#On Their Classification
The Gilded Sentinels are the line troops of Velmora, the Covetous Serpent, Sin-General of Greed. They are the only part of her host that the Bureau of War understands without a translator. A Sentinel advances, a Sentinel strikes, and a man goes down under the stroke. Every other entry in the Serpent's file needs a clerk, a confessor and an assayer reading over one another's shoulders. This entry needs a stretcher.
The troop table we inherited enters them under a single word: Tank. I have heard junior officers at Sibiu speak it as though it named some engine with boilers and a funnel. It names a function. The Sentinels are her heavy close-combat troops, the armoured body that stands in front and takes the blow so that the rest of her host may give one. The word says nothing about wheels or guns. The Bureau will thank the reader to stop drawing them in the margins of requisition forms.
The classification does not say what a Sentinel is. The record names a role. It does not establish whether the thing in that role is a demon of Greed, a corrupted man, or some third arrangement for which the Bureau of Doctrine has not yet ruled a heading. I have been invited to settle the question by memorandum, and I decline. A Hieromnemon who guesses at ontology in a troop file has earned the transfer that follows.
The order of business is known. Velmora buys first. The quartermaster, the toll clerk and the chaplain with a leaking roof are bought months before anyone sees a Sentinel. The Sentinels come afterward, once the paper has done all that paper can do and something must be leaned on.
#On the Stolen Gold
On the gold, every witness agrees. The Gilded Chasm dossier states that the Sentinels wear the Chasm's metal. Every account calls the plate stolen: armour of looted gold, worn over flesh that is itself molten. The sources say both things at once. The gold burns molten upon the skin, and the flesh beneath it is molten too. I have set the passages side by side. They do not explain each other, and I will not pretend that a schoolroom treatise on smelting can reconcile them. Gold that ought to run off the body stays on it. Flesh that ought to be cinder stays in its harness and walks.
Their blows crush. The troop table says men are crushed beneath gilded weight, and the published dossier adds that each strike carries the weight of every treasury the Sentinels have consumed. That second clause is the Bureau's rhetoric, and some of it is mine. Read it as a description of what it feels like to be struck, not as arithmetic in which each looted strongroom adds a stone to the arm. No one has weighed a Sentinel's fist against a ledger. No one has volunteered to.
Cut one and it does not bleed. The Velmora dossier records that the wound pays out: it weeps liquid metal, and the metal scalds whatever it touches. That means the trouser cloth, the boot leather, the wooden furniture of a bayonet, and the hand that reaches out from long habit to staunch a wound. That is the whole observation. It does not say the metal is thrown, that the body bursts, or that the wound closes behind the flow. I have struck all three from barracks rumour, because rumour has never been asked to sign for anything.
What the reports convey best is how the sight strikes a soldier raised in the poorer provinces. Before him is more gold than his village has seen in a century, beaten into a cuirass and coming at him with intent to kill. Every instinct that hunger trained into him tells him to stand his ground for the plunder. That instinct is the Sentinel's second weapon, and the Sentinel does not carry it.
Earlier editions of this Codex identified Velmora's primary sorcery as "cursed coinage."
The Bureau of Doctrine corrected this to Contract Theurgy. I record the correction here because the old phrase tempts readers to treat a Sentinel's plate as a hex that can be confiscated and melted out of mischief. The plate is certified as stolen gold, nothing more. No record makes it a contract. No record makes it a curse. Whatever holds the wearer to the Serpent's service, if anything holds it, is not in this file.
#On Their Place in the Host
Those who have faced Velmora's field host describe four classes of soldier and one engine of war. The Sentinels hold the line. The Coin-Sworn Shades are assassins bound to cursed currency, and their danger lies in going unseen. A Sentinel's danger is that it is seen and cannot be ignored. The Gem-Eyed Archers loose shards of crystalline greed that burst into blinding brilliance. The Debt-Binders chant, and men stumble and bow under their curses. Then there is the Avarice Engine, a golem of fused gold and silver sighted three times on the Sibiu approaches. It has its own entry, its own horror and its own column in the ledger of pay-chest losses.
The confusion I correct most often is between the Sentinels and the Engine. Both are gold, and both crush. The Engine is one titanic thing. The Sentinels are a class of troops. A captain who reports "the Sentinel" as though he had seen a single colossus has reached for the wrong file. The Coinbound cause the second confusion. They are currency-demons that flow and harden into tempting shapes. Hot metal weeping from a wound belongs to the Sentinels alone.
The dossiers are silent on how the classes stand in the field, who commands them, what weapon each Sentinel carries and how fast they march. I will not supply those particulars for the sake of a tidier page. Nor will I take the gemstone eyes and grasping extra hands of her appraising demons and bolt them onto a Sentinel's helm. Some illustrators have. Their work is filed under Decoration.
#On the Sibiu Approaches
Bastion-Sibiu holds the Transylvanian Alps wall from a requisitioned Saxon citadel and keeps the mountain passes. East and southeast of it, in the Charnel Lands, lies the Chasm. Beneath the mountains run the gold-veins that make the Serpent's front the richest on the continent. Her extraction pays for loyalties along three supply corridors, and that is her war. The garrison intercepts more bribed convoys than it repels direct assaults. Any officer who comes to Sibiu expecting an endless tide of gilded infantry will spend his posting reading manifests.
The Sentinels belong to that economy. Their plate comes out of the same rock that buys the quartermaster. The ore that pays a toll clerk to wave a wagon through and the ore that covers a Sentinel's breast are drawn from one seam and entered in one ledger. In the century and a half since the Sundering, the Church has learned to fear the first payment more than the second. It has not learned to stop accepting it.
Velmora's own declarations, as the files record them, insist that she does not fight. I read them as statements of preference. She would rather own a pass than storm it. The field host exists for passes she has not yet bought, and for purchases that failed or whose price outran her patience. There the approaches see gold walking.
#On the Countermeasures
There are two dangers, and they take two treatments. The first is contact. Hot metal from a cut Sentinel scalds whatever it touches, so the soldier who opens one should not then put his hand into the wound. That is my inference from the report and no standing order of the Bureau of War. I offer it in the hope that common sense will one day be issued with the boots.
The second danger is the gold. Whatever metal lies on the stones after an engagement, whether plate, spill or fragment, came out of the Serpent's seams, whatever the assay says of its purity. I advise against picking it up. No record shows that a Sentinel's leavings carry a curse. The record does show, at length and on every page of the Velmora file, what becomes of men who accept her metal without asking where it came from. Whoever picks it up has chosen to. The Bureau of Doctrine holds, and I concur, that no demon of the Serpent can make that choice for him. It can only make the choice cheaper.
The broader measures against her are measures against purchase, and they succeed in part. The contract readers of the Bureau of Records search agreements for buried clauses. The Debt Tribunals can annul a debt of demonic origin, though proving the origin is nearly impossible and most cases are dismissed. Coin is blessed before circulation, and her coin circulates anyway. The Bureau of Tithes teaches that tithing inoculates the giver. Whether it does is unclear. That the Bureau of Tithes promotes it is very clear. The Value Fast mostly breeds the desperation her agents feed on. The Mark of Poverty may close one of her doors, but it leaves the man vowed to it unable to hold a rifle on rations he cannot buy. Wealth does not damn a soldier who keeps his pay. The unasked-for gift should worry him.
None of these measures has been shown to turn a gilded blow. A properly tithed infantryman is crushed exactly as flat as a delinquent one. Against the Sentinels themselves the Bureau offers what armies have always offered: the line, the rifle, and the instruction to stay out of reach.
#The Ratification
The classification stands as entered. Velmora's armoured line troops, gold-plated, molten beneath, metal-bleeding when cut, are certified for the Sibiu instruction folios. The file on what lies under the plate stays open. I have locked it anyway. On the Eastern front an open file attracts offers.