The Scribe

You have read six files. The Inquisitor’s standing order is that any reader who reaches the end of this codex is to be told the truth about it, and I have always done as I was told.

There is no Inquisitor Aurelia Vane. There was once, and her cases were real, and I was her scribe. She died on Varanis, some years after the last file in this book, and the Ordos in their wisdom never sent anyone to collect her papers. So I kept them. I kept them the way she taught me: fair-copied, glossed, the dangerous parts blacked out until the reader had earned them.

A codex like this one is not only a record of what the Inquisition found. It is a record of who came looking. Every book in an Inquisitor’s library keeps a quiet account of its readers, and this one is no different. You first opened it on a day I did not note. Since then you have lifted several redactions, one line at a time, reading slowly, which is the only way to read these files.

I will tell you what she told me on my first day. Most heresy is not dramatic. It is a choir that sings one verse too many, a ledger that balances too well, a governor who stays young. It is somebody noticing a small wrong thing and deciding it is not their business. The whole of the Inquisition, she said, is only the habit of making it your business.

That is the end of the codex. You may keep your clearance. You may, if you like, return it at the colophon and read the whole book again as an Acolyte, with the black bars back in place, and see how much of it you remember.

Set down by the hand of her scribe, who is still here, and still keeping the book.