The Chapel at Night

The first time he walked out of Room 104 after the seventh bell, he was shaking so hard he had to hold on to the wall.

It was absurd. He had the right. The silver thread at his collar said so, the Deacon's signature on the card in his pocket said so, and Silas Ward stood in the corridor with a lantern, waiting with the patient air of someone for whom this was entirely routine. But as Cassian eased the door shut behind him, the old terror rose in his throat like bile. Four boys lay on the other side of that wood, rigid under their blankets, hearing the soft click of a latch they'd been taught to fear since September.

They think I'm walking out to be eaten.

And maybe I am.

"Don't look at the doors," Silas said, very low. "It's worse if you look."

"I know."

"You don't. But you will."

They walked.

The corridor was black. He knew the way by heart, but he had never seen it like this, from the other side of the Law. There was no gray glow, no red lamp at the end of the hall. The stone breathed cold around them. Beneath his feet, he could feel the hymn: a low tremor, rising through the floor, so steady that he'd stopped noticing it weeks ago, and so loud now that it seemed to come from inside his own bones.

And behind every door, he could feel them listening.

Forty rooms. Forty held breaths. The silence was a pressure on the skin, a swarm of invisible ears pressed against the wood. He walked past Room 103 and 102 and 101 with his eyes fixed ahead, and the lantern light slid along the walls, and every closed door seemed to lean a little toward him as he passed.

At the cloister door, Silas stopped.

"One thing," he said.

"What?"

"Whatever you hear in there tonight, whatever you see, don't speak unless you're spoken to. Don't read aloud unless you're told. And if you find your lips beginning to move on their own..." He hesitated, and for a moment looked younger than he was. "Bite your tongue. It helps."

…

The chapel was a different place at night.

They came in through the side door, and the cold struck him like a wall. The candles were lit, hundreds of them, the red tapers burning in their iron stands along the nave, and the light was thick and syrupy and low. The air smelled of resin and hot wax and, beneath it, of the earth.

The Chosen were already in place.

Thirteen of them now, with Cassian. They stood in a ring around the long dark table at the foot of the dais, in the circle of the innermost carved ring, cloaked and silent, heads bowed. Their faces were in shadow. The silver at their collars glittered like frost. He saw Tessa on the far side with her arms folded and her eyes closed. He saw the boy with the seam of a mouth, the gold-ring boy, the brothers. All of them breathing slowly, in unison, in and out, in and out.

Silas led him to a place at the left of the table. It was an empty space between two Prefects, a gap in the ring about the width of a boy's shoulders. He stepped into it. The two Prefects beside him did not move.

He looked down.

At his feet, the innermost ring of the carved floor passed directly under his boots. The groove was filled with something dark. It had dried to a crust. It gave off a faint, sweet, rusty smell.

Don't think about it.

At the foot of the dais stood the Rector.

He had put on the white stole over his cardigan, and the carpet slippers were gone; in their place, a pair of polished black shoes. In his arms he cradled a huge book, bound in cracked brown leather, the size of a tombstone. The Codex. Its pages were thick as cloth and the color of tea. He held it against his chest the way a woman holds a sleeping child.

Above him, in the dark, the great bell hung without a sound.

"Brothers and sisters," said Kell. His voice was soft, almost tender. "It is the thirteenth night before the Vigil. Let us begin."

…

It began slowly.

The Deacon read the first lines, in her low flat voice. The circle answered. A murmur rolled around the nave like wind in dry grass, and the candle flames bent toward the center of the room, all together, as if drawn by a draft. Cassian listened. He stood with his hands clasped behind him, as Silas had shown him, and let the sounds wash over his ears.

He had heard the hymn a hundred times. It had been the soundtrack of his nights for six weeks. Muffled and distant, it had been a blur of wailing vowels. But here, in the chapel, with the singers an arm's length away, the syllables came clear. They separated. They lined up like beads on a wire.

Ve-ni-te, sang the circle. Hos-pes.

Ve-ni-te.

Something in the back of his mind went click.

It was only a word. He had learned it three weeks ago in Latin class, from Mr. Calloway's dull voice: venite, the plural imperative. Come. He had written it in the margin of his workbook next to veni, vidi, vici and thought nothing of it.

Hospes.

Hospes. He knew that one, too. Calloway had been on a tangent about etymology: hospes, from which we derive hospitality, hospital, host. It meant a guest. Or a host. A stranger who is also a friend.

Come, guest.

The chill walked up his spine.

Men-sa, sang the circle. Men-sa pa-ra-ta.

Mensa. A table.

He stood absolutely still. The blood hammered in his ears. He didn't dare complete the thought. He held it at arm's length, as one holds a snake by the neck, and refused to let it turn and look at him.

Come, guest. The table is...

Don't.

Don't say the meaning out loud.

Leo's note. He saw the cramped pencil letters hanging in front of his eyes, and he understood, with a cold clean clarity, that it was not a warning against speech. It was a warning against understanding. Against letting the words become words. As long as they were just noise, as long as he was only a boy standing in a circle making sounds, there was a kind of safety in it.

He bit down on his tongue.

…

The light changed.

He saw it first on the faces across the table. The red glow of the candles was draining out of them, slowly, like color from a wound. Their skin went gray. Their eyes, half-lidded, took on a bluish sheen. He looked down at his own hands, and the backs of them had gone pale as paper.

The flames were no longer red.

They had faded to a thin, cold, bluish white, the color of ice under a winter moon. Every taper in the chapel had changed at once, without a flicker, and the long vaulted nave was suddenly glacial and strange, hung with a ghost-light that threw no shadows. Even the black table seemed to float in it, a dark slab on a pool of frost.

The cold came with it.

It dropped on him like a lid. His breath burst out in a white cloud. His fingers ached. The sweat on his forehead froze. Around the circle, the others were breathing in white plumes, steady and slow, and he saw that they had stopped shivering. They had stopped feeling it. They stood in the glacier air like statues, their eyes dull and fixed.

Venite, they sang. Hospes. Venite.

It was no longer a murmur. The voices had risen. Fifteen voices, thirteen young and two old, fused together in a single low thrum, and from somewhere beneath them, so deep he felt it in the soles of his feet, came another. A drone. A dark, steady hum that wasn't voice and wasn't instrument, that rolled up through the carved rings and the floor and the bones of his legs.

Something was singing with them.

Something below.

At the edge of the circle, far off in the blue shadows beyond the innermost ring, a small pale figure stood apart from the others. He recognized the shape of the shoulders. The thick glasses, flashing blue. Albert Sterling, in a plain gray robe without silver, hunched into himself, his arms wrapped around his ribs, his lips moving.

No. Not moving. Straining.

His mouth was clamped tight, the jaw trembling with effort, the muscles of his throat corded. As Cassian watched, the boy's lips began to part, helplessly, against his will, shaping the first syllable. Ve— He clapped a hand over his mouth. His eyes, huge and wet, squeezed shut.

He was trying not to sing.

It was the most terrible thing Cassian had ever seen. A boy fighting his own throat in a ring of chanting strangers, while the thing below the floor pulled on him like a hook.

Albert.

"Steady," Silas breathed, beside him. "Don't look."

He looked away. He didn't want to. The cold had reached his chest now and found the warm place under his ribs, and the warm place was rising, rising to meet it, a slow answering pulse. His scar burned. His heart began to thud in time with the hymn.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

…

The last note faded.

It faded slowly, as the lights came back. The blue drained out of the candles and a dull red crept in. The flames bent, righted, and burned steady. The cold lifted off the room in a long exhalation, and he felt the blood returning to his fingers in a flood of pins.

The Chosen stirred. They shook out their shoulders like sleepers waking. Someone coughed. Someone laughed, a short unsteady laugh, and was hushed.

The Rector closed the Codex with a soft thump.

He came down from the dais, smiling, his round face shining with sweat, and crossed the floor to where Cassian stood. He moved lightly for so large a man. Without a word, he placed his hand on Cassian's shoulder.

The palm was warm. Dry, wide, and heavy.

"Your hands are so warm, my boy," said Kell, softly. "Did you know? When I shook your hand in my study, I thought: here is a furnace. Here is a banked fire." He squeezed, once. His eyes behind the spectacles were bright and moist and full of an affection that seemed utterly real. "The Guest likes warm hands. It always has. It has been so long since we had a pair."

Cassian's mouth had gone dry.

"What do you mean?"

"In good time." The old man patted him and let go. "You did beautifully tonight. Beautifully. Rest now. Go back to your friends. Sleep."

He turned away, still smiling, and began to speak to the Deacon in a low voice.

Cassian stood in the thinning candlelight. His shoulder burned where the hand had rested. He looked across the room to the place where Albert had been standing, and found him gone.

And then, beneath his feet, it began.

Tock.

One sound. Dull, wooden, like the knuckle of a finger tapping on the underside of a table.

Tock.

Slow. Patient. Not loud, but so close that he felt it in his heels. The rhythm was unhurried, deliberate, a tap that waited and tapped again, and he stood motionless with his boots on the carved stone as the realization came creeping up his spine.

He knew that rhythm.

He had been hearing it for weeks, in the dark, in his sleep, in his own wrist when he laid two fingers against it.

Tock. Tock. Tock.

It was the beat of his own heart.