The Last Hand

"No," whispered the Rector.

He had lifted his head from the floor. His face was a mask of tears and dust. He stared at the boy standing in the arch, and for the first time in all the months of Cassian's knowing him, there was no kindness in it, and no cunning, no sweetness, no control. There was only a hopeless, bewildered horror.

"No, no. Not like this. Not the Hand. It's, it's the wrong way. The Hand doesn't, the Seal is a Seal. It can't be the same. It's never been the same boy."

"It's the only one you've got," said Cassian.

"But you're mine." The old man's voice cracked. "I made you. You're my, you were going to be my—" He stopped. He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth. "I loved you," he whispered. "In my way. I did."

"I know."

"Don't do it."

"It's done."

The Deacon had not moved. She knelt rigid on the stones with her key in her fist, and tears ran down her white cheeks and dripped off her chin. She looked at Cassian with an expression he could not read. It might have been shame. It might have been envy.

"Miriam," moaned the Rector. "Stop him."

"I can't," she said.

"Miriam."

"It's his to give," said Deacon Thorne, in a voice like paper. "It was always his."

…

The Guest came to him.

It uncoiled out of the dark, slowly, one limb at a time, and stood before him in the churning gloom. It did not rush. It did not tower. It bent its long body at the waist and lowered the swathed, pulsing head until the wet gray cloth hung a hand's breadth from his face. He smelled it. The kill floor. Iron, and clay, and ancient sweetness. His stomach heaved and he held himself still.

"Hand," said the voices.

"I'm not the Hand now. Not anymore."

A pause. Silence moved in the chamber like a held breath.

"No," the Guest agreed. "Seal."

"Yes."

"You come freely?"

"Yes."

"You give?"

"I give."

Something shifted in the gray folds of the cloth. The head tilted. It was listening, Cassian thought, with the whole of its vast attention, as a man listens who has been offered a great sum and cannot believe the figure. For the first time, the many voices fell silent. For the first time, there was no sound in the vault at all.

He raised his hands.

He held them out in front of him, palms up, as Albert had done. In the right, the black mark burned like a coal. He looked at it. He looked at the many-jointed fingers hanging in the gloom, and the soft hungry throat of the dark above them. And he thought of the thing he had never been taught.

He thought: I'll say it in my own words.

…

They had given him the rite in Latin. They had given him the hymn, the corrupted, crooked, beautiful Latin that nobody understood. Venite, hospes. Ad mensam nostram. Come, guest, to our table. For a month he had sung it without translating. Don't think. Just sing.

He thought now.

He let the words rise in his mind, one by one, in the order they came, and gave them the meaning they had never been allowed to have.

"Venite, hospes," he said.

His voice was low and clear and went round the vault like a bell.

"Come, guest. Come in. I've kept the door."

The darkness shivered.

"Ad mensam nostram. To our table. I know you're hungry. I know you've been waiting."

He heard a long slow sigh.

"Mensa parata est. The table is laid. I'll sit at it myself. Sanguis fusus est. The blood is spilled. All of it. All that's owed." He swallowed. "I won't be the last. I know that. But I'll be the last I can save."

Manum damus, he said. We give our hand.

He gave it.

He felt something take it. Cold, enormous, tender beyond all expectation. The long fingers wrapped round his own, and the touch was neither fierce nor cruel. It was the touch of something very old and very lonely, taking a gift it had waited a hundred years to be offered. He felt the black mark flare. He felt, as in a dream, the thing's strange vast attention turn upon him, and open, and take him in.

"Hospes, sede," he said. Guest, sit. "Ede." Eat.

Ne abeas.

Do not leave.

It was the last line. In the old rite it was a prayer to keep the thing at the table, to chain it with courtesy. He had said it a hundred times without hearing it. Now he said it as a man says goodbye to a house.

Stay. Stay here. Leave them alone.

The wet cloth bent down.

…

Light spread through the vault.

It was green and then white, and it came from the wall, from the floor, from the black mark in his palm. It was not painful. It was warm. It rolled outward in long slow waves, and where it touched the stones, the frost ran off them like water. The roar in the walls was dying. The iron door of the Hearth upstairs, far above, slammed shut with a sound he felt rather than heard.

The Rector was weeping aloud.

The Deacon had covered her face.

And Cassian stood in the middle of the light, with his hand in the Guest's and his head thrown back, and found that he was not afraid. It was strange. He had thought there would be pain. There was none. He had thought he would think of Albert, or of Leo, or of the blood, or of his father's laugh in the dark. He thought of none of it.

He thought of the kitchen on Cooper Street.

A small yellow room. A radio on the sill, playing something low. A woman at the stove with her back to him, stirring a pot, and her voice, thin and sweet and not quite on key, rising and falling over the sizzle of the pan. He couldn't hear the words. It was an old song. It had a lot of verses. She sang them one after another, as she worked, not to him, not to anyone, in the quiet of an ordinary afternoon.

Sing it again, he thought.

She did.

The light brightened until there was nothing else. The door of the vault slammed shut behind him with a soft final sound. The hands on his own were warm.

In the stillness, as it faded, somebody was humming.

…

Above the chapel, the stars came out.

It was nearly dawn. The clouds had cleared from the valley. A long pale streak showed in the east, and a thin, clean wind came down from the hills, and the frost on the lawns lay white and quiet. Not a pane was broken in the dormitories. The cracked bell was silent. In the fields, a dog barked once, and fell still.

The roar had stopped.

There was no sound anywhere in all the valley but the wind.

The pact had been bound again, for seven years.