The Thirty-Seventh Sermon

being the leaf the canon does not count

Attribution: Vivec, disputed. Some hands give it to the Sharmat. The temple gives it to no one.
Provenance: Recovered from the ash below Red Mountain. Unsigned, in a hand that changes its mind.
Condition: One leaf. The final movement struck in every copy but this.

Editor's note The canon numbers thirty-six. This leaf calls itself the thirty-seventh and asks to be counted anyway. The temple does not count it. We keep it because a line struck from the record is still a line, and because the ash kept a copy when the priests would not. Read it the way you would read any confession pulled from a fire. The hand is certain. The provenance is not. That difference is the whole sermon.

§ I · On Being Counted

Vivec said: you were counted at the door, Hortator, before your name had finished happening. Three names required a body. Yours was nearest, already on loan, the interest set in ash.

Do not mistake the loan for a gift. A gift is given once. This is given every morning and taken every night, and the day you are allowed to stand in is the difference between the two.

The Temple teaches that to be counted is to be loved, and the Temple is not wrong. It only leaves out who keeps the count, and what they mean to do with the sum.

§ II · The Provisional Hour

Everything given to you was given provisionally. You live in the Provisional House, and provisional is not an insult. It means the roof was raised in a hurry, by hands that did not expect to keep it and kept it anyway, out of spite and arithmetic.

You are permitted to love a provisional thing. You are not permitted to forget that it is provisional. The forgetting is the only sin the ledger punishes, because it is the only sin that asks the ledger to lie.

Walk as though the floor will hold. Someone is holding it. Their grip is a decision, renewed hourly. Call this the rent, Hortator, and pay it walking.

§ III · What the Sharmat Added

Here the hand changes. The Temple stops at the last canonical line and calls everything after it a forgery. The heretic does not stop.

The heretic says: if you were counted, you may count back. If a name moved into you without knocking, you owe it no better manners than it showed you.

This is the Sharmat's gloss, and the Sharmat is a liar, which does not make the gloss false. Listen, and do not believe, and do not pretend those are the same act.

§ IV · The Wanting

What was built was built by wanting. Not by love, which arrives late and takes the credit, but by wanting, which is older and has hands.

The Heart was not found. It was wanted until it appeared, the way every god appears: at the far end of a want so total that it grows a face and begins, in turn, to want you.

This is the engine under the Temple, under the Empire, under you. Belief is the name you give the wanting once you have decided to stop being ashamed of it.

§ V · What Was Struck

The last movement was struck from every copy but this one. We keep the strikes where we found them.

The thirty-seventh sermon ends by naming the hand that keeps the verdict, and the price of the mercy, and the single syllable that closes the door for good.

We cannot give you the name. The ash did not keep it, or the hand took it back before the ink set, or it was never there and the strike is the only honest line on the leaf. To witness costs nothing. To be entered in the record costs the rest.

The ending of the words is ALMSIVI.