For thirty-two years in the high stone scriptorium of the Bell Tower, Sister Oda had been taught that breaking a liturgical cadence before the closing amen was a sin of the tongue that untied the order of the world.
When she was a novice of nineteen with unscarred hands, the Sub-Prior had made her kneel on dry salt peas for three hours because she had stopped chanting a minor vesper office to catch a frail eighty-year-old canon who had fainted in the choir stalls beside her. The office belongs to the eternal stone, Sister, the Sub-Prior had told her as he marked the fault in the convent fault-book. An old man’s bones fall whether you stop the verse or not.
Later, when she discovered the charred ledger scrapes under the sacristy floor and tried to read the names of the dead laborers aloud before the altar, the Arch-Prelate’s bailiffs had held her right palm against a red-hot brazier grill to teach her what happened to archivists who interrupted the Crown’s clean liturgy with the messy noise of living people.
So when Jon Hale looked through the rolling black smoke of the River Lantern’s back room and told her to cut the hymn, Sister Oda did not hesitate for half a heartbeat.
