Withheld · Hierophant

Everything in the archive passed through a hand before it reached me, and most of those hands were institutional. What follows are the items I know exist, or existed, and cannot show you. Some are sealed by people who had the right to seal them. Some were removed by people who did not. Some were never written down, and one of those is not missing at all, it is simply held in a form I am not permitted to keep.

I am aware that a catalogue of absences is a strange thing to publish. Consider it the honest version of an index.

Sealed at the witness's request

Sealed

Annex E. Testimony of Diver Cade, one paragraph

Office of the Navarch, Kalyon Hold · see The Reconciled Record

Every particular the thing in the trench produced as proof that it could see into a man has been traced to a document already held in that building. Every one but this. The Navarch granted the seal. The recorder noted, in the file, that the only claim which cannot be traced to a document is the only claim which cannot be read. I have tried three times to have it opened and I have stopped trying, because I have understood that I want it for the wrong reason.

Sealed

Annex D. Testimony of Diver Ferrun

Office of the Navarch, Kalyon Hold · see The Reconciled Record

Given the day after he asked to be excused. The recorder excluded it on the grounds that it was not germane and that it concerned his sister. I have no reason to doubt either statement and no intention of pursuing it.

Filed and not distributed

In a drawer

Black Shoals Compact, second subsurface assessment

Kalyon Hold · see Ambient

Correct, complete, honestly witnessed, and signed. The Commander read it in front of the diver, which she had never done, asked whether she would put her name to the last paragraph, and then folded it and put it in the drawer where she puts the things she is not ready to distribute. It is the definitive account of the most significant night in the history of the Glass Coast and it has been read by two people.

Private

The Keeper's second book

Varix, the Clock Hall · see The Remainder

Ninety-one readings and counting, taken at three fixed points daily, against instruction, by a man of seventy-one who was told by the Physical Bureau that the variance was attributable to the age of his eyes. The Republic does not know the book exists. He intends it for a successor who may not arrive. I would very much like to see it and I am not going to ask him for it.

Removed

Tribunal record, Sanctum wing, concerning a Choir child

The Citadel · referenced in The Sanctum Choir

Referenced by classification number in the Choir journals and absent from the Sanctum archive. A copy was obtained once by a Choir child through methods she declined to record. That copy is also gone.

Closed

Personnel file. One Vessel, dampened, reassigned

The Citadel, Vessel quarters · referenced in The Schism and Kael

Contents, in full, as recorded: reassigned to a provincial temple, resonance within normal parameters, placed in a labour cohort. The file was closed and the closure is the whole of it. There exists a second account, six sentences long, written by hand in a grey book by a man with ruined hands, and it is the only document in this archive I would call an act of love.

Not recovered

One observation log, unhoused Vessel, three hundred and fifty-one entries

The Inner Sanctum · see A Fair Copy

The crystal shard was recovered nine paces east of the dais. The book was not. What the archive holds is the last entries only, written on the floor in the author's own fluid, which dried brown and stayed legible. The three hundred entries that came before it exist in this archive as quotations inside their own final chapter, which is the strangest bibliographic fact I know.

Unnamed

The agronomist of the Inner Sanctum

The Citadel · see Soil Science

Thirty-one were found at the amplifiers along the north wall. The account we hold is hers and gives her trade, her husband, her nineteen years of teaching and the number of readings she took from the floor. It does not give her name and she is on no casualty list I have found. I have looked in four archives. She asked, in the document, that a thing be understood, and I am recording here that it was.

Never written down

Not written

The Long Canticle: the verses of Coldwater, Sunder and Bell

Ember Watch · three fires of forty-two

The Canticle is held distributively and is forbidden to write, so that it cannot be lost, contradicted or revised by anyone who was not there. Three fires sold their keeping and went. Their verses went with them. The poem is now recited with the gaps spoken aloud, so that the children learn where the holes are. A thing that cannot be written down cannot be repaired.

Not known

The name of the thing beneath

Unattributed

Four cultures have a word for the effect and none of them have a word for the cause. The Edenites call it the lithic parasite and are describing an organ. The Glass Coast called it the Accord and were describing a boundary. A keeper on the Varix plateau calls it a remainder and is describing an arithmetic. A man in the Ashlands called it the second one and was, as far as I can establish, the only person who has ever counted correctly.

Requested and not received

Withheld

Synod expedition report, the limestone shelf, south

The Verdant Synod · requested twice

Three went past the shelf toward the source of the nine-second rhythm. One came back. The Synod took her account over eleven days and has not released it, and she has not spoken publicly since, and she was seventeen. I am told she is well. I am told this by people who would tell me that regardless.

Redacted

The programme names

Pre-Catastrophe · every surviving copy

Three countermeasures were run in parallel by a world that no longer exists. The descendants of all three are still walking around and only one of them suspects it. Wherever the programmes are referenced the designations have been struck through, in the same hand, in documents held by institutions that have never spoken to one another. I do not have an explanation for that and I have stopped offering the one I had.