Sanctus

Chapter 54

Dawn drew everyone back into the great cathedral hall for Matins, the last of the four nocturnes, to bear witness to the death of night and the birth of a new day. Because it carried with it so many powerful symbolic overtones of redemption, rebirth, deliverance from evil, and the triumph of light over darkness it was compulsory for everyone in the Citadel to attend.

Only today, something was different.

Athanasius noticed it when Father Malachi was in the middle of one of his rhetorical flights of fancy from the pulpit, and he glanced absently across the lines of red-cassocked guards standing in front of him. Despite the strictness of the rule that all should attend Matins, one of them was missing. At six foot five, Guillermo Rodriguez usually stood out, quite literally, from the others. But today he wasn’t there.

He remembered the sixty-two personnel files he’d delivered to the Abbot’s chamber the previous day. Sixty-two red files for sixty-two Carmina. He turned his body slightly as if listening intently to the sermon and conducted a silent head count.

The trapped air of the cathedral cave shook with the deep sound of every voice in the Citadel chanting the final doxology in the original language of their church. ‘Every day will I bless thee; and I will praise thy name forever and ever. Blessed art thou, O LORD: teach me thy statutes.’

Athanasius just managed to finish as the lines of the congregation started to disperse. There were fifty-nine guards. Three were missing.

As the sun rose, the great windows lit up above the altar; God had opened his great eye and was gazing down upon his loyal congregation. Light had, once again, defeated darkness; the new day had begun.

Athanasius filed out of the cathedral in the crush of brown cassocks, his mind filled with the possibilities of his discovery. He knew a little of Brother Guillermo’s past and guessed now at the reason the Abbot might have singled him out. It was a thought that troubled him greatly. He had always prided himself on his ability to curb the Abbot’s impulsiveness. The fact that three of the guards were now missing made him anxious — not just because he feared the Abbot’s response to Brother Samuel’s death, but because he’d had to discover it for himself.

By revealing the prophecy to him in the forbidden vault the day before, which seemed to foretell the end of the Sacrament and a new beginning, he thought the Abbot had demonstrated a thawing of the crippling secrecy that he believed kept the Church frozen in the past. Now his suspicions suggested quite the opposite. Far from looking forward toward an enlightened future, he feared the Abbot might be returning to the medieval behaviour of their dark and violent past.