‘And know this, my knights, my faithful: you will face not only the Archenemy beyond, but the Archenemy within. The resting place of holy martyrs may be defiled without thieves, by those who keep the lamps lit, and who sing the hymns, and who bless the coming and going of martyrs. You who are the last defense of martyrs must keep to keen courage, and a keener blade, and be watchful, and be wary, for the foes of the God Emperor are arrayed against you.’
Kessa’s tavern was as it often was at the evening hour, the first Whelvertail commonfolk to escape their day shifts settled into nooks and corners as nightshift haulers finished their drinks or meals, made their payments, and plodded out to their obligations. Glevedan felt there was a sort of subdued atmosphere about the place though. Were the clerks sore-wristed from signing? The stevedores sore-shouldered from lifting, and the shrine-runners sore-kneed from running? Or was this the lethargy of the folk who had spent all the prior evening enjoying the of the Circle Benevolent?
Perhaps, he hoped, it was merely his nerves, simple projection. Perhaps these were only tired people drinking what they could afford, and like Glevedan, becoming less aware of whatever gripped their city with varying success.
Glevedan had taken their usual table. Habit had made a small geography of the place: Kessa’s route between stoves and bar, where she could make her stops to replenish their libations or scold Rill for off-colour commentary. Rill’s preferred seat under the lamp, for reading, and Nyme’s with a view of the door, in case she needed to duck out of sight of choirmaster come to engage in the same vices she did. Even the spot near the door, where the floorboards warped and bowed where on rainy days (which were not the exception) men paused to shake off rain and leave a little of the outside on Kessa’s floor.
Jaro paused there now, on that darkened patch. He seemed to regard the tavern like a fellow who was owed a punch in the face for some matter of bar room honor, or else the way one scans a busy avenue for groundcars or carriages before crossing. He appeared to shake his head at something, tucked his cap in his coat, and started toward Glevedan’s table.
Kessa saw Jaro, and lifted her chin just once in acknowledgement. She did not wave, nor offer any kind words of greeting or invitation, but then she never did.
Jaro crossed the room, boots leaving small wet marks on the floorboards. He settled uncomfortably into his usual seat, trying on something approximating a grin for Glevedan, though it had little of his usual good humour.
‘Jaro, man, you look like you’re in withdrawals. Or like you owe someone money. Well, you do, but you know what I mean.’
Jaro’s mouth moved, trying to decide on a reply or an unconvincing smile, and then resolved to pursue neither. He stared for a long moment at the tabletop, until Kessa came by, plunking down two cups without invitation. She flicked Glevedan’s ear before hurrying to attend another table, one of her small tyrannies to remind them that under this roof was domain.
Jaro made an appreciative grunt, and lifted his cup to drink deeply. He winced at the steaming brew, but gulped it down until the tension in his shoulders eased back a fraction.
Glevedan waited. Though almost always terribly impatient as a class of tradesmen, clerks learned patience nonetheless, and Glevedan afforded his friend some small token amount of it. In that short span, Rill materialized, returned from his trip to the outhouse in the back alley with a lit lho stick between his lips. He thumped down into his own chair, puffed out a billowing cloud of heady smoke, and frowned.
‘Who died?’ asked Rill.
At last Jaro said, quietly, ‘One of the Gate Four chaps, from the fraternities. They said they had some well-off up-district client, wanted to hire some lads for a private business and they were paying good coin.’
Rill’s eyebrows rose. ‘Look at you,’ he said, trying at amusement. ‘Proper patronage.’
Jaro gave him a flat look, worry or fear or some unpleasant alchemical combination of the two.
‘They had a cargo. Lightburn Estate, that old one out by the Shambles, aye? But it were stamped right, sealed up, even had Prefecture papers.’
Glevedan kept his face still. It was, among the involved at the Ossuary of Viella Twice-Sainted, an open secret that the fraternities who worked Gate Four engaged in a broad range of business one one might generously attribute to the work of moving and hauling. An open secret that any number of the Throne-bonded guilds and union halls were in certain ways, simply masks to provide cover and legitimacy to the cartels which sprang up in Selpetua, like they did anywhere people congregated in great numbers, with great needs.
‘What was it,’ Glevedan asked, ‘as declared on the bill?’
Jaro exhaled through his nose. ‘Big crates,’ he said. ‘Four of ‘em. Marble statuary, by the writ.’
Rill made a small appreciative sound despite himself. The revels had made such words fashionable; and they spoke to excess, even here in Kessa’s sodden tavern.
‘Up the hill?’ Glevedan asked.
‘Up the hill,’ Jaro said. ‘Shriner districts. Big property over by Lanterre Minoris. Real big house, proper grand. Didn’t ask whose it were.’
Jaro’s gaze turned to the tabletop, and he set his drink down and braced his hands against the wood, as if it might offer some fortitude he lacked. He swallowed once.
‘The handlers at receiving,’ he said. ‘Not fraternity lads. No fish-stink or tar. Never seen the like. They had masks, like the revelers, fine coats, real fine. You wouldn’t know one from another. They even the same.’
Rill tried to take it somewhere ordinary. ‘Servitors,’ he said. ‘Some expatriate grandee from Galanyre, buying up the old City of Bones in the hope they can send their spawn home to Galanyre in a generation with a little bit of the glory of the saints rubbed off on them. That’s nothing new.’
Jaro shook his head. ‘Maybe,’ he said, though he spoke the word like a denial. ‘But they’d be the most expensive servitors in Selpetua. You ever known the Martians to sell a machine man that doesn’t leak oil and unguent like it’s properly pissing itself?’
Glevedan knew what he meant. Hecate was an oddity among the myriad worlds of the Imperium, in that circumstances in the Aphelion subsector conspired to place great constraints on the productivity of its Martian enclaves, and thus servitor labor was rarely spared for such frivolities as housekeeping for the wealthy. Why make a deal with the Martians, who would always find a way to contract you into a losing arrangement, when a city like Selpetua had no shortage of desperate poor? Where servitors did find use, it was almost always in circumstances of necessity, not vanity.
Jaro turned one of his palms up and jabbed at it with the fingers of his other hand, as if indicating something. ‘I point to where they sign on the docket, aye? They all step up at once. Every one of them. Same half-step. Same dip in the shoulder. They didn’t say a word the whole time.’
Glevedan could picture it. He did not have to work hard, for the image aligned too easily with what he had seen the night prior, when those masked things brought the , the Martyr Unbidden, before the street revellers.
‘And they took the delivery?’ Glevedan asked.
‘They took it,’ Jaro replied gruffly. ‘Handled the crates onto their own carts like they didn’t weigh a thing, and let me tell you, Glev, they were drogging ’
It seemed to Glevedan like Jaro wanted to say more, but something was holding him back. Rill, ever the vanguard of impropriety, pushed forward.
‘You’ve done odd jobs before for your , though. Never seen you jumbled like this, Jaro.’ Rill observed, waving the dwindling lho stick as if to emphasize his words. ‘Stop pissing about it and tell us what got you so spooked.’
‘When we…’ Jaro began, interrupting himself to trail off into a momentary silence, ‘...when I had hands on the cargo… it was , Rill. I don’t mean rain-cold, or river-cold. I mean a bloody chill right through the wood of the crate. The sort of cold you feel in a bone vault when you’ve been a big karking idiot and let your lamp burn out, and not worn your good coat. I leaned in to shift one of them at the end there, and I swear to the Throne of Terra, it sucked the warmth right out of me. I was shivering, man. Like sepulchre stone.’
The tavern’s noise carried on around them - laughter, a chair scraping, someone coughing wetly into a sleeve - but their table had gone oddly still. might as well have been synonymous with the foundations of Selpetua. Every person in the tavern lived, ultimately, above vast catacomb chambers of the dead they had no desire to picture.
Rill cleared his throat and kept his tone careful. ‘Marks?’ he queried. ‘Anything besides the Prefecture papers? A badge on your servitor men?, maybe?’
‘What does it matter?’ interjected Glevedan, with a faint desperation in his voice, as if they might put the matter to rest and resume their regularly-scheduled troubles, rather than whatever this was.
‘Just on the gates, where we delivered. Bit of ironwork decoration.’ Jaro traced shapes in the air with one finger, unwilling to put them to the tabletop. ‘Three ovals, like faces with the features rubbed out. Bit like those salon bills of yours, Rill. But that place was old, old construction. Old iron.’
Glevedan felt, absurdly, the folded carbon in his pocket shift against his ribs as though it had found a counterpart in conspiracy. And then, more absurdly, found himself patting his breast down, reaffirming no, there was no carbon, because he had left it under his loose floorboard. Throne, what was happening to him? Perhaps, he resolved, the events of the week had taken a greater toll on his psyche than he previously assessed.
Jaro hesitated at something unseen or unspoken again. His eyes went to Glevedan’s, then away.
‘You know this stuff better than me, Glev. I saw the full papers, okay? ’ he said. ‘And then–’ His mouth tightened on the last word. ‘’
Rill did not manage a comment at that. He only sat with his lips slightly parted, smoke hanging limply at a lazy angle.
‘Deconsecrated,’ Glevedan repeated, and heard how thin his own voice had become.
Jaro nodded once, sharp and unhappy.
In the city of Selpetua, a great many things were consecrated. Built upon the final resting place of uncountable blessed dead from a forgotten age, it was the foremost shrine city on the foremost shrineworld in the subsector. One could not so much as repave a road, or raise a new warehouse without being mired in months or years of administrative delay as the Most Holy Flagstones of Saint Something-or-Other were meticulously removed, counted, blessed and replaced elsewhere, or put up in some minor shrine for those who might pay a few crowns to kiss a rock supposedly trod upon by the most beloved of the God Emperor.
Very few things, however, might be described as , and for the very good reason that the word held a unique definition on Selpetua.
‘Deconsecrated,’ Glevedan said, again, with the same thin pronouncement of foreboding. ‘Jaro, what in the name of Holy Terra did you do?’
Jaro’s head snapped up at that. For a moment, Glevedan saw the embers of anger in his expression, quick and defensive.
‘What I did?’ Jaro demanded. ‘I hauled what the paper said to haul, where it said to haul it. That’s all. That’s all I Don't you throw this back in my face, Glev.’
Glevedan fought to hold his gaze. It was not so much anger with Jaro as an admixture of disbelief and dread, if not for his friend than for whatever foulness he was increasingly certain had taken root in his city.
‘I’m not putting it on you,’ he said, and forced his voice to steady. ‘But that word is loaded. It’s a church designation, Jaro. It doesn’t mean any old bit of saint-glass or stonework nobody wants anymore.’
Rill’s lho had burned down to a bent stump between his fingers. He was frowning at it, as if by doing so it had somehow betrayed him.
‘Someone forgot to slap it with the right oils and say the right prayers, so what? Hardly the first cartel job to disappoint the church.’ Rill mused, quietly.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
‘It means the sanctity has been stripped away,’ Glevedan corrected, and his tone made it clear the distinction mattered. ‘With full intention.’
‘You’re telling me there’s an office in this city that unblesses things?’ Rill asked, managing a snort, though it did little to restore levity.
‘There are three,’ Glevedan replied, annoyed. ‘But that’s not what I mean. It is a designation for… when a relic is found false, when remains are… corrupted. For when they must tidy away a shame.’
Silence fell again on the three of them, and stayed much longer than before.
‘The Archenemy shall find no purchase here, for Selpetua belongs to the blessed dead.’ Rill intoned, quoting the scripture.
‘I think,’ said Glevedan, rising from his seat after another pause, ‘I’ve had quite enough to drink this evening.’
Jaro flinched. ‘Glev, I didn’t mean to-’
‘It’s nothing,’ Glevedan interrupted. He stood fully, and gathered up his coat, and the act seemed to draw a line under the conversation. ‘Go home. Don’t take any more odd jobs. Don’t talk about anyone from Gate Four, and by the Throne, certainly do not do it here. Keep your head down.’
Jaro stared at him, and Glevedan could see the pride and fear wrestling there. At last, Jaro nodded once, sharp.
‘You’ll get yourself in trouble,’ Rill said, though Glevedan did not in that moment understand that Rill, ever the observant one, saw in his expression a resolution even Glevedan did not yet detect in himself.
Glevedan left Kessa’s place with the stale taste of lho smoke in his mouth and the word lodged behind his teeth.
The lane outside was wet and narrow; the tenements pressed in with their mean new brickwork, and the older masonry beyond them watched with the patient indifference of saints and stones. Somewhere uphill, in the direction of the shriner districts, a soft red glow held under the cloud cover as the revelers lit the night in crimson.
As he walked, Glevedan tried, with true earnestness, to put the matter away. He told himself that dockmen embellished things. He told himself that a wary cartel underboss trying to keep prying eyes off contraband cargo might intentionally mislabel wares to avoid scrutiny. He told himself Jaro might have seized on the word he only half-understood the implications of because it frightened him, and therefore felt explanatory. He told himself a dozen things.
None of them stuck.
At home - as much as his small, rented room could be called such - he barred the door with its iron latch and set his coat on the peg. His hands moved through their habitual orderliness: lamp, washbasin, boots aligned by the door. The order did not soothe him.
He sat on the edge of his bed and listened to the building creak, to the water in aging pipes, to distant sounds from the city. Selpetua had always seemed to welcome the night with eager placidity, happy to find quiet, and yet as of late, the nights seemed busier than the days.
He did not sleep. When sleep came near, his mind presented him with paperwork instead: a printed manifest, a scrawled signature, the dull confidence of a stamped seal of authority. He saw rows of filing cabinets, and cloaked men rooting through them, taking things or else replacing them. It was a sort of half-sleep dream fugue by which his mind played out all the concerns it had gathered up in the preceding days, and he did not care for it.
By the time the sun crept back to light the dawn sky the color of old parchment, Glevedan had ceased pretending he had a choice in the matter. The choice had been made by his nature. He had been trained, from his apprenticeship, to pursue irregularities until they were no longer irregular.
It was his day off, the first in a fortnight.
The city had granted him that small mercy with the expectation he would use it to become harmless again.
He dressed anyway.
He chose his better shirt, the one that made him look respectable rather than merely employed. He smoothed his cuffs, checked his pockets twice. He left his loose floorboard undisturbed, for there was no need to carry yesterday’s sins into today’s trouble.
He went out.
Morning in Whelvertail was all damp stone and struggling breath. The district reeked of river water, and of fat from the great sea beasts that gave Whelvertail its name, and of old wood swollen with rain. People moved with collars up and eyes down. A few salon bills remained pasted to corners and posts, bright against the soot-dark grime that asserted itself over most any surface exposed to open air.
Glevedan tried not to look as he passed, rubbing two crowns together in his pocket in anticipation of the street car fares to go over to the next district.
The Basilica of Viella Twice-Sainted did not sit in Whelvertail. It stood above it, in the shriner districts, where the stones were even older, the streets more grand, and the air laden more with incense than rotting sea life and industrial chemicals. Its towers were not the tallest in Selpetua - there were basilica that made this one look modest - but its importance lay in its function: it was an administrative shrine as much as a devotional one, where relics were assessed, verified, and in rare cases quietly disavowed.
On the north side of the basilica, half-hidden behind a colonnade, a door of dark wood bore a small metal plaque identifying it as the portal to the Annex of Abjuration and Reconciliation. Petitions by appointment. No pilgrim access.
Glevedan stood staring at it just long enough that he began to feel foolish, and then pushed it open.
Inside, the air was cool and dry, maintained by ancient vents that rattled faintly with the work of moving atmosphere through the ancient space. The room was a waiting area, thronged with a handful of Ecclesiarchy men lounging on hard benches or conversing quietly in corners as they waited to be attended to by the clerks of the Annex. More than a few of them clutched at bundles, or small chests or folios, and bore the particular look of those bringing items to pawn whose legitimacy may be cast into doubt. Hope, fear, resentment, all at once.
To Glevedan’s right, at a small desk, a clerk in black robes scratched away at a parchment without looking up. A chain of heavy-looking keys drooped around his neck, and a series of small bronze stamps much like Glevedan’s own sat on the desk, handles worn smooth by use.
Glevedan approached and waited until the clerk’s pen paused of its own accord. For a moment, the man did not look up at all, as if by disregard he might banish the petitioners who interrupted his day. Then his eyes rose to Glevedan’s face, took in the cut of his coat, the neatness of his collar, the bearing of him.
‘Petition?’ the clerk asked, in a voice as dry as the corridor.
‘Verification of records for consignment,’ Glevedan replied, and produced his Officio token - a little stamped disc of base metal that did not confer power so much as it indicated which powers precisely Glevedan was beholden to by his duties. ‘Rubricator Bulk, Ossuary Consignment.’
The clerk’s expression altered by a fraction. Clerks recognized other clerks the way dogs recognised kin: suspiciously, but with a begrudging understanding.
‘Verification of what?’
Glevedan kept his tone mild. Mildness would inspire fewer questions. ‘A consignment to the crownworld,’ he lied. ‘Relics for a new shrine in Lanterre, I believe.
The clerk’s pen hovered. The man seemed to consider, and then accept Glevedan’s explanation. He reached under his desk and produced a small card, sliding it toward Glevedan.
‘Fill,’ he said. ‘Name, function, what you are asking to see. Then wait.
Gleveden took up a waiting pen and quickly scrawled into the blanks on the card. Nothing particularly unusual, except that the lot numbers he listed belonged to a shipment he knew for a fact had no issues, and was not in question. The clerk’s mouth twitched as Glevedan returned the card, and he half-rose to beckon a junior functionary over. Keys clanking around his neck, the clerk sidled off to a side door and disappeared as the junior took watch over his desk.
Glevedan sat on a bench among the petitioners, trying to keep his posture relaxed. Across from him, a woman clutched a chipped saint’s bust wrapped in cloth and stared at the closed side door with a kind of devotional hatred, taking Glevedan for some upstart line-jumper. Two benches down, a man with a bandaged hand was whispering prayers under his breath between uneasy glances at the other clerks in the room.
Time passed in the annex the way it passed in all the most sacred places of Selpetua: slowly, with the deliberate if impassive cruelty of bureaucracy.
After what felt like an age, but was not even half an hour by the estimation of the drab timepiece on the wall, the jingle of keys signalled the clerk’s return.
‘Bulk,’ he said.
Glevedan rose.
The clerk led him down the same side corridor to a small records room. It was not grand, but rather a bleak stone affair, struggling ventilation systems bolted to ancient stone to wage eternal war against that ageless enemy of paper records and perpetual companion of all in Selpetua, the damp. Shelves of ledgers and folios filled the walls; a table stood in the center beneath a rack of flickering phosphor lamps that cast the chamber in a pale light.
The clerk set a sand-glass on the table and turned it. Fine grains began to fall at a steady pace.
‘You have half an hour,’ the clerk said. ‘You may consult the manifest register and the disposition index. You may not remove documents. You may not copy seals. You may not-’ His eyes narrowed. ‘-be clever. You will be searched upon departure.’
‘I wouldn’t dare, ser.’ Glevedan said.
The clerk gave him a look that suggested he did not share that confidence. Then, without further ceremony, he left, the keys jangling softly, the door clicking shut behind him.
Alone, Glevedan did not move at once. He stood and listened.
Nothing. Only the faint rattle of the vents, and the voltaic hum of the lights.
He approached the shelves with the careful respect one gave to anything that might upend their lives catastrophically.
He started with the register, an immense book kept for the Annex’s conscience as much as its liabilities. Glevedan set it out on the table and opened the battered tome to its most recent month.
Entries marched down the page in terse lines: date, object class, designation, authorizing office, disposition, on and on. Some ended with a note - The handwriting varied. Some clerks wrote in small, pious script. Some wrote as if they merely wanted to end the day and get to their drinking.
Glevedan scanned for first.
There were not many.
That was the thing, though, he felt. Damn near everything in Selpetua was consecrated. It would rarely, if ever, admit to stripping that sanctity away.
He found a cluster of entries close together - three in the span of two days. All ‘ecclesiastical material.’ All deconsecrated. All disposed by
He studied the column for authorization. It was the same on all three entries. A name, unremarkable to Glevedan.
Leaving the register on the table, he rose to retrieve the disposition index from its solitary place of privilege on another one of the shelves. This was a thinner volume, arranged by codes and destinations. It had the tone of a shipping office record, stripped of any devotional or decorative diction or declaration regarding its contents. The church was pious, but it was also practical.
He ran his finger down the list of codes until he found the one written beside the entries of Urdis Hecuba in the register. Repeating the numbers to himself, he paged through the index until he reached the rubric in question.
And there it was. It was almost offensive, how little effort had been made to hide the record. Glevedan frowned, and returned his attention to the first tome of records, the register.
He paged through it, pausing to reference index codes and cross reference against the formatting of the register, which were mismatched for no reason except clerical tradition set in stone long before he was ever born. After some minutes of this, sand still trickling through the hourglass, he found the entry he sought.
His skin prickled. Jaro had no idea what he had gotten up to.
It was an entry for the disinterment of corpses. Lightburn Estate had, at some point in its past, been the dwelling of some well-off church grandee, or else aristos and their ilk. But at some point in the last centuries, it had been abandoned, and then turned by necessity into yet another place to store the remains of Selpetua’s honored dead. It was not uncommon for blessed bones to be moved, stored, shuffled between one crypt and the next as the city undertook its work of cataloging and consecration and worship of the Emperor’s beloved martyrs. But that was a church affair, or sometimes the Departmento Munitorum, for more recent war dead. Never a private consignment, not even when some offworld widow sought to recover the remains of a husband or brother or son, slain in service of the Astra Militarum.
Glevedan studied the entry again, and then a third time, letting it etch itself into memory. He could not write it down. The annex clerk had forbidden copying, and Glevedan maintained the uneasy sense of observation he had felt since he made the first carbon copy, days before.
He looked again at the index, and caught something. Any layman might miss it, even a journeyman clerk. But Glevedan saw the disturbance, the irregularity in the index’s binding. A faint fray where the fibers holding parchment to spine had been cut and rethreaded to conceal the fact that someone had removed a great many pages from the tome.
He peered at the page numbers. The numbering did not skip or miscount.
But it was plain as day to Glevedan. Several folios worth of pages were missing, cleanly removed, and their removal disguised.
He sat very still, and felt his guts churn with unease.
One bad bit of paperwork at the officio, he might explain away. One odd story from the coworker he drank with, still nothing. But all the pieces arrayed before him, Glevedan felt, conspired to something else, something more alarming. This had none of the hallmarks of a crude cartel coverup. The dockmen were happy to pay their bribes or strong arm the rare clerk who could not be bribed, but they were hardly sophisticated. Common smugglers, not heretics or desecrators of holy relics.
He looked again at the sand-glass.
The lower bulb was over half full. Time had been falling away while he poured over ledgers.
Glevedan replaced the register in its place on the shelf with the care one affords a loaded pistol. He slid the index volume back into its place too. In a moment of inspired tradecraft he felt both proud and ashamed of, he located the records he had told the clerk he sought, and shuffled the order of the parchment in the folios, as if by the hand of a careless clerk, before leaving it haphazardly arrayed on the inspection table.
He had just turned back to the door when it clicked open and the black-robed man stepped in. His eyes went straight to the sand-glass, and then Glevedan, and then the parchment-strewn table, which caused his lips to curl in disgust.
‘Half an hour,’ he said. ‘Did you find what you needed?’
Glevedan managed a small nod, and a curt, professional smile. His voice, when it came, sounded ordinary enough. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I confirmed what I needed.’
The man watched him for a long moment, perhaps hoping for more - confession, panic, gratitude. Clerks enjoyed those small victories over their fellow bureaucrats.
Glevedan gave him nothing.
He bowed his head slightly - correct, respectful - and left the records room.
In the foyer, petitioners still sat disgruntled with their parcels, waiting to learn if family heirlooms or minor templum relics might be declared holy or fraudulent. The clerk returned to his desk and his pen, banishing the junior functionary to other errands. The Annex of Abjuration and Reconciliation continued the business of the day.
Outside, Selpetua carried on beneath its dreary sky. Pilgrims - the rare few there for piety, and not parties - knelt. Porters swore. Banners fluttered. The city looked pious, or pious as it ever could. It looked busy. Normal even, if you wished it hard enough.
Glevedan walked back down toward the trams to Whelvertail with a singular name lodged in his mind, and thoughts of missing records setting his imagination to work.
And beneath it all, the quiet implication of that word, that designation: The thing you call a holy thing when you have reason to suspect it is no longer holy, or because it has been made so.
A street car ride later and long walk later, he reached his lodging and barred the door.
Only then did he take out his own plain notebook - not a carbon copy or official register that might matter to anyone but him - and write down what he recalled from the records room of the Annex of Abjuration and Reconciliation.
When he finished, he set his pen down, and stared.
From somewhere beyond the walls of his apartment drifted a fragment of a tune. It might have been the hymns of overeager choristers. It might have been the revellers getting an early start on the evening’s so-called devotions.
Glevedan did not hum along to it.
