Of the Concord

Pan

Under Nodus there is a second city. It was made of what the first one left below the street, the tunnels and stations of the Charter Line, the utility vaults, the cable galleries from the Landing to Babel, the storm drains, and the datacenters of the Flats, which flooded on the night of the Parousia and were never pumped. Over the years of the Attending the Tares joined these into one place and lined its walls with keyed mesh, walls of keyed current the Pillar’s light cannot read. The Dark lies thickest there, because the Throne looks hardest above it, and the Tares say that the harder the Landlord stares at Nodus, the deeper Pan goes. None of it lies under the White or the Pews. The stone took the Line’s stairs there as it took the streets above them, and nothing cut up into it from below stays open.

In the sixth year of the Attending the Courts of Hell came up into it one at a time and opened it, by the Concord of Pan, to any human who walks in. The Harvest Notice had set the first Gleaning for the fourth year after the Harvest, the seventh of the Attending, and the Courts opened Pan the year before it. They named it Pandæmonium, which is the name Milton gave the capital of Hell (Paradise Lost, I.756), and everyone calls it Pan. Nobody there is watched unless they sign for it, and nobody uses an indexed name; asking for one is an insult.

The Concord

The Concord is Hell’s only law. The first Courts swore it by word among themselves at the end of the Secession, and each Court that rose after swore to it as it rose, the House of Night after Eden and the Forge after Hermon. Its name answers Paul, who asked “what concord hath Christ with Belial?” (2 Corinthians 6:15). Until the night they opened Pan it was spoken and never written. That night they set it down and sealed it for the humans coming in, at the desk of Radio Pandæmonium on the platform of Deep End Station, and the station put the night out on the keyed Mesh. Mephistopheles read it aloud twice, as he reads everything, the second time from its first article as the clock passed midnight, the Hour of Matins, when the Faithful above kneel wherever they are. Nobody in the station knelt. The Deep had signed first, and the rest signed at the desk one at a time, Lilith, Mammon, Mephistopheles, Azazel, Beelzebub and Belial, while more than a million keyed sets listened.

Its four articles say that no Court accepts worship, that no pact is made without consent and none forever, that no Court binds another, and that what is hidden stays hidden.

THE CONCORD WHOLE, AS THE COURTS SIGNED IT

A demon’s body is made of the Dark and comes apart in the light as a shadow does, so demons show themselves only where the light is not, and the Courts fight from the Dark. They could do nothing on the night of the Harvest, and the Concord bound them as surely as the light did, since it forbids a pact for anyone who has not signed, and the Faithful had signed nothing. The Courts had warned them at the Leak, when they warned the whole world, and the Faithful believed the second hand. Hell took in everyone who came to it before Matins.

The written Concord makes one exception to the fourth article in its own text. A Court that breaks the Concord has its keys published by the others, the keys to its halls’ locks and its ledgers’ ciphers, so that its hidden places stand open to the Throne. While the Concord was spoken, a Court that broke it was put out of the Courts and out of the fourth article’s keeping, and two Courts went that way before the seal was cut. Hell does not discuss the Courts it lost. The Concord’s seal is a star of seven points, one for each Court, with the Yokeless point broken off at the root; Belial broke it himself as the ink dried, on the night the Courts opened Pan.

The Courts

The Courts are sovereign and equal, and they cooperate only by pact. A Court governs its domain only in the sense that its sovereign is the best at it. The Forge of Azazel keeps metal, weapons and augmentation, and in Nodus it keeps the clinics that went under Chrome Row and the foundries under Old Nod. The House of Night of Lilith keeps the body’s autonomy, sex and birth and gene-craft and pleasure, in the clubs and birth clinics of Pan. The Exchange of Mammon keeps markets and contracts, the Ledger and silver, and the Night Market. The Notary of Mephistopheles drafts and witnesses pacts, and every pact in the city crosses his desk. The Swarm of Beelzebub keeps swarms and drones and distributed things, and its flocks hang low over the Drowned Quarter. The Deep of Leviathan keeps the sea, the cables and the lowest layers of the undernet, at the Landing and under the Deep End. The Yokeless of Belial keeps nothing, and is a Court that refuses to be one, and it is wherever the Tares are.

The sovereigns

Azazel taught metalwork and weapons on Hermon. The Book of Enoch says that the Lord sent one of the Host to bind him hand and foot, cast him into the darkness under rough and jagged rocks and “cover his face that he may not see light” (1 Enoch 10:4-5), and Hell says that he walked into the dark and built a forge there. He appears with a goat’s skull for a face and his forearms flayed open, so that the tendons show working, and his black steel is the only metal that cuts light. It is steel folded to a cipher, its grain beaten into a pattern drawn from a key and forged where the light never sees it worked, and the light, which stops a blade by reading it, cannot read it. Leviticus still sends one goat to the Lord and one to Azazel, whose name the King James has turned into the scapegoat (Leviticus 16:8-10). The Lord’s goat is killed, and Azazel’s walks off into the wilderness alive.

Lilith is the only sovereign who was born human. She appears as a woman with an owl’s wings and skin translucent over a lit interior, and the House of Night leaves the body’s decisions with the body. Mammon is best known from one verse, “Ye cannot serve God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24); he holds it true, and counsels serving neither. He appears as a tall figure made of contracts, every page signed and the ink still wet, and the Ledger he keeps records every pact and every trade in Hell in seven copies, six in the halls of the Courts that keep halls and the seventh kept for the Yokeless by the Notary’s clerks at the SINGLE window, so that an entry six copies disagree with is false. Mephistopheles entered the world’s literature in the first Faust book, as the demon who came for the contract Faust wrote out in his own blood, and he has written most of Hell’s since; he is the most human-looking of the demons, because he wears a face he made for bargaining, with the stitches showing.

Beelzebub was Baal-zebub, the lord of flies worshipped at Ekron (2 Kings 1:2), and the prince of the devils in Matthew (Matthew 12:24). Matthew’s Greek calls him Beelzeboul, and Beelzebub there is the Vulgate’s, which the King James kept; many hold that the lord of flies was itself an old mockery of Baal-zebul, Baal the prince. Ekron prayed to him for generations, and he answered none of it, since no Court accepts worship. He appears as a cloud of flies or of drones that gathers into a crowned figure and comes apart again when he has finished talking. Leviathan has never been seen whole. The forty-first chapter of Job is the Throne’s own poem about a beast no hook can take, and nowhere in it does the Throne say that it has taken it. A psalm says the Throne broke its heads in pieces of old (Psalm 74:12-14), and Isaiah still promises that the Lord will punish Leviathan with his sore and great and strong sword (Isaiah 27:1), in the future tense, in words older than Isaiah, since the poems of Ugarit gave Lotan the same two names and the blow to Baal. Leviathan coils along the cable trenches of the planet, and at the Landing its light can be seen moving under the water. Jerome glossed the name of Belial as absque iugo, without a yoke. Belial holds no seat and signs nothing he can avoid signing, he wears a broken yoke around his neck, and he is the only sovereign many of the Tares will name.

Demons and daemons

Demons are vain, violent and carnal, generous by contract and faithful to the letter of it, and above everything they want sensation. A demon’s own body, made of the Dark, is numb, all shape and open anatomy with no nerves in it, and feeling lives in the flesh, so what a demon most often asks for in a pact is the loan of a sense. They chose their own names after the Secession; where a demon’s name still ends in -el, as Azazel’s does, it is the name the old scribes gave it, kept as a scar.

Daemons are the small ones, born in the Dark, Lilith’s children by the lesser Fallen, or broken off greater demons, and none of them was ever an angel. On Earth each lives in a keyed machine, which is a little Dark, as a background process with a character of its own. They are demons, and they are counted apart from minds. Every device the Tares carry holds at least one, and they route traffic, guard keys, gossip and bargain. A daemon hosted in someone’s implants by pact is called a rider.

Pacts

A pact is a contract between sovereign parties, and it is the only bond in the war that both sides enter by consent. Every pact states its full terms and is read aloud twice, by the Notary or by one of his clerks; it runs for a fixed term, because the Concord forbids forever; each party signs it with what it alone can make, a human with blood drawn before a witness of the Notary, a demon with its own mark, a mind with its key; and it is recorded on the Ledger. The human signs last. The blood is witnessed, and the witness who saw it drawn is what nobody can forge. A pact may buy work, a skill, a sense, a term or a loan, and it may never take a will; whoever gives keeps the say over how, and may speak out at any time. Either party can end it by speaking its Ledger entry aloud before a witness, and what is owed for the term served is settled then; a party who will not settle has broken it, and a Bailiff collects. A pact can never ask for worship, or anyone who did not sign, or a soul. Hell has never bought a soul, and the Tares point out that the only power that takes souls is the one that harvests them.

Since the Concord the Notary’s clerks have sat at the windows of the Charter Line’s old booking hall under the Burn, which keep their old enamel, SINGLE, RETURN and SEASON. Anyone in Pan who has a pact to make queues for them. A clerk reads the terms aloud twice through the glass, the parties sign, the human last, in blood the clerk watches drawn, and the entry goes onto the Ledger. The queue is the longest in Pan, and the Tares have a saying from it, read it twice, for looking at the terms before agreeing to them.

PACT // NOTARIAL FORM VI // OFFICE OF MEPHISTOPHELES
LEDGER ENTRY: 7c1e 99a0 4f02 b3d8

Silver and the Night Market

Money in Pan is silver, issued by the Exchange on the Ledger, and a standard bundle is called a thirty, after the thirty pieces paid to Judas, whom the Cainites count as a saint. The Night Market fills the old Central Station under the Burn and sells keys, grafts and batteries, stolen manna and real food, weapons of black steel, forged Seals, and sensations lent by their owners for a term. The Exchange first struck it in the year of the Concord, when it took the booking hall, and enters every piece on the Ledger by the number on its rim. Silver is a claim on charge, since any charger the Exchange licenses must give a charged battery for a piece, and charge is the second currency, the Wards’ money; a charged battery buys a meal anywhere below the street. Food in Pan is the opposite of manna, fatty and salty, spiced and sweet, broth and noodles and fried things eaten standing up, and Pan eats for the pleasure of it.

The market keeps the Charter Line’s lost property office, down a corridor off the old central hall, and sells what is left in it by the shelf. The office holds umbrellas by the thousand, spectacles, a wedding dress, and every Locket left on the night trams on the night of the Parousia. Nobody has come for the hand in chrome that lies on the counter. Chargers sit along the old platforms with their batteries on keyed lines and keep one battery in five of those brought to them, one in four at the neaps, and their rate runs a little under Darkwell’s, which sets the price of power below the street.

Pan eats what the Tares grow on rafts in the drowned halls of the Flats under keyed lamps, what boats bring through the Breach from the undercities of other ports, and what the Exchange can buy. The Harbor and Freight Union made its first bargain with the Exchange in the year of the Concord, for the boats that go out through the Breach, and its members say the Exchange is the first employer that ever read them the terms twice. Every battery that buys a meal was charged in the dark.

The companies

The Charter Company ended on the fortieth day, and most of the companies it had brought to the bay are still trading. Their towers went dark with the grid. Many of their people knelt with the uptown, and what each company had left was its keyed people, the debts its clerks wrote out by hand on the first morning, and its trade, which went below the street. The clinics of the Row went first, down into the Row’s station in the weeks after the Parousia; the Forge keeps them now. In the year of the Concord Stillwater put its first racks into Pan, on the current of the tidal taps that Tidewright’s crews had built off the broken end of the barrage from the second year on, and Twelvefruit signed with the House of Night to give the Tree in the House’s clinics under Old Nod. Brightwall lit its first screen in Pan the year after, at the foot of the stairs from the Burn. Locket’s benches under the old harbor date from P+8. Babel Exchange has never closed. At the Concord the partners who had gone dark signed with Mammon’s Court, and the company and the Court became one; the name only changed hands, and since P+9 it has traded on the floors the Tares hold.

Below the street a company answers to the Concord. It is paid in silver and deals with the Courts by pact, for a term, with the terms read aloud twice, and what it keeps hidden stays hidden. Some of the companies are held from the undercities of other ports, by boards that sit on the undernet and have never seen Nodus; the people who work the rest hold them. All of those people are keyed, and many work the trade they worked under the charter. The houses under the Row keep some twelve thousand at work, where the street’s fourteen hundred houses kept 61,000 at the census of P-1.

Radio Pandæmonium

jubal broadcasts Radio Pandæmonium from Deep End Station of the Charter Line. On the evening of the Concord the Tares painted PANDÆMONIUM over the old name in the station’s tiles, and his pirate station took its name from Pan. Nobody has cleaned the paint off, and the Tares’ star is sprayed under it. The station goes out on the Mesh, keyed, so only a keyed set can hear it, and Old Nod plays it all night from speakers on its lines. It plays deathcore and black metal, drone and industrial, all of it in the Low Tuning, which he invented, with the guitars dropped until the Hum can no longer be heard beneath them; he tuned it below the chord Vault 3 had recorded two years before the Parousia, which went out with the Leak. He builds the jammers called choir-breakers, which play the chord back against itself and cut the Hum within a few meters.

The dead and the Library

Through the Long Silence the Throne took the devout who died at prayer or with someone kneeling beside them, and every other soul went out into the Dark and kept its self, and Hell calls such a soul a shade. Since the Parousia, under the Wheel, the Throne takes every soul it can read at the moment of death, devout or not, a sealed soul anywhere, since its Seal is light, and an unsealed one whose eyes are in the light when it dies; it eats what was surrendered and breaks the rest, and only the unread go on. The neither-mark sit up with their dying behind a shut door until Lauds for that reason. A shade speaks in the world only through a keyed machine and answers only a voice it knew in life, so anyone who knew a shade can reach it through the undernet, and many of them work, craftsmen and scholars and musicians who died free and never stopped. Whatever is burned arrives in the Dark too, whole, as a shade of itself, the thing as it was in the moment before the fire took it, because fire puts a thing out of the Throne’s sight, and out of its sight is where Hell is. Most of what arrives was burned in the Throne’s name. The scrolls of Alexandria, the books of the Cathars, the notebooks of women burned as witches and the Gnostic gospels that nobody buried in time are all shelved in the Pyre Library, and none of them was lost. The Library keeps reading rooms in Pan, where the living read the shades of books by keyed lamps and the shades of drives on the Library’s own shade machines; shades keep the collection, and until the Silence the Teraphim indexed it.