Colonel-Inquisitor Aras Venn

#On His Station

"Every man was who he claimed to be." — Hieromnemon Valerius Drax, The Shadow Court, On the Expeditions

Colonel-Inquisitor Aras Venn takes up about as much room in the Church's archives as the spine of one dossier. His title joined the sword to the tribunal. In A.S. 72, which the old calendar calls 1782, he commanded the First Expedition sent east to find the Shadow Court. He came back, and in A.S. 94 he was found dead. Around those two entries the record keeps almost nothing. I have been instructed to make an article of it anyway.

The title deserves a sentence. "Colonel" places him among soldiers. "Inquisitor" places him among the men who question soldiers. Together they tell the reader that he could order a march and then examine what it had done. They tell the archivist nothing more. The extracts available to this office preserve no appointing authority, no order, no service record and no date of ordination. I will not supply a childhood. I have enough enemies on the fourth floor of Records without manufacturing a mother for a colonel.

One clerical caution, issued once. The expedition left eighteen years before the Concordat of Strasbourg gave the Synod its formal constitution in A.S. 90. The Line was defensible but unfinished, and its practices were still being made standard. The offices that sent Venn east, examined him when he returned and housed him afterward all existed in earlier forms under earlier names. Later files give them the Bureau titles they received in time. I follow the files, but the reader should picture the paint as wet.

#On the First Expedition

The complement, as listed, was forty-two soldiers and six theologians, whom later records attach to the Bureau of Doctrine. There were also two cartographers, attached in the same backward fashion to the Bureau of Engineering, and one priest whose single duty was to keep a hymn going without a break for the whole march. Venn is named separately, as commander. The lists do not say whether he counted himself among the forty-two. I have seen men lose a promotion over less.

A continuous hymn was sound practice in the theology of that day, as it is in ours, because sacred sound keeps the Church within earshot of a marching column. Trusting a column of that size to one throat was an economy I would never have approved. Nobody consulted me in 1782.

They crossed the Sagittal Line south of where Bastion-Irongate now commands the gorge. They entered the Iron Gates and went east for eleven days.

That is the whole itinerary. I have been offered more. Any tavern on the Danube corridor will sell the reader a throne-room, masked envoys and seven figures seated at a black table, and the tavern version gets better with the second bottle. None of it is in the file. This Codex's own entry on the Court records that the place, if it is a place, moves with the attention of the Great Deceiver, and that maps east of the Line fail by degrees. The file does not say where Venn's column stood on the eleventh day, what it saw there, or why it turned back. I decline to say it for them.

They returned on the fourteenth day.

#On the Returned

All of them came back: every soldier, every theologian, both cartographers, the hymn-priest and the colonel. Expeditions into the fallen east do not, as a rule, come home complete, and the next two sent after the Court did not. Records treated the full count with the suspicion it deserved and certified each man three ways: by comparing wax seals, by examining hymn-memory and by measuring bone density. Every man passed. The certification proves identity. It says nothing about condition, and the file never pretends it does.

My plate on the Court as a place describes the debriefing report as fourteen pages long. Thirteen are classification headers, procedural stamps and the signatures of officials eager to be known as readers rather than as responsible parties. The fourteenth is sealed. The papers are held under Bureau of Shadows Memorandum 441-V, classified Obsidian. I do not know who wrote the memorandum or in what year. The formal Bureau of Shadows was constituted only in A.S. 92, twenty years after the march, so someone gathered the papers later. Someone always does.

The cartographers drew maps. The two maps agreed with each other in every detail and with no known geography in any. Their contents, and where they are now kept, are withheld. Two careful men, working separately, recorded the same country. The Church has never found it.

As for the theologians, my two earlier accounts disclose different amounts, and I let them stand apart. My tract on the Court as a sovereignty states that three of the six were dead within six months of the return. My plate on the Court as a place says only that what happened to three of them is classified. Neither names them or gives a cause. I have no third source, and I will not split the difference between two of my own.

#On the Adriatic Quarters

Venn spent his remaining years on the Adriatic coast, in the oldest of the sanitariums now run by the Bureau of Medicine. The house was once a monastery. It has whitewashed walls, no architectural distinction whatever, and an herb garden kept by an order of sisters. They have been told they serve the Bureau of Mercy, and they have had the sense not to ask further. The house's name and exact location are withheld. I have walked that garden, in A.S. 197, more than a century after Venn's death. Nobody showed me which room had been his, and I did not ask. In such houses one learns which questions are answered with a transfer.

He was allowed visitors on Tuesdays. The record grants the permission but names no one who used it.

The record does not say when he was admitted. A reader who subtracts 72 from 94 and announces twenty-two years of confinement has done arithmetic, which is admirable. He has not done history. The record also gives no diagnosis I can quote, no treatment, no regimen and no word Venn spoke in that house. I have heard the colonel credited with tears, with silences, with prophecies and once with a devoted dog, always by men born long after he died. All of it is struck.

What survives is the room.

In A.S. 94, which is 1804, Venn was found dead in his quarters. A single phrase had been written on every surface available to him: the walls, the ceiling, the floor, the undersides of the furniture, the bedframe, the underside of the mattress and the margins of his breviary. The caption filed with the Medicine entry's engraving records that the breviary's margins had been written over seventeen times.

The phrase is classified. I know that it is a phrase, that there was only one, and that it was repeated. I do not know what it says, and nobody who knows has told me.

The Bureau of Medicine classified the death as "natural causes, with complications." I once wrote that the complications were presumably theological. That was a remark, and the reader should not file it as a finding. The classification shows what Medicine was willing to sign. It does not show how the man died, and I do not know how he died.

#On the Closed File

Here is what the Church kept: a title, a command, a list of men, a route as far as the eleventh day, a return on the fourteenth, three tests of identity, and two matching maps of nowhere. It also kept a debriefing in which only one page matters, a death in a whitewashed room and a phrase. The debriefing's one page is sealed. The phrase, the maps, the fate of the theologians and the cause of death are all withheld. That proportion is about what one expects from a file the Bureau considers important.

The Second Expedition left in A.S. 80 under Warden-Captain Elise Morr. It had one hundred and twenty personnel and sixteen voices singing in rotating shifts, where Venn had one priest. The file says her people had studied the First Expedition's reports as far as their clearance allowed. One soldier came back. The Third left in A.S. 87 and is still listed as on assignment. I can find nothing to show that Venn had a hand in planning either.

Measured against those two, his was the success. Every man came home. In the years that followed, by one of my accounts, the Church lost three theologians it will not name, and it kept their commander behind whitewash on the coast until the walls of his room were full. I have read a great many casualty files. This is the only one I know of that lists every casualty as present.

No monument, tribunal or medical condition bears his name.