Alone in the Choir

PREVIOUSLY: Cassian followed Ronald Fisk down to the vault below the chapel and, when the Guest woke over the boy, shut the iron door and shot the bolt. Rector Kell told him that this was what a Hand does, that the Guest does not forget a gift, and that he was now entered in the Ledger as a giver. On the seventh night Cassian closed the Hearth door behind Albert Sterling. Afterward Leo held out his hand and asked him to run.

…

"Go," said Cassian.

Leo stared at him.

"Go on. I mean it." He did not rise. He sat on the stone with his hands hanging between his knees, and his voice was quiet and entirely calm. "The gate's open. The road's not far. You'll make the truck if you hurry."

"Cassian."

"I'll stay."

"You can't."

"I think I have to."

"Why?" It was a cry. Leo clutched his sleeve in both hands. "Why would you? What can you possibly do? You can't help him. You can't help any of them. You can't bring them back."

"No."

"Then why—"

"Because I'm the one who shut the door."

Leo's mouth opened. He shut it. He stood very still on the step, looking down, and the light of the fading candles lay on his face and showed it small and white and stricken.

"That's not a reason," he said at last, hoarsely.

"It's the only one I've got."

"You'll die."

"Maybe."

"You'll be eaten." His voice cracked. "You'll end up like them. Singing. Do you hear what you're saying?"

"I hear it." A faint smile. "I hear it now."

Leo let go of his sleeve.

He stood a long moment with his hands open at his sides. Then, slowly, he drew his cap down over his ears, and shouldered his bag, and said in a small flat voice, "I wish you wouldn't."

"I know."

"I really wish you wouldn't."

"I know, Leo."

"Goodbye, then."

"Goodbye."

He went down the steps. At the bottom he stopped, and looked back, once, and Cassian lifted his hand. Leo looked at it. His lip quivered. He turned and ran across the lawn, small and dark, and was swallowed by the night.

Cassian sat alone on the steps.

He listened to the footsteps die. After a time, the wind brought him the faint high shriek of a gate.

…

He stayed there an hour.

The candles burned down. The Prefects came and snuffed them one by one and went away. The cold deepened. Dawn was still a long way off. He sat with his back against the pillar and his cloak drawn round him and watched the stars wheel slowly behind the roof of the chapel.

And the singing went on.

It was very soft now. It came from the stone under his feet, and from the air, and it was not a hymn so much as a kind of conversation. Three voices, passing a phrase among them, one lifting, one answering. He could make out no words. But he heard the shape of it: a question, and an answer, and a question again. Are you there? I'm here. Are you coming?

Yes, he thought. In a moment.

He rose.

His legs were stiff. He stood on the steps and looked at the great oak door, and put out his hand, and it opened. It had not been locked. It never was.

The nave was dark.

Only the red lamp over the altar burned, a small low coal in the gloom. The rows of pews stretched away on either hand. The floor-rings shone. At the far end, under the vaulted arch, the iron door of the Hearth stood shut, and before it, in a pool of red light, a small figure sat in a chair with a book on its knees.

He had known he would be there.

"Ah," said Rector Kell.

…

"I hoped you would come."

The old man did not rise. He was in his dressing gown, with his slippers on and a rug over his knees, and his thin white hair was ruffled as if he had been sleeping. The book in his lap was the one he had held in the study: thick, black, bound in scuffed calf. A pair of spectacles hung from a ribbon round his neck.

"Sit, child. Sit. There is a stool."

Cassian sat.

He sat at the foot of the Hearth, six feet from the old man, with the iron door at his back. It was warm through his cloak. A faint sweet pulse came through the metal, slow, even, like a sleeper's breath.

"I thought," said the Rector, "that the other one might persuade you."

"Leo."

"A good boy. A very brave one, in his way. I have always felt for him." He smiled sadly. "I did not stop him. He is free to go. As I told you. As I have told them all. The gate is not locked."

"Why not?"

"Because no one has ever gone far." The old man stroked the cover of the book. "They go. They run. They reach the road, the town, the city. And then, one night, in their bed, in a strange house, they hear a thing. A tune. A name. And they remember that they left someone in the dark." He sighed. "Guilt is a stronger lock than iron, my dear. It is the only one we have ever needed."

Cassian said nothing.

"You, I think, are different. You stay. That's a great rarity." He opened the book. "And since you stay, I believe I owe you a courtesy. I believe I owe you the truth."

…

"This is the Codex," said Kell.

He turned it toward the light.

The pages were thick and yellow, and the ink was black and brilliant as the day it was laid. The hand was cramped and slanting, the letters sharp. Cassian knew the words. He had learned them as a child learns a nursery rhyme, by sound alone. Venite, hospes, ad mensam nostram.

"It is not a prayer," said the Rector. "You understood that already. It is an invitation. A letter written by a man of God to a thing he should not have written to. Josiah Blackthorne was no fool. He knew precisely what he was doing. And he disguised it, as men do, in the dress of devotion."

"I know."

"You know the sense. Not the substance." He ran his finger down the page. "Here. Read this line with me."

Manum damus, ut saturemini.

"We give the hand, that you may be sated." A pause. "The hand, Cassian. Not a hand. You have always taken that as a figure of speech."

Cassian's mouth had gone dry.

"The Hand is a person," said Kell, softly. "Not a post. A bloodline. A family of butchers. Josiah Blackthorne chose it on purpose, because the Guest, which is a hungry thing, wished to be fed by those who understood hunger. It wished for the work of a man who kills with his own hands, daily, for a living, and thinks nothing of it. Such a man's child, trained from the cradle, would be the perfect instrument."

"My father."

"Edward Hale was not the first. His grandfather held the post. His great-grandfather." The old man's eyes were kind. "But he was the first to sell it."

He turned the page.

…

It was a ledger.

Not the great one, the Ledger of Names, burned or buried or sleeping in its vault. This was a smaller book, a list, in a clerk's hand, running back and back. Cassian read the first column, and the second, and the third. He saw dates. He saw names. Hale, T. 1894. Hale, J. 1921. Hale, W. 1949. And at the end of the column, in fresh black ink, a line he did not need to read, because he had seen it, in his own handwriting, on a thousand school forms.

Hale, C. Entered at birth.

Beside it, in the margin, a tidy note: Contracted 1/9. E. Hale, per H. Dobbs. Consideration: one file.

"It was arranged," said the Rector, "the year you were born. A matter of convenience. Your father had a charge hanging over him. Our friend in the sheriff's office had it in his drawer. It was understood that he would deliver the next Hand when the time came, and that the file would disappear. It disappeared." He smiled. "Fifteen years you have been ours. You were entered before you could walk."

"And the scholarship."

"The scholarship was a bait. I confess it freely. A kindness, if you like, to make the thing less of a blow."

"The fights. The suspension. The boots."

"Arranged."

"The beating?"

The old man hesitated.

"Your father," he said carefully, "is a violent man, and was a violent man long before we found him. We did not make him so. But we did not discourage him. It was useful for you to be... tempered."

Cassian stood up.

His legs were steady. His hands were steady. A great slow tide of cold was rising in him from the soles of his feet, and he stood in the red light with his arms at his sides and looked down at the old man in the chair, and for the first time in his life he did not feel angry at all.

He felt nothing. Not even surprise.

"You've told me," he said.

"I have."

"Why?"

"Because it is kind." Kell closed the book. "And because it makes no difference now."

Behind Cassian, in the black iron of the Hearth, a voice began to sing.