The First Night

At a quarter to midnight on the twenty-fifth of October, the doors of the chapel were opened to the animals.

They came up the hill in the dark, on the back of a flatbed truck, in crates stacked four high and lashed with rope. Cassian heard them before he saw them: the tick of claws on wood, a rustling, a dry fluttering like the turning of a thousand pages, and underneath it, high and thin, the questioning bleat of the kids. The truck's headlights had been turned off. The driver, a stout man in a hat pulled low, did not speak to anyone. He unloaded the crates onto the grass at the chapel door and drove away without looking back.

Prefects carried them in. They set them in a long row along the north wall of the nave, just outside the outermost ring. Twenty-one wicker baskets, each with a pair of white doves. Fourteen crates of roosters. Seven kids in a pen of woven willow, standing on shaky legs, pressing against one another for warmth. Seven piglets in a straw-lined box, silent, huddled, their pink ears flat.

The Chosen formed their ring.

Cassian stood in his place at the table with the knife in his right hand. He had washed his hands in the salt basin. He wore his cloak, and under it a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, and his forearms were bare and pale in the red light. His heart was beating slowly. He was surprised at how slowly.

The candles were burning low and steady. The cold in the room had a texture now, a stillness, like the air inside a freezer. And behind the table, under the great dark bell, the iron door of the Hearth stood open.

It had been shut when he came in. The Deacon had drawn the bar herself, and swung the door back, and now the arch gaped before him, black and square and about three feet across. It breathed. Not warm air. Cold, with a faint iron smell, like the inside of a cellar. He could not see in. The darkness went down and down.

"Brothers and sisters," said Rector Kell.

His voice rang. He stood before the table in the white stole, with the Codex in his arms.

"We are met to keep the covenant of our fathers. For seven nights, we shall keep the vigil. For seven nights, we shall sit at the table. And on the first night, as the first night has always been, we shall bring the feast." He raised his head. "Let the Hand be ready."

"The Hand is ready," said Silas, from the ring.

Cassian felt the weight of every eye.

The Deacon moved to the first basket. She lifted out a dove in both hands, a pale shape, quivering. She brought it to the foot of the table and stood holding it out. It did not struggle. Its small eye was round and black and bright.

Cassian stepped forward.

…

"Mensa parata est," he said.

His voice came out hoarse. He cleared his throat. He took the bird from her hands. It weighed nothing. A scrap of down and bone and heat, the heartbeat flickering through the feathers into his palm like a tiny engine.

He didn't look at it.

He looked at the black mouth of the Hearth. He fixed his eyes on the edge of the stone, where the iron lip curved, and with his left hand he turned the dove's head, gently, and with his right he drew the knife. It was the work of one second. He felt the faint, intimate resistance, and the warm pulse go slack against his palm.

"Accipe," he said.

He laid it in the Hearth.

It was gone before his hand had pulled back. Something drew it in, swift and smooth, the way a river draws a leaf. There was a faint sound, from the dark, like a sack of dry sticks being crushed. A pause. And then, in the stillness, a tiny clatter, bright and clear, such as a handful of pebbles makes when tossed on a stone floor.

Bones.

He didn't let himself think. His left hand was already open.

"One," said Rector Kell.

The Deacon brought the next.

…

He learned the rhythm quickly.

Mensa parata est. Cut. Accipe. The dove, laid in the dark. The clatter on the stone. The Rector's voice, mild and clear, counting. Two. Three. Four. He did not look at what he held. He did not listen to the sounds in the Hearth, the soft, wet, hurried noises that followed each one, the crack and the grinding. He let them wash over him, and he listened instead to the beat in his own chest, and kept his hands moving.

Five. Six.

The feathers drifted across the floor. A few stuck to the blood on his wrists. The cold in the nave had gone from stillness to a kind of pressure. He could feel it on his skin, like the weight of a thousand eyes. The candles had turned blue-white and tall. The shadows lay motionless on the walls.

Nine. Ten.

He noticed with a distant interest that his hands had stopped shaking.

Eleven. Twelve.

The Chosen hummed behind him, low, steady, all on one note. It wasn't the hymn. It was something deeper, a drone with no words, which rose and fell and rose, and which seemed to go straight through his sternum and set his whole chest buzzing like a struck wire. He felt it carry him. It wrapped around his wrists. It guided the blade.

Seventeen. Eighteen.

He was no longer a boy in a cloak. He was a motion. A single, clean, repeating motion, from the Deacon's arms to the table to the Hearth, and the thing at the end of it, the black hunger beyond the iron lip, took what he gave it and wanted more.

Twenty-one.

"The doves are complete," said Kell.

Cassian stood breathing. His forearms were wet. A small white feather had caught on his lower lip. He spat it out.

"Rest a moment, my boy."

"I'm fine."

"Of course you are." The Rector's voice was tender. "The roosters."

…

The roosters fought.

Not at first. In the crates they had been quiet, huddled, glassy-eyed under their hoods. But when the Deacon lifted the first one free, the whole row exploded into noise. A clamor of hoarse screams, the beat of wings against slats, claws raking wood. The sound filled the nave, echoing off the vaults, and a Prefect at the back of the ring made a small whimpering noise and clapped a hand over his mouth.

The bird in the Deacon's arms went rigid, then thrashed. It was a big red cock with a ragged comb. Its eye rolled. The Deacon's face was white, and her knuckles whitened, but her hold did not slip.

"Hand," she said, through her teeth.

Mensa parata est.

He took it by the neck.

It was heavier than the dove. The warm bulk of it thudded against his ribs. It screamed once, a harsh, hideous cry like a rusted hinge, and he felt a flash of something sharp go through him, not fear and not pity but a kind of dizzying, wrenching recognition. The sound. The smell of straw and hot blood. The back lot at the plant, a gray March morning.

Quick. And don't hesitate.

He cut.

The screaming stopped.

"Accipe," he said, and his voice sounded like someone else's.

The Hearth took it.

Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen.

He did not remember the rest. Later, he would try to count and find that the numbers slid away, as the faces of passing cars slide away on a highway. He remembered the weight of the knife. He remembered a rooster that bit him on the wrist. He remembered the Rector's voice, steady as a metronome, never rising, never falling. Twenty-six. Twenty-seven. He remembered the cold, and the clatter, and that at some point in the night his eyes had begun to burn and he had realized he was crying and had not noticed.

Thirty-four. Thirty-five.

The kids were the worst.

They were small, and soft, and they bleated, and they looked at him. A gray-eyed one, with a white blaze. It trembled in the Deacon's arms, and she, who had never shown anything but stone, was weeping silently, tears sliding down the long lines of her face. He took it from her. It put its nose against his wrist.

He cut it so quickly that it had no time to know.

Forty. Forty-one.

The piglets did not scream. That was the strange thing. They were quiet, as pigs often are before the end, with a placid, trusting, unseeing patience. He had held a thousand of them. He knew the way the little bodies settled in the crook of an arm. They made a low contented grunting sound, and a pink snout nuzzled his sleeve.

Forty-six.

Forty-seven.

His hands were so slick the knife slid. He wiped them on his shirt. The Deacon brought the forty-eighth, and he did not look at her, and took it, and the Hearth took it from him.

"Forty-nine," said Rector Kell.

The last piglet lay in his arms. He held it a moment longer than he had held any of the others. It was warm and heavy and soft, and it had gone to sleep.

Mensa parata est, he whispered.

He drew the blade.

…

The silence afterward was enormous.

He stood at the table with the empty knife in his hand and felt the whole chapel lean toward him. The candles had stopped moving. The Chosen had stopped humming. In the Hearth, in the dark, nothing stirred. Only a faint, slow, satisfied settling, a sound like a heavy man sinking into an armchair, rose from below, and the tiny scattered clatter of the last bones, one, two, three, rolling to a stop on the stone.

Then the iron door swung shut by itself.

He swayed.

His knees buckled. A hand caught his elbow, steady and strong and cold. It was Silas. The Head Prefect's pale face hung beside his own, and there was something in it, in the pale eyes, that he had never seen there. Not pity. Reverence.

"Easy," Silas murmured. "Easy. It's done."

"I can't feel my hands."

"I know."

"I can't feel them."

"It passes." Silas took the knife gently from his fingers and laid it on the linen cloth. "Breathe."

He tried. He drew in air and it came ragged, shuddering. His wrists and forearms were crusted to the elbow. There was blood in his hair. There were feathers on his shirt, a gray drift of down. He looked down at himself and could not recognize what he saw.

Across the table, Tessa Quill had turned her face to the wall.

And then the Rector was there.

He crossed the floor in his black shoes, trailing the white stole, and he did not hesitate. He opened his arms and wrapped them around Cassian and held him. The wool of the cardigan was soft against his cheek. The old man smelled of lavender and pipe smoke and warm candle wax. He was shorter than Cassian, and he had to reach up, and his round body shook a little with the effort of holding him upright.

Cassian stood in the embrace like a statue.

His arms hung at his sides. His hands were numb, and cold, and heavy as stones, and he could not close them. He stared over the old man's shoulder at the shut black door of the Hearth. A single white feather turned and turned in the draft above it.

"There now," murmured Kell. "There. You were splendid. Truly splendid. It has not been so well done in a hundred years."

He drew back, holding Cassian by the shoulders, and looked into his face. His own eyes were wet.

"A telephone call came for you at dusk," he said. "From Mercy. The nurse, Dana. Your mother will be discharged on Friday. A private car will take her to Illinois. She will have her house, and her garden, and her friend. I wished you to hear it from me." His smile trembled. "You see? You have been such a comfort to so many."

Cassian opened his mouth. Nothing came.

The Rector patted his cheek, tenderly, as one pats a child's, and said in a voice that carried to the farthest corner of the chapel:

"You did well, Hand."