The Seventh Night

The six nights between were only singing.

That was what shocked him most, afterward. He had thought that after the first night, after the doves and the roosters and the kids and the piglets, the Vigil would climb in dread, each night worse than the one before. It did not. The Chosen gathered in the chapel at the seventh bell, as they had gathered all autumn. The Rector read. The Deacon answered. The circle sang the invitation, over and over, in the blue light, with the cold on their breath and the vibration in the floor. Cassian stood in his place with his hands clasped behind him. Nothing was asked of them. It was only a vigil, a long, patient, candlelit sitting-up, as one sits with the dying.

Come, guest. The table is ready.

He sang. He slept. He ate what was set before him. He sat at the gray table at breakfast with his plate full and his hands clean and the wool of his cloak warm on his shoulders. On Friday the thirtieth a car came for his mother, a long black sedan, and drove her to a house with a white fence. Dana wrote him a letter, three pages, with a drawing of a marigold in the margin. He read it twice and put it in the notebook and felt nothing at all.

The nights wore on. The moon dwindled to a thin pale wire.

And on Saturday, the thirty-first of October, the day of Halloween, in a school where no one had ever hung a paper skeleton or carved a pumpkin, the sun went down at a quarter past five, and the wind rose, and the seventh night began.

…

They brought him in at the stroke of eleven.

Cassian stood in the ring with the others. The candles were lit. The Codex lay open on the table. He had been told the order: the Rector would speak, the Deacon would read, the Seal would be brought. After that, he need do nothing at all. His part was finished. He would stand, and sing, and see.

The Seal.

He knew what it meant. He had known since the bathroom floor, since the night in the corridor with the tall wrapped shape. Silas had told him, not in so many words but in a dozen small silences, the way a doctor tells you the shape of a diagnosis. Over the past six days, a few things had been laid before him piece by piece. A mark. A boy. The last night. No one had said what happened to the boy. No one needed to.

The great doors swung open.

Silas came in first, in his gray cloak, bearing a lantern. Behind him came the Deacon, severe and white. And between them, walking slowly with his head bowed, came Albert Sterling.

He was dressed in white.

A long robe of unbleached linen that fell to his ankles, belted at the waist with a plain cord. His feet were bare. His glasses had been taken away. His hair had been combed, wetted, and parted neatly, as his mother might have done for a Sunday service. In the red light he looked about twelve years old.

A ring of pale marks showed at the base of his throat. The old bruise from the corridor, where the long gray fingers had closed. They had not faded. They stood out like a collar of frost.

He walked as if in a dream. His eyes were open but did not seem to see. They moved over the nave, over the candles and the bell and the circle of faces, as over a landscape glimpsed from a train.

Then they reached Cassian.

Albert stopped.

For one second, no more, the vacancy went out of his face. It was as if a hand had wiped a steamed window. He stood in the middle of the nave with the Deacon's fingers on his arm, and his gaze locked on Cassian's, and Cassian saw in it everything he had been afraid of: not hatred, not blame. A raw, naked, child's bewilderment.

Please.

He did not say it. He did not need to.

Cassian stood in the ring and did not move.

…

The Rector began.

His voice was gentle, as always, and very tired. He spoke of the covenant. Of the winter of 1893. Of Josiah Blackthorne, who had walked into the snow, and what he had been offered, and what he had paid. It was not a long speech. He had given it before.

"For one hundred and thirty-three years," he said, "the valley has been spared. And for one hundred and thirty-three years, on this night, a child of the valley has been given in thanks. Not taken. Given. The Seal is not a victim. The Seal is a witness. He sits at the table. He closes the door. He is the sign that we have kept our word."

Albert stood very straight.

"Will you go willingly?" said the Rector.

Silence.

It lasted a long time. Albert's lips parted. His throat moved. Cassian saw him look at the Deacon, at Silas, at Tessa Quill, who stood with her face turned aside and her hands clenched. At the rows of silver collars. At the shut, black door of the Hearth.

"I—" said Albert. His voice was a thread. "I don't have a choice. Do I?"

"There is always a choice," said Kell gently.

"Then I'd like to go home."

A tremor ran through the ring.

The Rector smiled, with enormous sadness. "I am so sorry, my child," he said.

He raised his hand. The Deacon began to read.

…

The cold came faster this time.

It dropped like a stone. In ten heartbeats the candles had gone ghost-white, the breath was smoking from every mouth, and the floor under Cassian's feet had begun to shake. A long, low, grinding tremor, like a freight train in a tunnel a hundred miles off. Dust sifted from the vaults. The great bell above the table swung gently on its chain, and a thin high note drifted out of its hollow mouth, unstruck, though no hand had touched it.

Venite, hospes.

He sang.

It was no effort. His lips shaped the syllables on their own. Ad mensam nostram. Mensa parata est. He heard his own voice, steady and sure, above the others, and it rolled out of him as it had every night, heavy and warm. The scar in his palm throbbed. His blood moved to the beat.

Across the circle, he saw Tessa Quill's mouth moving. Saw tears running down her face, steady and silent, and she did not wipe them.

Hospes, sede. Hospes, ede.

In the middle of the floor, Albert stood alone.

They had stepped back from him. The Deacon, Silas, the others, withdrawn to the edge of the innermost ring. He stood in the center, in his white robe, small and bare-footed on the stained stone, and the candlelight lay on him like frost.

From the vestry door came a sound.

A slow, scraping sound. A grinding of iron on stone.

The hatch.

Cassian did not turn his head. He did not have to. He felt it, as one feels a hot stove behind one's back: the slab lifting, the dark rising, the air in the chapel shifting toward the low door as though a great breath were being drawn. A smell crept in. Cold iron, wet earth, old teeth. The smell of the kill floor on a Monday.

Footsteps.

They were soft. Heavy. Unhurried. Each fell with a faint tap, like fingertips on a drum.

Hospes, ne abeas.

The Guest came through the vestry door.

It had to stoop. Its wrapped head cleared the lintel by an inch. The gray cloth hung from it in sagging, stained folds, and the long gray hands swung loose at its sides, and where its feet should have been the hem of the robe hung perfectly still above the flags. It moved without seeming to touch the ground. The breathing came with it, the dozens of lungs drawing in and out, in and out, a crowd of the long dead sighing in a cold room.

It crossed the nave.

No one moved. The singing never faltered. The Chosen sang with their eyes shut tight, their faces wet. The Guest passed between them like a priest down an aisle, and where it passed, the candles bent flat, then rose, and the shadows crouched on the walls.

It stopped at the table.

It stopped a yard from Cassian.

He could have touched it. He could have reached out his hand. Its robe hung before him like a curtain of mold, and the cloth of the head tilted down toward him, a blind knot of rags where a face should have been. A cold radiated from it. He felt his lips go numb.

It knows me.

The wrapped head inclined. Slowly. An inch. A courteous, unmistakable dip of acknowledgment.

Then it turned.

It turned to Albert.

…

"Cassian."

It was a whisper. A bare breath, no louder than a sigh. Albert stood in the center of the floor with his hands loose at his sides, and the tall shape rose over him, and his face was turned, not to the Guest, but across the ring.

"Cassian," he said again.

He did not scream. He did not struggle. His voice trembled but held steady, and his eyes were quite clear. For the first time in all the weeks he had known him, Cassian saw that Albert Sterling was not afraid of him. He was only asking.

It was a name. Only a name. A single word, spoken gently across a circle of cold light.

The chapel went still.

Even the singing faltered. The Rector's lips parted, as if on a breath held. The Deacon's hand tightened on the Codex. Silas, in the ring, had stopped moving altogether; the knuckles of his fist stood out white.

Nothing happened.

The wrapped head turned slowly toward Cassian, as though weighing the word. It stood quite still for the length of a heartbeat, a long gray statue in a dark robe. Then it turned back.

The Rector let out his breath.

Cassian's chest hurt. He realized he had not breathed.

The Guest put out one long gray hand. It laid it with great delicacy on the crown of Albert's head. The fingers were very long; they curved around the skull like the fingers of a man picking up a fruit. Albert closed his eyes.

The candles went out.

All of them, together, with a single soft whuff, like a held breath let go. The dark came down thick and total. For a moment there was no sound at all. No hymn, no breath, no heartbeat. The silence of the grave.

And then, from somewhere above, a faint high note, the bell, unstruck, trembling in the dark.

Then the candles flared back.

The nave was as it had been. The circle, the table, the Codex. The Rector with his hands folded. The Deacon's face like carved stone.

The center of the floor was empty.

No scream. No struggle. Not a sound. Only a white linen robe lying crumpled in a heap on the stones, and, on its collar, folded very neatly, as if by a careful hand, a pair of thick-lensed glasses.

The Guest was gone.

Cassian stood in the ring. He looked at the robe. He looked at the glasses. A small clear thought rose and floated in his head like a bubble: they took his glasses away. Where did they come from?

The hymn took up again, soft and sweet, among the weeping Chosen.

He felt his face. It was dry.

He had stood in the circle and sung while a boy was taken, and he had not wept, and he did not weep now. He waited for the grief. He waited and waited. It never came.

Cassian Hale did not shed a single tear.