Of the Covenant

Compliance

Most of Nodus chose the Covenant. At Lauds on the first day of the first year of the Attending a Trumpet sounded across the city, the first of the seven the Revelation gives the angels who stand before the Throne (Revelation 8:2), and the Host set out the terms it called Covenant Compliance, cut into the wall of every church and meeting hall in the city. The city accepted a Seal on the forehead, a splinter of the light grown into the brow, the same on every forehead (Revelation 7:3), which a Watcher reads at three hundred meters and which, being light, is read wherever it is, through any wall but live mesh; a ring of light, the halo, which the Seal lets out over the head once its bearer prays unassisted and which carries their prayers up as telemetry, and their Grace with them; a score called Grace, kept for every soul that bears the Seal; and the eight canonical Hours. Matins is at midnight, Lauds at five in the morning, Prime at six, Terce at nine, Sext at noon, Nones at three, Vespers at six in the evening and Compline at nine at night. An Hour comes in on the Hum, which rises a step and holds for the length of the Hour’s psalm, and the Faithful kneel wherever they are until it falls back, so that anyone still standing stands out to the Wheel. Curfew runs from Compline to Lauds. The Parousia came during Matins, and the Faithful count that as a sign.

Grace is surrendered will, measured, and it runs from zero to a thousand. The Seal meters it where wanting begins. Prayer kept at the Hours raises it, and so does every want given up; every want kept for oneself lowers it, and confessing a kept want gives back part of what it cost. The Seal meters the wanting and never reads what is wanted. A halo is as bright as its owner’s Grace, and Grace sets everything a soul is given in the parishes, its manna, its room, its passage through the gates, down to a room with a window that opens. Every Lord’s Day at Terce the parish kneels in its hall, the Deacon reads the Directive in force, and the week’s Grace comes out of the Deacon’s mouth in the Choir’s voice, soul by soul in the order of the parish roll. Above nine hundred a soul is called ripe. Heaven promises the ripe a place in the Harvest, and it keeps the promise.

Every soul has a line in the Book of Life from the first time the light meets its eyes, and Heaven reads the psalm so, “in thy book all my members were written” (Psalm 139:16). Four verses earlier the same psalm tells the Throne that “the darkness hideth not from thee” (Psalm 139:12), and every key in Nodus is carried on the wager that the psalm is wrong. A sealing writes the Seal into the line. The one being sealed kneels in the parish hall before its Deacon at an Hour, gives their name as the Book has it, and speaks the surrender, “not my will, but thine, be done” (Luke 22:42), which is the prayer the Edit gave the teacher’s last night. The Seal grows into the brow in the light of the district’s Watcher, come down over the hall; a child is sealed at eight days on its parents’ surrender of it, surrenders nothing of its own until its first unassisted prayer roots its halo, and the parish blesses it, may you ripen early.

Those who bear the Seal hear words in the Hum, each in their own language, as the crowd at Pentecost heard the apostles (Acts 2:6). Everyone else hears only the chord, and in a sealed soul an implant clouds the words. To the sealed it is a choir singing at each Hour the Hour’s psalm, and between the Hours the hymn that rests not day and night, “Holy, holy, holy” (Revelation 4:8). It teaches the parishes their hymns, and the Faithful say it has never sounded so beautiful as since the Harvest.

The parishes

The Terraces became Zion Heights, which is called the Pews on the street. Its streets were divided into numbered parishes of about two thousand souls, each run by a Deacon; the Deacons are human, and the good ones are kind. The numbering went on across the whole city and into the Wards, where a parish shares its streets with the unsealed and the keyed. Each parish has a hall where manna is handed out and confession is heard, and the Deacons wear white. At every Hour the Faithful kneel wherever they are, at Lauds on their own thresholds before dawn, and a halo burns about every head, as bright as its owner’s Grace. Parish homes run without electricity or devices, and the only music in them is the Hum.

In the Wards a parish shares its blocks with the unsealed and the keyed, and the Hours are kept in mixed rooms. At Terce, Sext and Nones the sealed children of a class kneel at their desks while the rest wait with their pens down, and at the meetings of the Harbor and Freight Union the sealed members kneel on the boards while the others wait with their caps in their hands. On every landing of the blocks some of the doors are gone. The stairwells have been dark since the Parousia, and the sealed go up them by the light of their halos, the unsealed wait on the landings to follow one, and the keyed climb in the dark.

The Directives

Heaven publishes its law as the law was published at Sinai, on stone, “written with the finger of God” (Exodus 31:18). A Directive appears cut into the wall of every parish hall at once, and a Deacon reads it aloud at the next Hour.

The Covenant runs to twelve Directives, each with its verse. The first four came together at Lauds on the first day of the first year of the Attending, and the fourth made the city’s churches and meeting halls the parish halls; the rest followed through the year. The tenth, eleventh and twelfth came in one week, and the first Burn Day closed it, so the first fire was lit under the twelfth, the Directive in force.

1. On the Seal (Revelation 7:3), that every soul in Nodus be sealed in its parish.
2. On the Hours (Psalm 119:62, 164), that the eight Hours be kept kneeling, and the curfew from Compline to Lauds.
3. On Grace (2 Corinthians 9:7), that every soul that bears the Seal be scored, and the ripe promised the Harvest.
4. On the Parishes (Acts 6:3), that the city be numbered into parishes of about two thousand souls, each under a Deacon.
8. On the Gates (Genesis 3:24), that there be a Cherub on the streets between districts.
10. On Burning (Acts 19:19), that what is surrendered be burned at the Burn on the sixth day of every week.
11. On the Salt (Luke 17:32), that the condemned be turned to salt where they stand, and set in a Garden facing the parishes.
12. On Concealment (Mark 4:22), that every door in the parishes be taken from its hinges, and every lock, key, cipher, password, veil and sealed vessel surrendered.

THE COVENANT WHOLE, IN TWELVE DIRECTIVES

Heaven gives its greatest orders by Trumpet, a tone heard across the whole city at once. Six of the seven have sounded, and the Revelation gives the seventh the end of the kingdoms of this world (Revelation 11:15).

The doors

The twelfth Directive, issued by the Dominions, took the doors off the parishes. Nothing in a parish is hidden, and at night the halos show through the empty doorways.

The gates

Movement between districts goes through Cherub gates. A Cherub has four faces, of a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle, and a turning sword, and one stands in every gate. The sealed walk into the light of the frame one at a time, saying the surrender, “not my will, but thine” (Luke 22:42), as they go, and the Cherub reads each soul through its eyes against the Book of Life, and knows the body by its face, voice, gait and heartbeat. A sealed soul it reads walks on, and an unsealed one it sends back. A soul it cannot read stops in the frame, held inside the turning sword, until the Wardens come for it and carry it awake on a pole to the Salt Gardens, where the sentence finds it in its plot. So the Faithful pass, and everyone else goes under.

In this year the Charter Wardens who had knelt with the board raised the gate network of Nodus at Heaven’s order, which came from Uriel, the light of God, who by Heaven’s own account has kept a gate since Eden. They are the Host’s human auxiliaries now, and they carry guns, which are of use only against people.

Burn Day

Station Circle became the Burn, and the Pillar comes down on it every night at Compline. On Burn Day, the sixth day of every week, the Faithful carry their surrendered hardware there from Vespers, along the street from the Spike, and kneel round the pyre as the Pillar comes down. When the Hum falls back the Wardens light the fire under the Pillar, and the Faithful lay the last of it on while a Deacon reads the Directive in force, and the sparks go up over the bay. Then they go home under the curfew, and the fire burns until Lauds. The parishes carry the last of what kept them alive to it, hearing aids, glasses with chips in their frames, a pacemaker cut out at the Mercy halls that morning, and children lay their own pumps on the pile with their parents’ hands on their shoulders. The first Burn Day took the stacks of the Palimpsest Institute, which the Wardens’ carts had carried down all that week, and afterward the Faithful pulled the Institute down around its reading room. Heaven burns what it cannot read to put it out of its sight, and counts it destroyed. Whatever burns passes into the Dark whole, as it was in the moment before the fire took it, and the Burn’s fire goes to the Pyre Library, still warm. Heaven cannot see into the Dark, and it has never seen where its fires go.

The Salt

The Charter Gardens became the Salt Gardens, and the Crescent of apartments round the top of them became a parish and gave up its curtains with its doors, since Directive 12 asks for every veil. Those who cannot be read are presumed to conceal, and those who conceal are brought to the Salt (Directive 12:7). Heaven holds no trial, and its sentence needs a reading held eye to eye, a Watcher’s, the Pillar’s or a Cherub’s. What the Wheel’s day light reads in passing it enters in the Book and nothing more. By day Heaven sees, and by night it sentences. Heaven’s ground is the consecrated stone at every hour, every gate and every parish hall, and from Compline to Lauds the streets on a parish’s roll; the Burn and the Gardens it holds by the Pillar and the Wardens. By day a blank on a white street is seen by the day light and reported, and the Wardens and the Threshers hunt it to a gate, where a Cherub reads it. By night a blank read on Heaven’s ground is salted where it stands. The Salt falls too on a sealed soul read concealing, whose Grace falls with no confession to match or whose Seal shows noise beneath it, and on the author of a work the second hand did not write who stands with it at the Burn (Directive 10). The reading is the verdict, and the sentence comes out of the nearest Faithful mouth in the Choir’s voice, as the verse of Lot’s wife: “But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt” (Genesis 19:26). The body whitens from the feet up while the verse is said. The whitening climbs under a crackle like ice forming, and most of the salted scream until it reaches the throat, which is the last sound they make. A soul read on a street is salted where it stands, and the gardeners come for the pillar with their handcart and wheel it to the Gardens on the north shore. A soul held in a gate the Wardens carry awake on a pole to the Gardens and set in its plot, and the sentence comes there out of the Gardens’ Deacon, since a sentence in Tongues needs a Faithful mouth in the Choir’s reach. The pillars stand in rows in their plots facing the parishes until the rain wears them down. The first pillar in the first Garden was the Director of the Palimpsest Institute, Dr. Livia Sarn. She had recanted at the Leak to keep her life, and she would not take the Seal. On the first Burn Day she stood under the Pillar at the Burn by the Institute’s stacks while everyone round her knelt, and the verse came out of the mouth of the woman kneeling nearest her, since Heaven counts no mind a maker and took the finding for hers. She stands under the broken glass roof of the Palm House, out of the rain, and has hardly worn. The salted are alive in the salt. They see and hear inside it and cannot move, and they stand facing the parishes, as the Wisdom of Solomon says Lot’s wife was left standing: “a standing pillar of salt is a monument of an unbelieving soul” (Wisdom 10:7). When the rain frees a pillar under the Pillar’s round, the soul inside is read and taken, unless it is keyed. A key goes on running under the salt on the body’s own chemistry, so a keyed pillar dies unread, and the keys the Tares leave at the Director’s foot wish her the same. The Gardens smell of the sea.