#On His Station
The Saint Veritas was a supply galleon and document carrier of the Bureau of Records. It worked out of Bastion-Constantinople under convoy pool R-17, with twenty-three souls on its registered complement. The master kept the watch. The clerk-captain countersigned the seals. The ink stewards minded the ink, which on a Records vessel is a sacrament with a requisition number. Below all of them, down among the biscuit and the census blanks, worked Ollo, the rat-catcher.
I record his trade without embarrassment, though it costs me something. A ship loaded with paper, wax, ledgers and dry provisions is a banquet laid out for vermin, and the rat is the oldest heretic in any archive. It eats the record, fouls the seal and breeds faster than any tribunal can try it. Every folio the Bureau ever lost to the tooth was a small apostasy, and the man who stood between the hold and that apostasy did more for the written Church than half the auditors who will read this dossier and sniff.
Ollo appears on every surviving muster roll of the vessel. In my file on the ship I wrote that his inclusion caused more administrative difficulty than the disappearance itself. Three clerks have since asked me what I meant. I referred them to the rolls, and the rolls referred them back to me. Twenty-three men were registered and twenty-three answered. Ollo is one of the twenty-three, and the rolls have never once been comfortable about it.
#On the Return
The ship vanished during the Silence of Harbor Lamps in A.S. 185 (1895 CE). Every light in the harbor went out for seventy-two hours, and Harbormaster Joram Clee entered the period in his log as Weather. Six months later, in A.S. 186 (1896 CE), on the far side of the year's turning, the ship came back into a harbor that had authorised no such passage. The full affair is filed under the ship's own name. For this dossier only the muster matters.
Twenty-three names were called and twenty-three men answered. The whole crew held that the ship had never left harbor: a night watch, a dawn inspection, and nothing in between. The harbor had six months of absence on its books, and the crew had one night. Both accounts sit in the same file to this day, and neither has been withdrawn.
Then Ollo presented three dead rats to the quarantine officer.
The record gives the scene in a handful of lines, and I have read them more often than I have read the Bell Codex. A vessel of the Bureau of Records has come back from a place no chart admits, or from no place at all, which is worse. Two Lictors stand on the quay. A courier of the Bureau of Shadows is present, and Shadows on a quay means someone has already begun deciding what will go unsaid. Within the hour the log will be confiscated. Four Bureaus will soon be quarrelling over the carcass of the matter. Into all this the rat-catcher steps forward, hands the product of his labour to the proper officer, and complains, in front of every one of them, that the voyage had been boring.
The file does not say where the rats were caught, and I will not pretend that three carcasses on a quarantine board prove anything beyond a man who had kept working. That is exactly what makes the moment intolerable. Every officer on that quay had been robbed of six months. Ollo had a tally, and the tally was three.
#On the Crew Declared Unaffected
Quarantine ended, and the crew went back to work, which was what the Bureaus most wanted from them and least trusted. Medical examination found them healthy. The ordeals of the Bureau of Purity found other things in other men. Those findings are set down in the ship's file and need not be dragged across this one. Ollo has no separately documented diagnosis, no recorded ordeal result and no treatment. I have looked, with the diligence of a man who expected to find a rat-catcher's name somewhere near the bottom of every list.
Four years later the paper caught up with the Bureaus' convenience.
An A.S. 190 personnel digest described the Saint Veritas crew as "unaffected after quarantine."
The digest stands corrected, as recorded in the Saint Veritas file: the crew was affected in ways that did not prevent labour. The correction covers the whole complement, the rat-catcher included. It does not say how any one man was affected, and this dossier will not invent the particulars for him.
I cannot say what Ollo did between A.S. 186 and A.S. 191. The record does not supply five years of him. It gives a man who returned, presented his rats and complained, and who next appears in the record still at his trade, at the moment the trade itself became the report. A lesser chronicler would fill the gap with taverns, nightmares and a tearful sweetheart on the quay. I leave the gap the way Records left it: open, unsigned and slightly damp.
#On Pier Seven
In A.S. 191 (1901 CE), Ollo reported that the rats under Pier Seven had begun forming queues.
That is the whole report as it survives. It gives no count. It does not say which way the line ran, where it began or ended, what hour he saw it, or what the animals were waiting for. No independent observation is attached to it. The file does not say whether any officer went under the pier to look. I set the sentence down as the report gives it, and I credit it to the one man in the harbor qualified to say what rats ordinarily do.
Then Ollo vanished.
His traps were found baited, sprung and empty. A sprung trap has closed on something. A sprung trap that still holds its bait has closed either on something that had no interest in the bait or on nothing at all, and Records has a form for neither.
One trap held a folded scrap of ship's log paper. It was blank except for a waterline across the middle.
Log paper belongs to ships. The Saint Veritas log was taken by Shadows within the first hour after the return, and its text is not repeated here. The scrap from the trap carries no text of any kind. The easy inference is that the rat-catcher had read that book, and it fails at the first roll call. The three people who saw the log before confiscation are named in the file, and Ollo is not one of them. A waterline shows how high the water came. It does not say what the water came up against, or when, or whose hand held the page while it was wet.
#On What Remains
The record holds the following: a name on every surviving muster roll; three dead rats presented at a quarantine board in A.S. 186; one complaint of boredom; a correction, shared with his shipmates, to a digest that had called him unaffected; one report of queues under Pier Seven; traps baited, sprung and empty; and a folded scrap of log paper, blank except for a waterline.
It does not hold what any Bureau would need to close him. There is no body, so Doctrine cannot write a martyr. There is no sighting, so Shadows cannot open a pursuit. There is no return, so Records cannot strike the name from its rolls with a clear conscience, though it has never had one to spare.
People who want a tidy horror will say he went under the pier after his queue, or joined it. People who want a tidy Bureau will say he deserted. The file supports neither story, and nobody has ever paid me to prefer tidiness to the file.
What is left is the trade. Whoever found the traps found them set, sprung and wanting, which describes the Harbor of Chains on most mornings. They are the last tools of Ollo's office on record. When I last asked, nobody had signed for them.