Forty-Nine

Dripping.

That was the first thing he heard when the Hearth door swung wide: a slow, steady, hollow sound from somewhere inside the dark. Plink. A pause. Plink. Water falling from a height into a still pool, very far down. It echoed up out of the black arch as if from the bottom of a well. In the stillness of the nave it seemed enormous.

The Chosen stood in their ring. Red candles burned along both walls. The floor-rings glistened in the glow like seven wet scars. Above the table, the great bell hung without a sound, and its hollow mouth gaped into the vaulted dark.

Cassian stood at the table with the knife in his hand.

He had washed in salt water. He wore the white shirt, sleeves rolled. The silver clasp lay cold at his throat. He had said his part to himself a dozen times on the walk up the hill: This is a role. You are playing a role. A stage. A mask. It is not you.

It did not help.

"Brothers and sisters," said Rector Kell.

…

Mensa parata est, he said, and took the first dove.

He didn't look. He had resolved that. He fixed his eyes on the Hearth's black lip and turned his hand, and the bird was warm and dry and quivering in his palm, and then it was not. He laid it in the dark. The dark drew it away.

A rustle. A small, wet, urgent sound, like a mouth at work. Then the clatter of bone on stone.

"One," said the Rector. His voice was deep tonight, grave and measured, a bell tolling.

Two.

Three.

He had thought it would be quick. It was not. Each one took a minute; the Deacon lifted, the Hand received, the words, the stroke, the laying down. Then the Hearth would take its time. It would wring each offering out slowly, with that damp, intimate noise, as if it were savoring. Cassian learned to wait for the clatter before he held out his hand again. The Rector counted. The Chosen swayed. Nothing else moved.

Seven. Eight.

The cold deepened. The candle flames drew up tall and thin. The smell of the nave changed, as the smell of a house changes when someone opens a cellar door: damp earth, old iron, and something sweeter underneath. He breathed it through his mouth.

Eleven.

Twelve.

He was counting under his breath. He hadn't meant to. It was something to hold on to: a little rope of numbers, thrown across a gulf. Thirteen. Fourteen. He could feel the feathers sticking to his wrists. He could feel the warmth of each small body leaving his hands. He thought of nothing. He thought of the number. He thought: twenty-one, and I will have done twenty-one.

Twenty.

Twenty-one.

"The doves are complete," said Kell.

He had not known he could be so tired.

…

The roosters made it worse.

It was the noise. He had not expected the noise. A scream, high and raw and furious, out of a body that seemed too small for it, and then another, and another, a whole shed of them, hammering the crates, and the sound ricocheted off the vaults until the whole chapel rang like the inside of a bell.

He felt it in his teeth.

Twenty-three. Twenty-four.

His hands were slippery. He wiped them on his shirt. A bird bit him on the thumb and he did not feel it till afterward. He took the next in his arm and the next and the next, and with each one the sense of unreality grew, a swimming, buzzing, sickening lightness at the edges of his sight. The candles smeared. The Rector's voice came from a long way off.

Twenty-six.

Twenty-seven.

The Deacon's hands were shaking. He saw that, with an odd clarity. She held the next rooster against her chest, with both arms, and the bird thrashed, and her knuckles were white. Her lips moved. She was praying, silently, or counting. Her eyes were fixed on the middle distance, and tears were running down her face in two straight lines.

"Hand," she said, hoarsely.

He took it.

It was a big bird, red-gold, heavy, with a bright mad eye. It screamed in his face. He felt its heart, a tiny frantic engine, slamming against his forearm. He drew the knife.

The edge slid.

Something went wrong.

It was nothing he could name. His wrist twisted. The blade skated. He felt the bird jerk, a spasm, a wrongness, and heard a different note in the scream. A thin high gasping shriek. And then the warmth was running down his hand, and the thing in his arms was thrashing, and he had not, he had not—

Quick. And don't hesitate.

He cut again.

It stopped.

The silence was appalling. He stood frozen, with the dead weight in his arms, and the knife in his fist, and a roaring in his ears. He heard himself make a sound. It started low in his belly and climbed, and he knew, with a dreadful clarity, what was coming.

He turned his head and was sick on the stone.

It came in a hot brutal rush. He bent double, clutching the rim of the table, the rooster still in his arm. He retched until the world went white. The sound of it echoed off the vaults. A kind of horrified hush fell over the ring. The Rector's voice stopped.

Someone gasped.

…

For a long moment, nothing moved.

He hung there, gripping the wood, gasping, with spit trailing from his lip. The taste of bile burned the back of his throat. His eyes streamed. He could feel them looking at him: thirteen pairs of eyes, red in the red light, and above them all, the cold black mouth of the bell.

I've broken it.

I've offended it. I've ruined it.

A hand touched his shoulder.

It was warm. Dry. It rested there lightly, and did not grip. He raised his streaming face, and found Rector Kell beside him.

The old man was looking at him. There was no anger in the round pink face. No scorn. Only a deep, slow, tender, terrible sorrow, such as one might feel for a child who has fallen ill at a funeral.

"Hush," said Kell, very gently. "Breathe."

Cassian breathed.

"You will be silent now," the Rector said. His voice was low, meant for him alone. "You have shown disrespect to the table. For this, there is a penalty, and the penalty is silence. You will not speak again tonight. You will not cry out. You will finish the work." His thumb moved once against Cassian's collarbone. "Do you understand?"

A nod.

"Good."

He drew back. His eyes, behind the spectacles, were bright and wet.

"It is the same for all of us," he whispered. "The first time."

…

He finished.

He didn't know how. He remembered afterward only fragments, scraps, like pages torn out of a book. The sour taste in his mouth. The wet cloth on his face, pressed there by someone, Silas, perhaps, with a murmured word. The rooster, laid in the Hearth. The clatter.

Twenty-nine. Thirty.

He did not count in numbers anymore. He counted in motions. Take. Turn. Cut. Lay. He learned a new trick: to let his eyes go slack, so the candlelight blurred into a single warm smear. It was easier. He did not have to see. He had only to move his hands.

Thirty-five.

The kids came. He took the first with his eyes shut.

It was soft. It trembled. It pressed against his chest, and he felt the small ribs, and the breath, and the pulse in its throat going fast, fast, fast.

Mensa parata est.

His voice was a croak. He had broken the Rector's order. He did not care.

Accipe.

Thirty-eight.

Forty.

The piglets came last. They didn't make a sound. That was the worst of it. He took one up in the crook of his arm, and it nestled there, warm and heavy and blind, and gave a tiny sigh. A pink snout nuzzled his sleeve.

Forty-three.

Forty-four.

In the cold blue light, he saw his own arms. They were wet to the elbow. They looked like someone else's arms. They looked like his father's.

Forty-six.

Forty-seven.

He set the knife against the last, and for a heartbeat his hand went still. He felt the whole ring draw breath. Felt the Rector's hand lift. Felt the Hearth lean toward him out of the dark like a mouth.

Quick.

And don't hesitate.

Forty-eight.

Forty-nine.

…

The last bone fell.

It rang. A thin, bright, falling sound, like a coin dropped in a well. It bounced once, twice, and rolled to a stop. And then it was quiet in the chapel, so quiet that the guttering of the candle flames was a roar.

Nothing breathed.

The iron door of the Hearth swung shut by itself, with a slow, soft, satisfied click.

"The Hand has finished," said Rector Kell.

His voice was hushed. It carried to every corner of the nave. Cassian stood at the table, swaying, with the knife still in his fist, and felt it wash over him like a benediction.

He could not feel his arms.

He looked down. They hung at his sides, slick, scarlet, crusted with down and dark clots. His fingers had gone numb from the wrist. There was something under his fingernails. A wet gray feather clung to his lip. He stared at it, and at the red on his palms, and for a moment he could not tell whose hands they were.

Don't look, he told himself. Don't look. Don't look.

He looked.

There was blood on his hands. A great deal of it. It ran in thin lines along the creases of his palms, dripped off his knuckles, pooled in the hollow of his thumb, and in the middle of it, pale, jagged, long since healed, the old scar glowed white, like a crack in a dark pane.

The Chosen began to sing.

It was soft, and sweet, and weary. A hymn of thanks, perhaps. He did not listen. He stood in the middle of the floor with the knife in his hand and the cold seeping up through his boots, and the red light lay on him like a robe.

Somewhere beneath his feet, in the dark, something sighed.

He stood like a statue, and did not weep, and did not speak, and did not look down.