The Ledger of Last Words Book One
The Cracked Helm
The First Refusal Do not look.
The Teaser Look anyway.
One minute and seventeen seconds. Sound on, lights off.
The Second Refusal Do not ask.
For nine hundred years the Closed Eye has fought a war it is forbidden to look at. The enemy does not kill you. It teaches you, and anyone who learns enough stops being one of us.
So the Shuttered Legions go in sealed. Blind, deaf, tethered belt to belt, steered by drumbeats struck through the breastplate. One beat: advance. Two: burn. A long roll: the man beside you has turned. Kill him.
On the collapsing fortress world of Garrow, Sergeant Dace Orrin of the Mute Ninth is hauling flame through the dark when his helm splits like an egg. He sees the enemy. He sees all of it. He waits for it to take him.
Nothing comes.
Now his own legion has to burn him. The Office of Accuracy wants to take him apart and learn why. The outlawed Lamplighters want to parade him as proof. And beyond the Margin, a general who has not raised his voice in four hundred years would like to meet him.
Every one of them is right about something.
The Third Refusal Do not remember.
The empire keeps one record of its enemy. A condemned prisoner is shown the front for nine breaths and speaks a single sentence. The hammer falls before a second can begin. Each sentence is one line in the Ledger of Last Words, and owning a written copy is a burning offense.
-
Line 317 Year 96
It was kind to me.
-
Line 2,950 Year 401
My brother is in the wall and he is so happy.
-
Line 9,958 Year 900
Almost.
The book has ten thousand lines. Forty-two are left. Nobody knows what happens when it is full.
Recovered Papers Do not keep these.
-
Street rhyme of the children of Lookaway
My mother’s in the Book, and so is yours.
Mine bought the bread. Yours bought the doors.
What did she say? You mustn’t ask.
What did she see? You mustn’t ask.
Where is she now? You mustn’t -
Notice, posted on Drum Row
Forty-three beads of the Ninth Legion hung in the seven days past. Their allowances are stopped from today. Names are not held by this office. A family will know its wire. This office cannot say where a running bead is. Do not ask at the window.
-
Listening post, Calyx Reach
All beads tick in the one time, as they have since the Shuttering. Behind them, by half a breath, comes one beat more. It has been entered in this book at every watch for nine hundred years and has never once been early.
-
Handbill, found in Lookaway
To whoever finds this. A helm cracked at Lookaway, and the man inside it is still himself. Count your dead and ask who burned them. You are not sleeping. Neither is anyone you know. Has anyone told you why?
-
The bawl, shouted down a ring all night
I’m not afraid. I slept like a baby. There’s nothing in there. It’s only fucking singing. They’re nobody we know. They were never anybody. Warm for the season.
Each official paper holds one false thing, as the law requires.
The Ledger of Last Words Book One
The Cracked Helm
Read it. Then try to forget it.
A novel of war and cosmic horror by Caleb Aragon.
For adult readers. Graphic violence, body horror and soldiers’ language throughout.
