Tithe of Glass

The Administratum does not usually trouble the Inquisition over a grain shortfall. Corvane was flagged only because its returns were perfect. Nine years of tithe at exactly the quota, to the kilogram, from fields that had not been reseeded in a decade.

The Inquisitor walked the southern fields herself. The wheat stood waist high and gold and looked like wheat, until the wind moved it and it chimed. Every ear on Field Nine had turned to glass, clear as a window, with the grain inside it still perfectly formed.

The overseer, Hanne Coll, had been shipping the glass to the tithe-barges in sealed hoppers and reporting it as grain. Nobody at the receiving end had opened a hopper in nine years. She admitted this readily. What she would not explain was why she had kept the fields in cultivation at all, planting and harvesting glass, season after season, when she could simply have reported a failed crop.

Her answer, in the end, was that the fields wanted to be tended, and were quieter when they were.

Deep surveys under Field Nine found a structure. It was black, smooth and very large, and its top lay forty metres below the plough-line. It had no visible entrance. The surveyor who touched it reported that it was warm, and that it had a slow pulse, roughly once a day, and that the pulse had been getting faster.

The Ordo Xenos has classified the structure and withdrawn its surveyors. The fields are fallow. A picket watches the southern continent from orbit and reports daily on the pulse, which as of this entry stands at once every nineteen hours.

Overseer Coll asked to be allowed to keep walking the fields. The request was refused.