The Man Who Answers Questions

The cloister door was not locked.

It stood ajar at the end of the long stone gallery, with a thread of yellow lamplight showing in the gap, and the smell that drifted out was woodsmoke and old paper and, faintly, lemon oil. Cassian stopped in front of it with his hand half raised to knock. Behind him the gallery stretched away in the dark, arch after arch, the rain beginning again between the pillars. Ahead of him, past the door, the black chapel crouched on its hill.

"Come in, Mr. Hale," said a voice. "You'll catch cold."

It was a mild voice. Warm, slightly husky, like a grandfather's. He had been braced for something else, he realized. A boom. A growl. He pushed the door open.

The room was a study. A real one, long and low and crowded with books, with a coal fire on the hearth and a thick Persian rug worn pale at the center. A tall window looked out over the dark valley. A cluttered desk. Two leather chairs drawn up by the fire. A kettle singing on the hob.

And in the near chair, a man rose to his feet with a smile.

Rector Ambrose Kell was not what Cassian had pictured. He was small, for a start, not much taller than Cassian himself, and rounded at the middle, a man in his sixties in a gray cardigan with leather patches on the elbows. His hair was a soft white halo. He wore wire spectacles and carpet slippers and had a pipe in his breast pocket that he plainly hadn't lit in years. He looked like a retired schoolteacher, the kind who bakes bread and keeps bees.

"There you are." He crossed the rug with his hand outstretched. "At last. I've been looking forward to this since Friday."

Cassian stared at the hand.

Nobody touched him here. Nobody. For three weeks he had watched staff recoil from him as from a leper. He had been handed a tray at arm's length, a form at the end of a pole, a bowl of soup by a cook who crept up and ran away. And now the headmaster of the strangest society in the world stood before him with an open palm, wide as a baker's, dry and warm.

He took it.

The grip was firm and kind. The old man's hand closed around his and held it for a moment, and Cassian felt something he could not name, a peculiar, tingling pressure beneath the skin, like the instant before a thunderclap. Kell's eyes behind the spectacles brightened.

"Yes," he murmured. "Yes. Just as the Deacon said."

He let go.

"Sit, sit. Please. The tea is real, I promise you. No sedative. Though I understand Miriam was rather heavy-handed on Friday night. She's afraid of nearly everything and shows it by being severe." He poured two cups, steam curling up, and handed one over. "Sugar? There's cream. We keep a cow."

Cassian took the cup. He did not drink.

"Where is it?" he said.

"Where is what, my boy?"

"The thing from the hall."

Kell's smile did not alter. He lowered himself into the opposite chair, tucked his slippered feet under him, and sipped his tea, and the fire cast a warm light on his round pink face.

"Ah," he said. "Directly to the point. I admire that. Silas said you would."

"Silas said to ask what it costs."

"Did he?" The old man chuckled. "That boy has hidden depths. He is the finest student I have ever taught, and he has not once, in five years, said anything unprompted that I could use against him. I fancy you have made a friend there."

"He said it twice. The old man in the library said it too."

"Mr. Pike." Kell nodded gravely. "A good man in his way. Cowardly, but a good man. You should not blame him for the cowardice. He has a granddaughter." He sipped. "I believe you have already realized what we know about you. So let us dispense with the pretense that I am going to be mysterious. I will tell you what I can, and you may decide how much you wish to hear."

…

He told it simply.

The valley, he said, had once been poor. Poorer than Cassian could imagine. In the winter of 1893, when the snow came down for twelve weeks and the whole of Hollis Creek was sealed under ten feet of white, the people ate their horses, and their dogs, and then began on one another. The minister of the little church, a man named Josiah Blackthorne, walked out into the drifts on Christmas Eve to pray. He was gone three days. When he came back, his hair had gone white and his eyes had a look that the survivors never forgot.

"He said that he had made an arrangement," said Kell.

The fire popped.

"I will not tell you what. Not yet. It is not a story for one night. But I will tell you that the arrangement was kept. The snow broke the next morning. Food came up the valley road. Not one soul in Hollis Creek died that winter. Not one." Kell turned the cup in his hands. "And in the one hundred and thirty years since, there has been no famine here, no plague, no drought, no fire. The town has prospered, the school has prospered. Its graduates run banks and courts and hospitals from here to Richmond. This is not luck, Mr. Hale. It is a covenant. And it is kept, every day, by a small body of people who understand the price and agree to pay it."

"The Chosen."

"The Chosen. Yes."

"And what is the price?"

Kell regarded him over the rim of the cup. It was a long, thoughtful look, and there was nothing cruel in it. If anything, there was sorrow. And that was somehow worse.

"A little time," he said. "A little labor. A little silence. On certain nights of the year, those of us who have been given the strength are asked to perform a small service. It is not pleasant. I will not insult you by saying so. But it is necessary, and it is brief, and when it is done, the valley sleeps."

"And what you saw on Friday?"

"Our Guest." The old man said the word with careful gentleness, the way a priest says the name of a saint. "You were frightened, of course. Anyone would be. But consider what you saw. It put out a hand to take a boy who had trespassed. And you took hold of it, and it stopped."

"It bowed."

"It bowed." Kell's voice softened with something close to wonder. "Do you understand what that means? In one hundred and thirty years, no one has seen it do that. It is a creature, Mr. Hale, of immense power and no courtesy at all. It does not recognize authority. It recognizes only the covenant. And on Friday night, it recognized you."

Cassian's hand was shaking. He set the cup on the arm of the chair and gripped his knee.

"Why?"

"That," Kell said, "I believe you already suspect."

The room was quiet. Behind the old man, in the high window, rain slid down the black glass in long meandering lines. Somewhere below them, miles under the stone, the hymn began, faint and slow, the first notes of the night's long singing.

"My father," Cassian said.

"Your father?"

"The Deacon asked about his work."

"Ah." A small, sad, understanding smile. "Yes. A trade is a kind of inheritance, isn't it? Steady hands. A quiet temper. A habit of looking at death without flinching." He leaned forward. "I will be honest with you, Cassian. May I call you that? I think you have been told for most of your life that your father's gift was a curse. That the thing you can do, the thing you learned in the back lot of the plant, is something to be ashamed of. I think perhaps it has made you angry."

Cassian said nothing. His jaw was tight.

"It isn't a curse," Kell said quietly. "Here, it is a vocation."

…

He did not ask what the vocation was. He could not make the words come. He sat very still and let the old man go on, the voice warm and slow, the fire throwing patterns on the carpet, the hymn beneath them like a pulse.

"This is what I can offer you," said Kell. "I will say it plainly, so there is no misunderstanding. First. Your mother's care, for the rest of her life. You have already seen the first fruits of it. Every bill paid. A house of her own in Illinois, if she desires one. A pension for the man who loves her. She will want for nothing."

"And Edward?"

"Will never trouble her again." Kell's voice did not alter. "I give you my word on that."

Cassian's breath caught.

"Second. A place among us. The table, the privileges, the freedom of the grounds. You will not be hungry or afraid again. No door in this school will be closed to you. You will be taught what you wish to be taught, and told what you wish to be told, in time." He paused. "Third."

He rose, crossed to the desk, and lifted something from it.

It was a telephone. Black, heavy, old-fashioned, with a rotary dial and a curling cord. He carried it back across the rug, set it on the small table between the chairs, and lifted the receiver. The dial tone purred in the quiet room.

"Third, a call."

Cassian stared at it.

"The number is the same, I believe." Kell's finger rested on the dial. "Mercy Hospital, Intensive Care. You may speak as long as you like. I will step out of the room. No one will listen. It is yours."

"That's a trick."

"It is not. It is a courtesy." The old man's eyes were kind. "I am not a cruel person, Cassian. I do not wish to buy you. I wish only for you to see what this place can give. I think you have been alone a great while."

He held out the receiver.

Cassian looked at it for what felt like a year.

Then, in a voice he didn't know, he said, "What's the price? The real one. Pike said ask twice."

Kell did not lower his hand.

"Your silence," he said. "Your obedience, in the matter of the covenant. And on certain nights, your hands."

"My hands."

"Yes."

"For what?"

"That," said the Rector, very gently, "I will tell you when you have said yes."

…

He made the call.

He dialed with a finger that wouldn't hold steady. The line rang six times. He heard Dana's voice, flustered and sleepy, say "Mercy, ICU, who's—Cassian? Oh my God. Is it you? Are you all right?" And he heard her tell him that his mother was asleep, that she'd eaten a whole bowl of soup that afternoon, that she'd asked for a mirror and complained about her hair. That a man from the school had telephoned on Friday to say Cassian was doing very well and not to worry.

"A man from the school," he repeated.

"Very polite." A pause. "Cassian. Is this a good place?"

He looked across the study. The Rector had stepped out. The door was shut. The fire burned. The hymn pulsed under the floor, through the soles of his boots, like a second heartbeat.

"I don't know," he said. "I'll tell you when I do."

He hung up.

For a time he sat in the warm room, in the leather chair, with his hands hanging between his knees. He thought of his mother with her hair standing up in tufts, asking for a mirror. He thought of Daniel, whom he'd never met, sitting by the window. He thought of the boots at the foot of his bed. He thought of Albert's face in the dark, wet with tears, whispering I thought it was a club.

He thought of a gray wrapped head, bowing.

The door opened, and Kell came back in, quiet in his slippers. He took the chair again and folded his hands.

"Well?"

"What happens if I say no?"

It was the question he'd been afraid to ask. Kell's face did not change. He gazed into the fire, and the light danced in his spectacles, and for a moment he looked very old.

"Then you are a student of Blackthorne Academy," he said, "and nothing more. You may go on as before. The Deacon and I will see that your mother is not troubled." A pause, soft as a sigh. "But I cannot promise what the valley will do, Cassian. It is not mine to command. The Guest has seen you. It has learned your name. It bowed to you once, and I do not know what it will do if you turn away."

"That's a threat."

"It is a fact, my boy. I would give anything for it to be otherwise."

The fire hissed. Under the floor, the voices rose.

"You have until Wednesday," said Rector Kell. "Think carefully. Ask whoever you wish. Then come back and tell me what you have chosen."

He smiled, and the smile was perfectly kind.