or'dun lay, and looked at the sergeant, and then at Dra'kaan.

"A hand's width."

"Yes."

"Without asking me."

"You would have said yes. Then it would have stood in your book that you ordered it, and not that I did it." Dra'kaan wiped the blade. "This way it stands correctly."

Bre'kar looked at him for a while. Then he drew the book out of the hip pocket of his armour, the small one bound in leather that Dra'kaan had seen him open twice in fifty-six years, and wrote in it, standing, without looking up.

"It stands in there that I ordered it," he said as he closed it. "With the date. Whoever wants to come up, comes up. That is my order, from today, and you carried it out a day too early." He turned to the door. "Take care of yourself."

Dra'kaan stood at the table and watched him go. Or'dun on the table laughed, quietly, with the wound that would not close.

"He took it away from you," said the sergeant.

"Yes," said Dra'kaan. "He takes away from everybody everything that becomes inconvenient afterwards. That is his way of carrying it."

III. Marrit

The boiling folk out of the lower city lived in the Ring wherever there was room: in the yards of the salt merchants, in the empty counting houses, in the galleries of the wall itself, sixty-seven thousand people who had brought nothing with them but what they could carry, and whom the upper city looked at the way a city looks at people it has let in.

Vollrath had put those who could do something into the infirmaries. Dra'kaan had been given three women out of the fifth pan, because salt boilers could handle hot liquids and had no fear of burns, and one of them was called Marrit Rieck.

She did not ask. That was the first thing he noticed. The other two asked everything you can ask an Apothecary of the Astartes when you see him for the first time without his helmet, and he answered briefly; Marrit asked nothing, worked, carried water, held Or'dun's arm when Dra'kaan opened the wound, and did not look away while she did it. On the third day, when they were alone in the rear vault, she said the first sentence that was not an answer to an instruction.

"My father is down there."

Dra'kaan stopped counting the phials.

"Tammo Rieck. The bridge-warden. The captain knelt in front of him, on the tenth day. He stayed, because of the sluices." She said it the way you say something you have said thirty times in your head. "I wanted to ask whether you know anything. You are at Gate Three. You look down."

"I see the alleys. I see the lights. I do not see who is standing at a bridge."

"No." She nodded. "That is what I thought."

He looked at her, and then he did something he rarely did, because he did not consider it his task: he took her up onto the rampart walk.

It was afternoon. Below them lay Salzgrund, with the Rauhgraters in the alleys and the lights that burned by day, and behind it the plain and the camp, and between the boiling houses and the fence the black frames of the graduation towers. Dra'kaan pointed down, not at the alleys but at the frames.

"Look at that."

She looked. He saw how she looked, with the eyes of a woman who had been reading brine since her sixteenth year, and how she grasped it before he said it.

"They are trickling," she said.

"Since the first day. Every day. I stand here every morning, and they are trickling." He let his hand drop. "I understand nothing about salt. But Vollrath told me that the graduation towers run dry if nobody distributes the brine, in two days, three. And that the boiling houses then go out. The boiling houses are burning. I can see the smoke."

Marrit stood at the rampart and looked at the trickling that could not be heard from here, and did not weep, and Dra'kaan saw that she had learned that from somebody.

"The canal runs," she said.

"I do not know what that means."

"It means that he is alive." She wiped her hands on her apron although they were dry. "It means that he is standing at the sluices and not looking up. If he looked up, he would not be working them. You cannot do both."

She went back into the magazine, and Dra'kaan stayed standing and looked at the graduation towers and thought that for two weeks he had been looking every morning at a sign of life without knowing that it was one, and that it had taken a salt boiler to read it. On Nocturne they would have said: he had seen the metal and not the flaw. It did not happen often. It happened.

IV. What the Sword Left

On the eighteenth day the thread had reached Or'dun's heart. The second one.

Dra'kaan saw it on the narthecium's image: the black line, thin as a hair, which went out from the wound, had travelled along under the skin, had branched, had found the Second Heart and laid itself around it, not into it, only around it, like a hand that is not yet closing. Or'dun felt it. He did not say so. He said that he was cold, and an Astartes does not say that.

Tar'gan on the second table spoke in his sleep. He now spoke awake as well, sometimes, in a language that was not Gothic and not Nocturnean and that Dra'kaan did not know, in a tone that went up and down. He did not know it when he did it. He would look at you in the middle of a sentence, with clear eyes, and the words went on coming, and then they stopped, and Tar'gan asked what he had said.

Dra'kaan had tried everything that was catalogued. He had cut out the edge of the wound, deep, into healthy tissue, and the thread was back the next morning, thinner, further on. He had cleansed Or'dun's blood as you do with a poison, and the thread had remained, because it was not in the blood. He had examined the sword that lay in the gate arch, with the auspex and with his eyes: a blade of a metal he did not know, without a power field, with writing on it that he did not read, and without any glow at all. It was a sword. What it had left in Or'dun was not a sword.

He knew the marks of the Warp on a body. He had seen them on two worlds, and he had learned what you did with them: you burned. You did not cut, you burned, all of it, and you did not recover the gene-seed, because you did not know what was in it. So it stood in the procedures, and the procedures were old and old for good reason.

Or'dun was alive. Or'dun spoke, looked at him, asked how many there were today, and meant the phials. You did not burn a man who asked how many there were today.

In the evening Dra'kaan went up onto the rampart walk and waited until the step came.

Vel'Schwur stopped when he saw him. The Chaplain had his helmet under his arm, as always at night, and the scarred face was calm, as always, and Dra'kaan said, without preamble, what he had to say.

"There are things in the Reliquarium that are not catalogued."

Vel'Schwur looked at him. He asked no question.

"I do not know what. I know that every Chaplain is given access at his elevation and that every one of them puts something in and that the Adeptus Terra knows nothing of it. I know that the maxim we learn as novices refers to something that lies there and that nobody names." Dra'kaan held the look. "I am not asking what it is. I am asking whether there is something about gene-seed in it. About what a body does with something foreign that gets into it. I have a sergeant who will die in two days, and a brother who speaks in a language he does not know, and everything that is catalogued says: burn."

It was quiet for a long time. Below, the lights burned in the alleys.

"There is something," said Vel'Schwur.

V. The Sealed Fire

"Seventeen sheets," said the Chaplain. "Copied out by hand, a very long time ago, by a Chaplain whose name I will not tell you because it changes nothing. Out of a work the primarch himself began and that the Mechanicus classified as heresy and impounded before our Chapter was founded. It deals with the gene-seed. With the fact that it is not fixed. That a Chapter could adapt, to a world, to an enemy."

Dra'kaan said nothing. He had known it since he had learned the maxim as a novice, without knowing it, the way you know that there is a door in a house you have never opened.

"I have read them," said Vel'Schwur. "Every Chaplain reads them once, and then he puts them back. And I will tell you what is in them, because you have to know it in order to understand why I am not giving them to you: there is no procedure in them. No chemistry, no cut, nothing you could apply to Or'dun tomorrow. There is a thought in them. That an Apothecary must not only be a physician but also a maker. That the host must be allowed to change so that the gene-seed grows." He looked down at the lights. "It is a door, brother. Not a medicine. And you are standing in front of it with a dying man in your arms, asking me whether you may open it."

"Yes."

"Then I say no."

Dra'kaan had expected it. He found that it struck him all the same, in the place where nothing had struck him in fifty-six years, and that he did not hate the Chaplain for it, and that he did not know what he did instead.

"The four pillars," he said. "The second ash. What is sealed does not remain forbidden for ever. It must be examined afresh."

"Yes. By those who do not need it." Vel'Schwur turned to him, and his voice was as calm as ever, and Dra'kaan heard that the calm cost him something. "That is the rule, and it is not arbitrary. A sealed knowledge is examined when the Chapter can afford to discard it. Not in the nineteenth night of a siege, by an Apothecary who is losing a brother. You would not examine. You would grasp. And if you had grasped and Or'dun lived, then we would have a sergeant and an open door, and the door would stay open, because it had helped once. And if you had grasped and Or'dun died, then you would have killed him with something the primarch himself did not think through to the end."

"So he dies with something I have thought through to the end."

"He may die. And you will have done what is catalogued, and I will bear testimony that you did everything." Vel'Schwur was silent a moment. "I cannot open a door for you, Dra'kaan. I can only bear witness to what you do. That is little. It is all my office gives."

Dra'kaan looked down at Salzgrund. At the lights. At the graduation towers, which were trickling.

"Sealed does not mean forgotten," said the Chaplain, more quietly. "It means: not opened by the one who happens to need it. Some day one will come who does not need it and reads it all the same. Then it will be examined. I do not believe I shall live to see it. I also do not believe that it will then help anybody we know today."

He went on, his round, and Dra'kaan stayed on the rampart walk until the step had died away in the wall, and found that he was thinking of the door the way you think of a door behind which somebody is speaking, and that he would not open it, not because the Chaplain had said so, but because, if he was honest, he would have said the same thing himself, on another day, with another dying man.

It did not help. It was true all the same.

VI. Brenneke's Wife

On the twenty-first day a woman with two children came up the climb, and Dra'kaan was in the gate chamber, because since the fourteenth day he was always in the gate chamber when somebody came up the climb.

There had not been many. Eleven in seven days, singly, mostly men, mostly at night. They did not come because they had not seen, but because they had seen and did not want to sit any longer, and Dra'kaan pulled every one of them through the gap and handed him to the soldiers and asked no questions. He had learned that the questions sent them back, into their heads, into the alley, and that in the gate chamber they needed only one thing, namely a hand.

The woman stopped in front of the portcullis, as they all stopped. She did not call out. The children stood beside her, a boy and a girl, small, and looked at the portcullis, and Dra'kaan looked through the vision slit at the three of them and at the empty climb behind them, and down at the foot of the climb stood a sentry of the Rauhgraters and beside him a small man with a bent back who was not looking up.

"A hand's width," said Dra'kaan.

The leaf swung open, the portcullis rose, he knelt in the gap and held out his hand, and the woman pushed the first child in, and he took it the way you take something that is too light for the hand holding it, and set it down behind him, and then the second, and then the woman, who crawled and shook and whom he pulled by the arm, and then the portcullis fell.

She stood in the gate chamber and held the children and looked at him.

"My husband is down there," she said. "He is kneeling. He saw our son lying there, on the first morning, and he is kneeling."

Dra'kaan nodded. He said nothing. He thought of Marrit, who was carrying water in the magazine, and of the small man at the foot of the climb, and of Or'dun, who lay on the table and asked how many there were today, and he found that he had a city in front of him in which everybody had left something below, and that his office consisted of holding a hand through a gap.

In the evening he entered the three of them in his register. He had been keeping one since the fourteenth day, because Bre'kar kept one and because somebody had to count: fourteen people who had come up through a hand's width. He wrote down the names when they gave one. This woman gave one. Brenneke. He wrote it down and thought that down below there was one kneeling who was called the same, and that both names were right.

VII. The Cut

On the twenty-third day he decided to cut, because he had nothing else left, and because a smith who does not know a metal does not look at it until he knows it, but works it until it tells him what it is.

He told Or'dun. He told him all of it. That he would open the wound, as deep as it went, and follow the thread with the blade to where it enclosed the Second Heart, and that he would cut it off there if it could be done, and that perhaps it could not be done, and that Or'dun would have to be awake for it, because Dra'kaan had to know whether the sergeant was still Or'dun while he cut.

"And Tar'gan?"

"Tar'gan first. He is further along."

"And if it cannot be done?"

"Then I will burn," said Dra'kaan. "So it stands in the procedures. I am telling you so that you know."

Or'dun looked at the ceiling. Then he said, "Cut."

He began with Tar'gan, and after an hour he knew that with Tar'gan it could not be done. The thread was no longer a thread. It had branched in the chest like a root, around both hearts, into the lung, and when Dra'kaan severed it in one place, Tar'gan spoke, awake, with clear eyes, in the language he did not know, and smiled while he did it, and Dra'kaan heard in the smile the smile of the dead man in the gate arch and knew what he was doing.

He did it. He did it as a craftsman, without haste, the way Bre'kar had fought in the graduation towers, and he said Tar'gan's name beforehand, once, aloud, short, so that the brother heard it, and Tar'gan stopped smiling and looked at him and nodded. After that he did not speak in the foreign language any more. He did not speak at all any more.

Dra'kaan stood at the table for a while afterwards and washed his hands in the brine Marrit had brought him, because salt was what this city had against putrefaction, and because he had grasped that it was no use and did it all the same.

Then he went to Or'dun.

He opened the wound, from the shoulder to the hip, and followed the thread. It took three hours. Or'dun was awake. Or'dun said every twenty minutes how many there were today, and Dra'kaan answered every time: fifteen. The thread ran along under the ribcage, thin, black, and where Dra'kaan touched it with the blade it drew back, not like tissue, like an animal, and he followed it to the Second Heart and found there, where the thread laid itself around the heart, something that was not thread: a splinter, barely the size of a fingernail, of the metal he did not know, and the splinter glowed. Faintly. Without a field.

He took it out.

It was not an elegant operation. He drew it with a forceps made for shell fragments out of the tissue between the Second Heart and the lung, and Or'dun screamed, for the first time in twenty-three days, and then the splinter lay on the plasteel and glowed, and the thread in Or'dun's chest was still there, black, and did not move any more.

In the morning it was paler. On the third day it was a line, like an old scar. On the fifth Or'dun asked when he might get up, and Dra'kaan said: not today.

The splinter lay in a phial, alone, in the rearmost niche, and still glowed, and Dra'kaan looked at it every morning, after the fifteen, and did not count it among them.

VIII. Not Catalogued

Tar'gan's gene-seed lay in the sixteenth phial.

He had recovered it. He had done it before he burned, against the procedures, which said that with the marks of the Warp you recovered nothing because you did not know what was in it, and he had done it because the procedures had been written by men who had burned a brother without first naming him, and because Tar'gan had nodded. The progenoid glands had looked undamaged. They always looked undamaged. That was the problem.

On the twenty-fourth day he sat in the rearmost niche with the sixteenth phial in his hand, and the procedures said: destroy. A Chapter that let something into its gene-seed that it had not catalogued was no Chapter any more in three generations. He knew that. He also knew that fifteen phials had been saved out of a company that had been seventy-eight, and that a sixteenth meant a fifteenth more Fire Wardens, in fifty years, whether the city fell or did not fall and the Chapter went on.

Above all he knew that he could not decide it. Not here. Not with what he knew.

So he did what a smith does who has worked a metal until it has told him what it is and who still does not know it: he put it aside and wrote on it what it was.

He took the sixteenth phial out of the case and put it into a second, smaller one that Marrit had fetched him out of a boiling house, a container for salt samples, of plasteel, with a lid that could be sealed. He put the splinter in with it, in its own phial, glowing. He sealed the case. And he wrote on the lid, with the narthecium's engraving stylus, in the small, straight hand he used for the names:

Brother Tar'gan, Fire Wardens of Nocturne. Fallen on the 23rd day of the siege of Hollbrunn, by the hand of his Apothecary, according to the procedures. Gene-seed recovered against the procedures. Marks of the Warp in the chest; cause: splinter, enclosed. Not catalogued. Not to be opened without the Chapter Master and a Chaplain. Not to be destroyed without the same. Dra'kaan.

Vel'Schwur stood in the doorway as he set down the stylus. Dra'kaan had not heard him come. He never heard him come.

"Show me," said the Chaplain.

Dra'kaan held out the case. Vel'Schwur read the lid, for a long time, and his hand lay on the crozius at his side while he did it, not as a threat, only because that was where it lay.

"You recovered against the procedures."

"Yes."

"And sealed against your own knowledge instead of destroying."

"Yes."

"Why?"

Dra'kaan looked at the case. "Because I am not the one who needs it," he said. "I do not need him. I have fifteen. That is why I can seal him instead of grasping or burning. You said that sealed means: not opened by the one who happens to need it. I listened." He looked up. "Some day one will come who does not need it and examines it all the same. The Chapter Master. A Chaplain. Not I."

Vel'Schwur looked at him. Then he took the case, held it a moment, the way you hold something whose weight you are testing, and gave it back.

"I bear witness to it," he said. "With the date."

"That is all your office gives."

"Yes." The Chaplain turned to the door. There he stopped, without turning round, the way another had stopped in front of Gate One, and Dra'kaan thought it and put the thought down.

"It is more than I believed in the nineteenth night," said Vel'Schwur. "You have built a door that is not opened today, and you have put into it the thing that most keeps me from opening it. That is not catalogued, brother. That is Nocturne."

He went. Dra'kaan sat down again and counted the phials. Fifteen. And one that he did not count among them, in a sealed case, with a name on it that had been said aloud once.

IX. The Trickling

On the thirtieth day Marrit stood beside him on the rampart walk, at the morning hour, because since the sixteenth day she had stood there every morning.

They looked at the graduation towers. They were trickling. You saw it in the sheen on the black wood, which changed when brine ran and did not change when none ran, and Marrit read it the way Dra'kaan read a narthecium image: at once, without thinking, with the knowledge that she could not explain it to anybody.

"He turned the third sluice back," she said. "A few days ago. The lower main was open for a moment, you can see it on the trickling wall on the left, that was wet all the way down. Now it is dry again."

"How do you know it was him?"

"Because nobody else would have turned it back."

Dra'kaan nodded. In thirty days he had learned that he knew nothing about this city, and that the people who knew something about it saw it in places where he saw nothing, and that this was not a flaw but the thing itself. He had a sergeant who would get up. He had fifteen phials and a sealed case. He had fourteen people in a register who had come up through a hand's width, and a captain's book in which it stood that he had ordered it. He had a splinter that glowed.

And he had ten days.

Bre'kar said the number every morning, on the rampart walk above Gate Two, to nobody. Dra'kaan heard it sometimes, when the wind stood right. Ten. The company numbered sixty. Two more had fallen on the Ring since the twelfth day, to lasguns from below, and Tar'gan in the magazine, and their phials stood with the fifteen, and Dra'kaan counted seventeen and said fifteen when Or'dun asked, because Or'dun knew the number from the table and was to keep it.

"What happens on the fortieth day?" Marrit asked.

"Ships come. Another Chapter. Gold." Dra'kaan looked at the plain, at the camp, at the fires that burned in daylight as well. "They will land and relieve the city. That is what was promised, and those who promised it keep their promises."

"And the ones down there?"

He did not answer at once. He looked at the alleys in which the lights sat, more of them than ever before, and which for some days now had been ordering themselves, in rows, in the streets towards the Boiling Square, as though somebody were dressing them, and he thought of the stranger in front of Gate One who had said that he had patience.

"The ones down there have seen," he said. "I do not know what that means on the fortieth day. I know that your father has not done it."

Marrit nodded. She looked at the trickling.

"The canal runs," she said, and went down into the magazine to carry water, and Dra'kaan stayed standing a while longer, as he stood every morning, and looked at the sheen on the black wood that changed because brine was running, and that had been, since he could read it, the only thing in this city that said the same thing every day.