Guarantors

#On Their Nature

"Volens solvit." He pays, and he means it. (Gloss in the author's hand)

The Guarantors are demons of Velmora, the Covetous Serpent and Sin-General of Greed. They are true demons with bodies, and they belong to her household. They are not part of her congregations. The Bureau's classified bestiary lists them with the Assessors, the Collectors, the Coinbound and the Ledger-Keepers, and keeps them apart from the shadow-thin influence-demons that drift across the Line offering things. Velmora's dedicated file describes their function in one word: they enforce.

A reader raised on village sermons hears that word and pictures a bailiff with a cudgel. He should put the bailiff away. The file is exact about the method. A Guarantor changes what the signatory wants to do, and it leaves the doing to the signatory. No bruise is needed. No limb moves without its owner's leave. When a clause comes due, the Guarantor works on the wanting, and the debtor performs the clause because the debtor has come to desire it.

I have never knowingly met one. I say so plainly. Every Hieromnemon who files on Greed is expected to supply an anecdote, and an honest anecdote about a Guarantor would require me to know whether I had met one. That question is the subject of this entry.

The dedicated file also sets limits on the class. Physical demons must travel into Synod lands to work there, and they are rare on our side of the Line. Most of the damage done in Velmora's name within our borders is done by human hands at polished desks. The Guarantor does not stand at every notary's elbow. A clerk who believes it does will see one in every inkwell and file nothing useful.

#On the Clause That Comes Due

The dedicated file gives one example, and I take it as given, because nobody should have to invent a worse one. A contract provides that the signatory will deliver a firstborn child. In the parent entry I fixed the term at the third bell of the third year.

This is an illustration. It names no parent, no child, no parish and no year. I have no docket to attach to it, and I would distrust any clerk who offered me one.

At signing, the clause is a horror, and the signatory knows it. People sign such things because the winter is long, because three years seems a geological age to a hungry person, or because they assume that a remote term can be renegotiated before it matures. Many sign while refusing to look at the clause, which is the commonest way of reading a contract in the eastern provinces. The fear is real at the table. It is the last honest feeling the clause will receive.

Three years pass, and the third bell rings.

The parent finds that they want to comply. The dedicated file says the choice "will make sense at the time," and nothing harsher could have been written. The parent does not wake in terror at the hour. They wake with the matter settled and the reasons in order: the debt was fair, the terms were known, and a person of good character keeps their word. They comply with the composure of someone paying a tithe. The obligation they dreaded at signing has become, by the time it falls due, a decision they consider reasonable.

What happens after the third bell, the file does not say. I will not supply it.

On one point the Bureau of Doctrine is firm, and I share its view. A parent may sign whatever a parent pleases, but the signature cannot carry the will of a child who never signed. The clause binds the parent's pen and nothing beyond it. In Velmora's held country, where people can be chained and the body is no longer its owner's to dispose of, that distinction keeps no one warm. It still governs this entry.

#On the Will That Remains

In the parent entry I wrote that the signatory will find that they want to comply. The future tense was rhetoric, and I correct it here.

Doctrine holds that within Synod territory no demon overrides a human will. There is no possession and no compulsion, and no pact becomes truly irresistible. The human can always choose differently. The dedicated file says so in capitals, which is how lore files raise their voices. The Guarantor does not suspend this rule. It works inside it, and the work is ugly. It changes what the debtor desires and which reasons look sound to them. It leaves the refusal where it was.

The signatory can still refuse. They must now refuse something they want, for reasons they no longer feel, against arguments that sound like their own conscience. The Bureau calls this a free choice. It is free in the way a road is open when a cliff stands across it: the road is technically available.

Doctrine adds two things I am bound to record. Corruption is always reversible: a person who has served a demonic clause can still choose otherwise at the next hour, and the next. That capacity cannot be bought, because it was never put up for sale. Redemption costs something, though. The consequences of past choices remain, and what was delivered at the third bell stays delivered.

The parent entry also records that the Bureau of Doctrine has worked for forty years on a theological counter to the Guarantors. I stand by that testimony. In that time it has produced sixteen hundred pages of commentary on free will, three councils that reached no conclusion, and one very comfortable armchair in which the chairman of the relevant sub-committee has been found asleep on four occasions. Every one of those pages affirms the debtor's freedom. None of them tells the debtor how to use it.

#On the Other Instruments

Clerks like to draw Velmora's demons as an assembly line, and the diagram is handsome and unsupported. The sources give each class a function and nothing more. The Assessors determine value. The Collectors acquire particular things. The Coinbound are wealth with a body. The Ledger-Keepers record deals and debts. The Guarantors attend to fulfilment. No source gives an order of operations, a chain of report, or an office in which one class hands the debtor to the next.

The word also causes confusion with the cult. The Ten Thousand Keys rank their human servants in a Hierarchy of Debt of five tiers: Debtors, Creditors, Assessors, Ledger-Keepers and Inheritors. Guarantor is not one of them. A Keys lender who styles himself the guarantor of a loan is a man with a seal, and he belongs in Purity's files, not here.

The pressure is felt hardest at Bastion-Sibiu, which faces Velmora's domain in Moldavia, Wallachia and the Transylvanian highlands, with the Gilded Chasm behind them. In the Binding Markets of her held country, contracts are traded for service, loyalty, future acts and children not yet born, and any such clause could one day fall due. Velmora's gold also buys loyalties along three of Sibiu's supply corridors. That is strategy, and no evidence ties it to the Guarantors. When a convoy is lost at Sibiu, the file names a bribed quartermaster.

#On Scrutiny and Annulment

The Synod's first defence is to read the contract before anyone signs it. The Bureau of Records keeps contract readers who go through every document of legal significance, with several readers on each, looking for buried clauses and terms that do not mean what they appear to mean. The readers are rotated every two years, for reasons the Bureau of Medicine has filed. A reader can find the firstborn clause. A reader cannot find the desire that will arrive three years later, because on the day of reading it does not yet exist.

The Debt Tribunals come next, and here the Bureau's position contradicts itself. A tribunal may annul a contract shown to be of demonic origin, which requires proof that the signature was obtained through supernatural coercion. Doctrine holds that no demon coerces a will in Synod lands. A Guarantor's debtor walks into court wanting to pay and gives evidence of their own free consent in a clear, untroubled voice. I record the contradiction as it stands. I have found no ruling that resolves it.

When a tribunal does annul a contract, the instrument is void and the creditor loses his claim in law. That is a different thing from the debtor's refusal, which Doctrine says was always available, and both differ from restoration, which no court has claimed to provide. A ruling cancels the paper. It does not reach the wanting, and nothing that was delivered comes back under seal.

The general defences are no better proven. The Bureau of Tithes preaches tithe as inoculation, and the evidence for it is disputed. The Value Fast puts property into communal custody for fourteen days and gives Velmora's agents a timetable of desperation. The Mark of Poverty may protect those who take the vow, and it removes them from every ledger the war depends on. None of these measures has been shown to reverse a desire a Guarantor has already arranged.

The Contract Theurgy entry gives one more warning, and I repeat it as that account's and not my own. In drafting a counter-contract, one wrong witness can invite the Guarantor to appear under seal. The entry gives no procedure, and this file will not invent one.

#The Ratification

This entry is filed under the classified bestiary of Velmora's household as the current survey, and it rests on the parent dossier sealed in A.S. 201. It certifies the Guarantor's function, which is attendance at fulfilment through altered desire. It certifies the debtor's freedom to refuse. It certifies no cure.

Readers who hold an instrument with a term still running are directed to the contract readers in the first instance and to the Church in the second. They should not wait for the third bell to decide what they want. By then the Guarantor may already have decided it for them.