The Worked Place

The Order sends missionaries to the Laeroth about once a generation, and the standing joke in the seminaries at Grismere is that the posting has a very good survival rate and a very poor return rate. The men come home. They simply do not come home as missionaries.

Anselm Vey went out in his thirty first year and came back in his thirty second. He never preached again. The journal was found among his things a long while afterward, and the Order has never suppressed it, which is the detail people find hardest to explain, and which the Order has never explained.

The season of being heard¶

He expected martyrdom. Every missionary to the orcs does, and the seminary quietly encourages it, and Vey writes about his own expectation afterward with an embarrassment that is the most human thing in the document.

What he got was hospitality of a wintry kind. He was given a place at the edge of the camp, and food that was adequate, and permission to speak in the evenings to whoever cared to stand there. Some did. Not many, and not the same ones twice, and none of them ever interrupted him.

The Idurist morticians came most nights. They asked him questions after, and Vey records them at length, because they were not the questions he had been trained for. They did not attack the existence of Sanctus. They asked what the purification cost, who paid it, over what span, and whether the one being purified was consulted. They asked him to be specific about the instruments. When he answered honestly, which to his credit he always did, they wrote it down.

I preached mercy to them for an hour and they listened as though I were reading out an inventory. Then the elder one asked me to describe the Rite of the Scourge in full and in order, and I did, and he thanked me, and he said it was well kept. Well kept. As one craftsman to another.

I have never in my life been so frightened by a compliment.

Vey, journal, the fifth week

What he kept asking¶

By midwinter he had stopped preaching and started arguing, which is the failure mode of clever missionaries, and the argument he kept returning to was evidence.

He wanted to know what would satisfy them. He put it to the war-speaker Ghaural perhaps a dozen times, in a dozen phrasings, and got a dozen versions of the same shrug, and then in the eleventh week he asked it once more and got an answer.

We knew a god. We remember the terms. Go home.

Answer given by a Laeroth war-speaker to a missionary of the Sacred Light

Vey, being who he was, replied that memory is not evidence and that a people who cannot say what they were before cannot testify to what was done to them. He meant it as a debating point. He writes, afterward, that he watched it land, and that Ghaural did not become angry, and that the absence of anger was the worst part.

Ghaural told him to bring boots.

Six days out¶

They walked six days into the back country, five of them, Ghaural and three others and Vey. The others were not an escort. Vey is careful about this. They came because they had not been, and none of them had ever been, and two of them had grandparents who had.

The place has no name. The Laeroth call it the worked place, in the way you would say the quarry or the mill, and Vey notes that the word carries no reverence and no dread. It carries the sense of a site where a job was done.

It is a gallery cut into living rock, and it goes back further than his lamp would reach, and he walked it for most of a day and did not come to the end of it.

The carvings¶

The wall is carved the whole way, both sides, floor to ceiling, and Vey's first written reaction is the one that undoes everything afterward.

It is beautiful. It is superb work. The line is confident, the depth is even, the modelling of a cheekbone is the modelling of a master who has done ten thousand cheekbones, and the whole gallery is one hand from beginning to end, or one school so disciplined that it might as well be.

It is faces.

They run in sequences. The same face, over and over, along a stretch of wall, altered by stages. At the beginning of a sequence the face is fair. Vey uses that word and then argues with himself about it for a paragraph, because he wants to say elven and cannot, and wants to say human and cannot, and settles on fair because it is the only thing the dwarven records ever agreed on either.

By the end of the sequence the face is an orc.

Between those two points there are, in the sequence he counted, four hundred and six carvings. He counted them because counting was the only work available to him at that moment. Each one is annotated, in a small precise script that is not orcish and is not any language on any map, cut into the margin beside the face, the way a mason marks a course.

Then the next sequence begins, with a different face, and the count starts again.

The thing about the marks¶

He worked out what the annotations were on the ninth day of the return journey, which he spent mostly not speaking.

He could not read them. He says so plainly, and repeats it twice, and it is the reason the Order has always been able to publish the journal. He never read a word of it.

What he recognised was the shape of it. He could not read one character of the script, but the thing had a form, and he knew the form. Position for the stage, position for what was removed, position for what was gained, position for the interval, and at the close of each sequence a single mark set apart from the rest, in the place where a keeper of such a record would write that the work was finished and finished well.

He had kept records in that form for eleven years. His Order keeps them still. The progress of a penitent through the Scourge is set down stage by stage, what was removed, what was gained, the interval between, and at the end of it a mark set apart, in the same place, meaning the same thing.

I have looked for another conclusion for eleven days. I have not been idle about it. I have proposed to myself that the resemblance is coincidence, that all records of process resemble one another, that a ledger of grain would look the same, and I have gone and looked at a ledger of grain in my head and it does not look the same.

I will not write the conclusion. I am aware that refusing to write it is not the same as not having reached it. I record only this: it was done by someone who was keeping the account for a reason, and who was pleased with the work, and who expected somebody to read it one day.

Not them. They cannot read it. They were never going to be able to read it. That was seen to.

Vey, journal, the last entry written on the road

What the orcs did there¶

Nothing.

They walked the gallery with him. They looked at the fair faces at the start of each sequence with an interest Vey describes as the interest of a man looking at a stranger's family portraits, polite and completely empty. Ghaural made no effort to underline it and did not need to.

There is no one left to recognise anyone. The songs went, the cities went, the faces of their own dead went, whatever they called themselves before anyone called them orcs went, and the only record of any of it that survives anywhere in Valdrin was kept by the hand that took it, in a script that hand did not teach them, in a gallery that has been open and unguarded and entirely safe to visit for longer than there have been kingdoms.

They do not go twice. Vey assumed grief, and then assumed horror, and was wrong both times. He asked one of the young ones about it on the road back and got the only answer in the journal that he does not comment on afterward.

There is nothing of ours in there.

One of the three, on the return march, name not recorded

Afterward¶

Vey petitioned for reassignment on his return and was given it without difficulty, the Order being long accustomed to what comes back from Ashmaw. He held no post of consequence again.

He spent the last twenty six years of his life at an Aurist almshouse on the Grismere road, which he never formally joined, doing work that no chronicle would trouble to record: gathering fallen leaves, dressing small wounds, sitting up with people at the end. Diamal asks for nothing that would look impressive in a chronicle. It is generally supposed that this was the appeal.

He kept exactly one practice of his old faith, and the journal ends with it, and the seminaries at Grismere argue about what it means to this day, which is probably what he intended.

The final entry, in a much later hand than the rest

I still keep the record. Stage, and what was removed, and what was gained, and the interval.

I no longer set the mark at the end. Nothing I have done since I came back has been finished, and I would rather be the kind of thing that is not finished with.