Refusing the Offering

"Cassian."

It was his mother's voice.

It came out of the dark at his back, close behind his ear, soft and tired and breathless. He knew it before he knew he knew it. The little catch in the middle of the name. The way the s went flat. He had heard it saying Cassian, supper up the stairs, and Cassian, hush, in the night, and Cassian, honey, it's all right through a bathroom door with a cold cloth in her hand.

His arm stopped halfway through its swing.

"Cassian, baby. It hurts."

He turned his head.

The Guest was standing at his shoulder.

It had come down out of the dome without a sound, and it stooped over him, swathed and gray, with the wet cloth quivering where a face should be. The many-jointed hands hung at its sides. The voice that came out of it was not a hundred voices now. It was one. It was thin and shaky, and so exactly like hers that the floor seemed to slide away under his boots.

"It hurts so much, baby. I can't breathe."

"Mom."

"I'm in the dark. I'm so cold."

"It isn't her," Leo said sharply. "Cassian, it's not—"

"Please."

He couldn't help it. He took a step.

…

"I can help," said the voice.

It was a whisper, low and confiding, like a conspirator's. He was close enough now to smell it, the sweet, rank, coppery breath, and under it, impossibly, a thread of lavender.

"It's easy. It's so easy, baby. They told me. All you have to do is give me what I'm owed. One last offering. Just one, and I'll be well. I'll be better than well. I'll be strong, I'll walk, I'll run, I'll never hurt again. I'll live to be a hundred." A tender, shaking sigh. "Don't you want that?"

"Yes."

"I know you do."

"Yes, I want it." His voice broke. "I want it more than anything."

"Then give me the boy."

He went cold.

"That one." The long gray hand rose, slow as a lily, and pointed past him. "The one with the book. The one with the clever tongue. He will do. He's just right. He's clean, he's willing, he has the blood of the house." The voice was soft as a hand on a forehead. "Give him to me, baby. Give me Leo."

Behind him, the boy drew a sharp breath.

"It's only one," said his mother. "Only one, and it's for me. You'd do it for me. You've done so much already. You've done forty-nine."

Cassian stood quite still.

His arm trembled. He could feel the knife, heavy in his fist, the bone handle warm against the scar. His eyes were burning. His throat was a knot. In the dark above the dome the many-voiced breath was waiting, and beneath it his mother's voice went on, sweet and imploring and sad.

"You're a good boy. You've always been a good boy. Do this one last thing for me."

…

He knew it was a lie.

That was the worst of it. He knew. He knew with every cold reasoning cell in his head. His mother was sleeping in a bed in Ottley, Iowa, in a ward that smelled of floor wax, with a man in a work jacket asleep in the chair beside her. She was not here. She had never been here. This was a thing that wore a mask of cloth and spoke with a stolen voice.

But it was her voice.

It was her exactly. It had her breath in it, her fear, her lilt. It had the small private tremor at the end of every sentence that no one but her son had ever noticed. It had her love. That was the thing that undid him. It had been made out of his own memory, reached into the soft part of him and drawn it out. It knew the exact shape of his need.

It always finds the place, Leo had said.

The little hole. The crack where something's missing.

He lowered the knife.

He lowered it very slowly, until the point rested against the stone. His whole body was shaking. Tears ran down his face and fell on his hands, and he did not wipe them.

"Yes," breathed his mother. "That's it. That's right."

"Cassian," said Leo.

It was very quiet.

"Cassian, it's all right. If you can't. I'll do it. I'll go to it." He was white as paper. He had come two steps forward with the notebook hugged to his chest, and his voice was clear and thin and entirely without fear. "You don't have to carry this by yourself. If it has to be somebody, then let it be me."

Cassian stared at him.

Two dark eyes. A split lip. A face too young for what it had seen. A boy who had lain every night for a month three feet from him with his heart in his throat, and had never asked for a thing in return. I'm glad it was you.

Let it be me.

Something broke in his chest.

…

He did not remember deciding.

He knew only that the world went suddenly very clear and bright, as it does in the last moments before sleep or after a fever. He felt the grip of the knife. He felt the cold of the stone under his feet. He felt, quite distinctly, in the pit of his belly, the thing he had been taught to feel at the plant on the first day: the stillness. The cold. The knowledge of the exact right place.

Quick, his father had said. And don't hesitate.

"No," said Cassian.

He said it quietly.

"Baby?"

"You're not her."

"I am. I am. Cassian—"

"She never asked me for anything." His voice shook, and steadied. "Not once. Not in sixteen years. She'd have died first."

The Guest drew back.

It did it all at once, with a rustle like wind in a field of dry corn. The soft voice cracked. A hundred other voices broke through, one over another, a child, a woman, a man with a rasp, and the swathed head swelled and rippled. A long cold hand reached for him.

He swung the knife.

He did not swing it at Leo. He did not swing it at the thing with his mother's voice. He turned his whole body on the ball of his foot, and brought the blade round in a flat, savage, perfect arc, as he had been taught to cut a hide from the neck to the tail, and drove it with all his strength into the open book on the pedestal.

…

The Ledger screamed.

It was not the leather. It was something inside it. The knife went in to the hilt, through the black cover and the thick gray pages, and stopped with a jolt against the stone beneath. And a sound came out of the book, a high, thin, piercing shriek, such as a hare makes in a trap, and under it a lower sound, a groan, as if a thousand people had cried out at once.

Black blood welled from the cut.

It was thick, and slow, and it stank. It ran down the face of the pedestal in dark ropes and pooled on the floor. Cassian dragged the knife through, ripping the cover open from corner to corner, and the pages burst out of their binding in a flutter of gray. A name flew up, then another. The names were in the air. They flew round the dome like moths.

"No," said the Guest. "No. NO."

He reached for the red candle.

It sat in its iron dish at the foot of the stand, small and steady, burning with a flame the color of a heart. He closed his hand about it. It was cold. It was colder than ice. It seared his palm, the new black mark, and he held it, and lifted it high, and the light threw his shadow huge and trembling across the vault.

"I won't," he said.

The Guest was screaming now. All the voices, all together, a wall of sound.

"I'm not giving you anyone," said Cassian. "Not him. Not me. Not Albert. Not Elias. Not any of them. Not ever again."

He set the flame to the book.

"I refuse," he said, in the middle of the roar, in a voice that carried to the top of the dome.