Ash-Credit

#On the Tender of the Dead

Being a survey of the instrument by which the Synod has persuaded the dead to keep working, set down by the Hieromnemon at the Bureau's request and against his digestion.

Ash-credit answers the oldest complaint of the poor, which is that they have nothing to sell. They have themselves. More precisely, they have what is left of themselves after the kiln, and the Bureau of Tithes has determined that this residue, properly weighed and sealed, is worth bread.

The doctrine beneath it was settled before any clerk thought to price it. Grace is paid for. A miracle spends the faithful rather than Creation, and whatever is spent must be entered somewhere. Ash-credit is that entry. It is the ledger-value produced when cremains, bone-dust, saint-dust, reliquary allotments and pledged future remains are accepted as collateral against the devotional debt of a household, a parish or a regiment. It shares a column with the bell-hour and the saint-share, under the heading the Bureau of Doctrine calls Saints' Shares and the trenches call the bill.

No council enacted it. I have searched the acts of the Concordat of Strasbourg and of every successor body for a founding decree. I found only footprints: a tithe schedule, a Records form, a Purity circular on the handling of crematory sweepings. The instrument grew through the Bureaus after the Concordat the way lichen grows on a vault, by patience and damp. By the present survey it is everywhere, and nobody signed for it.

#On Deposits and Instruments

Distinguish the forms. The Bureau does, and it fines those who confuse them.

A saint-share is a grace allotment, redeemable in indulgence credit or sacred benefit. A bell-hour is sanctified time, issued under the Bureau of Bells to factories, fieldmasters, pilgrim routes and units that need Heaven's cadence to pace their labour. A dust future is a contract on ash that does not yet exist, usually the eventual cremains of the signatory, or of a relative who was not consulted. In Metz a man may mortgage his grandmother's dust. In Ghent, by attested practice, a woman may pre-sell her infant's ash, and the contract is notarised before the first cry.

An ash-credit is the figure the clerk writes once any of these has been accepted. It is spendable and auditable, and it stands in the ledger where a grandmother used to stand.

Deposits arrive in urns, sacks and sealed jars, and they are graded. Saint-dust takes the highest rate, provided it comes certified from the Saint-Dust Cooperage of Mournwater in stamped slurry casks, where the same powder is sold as medicine, propaganda and speculation on the same afternoon. Family cremains are graded in the middle. At the bottom sits salvage: the bone-lime and sweepings of the Lime Yards of Marrowgate, which reach the counting-houses by cart with no relatives at the counter to watch the needle.

In exchange the household receives what a hungry diocese can swallow. It may get bread, salt, absolution tokens, ration priority or a season's delay on the levy. The receipts come in three forms: a transfer writ for the ash that changes hands, a vault certificate for the ash that stays, and a ration stamp for the loaf that leaves by the side hatch still warm.

#On Custody

Every Bureau owns a portion of the ash, and none will say which portion.

The Bureau of Tithes holds that ash is coin, having decreed dust futures lawful tender on the principle that to pledge is to prove faith. Doctrine holds that ash is relic, because the body the Creator raises must first be located. The Bureau of Purity holds that ash is evidence, and it keeps samples. The Bureau of Relics reserves a seizure right over any deposit that glitters, hums or bleeds on damp mornings, and its authenticators haunt the grading halls in pairs. The Bureau of Records files all of it in four registers that disagree, and takes the disagreement as proof that the filing is correct.

The Bureau of Rites holds the one key the others lack. It licenses the conversion of ash-credit into sanctioned miracle. No chaplain may draw field grace against a parish's ash without a Rites warrant, and no warrant issues against a parish in arrears.

The Bureau of Mercy keeps a dissent on file. It is one sentence long, and I reproduce it because suppressing it would only lend it glamour: "A corpse is not currency. Dust is grief, not coin."

#On Use at the Counter and at the Line

Every parish owes an ash quota, assessed each season by a Tithe Assessor who arrives with a scale, a register and no appetite. A parish that meets its quota keeps its liturgical benefit. A parish that falls short loses it, and the loss is visible. In Strasbourg, within sight of the high Bureau precinct, a parish once failed to pay its ash. The following Sunday its bread transubstantiated into rancid black mush. Doctrine's verdict was five words long: debts unpaid cannot rise.

Inside the rationing halls, ash-credit sets the size of the loaf. A household whose dead have been paid in draws the larger portion. A household that has buried its dead privately, out of sentiment or poverty or the old Rationalist squeamishness, draws bread thinned with soot. The Bureau calls this ossuary equity. The soldiers have a shorter phrase for it: eat your dead, or starve.

At the Line, the arithmetic follows a man into the trench. His company's Grace Rations of bell-hour chits, saint-shares and indulgence slips are drawn against the ash-credit of the parishes that raised it. If his mother's parish is in arrears, his chaplain's warrant is suspended. The bell does not ring for him. The relic stays in its case. He goes over the top with courage his parish could not afford, which is to say with none that the Bureau recognises.

The forgers who circulated counterfeit absolution chits at Bastion-Constantinople had their tongues nailed to a church door, and their successors learned the lesson. They moved into ash scrip, where the paper is harder to forge and the collateral easier to fake.

#On Fraud, Default and Collection

Fraud begins at the scale. Hearth-ash, chalk, ground horse-bone and the sweepings of a baker's oven have all been presented as grandmother. At the Rheinscarp Ash Exchange of Saint Pelagia, brokers settle authenticity by taste, and I have watched one do it. His face did not move. I have seen men meet a bayonet charge with more visible reluctance.

Short delivery is the subtler problem. A pledged debtor dies at the front and is never recovered, or drowns in the Rhine, or burns in a house fire under the wrong jurisdiction. The ash never reaches the vault, but the debt survives him. Records transfers it to the nearest relative capable of holding a pen, and failing a pen, a thumb.

Default is collected. In Mainz a Bishop-Praetorial defaulted on his ash-credit, and his creditors exhumed his parents to recover the sum. The corpses were burned in the square, and the ashes were divided into sacks stamped with the Synod seal. Records holds no date for the episode that I would trust, so I supply none. The Bishop-Praetorial kept his see. His parents, having settled the account, were not consulted further.

Where the Lime Yards and the Ash Banks meet the living, the categories grow confused. Cologne's survivors of the reported vault slides at the Bank of Eternal Dust came out coughing the remains of strangers, and Purity declared them living reliquaries while Records filed them under Collateral. Both entries stand. At Rouen it is said that an entire diocese was pledged in advance for a grain shipment that never arrived. The Ash Banks deny the rumour with the energy of an institution denying something specific.

The dust-futures scandal of A.S. 199 belongs to Rheinscarp alone. The Exchange was found trading futures on the cremains of people who were still alive and had never signed. On the lower terraces it is said the names came from the Records lists of persons due to be corrected out of the ration count. The Exchange says the tranche was written on actuarial prudence. Mercy's hunger-waiver clerics say both statements describe the same list.

#On the Present Survey

As of A.S. 201 ash-credit is audited quarterly by Tithes, graded by Purity and licensed for use by Rites. Relics watches the gold-fleck counter, and Doctrine has not ruled whether a relic can bear interest. It will not rule while the bread keeps rising. The Great Ledger records the dead once. The ash registers record them again, at a valuation, and the second entry is the one that feeds anyone.

The families keep coming to the counter. The needle keeps moving. Somewhere a child is learning the difference between a grandmother and four loaves, and the clerk is writing it down.

The dead have always been in the Church's service. The Synod has merely started paying them, and it pays them in bread for their children.