Some of the realm’s dangers are crimes wearing the dress of monsters. One is a thing the law has no word for at all. These are the matters Britannia’s instruments were never built to hold.
“Three crimes and one difficulty. Every one of them is committed in private, before witnesses who are participants, and leaves behind a place rather than a thing. I can prove a place was used. I have never once been able to prove who used it.”
Crimes, not kinds
Necromancy, summoning, corpse-questioning, unsanctioned binding and infernal traffic are forbidden in most civilised jurisdictions at pain of death, not because they are thought impossible but because they are thought too ruinous for private hands. The same society that licenses a wardwright may hang a necromancer and burn a summoner’s papers. A crime, though, needs a defendant, a standard of proof and a court. A body that rose of itself and a body that was raised cannot be told apart, so accusations turn on reputation. What exists in quantity is grubbier: corpse-theft, bone-broking, the sale of parts. That is prosecuted as theft, and successfully.
In law a cult is not a belief, and only persistent corruption of burial reliably convicts. Blood rite leaves no altar: only ground compacted by standing, a small fire, blood, and participants who are ordinary, often respectable, and all say the same thing in the same words.
Curses and haunts
A curse is an undertaking made against a person rather than with a place, with a form, a place, somebody with standing, and something given up. A few take; many are only anger. They are laid mostly by the dispossessed, the dying and the refused, and standing to curse comes from having been wronged with no other remedy. The trap in the commission is that the party paying to lift a curse is usually the party who did the wronging.
A haunt is both a place and the thing in it, and the realm does not believe the two can be told apart. What matters is whether it travels. Anything ever seen off its ground goes to the orders; anything never seen elsewhere goes to the Wardens of the Quiet Ground, to be walked rather than cured. Naming a haunt concedes it: a named haunt such as London’s Choir Door comes with a candle, a rule and a yearly vote in a minute book, while an unnamed one usually has a landlord, a wharf interest or a vestry behind the silence.
The one with no finding
The common word is vampire, and no instrument in the realm uses it. It is the only case that is arguably still a person. In every account it holds a room, has a name, pays rent or owns property, and has often been a neighbour for years. A Black Lantern brother has written that his book has no form for such a thing, and that he has twice begun a page without knowing what to call it.
The law is the obstacle, and the law is right. Suppressing something that holds standing would be an execution without trial. No house attends without a finding, no court finds without examination, and no authority may demand that a tenant say what he is. So the accusation is nearly always false and nearly always about property. What is reported, when anything is, is never a scene but a rate: a ward losing women faster than its neighbours, bodies drained past what the wound explains, facts no competent person has ever connected. Families conceal such matters, and not without reason: a household that has one has a relative, and no remedy exists.
What a suppression is
A suppressing house attends only once standing and fee are settled. It surveys by day, then bounds the ground, and nothing may cross the bound until the work is done. Next the brother must enter what kind he is holding, because the form allows no blank, and a great deal of what the realm believes about its dangers was decided by a tired man at that point. Four go in on foot. Two work, two hold the inner mark, and hired hands hold the outer bound, the most dangerous few hours in the trade. Nobody may pursue. Perhaps forty such books exist, none copied to another house. A Fleecegate cellar has stood unclassified for thirteen years, and Ironmere in 4597 has no entry at all.
For a company
Hired against a cult or a blood rite, a company should find the place, establish that it was used and when, list who could have been there, and leave the catching to a magistrate. Brought into a whispered household, it will learn nothing by arriving with the word in its mouth, and a good deal by asking who has died and in what order. One book records a household in Yellow Ward in 4614: attendance refused, the ground entered as no finding, because the house does not attend a person. And whoever persuades two houses to read their books side by side will have done what no chapter, Crown office or university has managed in four hundred years.