The Old Man at the Desk

PREVIOUSLY: Cassian took the knife and fed the Hearth on the first night of the Great Vigil: forty-nine offerings, forty-nine bones. Afterward Leo sat on the edge of his bed in the dark and said, If you want the truth, find Pike. If not, don't. Cassian lay awake until dawn. He chose to ask.

…

He went to the library at ten past seven on Monday morning, before the first bell.

The corridor was empty. It had that early hush he had come to know, of stone that had not yet warmed, and breath that smoked faintly in the air. The boys were at breakfast. The Prefects were at their posts. Through the long windows the lawn lay gray with frost, and at its edge, black against the sky, the chapel stood with its red slits dark.

He had not slept. He knew what he looked like. He had seen it in the washroom mirror: the bruised sockets, the pinched mouth, the face of a boy who has been left out in the rain. He had scrubbed his hands again. He had changed his shirt. It had not mattered. The smell of the chapel clung to him still, faint and sweet, in his hair, in the weave of his collar.

He pushed open the library door.

Pike sat behind the lending desk with a ledger open in front of him and a pencil in his hand, not writing. He was smaller than Cassian remembered, a shrunken old man in a brown vest with white hair standing up like dandelion fluff, and the lamp on the desk threw his shadow tall behind him on the shelves. He raised his head.

For a long time, neither of them spoke.

Then the old man took off his glasses, and folded them, and laid them on the ledger.

"You killed forty-nine yesterday," he said.

His voice was low and dry and very gentle.

Cassian stood in the doorway.

"I heard it from here. Everybody did." Pike's eyes were red-rimmed, and bright, and fixed on the middle distance. "The roosters. I've heard them every seven years for forty-one years, and I have never once been able to sleep through it. They know, you see. The animals. They know long before we do."

"You knew," said Cassian. "All this time. That day you sold me the phone."

"Yes."

"And you didn't say."

"No." The old man's mouth shook. "Nobody says. That's how it works, boy. We all know. Everyone who works in this place knows what is under the chapel. The cook, the janitor, the nurse. And none of us says a word, because the first one who does..." He lifted a hand and let it drop. "Well. You'll see."

…

Cassian came in and shut the door behind him.

He crossed the room slowly, and stopped in front of the desk, and put his hands flat on the worn oak. They did not shake. That was the horror. They lay there, broad and still, with the scar white across the right palm.

"I want to know everything," he said.

Pike said nothing.

"The Codex. The thing under the chapel. Whatever your Society is, wherever it came from. Why it needs a Hand. Why it picked me." He kept his voice level. "I want to know what's in the old library, the one in the basement of Block B, the one nobody goes to. Leo says to ask you."

At the name, the old man flinched.

"Leo said that?"

"Yes."

"The boy is brave," Pike said, very softly. "Braver than I ever was."

"Please."

Pike looked at him a long moment. Then he looked at the lamp. Then, slowly, as if turning the pages of a book he had hoped to leave unread, he began to speak.

"I told you once that if I helped you, I'd be punished alongside you."

"I remember."

"I meant it."

"I know," said Cassian. "I'm asking anyway."

The old man shut his eyes.

It was a small gesture. A man closing a door. For a long moment he sat with his lids pressed down and his lips moving, and Cassian, watching him, thought that he was praying, or counting. When he opened them again, something had gone out of his face. It was not fear. It was something nearer relief, the quiet slackness of a man who has put down a weight he has carried for years and finds that his arms no longer know what to do.

"All right," said Pike.

…

"Block B," he said. "Down the stairs at the end, past the old boiler. There's a door that looks like a closet. The Warden of Records keeps the key. Which is to say, it is kept in the Warden's office, in a drawer, and the Warden is a man of seventy-one who has not been down those stairs in a decade."

"You have a key."

"A spare." Pike turned his glasses over in his fingers. "From a boy I once knew. He had it cut in the village and gave it to me for safekeeping. He said, If anyone comes asking, Mr. Pike, give it to them. I told him no one would ever ask." A small bitter smile. "That was fourteen years ago."

Cassian's heart gave a hard slow knock.

"Who was he?"

"Later." The old man waved a hand. "Not here. The walls have ears, in this place, and the ears are not all human. Come at noon, when the boys are at lunch. Ms. Dunmore does her rounds of the east wing at twelve and doesn't return before a quarter past. That gives us the time."

"She'll see me."

"She won't if you're careful."

"And if she does?"

Pike was silent.

He drew his ledger toward him. He took a cloth from his pocket, and he began, very carefully, to polish the lenses of his glasses, breathing on each, rubbing in slow circles. His hands, Cassian saw, were trembling. The cloth made a small dry whispering sound in the silent room. He polished one lens a long time, and then the other, and then held them up to the lamp and looked through them at nothing.

"If you see I'm afraid," he said, "you're right. I am."

He put the glasses on.

"I'm more afraid than I've ever been in my life. Noon, boy. Don't be late."