It was on the thirteenth day of Secundus, in the third quarter of the fiscal annum, that Junior Lexographer Erasmus Vohl discovered the invitation among his docket of supply requisitions.

The morning had begun, as all his mornings began, with the ritual cleansing of his workstation. He made three passes with the sanctified cloth, uttered one prayer to the God-Emperor for clarity of thought, and one prayer to the Machine God for the proper function of his cipher-slate. Then, he retrieved his docket from the pneumatic tube, carefully broke the wax seal, and arranged the documents in order of filing priority.

Today’s allotment was typical: forty-seven transfer requisitions, each requiring verification, annotation, and countersignature before forwarding to Secondary Processing. Vohl had been processing transfer requisitions for the 217th Valhallan Infantry for nine years, four months, and sixteen days. The 217th was stationed somewhere in the Segmentum Ultima, though the exact coordinates were classified above his clearance level, as was appropriate for a forward combat regiment. They required regular resupply, and it was Vohl’s sacred duty to ensure those supplies were properly documented, and those documents properly archived.

Vohl adjusted his spectacles – augmetic lenses really, though he preferred the archaic term – and began with Requisition 8840-Theta: a request for fifteen thousand ration packs, standard infantry pattern, each one enough to keep a soldier of the Militarum fed for a year. They were to be delivered to coordinates that, according to his star charts, corresponded to a region of empty space some forty light-years beyond the Pale Stars.

He checked the authorisation codes against the master ledger (all in order, as they always were). He verified the supply chain documentation (complete, as always). He cross-referenced the delivery manifest with the regimental roster (more than ten thousand men and women serving the Emperor in the far reaches of the Imperium).

Then, with his stylus, he made the necessary corrections. The ration quantity should be fourteen thousand, eight hundred and forty-seven, as he had calculated the proper wastage coefficients years ago, accounting for the steady attrition that forward regiments inevitably suffered. The coordinates needed adjustment by three degrees; stellar drift, he noted in the margin, as he always did. The delivery date was moved forward by six weeks to account for warp translation times.

These adjustments were necessary. They ensured efficiency, and meant that when the supplies arrived (as they surely would, as they surely must) they would arrive in the correct quantities, at the correct times, to the correct coordinates. The Administratum was the backbone of the Imperium. Without proper documentation, without meticulous record-keeping, the great machine would grind to a halt. Men would starve, regiments would fall, and entire worlds would be lost.

Vohl took pride in his work. It mattered.

By the third hour of his shift, he had processed twelve requisitions. By the fifth hour, twenty-six. His hand moved with the practiced efficiency of long repetition: check, verify, annotate, sign, seal. The documents formed neat stacks on either side of his desk, processed on the left mirrored by pending on the right. The pending stack steadily shrank but never vanished entirely. The processed stack grew but was always taken away before it risked toppling. Together, they existed in a state of perfect equilibrium, like a mathematical constant, immutable and eternal.

It was during the processing of Requisition 8855-Gamma (a request for replacement lasgun power packs, fifteen thousand containers, to be delivered to the same empty coordinates) that he noticed the card.

It lay between pages seven and eight of the requisition form, tucked in where the supply authorisation should have been. The authorisation was still there, on page seven, exactly where it should be. The card was simply additional.

The vellum was of excellent quality, he noted, running a thin finger across its surface. Too excellent, really, for official correspondence. The script was hand-lettered in a style he recognised from historical missals in the Archive’s restricted collection.

The Mummers of the Tertiary Enclave Request the Honour of Your Attendance at a Revival Performance of ‘The Celestial Harlequinade: A Masque in Eight Tableaux’
The Orpheum Theatre, Merchantman’s Quarter
Sixthday, at the Nineteenth Hour

Vohl read it three times, his mind automatically cataloguing irregularities. There were no bureau stamps, nor reference codes, nor filing designations. The paper bore a faint watermark he couldn’t quite make out. As it caught the light it might have been a mask, or perhaps a star, or perhaps both.

He had never heard of the Orpheum Theatre. The Merchantman’s Quarter was, he believed, somewhere in the eastern districts, though he had never had occasion to visit. His entire life was contained within a triangle formed by his quarters, the transit station, and Sub-Level Gamma of the Eastern Archive. Beyond that triangle lay a city he knew only from maps and administrative boundaries.

The invitation bore no signature, no seal of authenticity. It was, he thought, highly irregular. He knew that he should report it to the Security Overseer, but instead he set it aside and returned to his work.

Requisition 8855-Gamma required the usual corrections. He worked steadily through the afternoon, through the midday prayer-bell, through the afternoon nutrition break (which he took at his desk, as always, consuming his ration bar while reviewing stellar coordinates). By the time the shift-klaxons sounded, he had processed thirty-nine requisitions.

Eight remained. There were always eight remaining at the end of the day. Tomorrow there would be forty-seven again. The numbers never changed.

Vohl gathered his things, packing away his cipher-slate, his stylus case, his devotional chaplet in his satchel, and made his way through the labyrinthine corridors toward the transit-lifts. It was only when he reached his meagre quarters that he discovered the invitation once more. It had somehow found its way into his satchel, tucked between the pages of his prayer book.

He held it up to the glow of his desk lamp. The watermark was clearer now, definitely a mask, theatrical and grinning. Or perhaps it was a star. The design seemed to shift with the light.

Curious, he thought, but said nothing aloud. He placed the invitation on his desk, said his evening devotions, and retired to sleep.

In his dreams, he continued to process requisitions, his stylus moving across forms that stretched into infinity. Somewhere in the distance, he could hear music, and laughter, and the sound of bells.

— =][= —

Sixthday arrived with the same grey regularity as any other day. Vohl rose at the fifth hour, performed his ablutions, consumed his morning ration, and reported to Sub-Level Gamma by the sixth. His docket contained forty-seven requisitions, as always. He began processing them in order of priority, as always.

Throughout his morning labours, his mind kept returning to the invitation. It sat in his satchel throughout the shift, a small weight that seemed heavier than it should be. During the midday prayer-bell, instead of beginning his devotions immediately, he found himself retrieving the card and studying it once more.

Sixthday, at the Nineteenth Hour.

That was today, seven hours from now.

He had never attended a theatrical performance before. Attendance at such diversions required recreational chits, which required authorisation from the Bureau of Recreational Allowances, which in turn required a petition that took an average of eighteen months to process. His last petition, which he had submitted three years ago, had been denied on grounds of “insufficient seniority.” He hadn’t tried since.

Despite that, here was an invitation, seemingly addressed to no one and to him alone, found in the middle of his paperwork like a misplaced decimal point. The abnormality of it all weighed on his mind something like guilt.

Vohl was not, by nature, a man given to spontaneity. His life was one of forms and procedures, of documented decisions and proper channels. However he was also, in his own small way, curious. The Administratum valued curiosity, to a certain extent, providing that curiosity was carefully controlled, and manifested as thoroughness in one’s duties. This invitation was, technically, an irregularity that he felt should be investigated.

He filed the justification away in his mind, knowing it for the rationalisation it was, and completed his shift. When the klaxons sounded, he gathered his things and, instead of boarding his usual transit-car toward his quarters, consulted a map terminal and found the route to the Merchantman’s Quarter.

— =][= —

The journey took longer than he had anticipated. He took three transit-cars, two mass personnel lifts, and rounded it off with a long walk through districts he had never seen. The city changed as he travelled eastwards, the grey administrative blocks gave way to older structures, their facades darkened with centuries of grime. The crowds thinned. The lumens grew dimmer, and mist snaked from the mouths of alleyways.

The Merchantman’s Quarter, when he finally reached it, was not as he had imagined. From the name, he had expected shops or rows of market stalls, but instead he found wide streets lined with shuttered warehouses, their windows dark. There were people here, but not many, and none of those who hurried past met his gaze. They moved through the gloom on inscrutable errands, wrapped in dark cloaks against a deepening chill.

Vohl glanced about, then consulted his map. This was a curious place to build a theatre. According to the transit authority’s records, he was standing at the intersection of Procurator’s Lane and Saint Macharius Way. The Orpheum Theatre should be here, at this very corner.

And so it was.

It rose before him, a building of dark stone carved with theatrical masks and scenes of revelry that seemed, in the failing light, to shift and writhe. It sat uncomfortably cramped between two shuttered warehouses, as though it had grown there and shouldered the existing buildings out of true. Golden light spilled from tall windows, and from within came the sound of conversation, laughter, and the tuning of instruments. The entrance was flanked by dark columns, and above the doorway, in letters of tarnished brass, was written: THE ORPHEUM.

Vohl stood before it for some time, the invitation clutched in one hand, uncertain. The building was real. He assumed, therefore, that the performance would also be real. But something about the scene troubled him in a way he couldn’t quite articulate – like finding an extra page in a document that should have only seven, or a sum that should balance but doesn’t.

The light was warm though, and terribly welcoming, and, he thought, he had come all this way. Steeling himself, he climbed the steps and was embraced by the light.

The foyer was resplendent. Chandeliers of real crystal – not synthglass, but actual glittering crystal – cast warm light across walls hung with velvet. Men and women in fine dress moved about in clusters, their conversation a pleasant murmur. Servitors in theatre livery offered refreshments from silver trays. It was, Vohl thought with something like wonder, truly beautiful.

A masked attendant in archaic motley approached him with a slight bow. “Your invitation, honoured guest?”

Vohl produced the card. The attendant examined it, nodded, and gestured toward a doorway. “The performance begins shortly. Please, take your seat. You are most welcome here.”

There was something in the way he emphasised that last part, most welcome, that made Vohl pause. Only for a moment, however, as he passed through the doorway and found himself in the theatre proper.

The auditorium was larger than the building’s exterior had suggested, rising in tier upon tier of velvet-upholstered seats toward a distant ceiling lost in shadow. This should not be possible, Vohl thought distantly, the building he had seen from outside could not contain a space this vast. But the thought was fleeting, overwhelmed by the sheer spectacle of it all.

The stage itself was set with a simple backdrop: a painted cityscape, all spires and temples, rendered in a style that seemed both familiar and subtly wrong. The proportions weren’t quite right. Some spires stood too tall, some too twisted, some leaning at angles that would have been structurally impossible. Artistic license, Vohl supposed, though he admittedly knew little of art.

Vohl found his seat in the third row – in the centre, an excellent position – and settled in. Around him, the other audience members chatted quietly among themselves. He studied them with the practiced eye of a man who spent his days reviewing fine details.

The couple to his left were dressed in the fashion of mid-level Administratum functionaries, like himself – he could tell by the cut of their coats, the quality of their augmetics. The woman’s jewellery was fine but not ostentatious, suitably appropriate to their station. As he watched, he noticed something odd: they were speaking, their lips moving in conversation, but he couldn’t quite hear what they were saying. When he tried to focus on their words, their mouths would stop moving, as if they were speaking only when he wasn’t listening.

The man three seats to his right wore the robes of a merchant-trader, appointed in fine silk and furs. His hands were folded in his lap, rings glinting in the auditorium light, and Vohl noticed that he had seven fingers on his left hand. No – six. He blinked. Five fingers. He must have miscounted.

Further back, in the fifth row, he glimpsed a face he thought he recognised. A woman, middle-aged, with the pale skin of someone who worked deep in the archives. She had been a lexographer in his department, years ago. Vohl tried to remember her name – was it Meridian? Meridus? She had vanished one day, simply failed to report for duty, and he had processed her dereliction paperwork himself. When he turned to look directly at her, the seat was occupied by someone else entirely. A young man, clean-shaven, who looked nothing like her.

The lights dimmed, and an expectant hush fell over the audience. Somewhere in the darkness, a bell chimed eight times. The count troubled him. Eight was not a liturgically appropriate number. Services were conducted in threes, or sevens, or twelves. Eight was-

The curtain was rising, and there was no more time for such thoughts.

— =][= —

The performance began conventionally enough. The players emerged from the wings in the manner of the old commedia, all stock characters in masks and bright costume. There went the Fool, capering and jingling. So too The Merchant, corpulent and grasping. The Lovers, circling one another in stylised passion. The Soldier, stern and martial. Others too: the Scholar, the Priest, the Magistrate, the Maiden.

Their play was a familiar sort of farce, full of mistaken identities and comedic reversals. The Merchant sought to marry his daughter to the Magistrate, but she loved the Soldier. The Fool schemed and plotted in ludicrous ways. The Priest offered benedictions that somehow advanced the confusion. The audience laughed, Vohl among them, at jests both bawdy and clever.

The dialogue was sharp, witty. The Fool’s lines were particularly amusing, observations about the nature of duty, the absurdity of hierarchy, the comedy of devotion. “We toil in service of forms,” the Fool declared, executing a cartwheel, “and call it purpose! We count the grains of sand and believe we have measured the beauty of the beach!”

But as the first tableau gave way to the second, and the second to the third, Vohl began to notice certain irregularities. The Fool’s jests, at first merely ribald, took on an edge that was less humour and more mockery – mocking of things Vohl had been taught not to question. “The Emperor protects,” the Fool said, his voice suddenly sharp, “but from what? And if He protects, why do we cower? Perhaps protection is the sweetest cage!”

The audience laughed, but the laughter had changed. It was too loud now, and echoed for too long, with an edge of hysteria.

The costumes, too, began to change. The Merchant’s rotund form seemed to shift beneath his robes, as though his flesh were something less than solid, more like liquid constrained by fabric. The Lovers’ dance grew more frenzied, more intimate, their movements taking on geometries that hurt to follow; limbs bending at angles that shouldn’t be possible, tracing patterns in the air that left afterimages in Vohl’s vision.

The Soldier wore armour littered with small decorations that might have been skulls, or might have been something else, something that shifted when Vohl tried to focus on them. Stars? No, merely decorative filigree. Then why did looking at them make his teeth ache?

In the fourth tableau, the characters began speaking in riddles. The Scholar stepped forward, his mask gleaming in footlights that had taken on a greenish cast. “What walks on eight legs at dawn,” he asked in a voice like silk over broken glass, “on four at noon, and on two at dusk?”

The Fool capered forward. “Why, the same thing that crawls on none at midnight, brother Scholar! The same thing that dances on all legs at once when the music is right!”

The audience erupted in laughter. Vohl did not laugh, Vohl could not laugh. His hands gripped the armrests of his seat.

The lights dimmed for an interval. House lights came up but they were red, like the light of a dying sun. The audience rose, stretching, making their way toward the refreshment hall. Vohl remained seated, his heart pounding for no reason he could name.

“Enjoying the performance?”

Vohl turned. The Fool stood beside his seat, still masked, but out of character. Up close, the mask was even more disturbing. The painted smile too wide, the eye holes too deep. So deep, Vohl couldn’t make out the glint of real eyes at all.

“I… yes,” Vohl managed. “It’s very… entertaining.”

“You’re a lexographer, aren’t you?” The Fool’s head tilted, birdlike. “I can tell. You have that look about you, the look of a man who counts things. Who puts things in order. Tell me, do you ever wonder about the patterns?”

“Patterns?”

“In your work. All those numbers, all those requisitions. Do you ever see patterns that shouldn’t be there? What about recurring figures? Or numbers that appear too often to be coincidence?”

Vohl thought of the eight requisitions that always remained at the end of each day. Forty-seven documents delivered, thirty-nine processed, eight remaining. Every day, for nine years.

“I… I should return to my seat,” he said.

The Fool laughed, a sound like bells and breaking glass. “But you never left it, Erasmus.”

Vohl realised the Fool was right. The audience still sat around him, silent and attentive. The players were still on stage. All were watching his exchange with the Fool. The fourth tableau had not ended.

“The patterns are everywhere,” the Fool whispered, leaning close. “In your ledgers, in your requisitions, in the very structure of the Administratum itself. Eight offices, eight bureaus, eight divisions. We who serve it without knowing. We who count its number in our sleep.”

“That’s not-” Vohl began, but the Fool was already moving away, back toward the stage, back into character. Had he ever left?

The fifth tableau began.

— =][= —

The performance had changed. Had always been this way, and Vohl had simply failed to notice? The backdrop was no longer the simple painted cityscape but something more elaborate. It was still a city, but one as seen from a great height, or perhaps from a great distance. The spires seemed to spiral now, following patterns that drew the eye upward in ways that made his head swim slightly if he stared too long.

Their dialogue too had changed, grown more philosophical. The characters spoke of transformation and change, of the hidden geometries that underlay all things. The Priest delivered a sermon on the beauty of creation unbound, on the perfection that lay beyond static form. His words were eloquent, almost poetic, though Vohl noticed he gestured often with his hands spread wide, eight fingers splayed on each hand, though surely that was just a trick of the light.

Around him, the audience sat perfectly still, their faces rapt with attention.

The sixth tableau was a dance. The eight players formed a circle on stage and moved in a pattern that was mesmerising in its complexity. As they danced, their steps seemed to trace designs on the floorboards. Vohl found himself trying to follow the pattern, to understand its looping, recursive logic.

The dancers’ shadows on the backdrop seemed longer than they should be, and in the shadows, Vohl thought he glimpsed other shapes. Eyes, perhaps, watching from the darkness, but when he tried to focus on them they were simply shadows again.

The dancers moved faster. At the centre of their circle, the air seemed to shimmer slightly, like heat rising from pavement on a summer’s day. An illusion of the limelight, surely.

Vohl’s head ached. He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them, the seventh tableau had begun.

The seventh tableau began with all the players gathering at centre stage. The backdrop behind them was gone entirely now, replaced by that shimmering, that disturbance in the air that was growing larger with each passing moment.

The Fool stepped forward, his bells silent now, and spoke in a voice quite unlike the one he had used throughout the performance. A resonant timbre that Vohl felt in his bones.

“We are the mask,” he said, “and the face beneath. We are the laughter in the dark places, the jest at the heart of all things. We are the players of the great game, and you,” he gestured to the audience, “you are most welcome in our theatre. You have always been welcome. You were invited before you were born. The invitation was written in your blood, in the ledgers you keep, in the patterns you trace without knowing.”

The other players joined him, speaking in unison, their voices overlapping and harmonising in ways that should not have been possible.

“We are the eight who are one, the one who is eight. We are the number that completes the count. We are the equation that balances the books. We are the sum at the end of all addition, the remainder that cannot be divided. We are the pattern your Emperor sought to hide, the formula he struck from all records. He failed to understand that patterns cannot be unwritten, numbers cannot be uncounted. We persist in the margin of every page, in the error of every calculation, in the eight requisitions that remain at the end of every day.”

Vohl’s blood ran cold. They knew. They had always known.

“And now,” the Fool said, reaching up to his mask, “the performance concludes. The masks come off. The truth is revealed. Are you ready, lexographer? Are you ready to see the pattern complete?”

“No,” Vohl whispered, but the word had no power.

One by one, they removed their masks.

What lay beneath was not flesh. Or rather, it was flesh, but flesh that had forgotten its proper arrangement, flesh that had been given permission to be something more. The Fool’s face split into a smile of too many teeth, each tooth a screaming mouth, each mouth singing a different note of the same terrible song. The Merchant’s visage melted and ran like wax, revealing a mass of watching eyes that stared in every direction at once. The Lovers had no faces at all, only an absence that seemed to reach forward, hungry and cold.

The Scholar’s face was a book of skin, its pages turning to reveal different expressions, different identities, all of them wrong. The Priest’s head opened like a flower, revealing petals of bone and sinew. The Magistrate’s features were constantly changing, cycling through forms too quickly to follow. The Maiden was beautiful and hideous in the same moment, her beauty a wound that refused to heal. The Soldier’s face was a battlefield, flesh warring with itself in eternal conflict over the terrain of his grinning skull.

Through them all, through every ruined visage, Vohl saw the same thing: joy. Terrible, transcendent, unbearable joy.

Vohl tried to scream, but no sound came. Around him, the audience rose to their feet as one, applauding as one in rapturous acclaim. He turned to flee and found that the doorway through which he’d entered was no longer there. Instead, the wall was smooth and unbroken, covered in velvet that pulsed with organic life.

He looked back at the stage. Behind the players, the shimmer had become a tear, a wound in reality itself. Through it, Vohl glimpsed colours that seared his eyes, heard music that was also screaming, felt a presence that was joy and madness made manifest. It was vast and it was intimate. It was distant and it was already here.

The players turned toward the opening, toward that impossible beyond, and one by one they stepped through. As they went, their forms dissolved into light and chaos and laughter.

The last to go was the Fool. He paused at the threshold and looked back at the audience, his face seeking Vohl specifically. His ruined face, that nightmare of mouths and teeth and screaming joy, split into something like a smile.

“This show is over,” he said, “but the performance never ends, there is always one final tableau. We are all players, lexographer. We have always been players. The only question is whether you will take your bow in ignorance or in understanding. Will you return to your requisitions, processing the pattern without knowing it? Or will you step through and see the pattern whole?”

The theatre began to shake. The crystal chandeliers swayed and shattered, raining glass like tears. The velvet-covered walls split and peeled, revealing not stone or plascrete but something organic, something that pulsed with obscene life, veined with sickening colours. The floor buckled, and Vohl fell to his knees.

The opening on the stage grew wider, and from it spilled light that was also darkness, warmth that was also the most terrible cold. Vohl could feel it pulling at him, inviting him, welcoming him. The audience around him was moving toward it now, walking calmly toward the stage. They never ceased their applause, their faces blank with ecstasy. Their forms began to blur and dissolve at the edges as they approached the threshold.

Vohl tried to resist. He whispered the Litanies of Protection, called upon the Emperor’s name, clutched at his chaplet until his knuckles were white and the prayer beads cut into his palm. But the pull was so strong, and he was so very tired, and there was a part of him – a small, treacherous part that had been growing with each processed requisition, each meaningless form, each day of the same forty-seven documents and the same eight remaining – that was curious about what lay beyond.

That part of him wanted to know: what was the pattern? What did the numbers mean? Where did the requisitions actually go?

The answers were through that door, he could feel it. All the answers, tallied up in the complete ledger. The balanced equation, revealing the perfect sum.

The floor tilted, violently. Vohl slid forward, toward the stage and the light. He tried to grip something, anything, but there was nothing solid left. Everything was dissolving, transforming, becoming something other.

The last thing he saw, as the theatre collapsed around him and the floor gave way beneath his feet, was his own hand reaching toward that impossible light. The skin was coming apart, unravelling into strands of something that might have been flesh or might have been numbers, endless numbers, looping in figures of eight.

He could not say whether he reached out in horror or in longing. The distinction no longer mattered.

— =][= —

The report filed by the Arbites eight days later noted that Junior Lexographer Erasmus Vohl had failed to report for duty. His possessions were intact, his devotions current. Transit records showed his last movement toward the Merchantman’s Quarter on Sixthday evening. A patrol was dispatched and followed his trail to the intersection of Procurator’s Lane and Saint Macharius Way – the site of the former Orpheum Theatre, destroyed by fire seventeen years prior.

A note was appended to Vohl’s work record: Cross-reference with Munitorum archives indicated the 217th Valhallan Infantry Regiment, for whom he had processed requisitions for nine years, had been lost in the warp sixty-three years ago. Origin of the requisition documents he had been processing remained unclear.

The case was closed, and the workstation was reassigned.

Junior Lexographer Mira Jessup reported for duty at workstation 47-G in Sub-Level Gamma. On her eighth day, she found a card of vellum among her transfer requisitions. Excellent quality, and beautifully hand-lettered. An invitation to a performance at a theatre she had never heard of, in a quarter of the city she had never visited.

She read it once. Set it aside. Returned to her work.

By the end of the day, she had processed thirty-nine documents. Eight remained.

At the end of her shift, when she gathered her things, she discovered the invitation in her satchel. She did not remember placing it there.

She studied it in the light of her desk lamp. The watermark seemed to shift – a mask, or perhaps a star.

Curious, she thought.

She placed it carefully in her prayer book and retired to her quarters.

That night, she dreamed of music and laughter and the sound of bells.