Gem-Eyed Archers

#On Their Nature

"Visus non satiatur." — Bureau of Doctrine, gloss upon Classification Memorandum IV.1.07-002

The Gem-Eyed Archers are the ranged elite of Velmora, the Covetous Serpent, Sin-General of Greed. They loose crystalline shafts. The shafts burst into blinding brilliance on impact. Those three sentences hold everything the Codex can certify about the weapon. I have read every line the archive holds on the subject, and it did not take me long.

This entry is a subsidiary assessment. It comes from the host classification in the Velmora dossier, sealed under the Bureau of Doctrine in A.S. 201, and that year belongs to the dossier. It is not the year an archer was first seen, first taken or first explained, because the archive records none of those events.

The bestiary is a shelf. The Bureau of Records files the Archers there because they serve in a demon's host and do a demon's work. The shelf says nothing about their blood. The record does not say whether every archer is a demon in the proper sense, or a man altered in Velmora's country, or several kinds of creature filed under one name to suit the quartermasters. The eyes do not answer the question. Gemlike eyes occur among Velmora's demons generally and among the mutated human servants of her domain, and a shared iris is no proof of descent. A troop designation records what a thing does on the field. What it is belongs in a separate folio, and that folio is empty.

#On the Crystal Shafts

The sources call the ammunition two things: crystal shafts, and shards of crystalline greed. I see no conflict. The first phrase describes the object and the second gives the theology the Bureau assigns to it. The archive names no mineral, no forge and no pattern of fletching. I will not have some clerk at Sibiu writing "quartz" on a requisition because he believes he read it under my seal.

The order of events is fixed. The shaft flies, it strikes, and then it bursts into light. The brilliance comes at the moment of impact. No report I hold describes a shaft glowing in flight, and none records a burning blast, a poison, a glow that lingers, or a blindness that lasts beyond the engagement. Such things may exist. They are not in the file, and nothing outside the file enters the Codex under my name.

The tactical consequence needs no informant, because any man who has kept a trench watch can work it out. Take the moment of a strike. The sentry is at his loophole, the observer has his glass to his eye, and the gunner is laying his piece by a shielded lamp. Each of them works by sight. A flash at the point of impact takes that sight away at the instant he needs it most: to find where the shot came from, to see what follows it, to learn whether the man beside him is still standing. This is my inference and the archive does not contain it. The archive holds no Velmoran drill-book, no measured range and no rate of fire, and I have never seen a shaft burst. The Bureau of War may build a doctrine on inference if it likes. My office is classification.

#On the Beautiful Light

The Velmora dossier gives this matter two sentences, and I wrote both of them. I am told the light is beautiful. I am told the men who stare into it sign things.

I repeat the words "I am told" because some office will try to strike them, and without them hearsay would read as a finding. I never stood in that light. The testimony reached me secondhand. It does not say which documents were signed, or by whom, or how long after the flash, or how often, or what agency was at work.

The doctrine of the Church is not in question here, and I state it plainly. No demon overrides the human will. Within Synod territory a demon may tempt, deceive and delude. It may dazzle the eye. It may not reach behind the eye and move the hand. A dazzled man has lost his sight for a time. A man who signs has chosen to sign, even if he chose under deceit, or in the stupor of wanting, or at the worst hour of his life, and the choice stays his.

Velmora prices loyalty, security and a man's own name like goods on a shelf. In that trade, a beautiful thing that arrives at the moment of terror works like an advertisement. Three readings remain open. The light may tempt. It may merely coincide with work her notaries are doing elsewhere. Or the men who signed may have signed just the same in the dark. The testimony runs three things together: the eye impaired, the heart wanting, and the hand consenting. The Codex keeps them apart, and it will go on doing so until someone brings me the paper.

#On Their Place in the Host

Velmora's boast that she does not fight describes her preferred method. It is no order of battle, because her host does take the field. The dossier counts four classes of soldier and one engine. The Gilded Sentinels are her armoured line. The Coin-Sworn Shades are assassins bound to currency. The Debt-Binders are chanters in support. The Avarice Engine is her heavy golem. The Archers alone do their work at a distance, and the record distinguishes them in nothing else. I do not know where they stand relative to the Sentinels on any given morning. Some drafts circulating in Records claim to know, and they are still drafts.

Their theatre is the mountain wall. Bastion-Sibiu holds the Southern Carpathian passes in Zone 4 of the Sagittal Line. Beyond them lies Velmora's held country in the Charnel Lands, which takes in Moldavia, Wallachia, eastern Romania and the Transylvanian highlands. Under those highlands she works the richest gold-veins on the continent. That ore does more of her fighting than any arrow: it buys quartermasters, toll-clerks and chaplains along three supply corridors, and Sibiu intercepts more bribed convoys than it turns back assaults. When an assault does come, the Archers march with it. Debt presses on the passes every day of the year, and the shaft only now and then.

Her seat is the Gilded Chasm and her congregation is the Ten Thousand Keys. The cult's Hierarchy of Debt has no archer rank, and I will not invent one for the sake of symmetry. Her principal sorcery is Contract Theurgy. Cursed currency is one channel of her host's work and is chiefly the Shades' affair. The Archers carry crystal.

#On the Countermeasures

Remedies fall into two kinds: battlefield precautions, which rest on reason, and supernatural remedies, which require proof. The Codex can recommend the first kind. It can certify nothing of the second kind against these shafts.

What follows is my own counsel and not a standing order. Keep to cover. Do not look at the place where a shaft has struck. A man who turns his head to see the light again has learned something about himself, and he should take it to his confessor before the next engagement. Pair the watch, so that one man looks away at the moment of impact and still has his eyes when his comrade has lost his. None of this confers immunity. Any sensible sergeant would give the same advice about any bright thing in the dark, and sergeants are cheaper than theologians.

The paperwork falls to the contract readers of the Bureau of Records, the clerks who search agreements for buried clauses and for terms that mean something other than what they say. Anything a soldier signs after an engagement with Velmora's host belongs on their desks: a requisition, a loan, a will, or a letter he does not remember drafting. That measure protects the paper and does nothing about the light. The two must never be filed under one heading.

The general measures against Velmora remain in force: the doctrine of tithe as inoculation, the Debt Tribunals, the Value Fast and the voluntary Mark of Poverty. None of them has ever been tested against a crystalline shaft. Against Velmora in general their results are modest at best. The Tribunals annul a contract roughly once a decade, and the Value Fast has been known to deliver desperate men straight to her agents. I list them because they exist. I do not recommend them as a defence against arrows.

The archive holds no goggles proof against the brilliance, no consecrated filter, no protocol of mirrors and no hymn that quenches crystal. If a sutler offers you any of these, send him to the contract readers with his receipt.

#The Ratification

The record certifies four things. The Archers are Velmora's ranged elite. They loose crystalline shafts. The shafts burst into blinding brilliance on impact. And attributed testimony reports that the light is beautiful and that men who look into it sign things.

The record does not certify where the Archers come from, what their eyes are, what is in the documents, or that the light has any power over the hand that signed. Those questions stay open and will not be closed by enthusiasm. The Bureau may revisit this entry when someone hands it the paper.