Greed

#On Possession

"Gold rusts, but relics endure." — Market cry, as recorded in the Synod's account of the Currency of Faith

Greed is the appetite that cannot say enough. The Bureau's catechists define it as an excessive love of money. That is like defining arson as an excessive love of warmth. Money is only the handiest instrument. A man may fall to Greed without touching a coin. He can do it by hoarding favours, collecting offices, buying a rival's ruin on long credit, or keeping a wife on his books as an appreciating asset. The sin is finished when everything in his keeping has been given a price, and nothing in his keeping can be loved until it has first been appraised.

The Church does not condemn the counting-house. A widow who haggles for her children's bread commits no sin. A merchant who profits honestly commits none either, and the Bureau of Tithes would be most upset if he stopped. Provision is lawful, and so is sufficiency. The fault begins when getting things stops serving a life and becomes the life. It is complete when obligations stand where persons used to, and the ledger is consulted before the conscience.

Men were usurers long before the Sundering of A.S. 45. What changed afterward was that the old appetite found a patron, and the patron keeps books.

#On the Terms

Velmora, Sin-General of Greed, is called the Covetous Serpent in the older compilations and the Appraiser in the mouths of her own devotees. This office has never questioned her, and no authenticated account of her voice exists. Her methods are another matter. They have been questioned, catalogued, burned and catalogued again, and they are dull in their consistency. She offers something real.

The wealth spends. The debt is forgiven. The guild waives its fees, the venture prospers, and the vacant post falls open at the right moment. The Bureau of Doctrine prefers to call infernal gifts illusions, because an illusion spares the Bureau from explaining why a sensible man took it. The gifts are genuine, and that is the whole of their power.

The cost comes later, and it comes through ordinary channels. First comes the partner whose ruin paid for the windfall. He was never told, and he works it out by degrees. Then comes the recipient himself, who checks the strongbox twice a night and can no longer sit at his own table without pricing the silver. In the end his friendships last exactly as long as the friend holds his paper. When there is no one left in his house who is not owed something, he has finished being robbed.

Contract Theurgy is the Bureau's name for Greed's art of the written pact. Reports from the frontier describe agreements that behave like parasites: clauses that tighten when tested, and interest that seems to accrue in the signer's sleep. The Bureau of Purity has burned enough such documents to vouch for the smell.

Let the reader be clear on one point that the Bureau's own sermons tend to blur. No pact made in Synod territory removes the signer's will. No demon may possess him, compel him, or hold his soul under seal. The contract feels binding for three reasons: he signed it, he needs what it pays, and his creditors know where his children sleep. Every later payment is another choice. The cults teach that the signature is the sale. Certain Bureau preachers teach the same, since a man already damned costs nothing to rehabilitate. Properly read, Doctrine says the door stays open. The corridor beyond it is long, and the Synod usually waits at the far end with a rope.

#On the Borrower

"A fortress that cannot be bribed is merely a fortress that has not yet received a sufficient offer." — Attributed to Velmora. Denied by the Bureau of Doctrine. Believed by the Bureau of Tithes.

Most of Greed's agents are human, and most of those are respectable. They include the merchant whose terms are surprisingly kind, the banker who extends credit when the harvest fails, and the quartermaster with a talent for finding stores. They host dinners. They endow orphanages. Nobody burns a philanthropist on suspicion, and they know it.

The cults are independent cells. They work for a favour they hope will come and in most cases never does. Nothing in their correspondence shows a line of command running from any infernal court down to the village moneylender. Velmora's devotees are distinguished from the other sins' rabble by organisation, which they arrange among themselves. The Hierarchy of Debt ranks them as Debtors, who recruit others to reduce their own balance; Creditors, who lend onward; Assessors, who appraise; Ledger-Keepers, who know what everyone owes; and Inheritors, who wait for a collection they have been promised and cannot audit.

In the highlands below Bastion-Sibiu, the local example is the Ten Thousand Keys. Its lenders offer relief when a valley's crop has failed. The borrower signs and receives a brass key cut to no lock he owns. The obligation runs past the loan. The first repayment is grain. The second is a word about when the convoy passes. The third is an introduction to a neighbour whose harvest has also failed. The Vault of Ten Thousand Keys, an infernal place, is a separate matter that the cult's name only borrows. A farmer who takes the loan is a debtor. He has not yet become an initiate, a difference the Bureau of Purity has not always had the patience to observe.

He may refuse at any step. Each refusal costs more than the one before.

#On the Unbreached Wall

Sibiu stands behind the Transylvanian Alps on the middle sector of the Sagittal Line, and by the published account its walls have never been breached. Its economy is the weak point, and three currencies have to be kept separate there before the weakness makes sense.

The Crown of Grace is the Synod's coin. It is blessed iron, and its worth rests on sanction rather than on metal. Crown scrip is the garrison's paper, used in Sibiu's ration economy since A.S. 130. Gold belongs to the enemy's side of the ledger. It is drawn from the eastern highlands of Moldavia and Wallachia, and from the Gilded Chasm, whose position the surveys have never agreed on. That gold pays for the infiltration. It buys printers, teamsters and silence. It rarely needs to enter the bastion at all.

The mechanism can be followed through a single sack of flour.

A highland valley fails. The Keys lender arrives before the Synod's relief, which is not difficult. The farmer survives and sells his next crop to a convoy. The teamster hauling it has been paid, in gold that came from no Synod mint, to wave a crate through without opening it. The quartermaster who receives the flour pays in scrip, and some of that scrip carries serial numbers that, according to the Tithes discovery of A.S. 181, were never issued. A soldier buys bread in the Market Ring with one of those notes because the verification queue is long and he is hungry. No one in this chain has committed anything a court-martial would recognise as treason. Everyone has been fed. And each of them now owes something to a creditor the Synod did not appoint.

Then there is the gold that sentries report weeping from the Citadel Ring's walls. The Bureau of Tithes collects it. The Assay Chamber finds no taint in it, a result that proves the gold clean and proves nothing about where it came from. The garrison believes the Serpent owns the foundations. That is testimony, and I record it as testimony. The mechanism is unexplained, and the Bureau has ordered personnel to stop discussing it, which has not reduced the discussion.

#On the Lawful Remedy

The Synod has remedies, and every one of them works partly.

The Bureau of Records keeps contract readers. These are clerks who read nothing but agreements, looking for clauses that do not quite parse, and they retire early and quietly. At Sibiu every Crown and scrip note is assayed, or is meant to be, since the verification protocol is observed in fewer than half of transactions. Currency is blessed at the mint, and the enemy's coins circulate regardless. Debt tribunals can annul an obligation of demonic origin once that origin has been proved. Proof is nearly impossible, most petitions are dismissed, and the filing fee is not refunded.

The Bureau of Tithes teaches that a faithful tithe protects the giver from being bought. Whether it does is unclear. That the Bureau promotes the teaching is entirely clear. Value fasts strip soldiers and citizens of their possessions for a season. Their aim is to loosen the grip of ownership, and what they mostly produce is desperation, which is exactly the market the Keys lend into.

Sibiu adds its own Doctrine of Sufficiency, posted in every barracks: Desire nothing beyond thy ration. The Crown provides. The Crown suffices. It is sound teaching. It is preached by an institution that lives on tithes, gate tolls, tribunal fees and the relic trade. It is administered through a ration system that pays partly in forged paper. And it competes with Synod charity, whose application takes six weeks to clear three Bureaus. The garrison is told to want nothing while the Bureau collects the gold from the walls.

#Ruling

The Bureau of Doctrine finds Greed to be a sin of the will. It is practised by persons who remain answerable, and it is profitable to everyone in the room, the Synod included. Petitions to classify debt held by Velmora's creditors as an irrevocable sale of the soul are denied as contrary to Doctrine. Petitions to forgive such debts are referred to the tribunals, subject to the customary fee.