Dust rose from the cracked road in pale, anemic plumes as the sun climbed toward noon over Hollow's Creek. It was a thin dust, the kind that came from earth too long parched, and it clung to the cuffs of trousers, the hems of dresses, the fur of the dogs that slunk between the starved rail fences. The town lay squat in the crease of two bluffs, the way a beggar lies down in a ditch, and the bluffs themselves had gone the color of old bone.
Mayor Aldric Vane stepped off the boardwalk in front of his trading post and watched the sky. A man could learn a great deal about a town by watching its sky, and the sky above Hollow's Creek had become a liar. Every dawn promised rain, and every dawn delivered only a white, sun-bleached glare that made the pupils shrink and the temper shorten. The glass thermometer bolted to the porch post read ninety-four in the shade, and there had been no shade for a fortnight. Vane adjusted the watch chain across his vest, flicked a fleck of dust from his cuff, and let his gaze travel the length of what he owned.
He owned the trading post. He owned the mill, though the wheel had not turned in sixty-two days. He owned the slaughterhouse and the lease on the cemetery plot and the promissory notes that hung in a locked drawer behind the cigar case. The street itself, such as it was, belonged to no one, but the boards beneath it answered to his accountants in Saint Louis. He was a man who had learned to take his pleasures in ledgers, and the ledgers of late had grown thin and irritable, the ink fading on figures that should have been swelling with the harvest trade.
The harvest had not come.
Vane's boots, polished that morning by a boy who would not be paid until October, struck the dry boards with a rhythm that townsfolk had learned to listen for. He had a walk that was not quite a parade and not quite a patrol. It suggested, with every measured step, that the boardwalk had been laid for his convenience and that the rest of them were welcome to stand aside. This morning, the welcome was thinner than usual. A knot of men had gathered near the courthouse steps, their hats pulled low, their hands shoved deep into pockets that held nothing. They watched him the way starving dogs watch a butcher: with a mixture of hope and blame.
He acknowledged them with a nod so slight it could have been mistaken for a twitch. Then he climbed the three steps to the post, nodded to the clerk behind the counter, and turned the sign in the window from OPEN to CLOSED.
"Sheriff's business," he said, before the clerk could ask. The lie was a small one, and useful, and the clerk knew better than to press. The clerk's name was Ezra, and Ezra had two children and a wife with a cough that would not quiet, and he had learned the geometry of survival in a town that had begun to look like the inside of a coffin. He lowered his eyes, drew a cloth across the counter in a slow circle, and said nothing.
Vane crossed the dim interior of the post, between barrels of salt pork and crates of cartridges, past the rack of long rifles and the glass case of pocket watches that no one in Hollow's Creek could afford to wind. A bell above the back door gave a small, defeated chime as he pushed through into the alley. The alley smelled of ammonia and old straw and the faint, sweet rot of a dog that had died beneath the feed store and not been retrieved. He breathed through his mouth.
At the end of the alley, a boy sat on an overturned crate, peeling a stick with a pocket knife. The boy looked up with eyes that were too old for his face.
"You're early," Vane said.
The boy shrugged. "I wasn't doing anything else."
Vane studied him for a moment. The boy was twelve, perhaps thirteen, with the kind of hunger that had moved past the stomach and into the bones. His name was Hettie, though no one called her that anymore, and she had been useful to Vane for the better part of a year in ways that required no ledger entry. Old Hettie, some of the men at the courthouse had taken to calling her, as a joke, because she had the eyes of a woman who had outlived her welcome and the mouth of one who had not been invited to dinner. The name had stuck the way burrs stick to wool, and now even Vane used it, though never to her face.
"Where is he?" Vane asked.
"Back room. The one with the Bibles."
"You let him in alone?"
"He had a gun."
Vane's jaw tightened by a fraction. "Of course he did. Did he draw it?"
"No, sir. He just sort of showed it. Like a man shows a pocket watch when he wants you to know the time."
Vane almost smiled. Almost. The muscles at the corner of his mouth began their familiar negotiation, and he quashed them. Smiling was a tool, and tools were best used at the proper moment, and the proper moment was not in an alley that smelled of dead dog. He gestured for the boy to stay, and the boy, who had no intention of moving, returned to his stick.
The back room of the trading post was not, in fact, a room with Bibles. It was a room with ledger books and a strongbox and a set of law books from the territorial capital that Vane kept more for show than for reference. The Bibles had been removed three years ago, when the previous preacher had been encouraged to move on to greener parishes, and the room had been converted into a place where men could be persuaded to reconsider their positions. There was a table, and two chairs, and a single window that looked out onto the blank face of the bluff. The window was locked. The door was solid oak.
Father Maron sat in the nearer chair, his hands folded on the table, his cassock dusty at the hem. He had walked the half mile from the church in the heat, and the heat had not been kind to him. A vein throbbed at his temple, and a faint sheen of sweat caught the light that fell in a pale blade through the slatted shutters. He looked up when Vane entered, and his face, which had been composed into the particular mask of clerical patience, softened by exactly the degree required to suggest relief.
"Mayor," he said. "Thank you for seeing me."
Vane closed the door behind him. He did not lock it. Locking the door was a gesture, and gestures were for the weak. He crossed to the far chair, drew it out, and sat with the unhurried precision of a man settling into a pew. He folded his own hands on the table, mirroring the priest, and let a silence gather.
It was a good silence, a practiced one. Vane had cultivated it the way other men cultivated roses, pruning the awkward pauses, watering the expectant ones, until the thing that grew was a hybrid of menace and patience that had served him through three elections and two scandals. Father Maron, to his credit, did not rush to fill it. He had been in this room before, though not this particular one, and he knew the rules.
"Drink?" Vane said, at last.
"Water, if you have it clean."
Vane reached into the drawer beside the ledger and produced a bottle and two glasses. The water was not clean, not by any standard a city man would recognize, but it was wet, and in Hollow's Creek wet had become a currency more valuable than silver. He poured, slid a glass across the table, and waited until the priest had drunk.
"You wanted to see me," Vane said. "Here I am."
The priest set down the glass and folded his hands again. "It is about the stranger."
"The stranger."
"The one who arrived yesterday. On the black horse. He has been asking questions at the church. He has been asking questions at the store. He has been asking questions at the well."
Vane lifted his glass but did not drink. "People ask questions. It is a free country, more or less."
"It is not the asking." Father Maron's voice softened, taking on the cadence of a man delivering a homily to a difficult congregation. "It is the kind of questions. He asked me about the Carrick land. He asked me about the old records. He asked me about Ezekiel."
The name fell into the room like a coin into a well. Vane let it ring.
"Many people ask about Ezekiel," he said. "Ezekiel was a preacher. Preachers attract interest."
"This man is not interested in preaching. He carries a pistol that has been used, and a journal that has been written in by a man who is no longer alive to write in it. He is carrying the weight of something. I have seen that weight before. I have seen it in men who have come back from wars, and in men who have come back from prisons, and in men who have come back from places I do not have a name for. He is one of those men."
Vane set the glass down. "And what does he want with Ezekiel?"
"I do not know. That is why I came to you. He asked if Ezekiel had a son. I told him that I could not, in good conscience, answer that question without first consulting the man's family."
"His family is in the ground."
"His family is in the ground here. That is not the same thing."
Vane regarded the priest. Father Maron was a small man, a soft man, a man whose shoulders curved inward as though he were perpetually shielding himself from a wind that only he could feel. He had been in Hollow's Creek for twenty-three years, which was longer than any preacher had a right to last in a town that chewed up its clergy and spat out the bones. He had survived by saying very little, and by knowing when to say it, and by maintaining a useful ignorance of the things that Vane preferred to keep in the dark. In another town, in another life, he might have been a happy man. Here, he was a necessary one.
"You did well to tell me," Vane said.
"I did not come for approval."
"No. You came because the stranger frightens you, and you have decided that frightening me more is the safer course." Vane's voice remained level, almost conversational, but the temperature in the room dropped by a degree that had nothing to do with the weather. "That is a miscalculation, Father. A small one, but a miscalculation all the same."
The priest did not flinch. That was something, Vane supposed. The old Maron would have flinched.
"I came," the priest said, "because I believe the stranger is Cassius Carrick."
The silence this time was not a cultivated one. It was the silence of a man recalculating, and Vane was not accustomed to recalculating in the presence of witnesses. He let the moment pass, then another, then a third.
"You cannot be certain," he said.
"I served his father. I baptized the boy. I know the face. Twenty-three years, and the Carrick face does not change. The jaw, the eyes. The way he stands as though he is waiting to be struck." The priest's hand trembled slightly, and he stilled it with the other. "He is thinner. He is harder. But he is the boy."
"And the pistol."
"And the pistol."
Vane rose, crossed to the window, and looked out at the blank face of the bluff. The bluff stared back, unimpressed. He considered the angles. Cassius Carrick had left Hollow's Creek seven years ago, a youth of nineteen with more scripture on his tongue than sense in his head, and he had not been heard from since. The telegram that had announced Ezekiel's death had come from a town in the southern territory, and the body had been brought back in a pine box that Vane had paid for, because it would have looked peculiar if he had not. The funeral had been small. The grave was in the northeast corner, near the fence, where the soil was shallow and the digging had been easy.
Vane had not expected the son to return. Sons who left Hollow's Creek did not return. It was one of the town's few mercies.
"What does he want?" Vane asked, though he knew, and the priest knew he knew, and the knowing sat between them like a third man at the table.
"I did not ask."
"You should have."
"He did not invite the question."
Vane turned from the window. "You will invite it. You will go back to the church, and you will find this man, and you will tell him that you remember him. You will tell him you are glad he has come home. You will weep, if you can manage it, and you will offer him the church's hospitality, which in this case means a bed and a meal and the use of your privy. You will listen to what he says. You will report it to me."
"And if I do not?"
The question hung in the air, sincere and trembling. Vane regarded the priest with the expression he reserved for men who had mistaken their usefulness for a kind of armor.
"Then I will be very disappointed, Father. And you have seen what my disappointments look like. You buried one of them last spring."
Father Maron closed his eyes. The lids were thin, and the veins beneath them showed blue, and he looked for a moment like a man who had been fasting for longer than a week. When he opened them again, the softness had not returned, but something else had: a small, hard light, the kind that burns in a lamp that has almost no oil.
"I will do what you ask," he said. "But I want something in return."
"Name it."
"Rain."
Vane almost laughed. Almost. The muscles of his face began their negotiation, and he quashed them again.
"I cannot make rain, Father."
"You can make a great many things. You have made this town what it is. You can make it something else." The priest rose, his cassock whispering against the chair. "The people are afraid. They are saying the drought is a judgment. They are saying it is the Carrick sin, come home to roost. They are saying that until Ezekiel's blood is answered, the sky will not open."
"Superstition."
"Perhaps. But superstitions have teeth, Mayor. And the man with the pistol has come to pull them."
Father Maron crossed himself, a small, habitual gesture, and moved to the door. Vane did not open it for him. The priest opened it himself, and the bell in the alley gave its small, defeated chime, and the door closed, and Vane was alone with the ledgers and the strongbox and the blank face of the bluff.
He stood for a long time. Then he sat down at the table, drew a sheet of paper from the drawer, and began to write.
The quill had a mind of its own, or so Vane liked to think in the small hours when he could not sleep. It caught on the fibers of the paper and bled a small star of ink into the grain, and he had to blot it before he could form the first letter. He worked slowly, because slowness was a kind of caution, and caution was a kind of armor. The words came out in the careful hand of a man who had learned his letters at his mother's knee and had never quite lost the tremor of a boy's wrist.
He did not know what he was writing until he had written it. The pen moved, and he followed it, and the page filled with a language that felt older than English, older than the creak of the chapel floor, older than the bones of the men buried in the churchyard. He did not read it back. He folded the sheet once, twice, three times, and slid it into the pocket of his waistcoat, where it lay against his heart like a second pulse.
Then he rang the bell.
The sound was small and precise, and it brought a clerk in from the outer office, a young man with ink on his cuffs and a face that had not yet learned to arrange itself into expressions. Vane gave him instructions in a low voice, and the clerk nodded, and went away, and the room was quiet again.
Vane rose, went to the window, and looked out at the town. The afternoon had begun to lean westward, and the shadows of the storefronts stretched long across the dust of the square. He could see the chapel, half-hidden by the livery, and the dark line of the road that led up into the hills, and the thin trail of smoke from Old Hettie's chimney, and the slower pulse of dust where someone was walking along the fence line of the cemetery. He watched until the figure passed behind the chandler's shop and did not reappear.
He turned from the window, crossed the room, and took from the strongbox a small leather folder. He carried it to the table and sat, and opened it, and spread its contents before him in the slanted light. There were papers, and some of them were very old, and some of them were very new, and all of them were stained in one way or another with the particular brown that comes from years of being handled by hands that have other things to do than handle them gently. He did not read them. He had read them many times. He only looked at them, the way a man looks at the cards he has been dealt, and he considered what hand he might yet play.
The first paper was a deed, drawn up in the year that Hollow's Creek had been nothing more than a bend in the river and a name on a surveyor's map. It granted to a man named Eliab Carrick, in perpetuity, the land on which the chapel now stood, and the land that lay around it, and the mineral rights beneath it, and the water rights above it. The signature at the bottom was not Eliab's. It was his father's. And the witness was a man whose name Vane had paid to have struck from every public record in the county.
The second paper was a letter, written in a hand he recognized, and dated three weeks before the death of Ezekiel Carrick. It was a brief letter, and a strange one, and it spoke of a debt that had never been recorded in any ledger Vane had ever seen. He read it now, and his mouth thinned.
The third paper was a small rectangle of card stock, and on it was written a single line in an ink that had faded almost to the color of the water in which Old Hettie boiled her herbs. The line was a name. The name was not one he had expected to see. He looked at it for a long time, and then he put it back in the folder, and closed the folder, and put the folder back in the strongbox, and locked the strongbox, and put the key in his pocket.
He had been sitting there for perhaps half an hour when the clerk returned and stood in the doorway, waiting to be noticed. Vane did not look up.
"Well?"
"The man, sir. He is at the chapel."
"At the chapel."
"Yes, sir. He came down from the hills about an hour ago. He is speaking with Father Maron."
Vane looked up then. The light had shifted, and his face was in shadow, and the clerk could not read his expression.
"At the chapel," he said again, as if tasting the words.
"Yes, sir."
"Alone?"
"With the priest, sir. They went inside some twenty minutes ago. The doors are closed."
Vane rose, smoothed the front of his waistcoat, and took his hat from the peg by the door. He did not give the clerk any further instructions, and the clerk, who had learned when not to ask, stepped aside to let him pass.
The walk to the chapel was not a long one, but Vane took it slowly. He nodded to the men on the porch of the trading post, and tipped his hat to two women who were carrying baskets, and paused to exchange a word with the undertaker, who was sweeping the threshold of his shop with a broom that had seen better days. He was, in these moments, exactly what he appeared to be: the mayor, the merchant, the man who kept the wheels turning and the accounts balanced and the peace, such as it was, from being altogether broken.
But his right hand, in his pocket, was closed around the folded paper, and the paper was warm from his body, and he could feel the shape of the words he had written pressing into his palm.
The chapel of St. Judas the Apostle stood at the far end of the main street, where the road began to rise toward the hills. It was a small building, built of timber that had been hauled down from the high country in the first years of the settlement, and it had the look of a thing that had been repaired more times than it had been built. The bell tower was new, the gift of a man who had since left the territory, and the cross above it was of a slightly different color than the rest of the wood, and in certain lights it caught the sun and threw it back in a way that made travelers look up from the road and pull their hats a little lower over their eyes.
Vane stopped at the gate. The gate was iron, and it had been painted at some point in the past, but the paint had long since surrendered to the weather, and the iron beneath it was the color of dried blood. He did not open it. He stood, with his hands folded before him, and looked at the chapel, and the chapel looked back at him with its blank, shuttered windows.
The doors of the chapel were closed, but not latched. He could see, even from the gate, that one of them was ajar, and that a thin line of yellow light fell across the step, and that the light moved slightly, as if someone inside were pacing. He listened. He could hear, very faintly, the sound of voices. One of them was low, and slow, and had the cadence of a man who was used to being listened to. The other was rougher, and quicker, and had the sound of a man who was not.
He did not go in. Not yet. He turned from the gate, and walked along the low stone wall that bordered the churchyard, and paused where the wall curved around the oldest of the graves. The grave was marked with a stone so worn that the name upon it could no longer be read, and the grass around it was of a darker green than the grass of the other plots, as if the ground itself remembered what lay beneath.
He stood there for a long time. The sun moved. The shadows lengthened. The bell in the alley of the trading post rang the hour, and he did not count the strokes.
When he turned back toward the gate, the door of the chapel was open, and Father Maron was standing in the threshold, and beside him was a man Vane had not seen in five years, and the man's hand was on the butt of a pistol, and the pistol was not holstered.
Cassius Carrick looked at the mayor, and the mayor looked at the son of Ezekiel Carrick, and between them, in the space of a breath, the whole history of Hollow's Creek seemed to pass like a shadow across the light.
"Mayor Vane," said Father Maron, and his voice was very steady, and very tired, and very kind. "I believe you know this young man."
Vane removed his hat. He held it against his chest, the way a man holds a shield.
"I knew his father," he said.
"You knew more than that," said Cassius Carrick, and his voice was the voice of a man who had come a long way to say a small number of things, and meant every one of them. "But we can discuss that later, if you like. Right now, I have questions, and I have reason to believe you have answers."
The afternoon light fell between them, and the chapel bell, moved by some vagrant breath, gave a single, involuntary chime.
Mayor Aldric Vane did not step back. He had built his fortune on the principle that a man who retreated was a man who would be pursued, and he had no intention of becoming prey in his own town. He drew a slow breath, felt the camphor in his lungs, and let his gaze settle on Cassius Carrick with the same unhurried appraisal he would give a horse he was considering buying.
"You've grown into your father's frame," he said. "He had the same way of standing. As if the ground owed him something."
"Don't speak of him."
The words came low, almost a whisper, and all the more dangerous for being so. Vane recognized the tone. He had heard it from men who had come to collect debts, men who had come to collect bodies, men who had come to the trading post in the small hours with blood on their boots and scripture on their lips. It was the tone of a man who had been broken and reassembled into a weapon.
"Very well," Vane said. He inclined his head toward Father Maron. "Perhaps we should continue this conversation somewhere more private. The church, perhaps. The street has ears."
"The church," said Carrick. "Yes. I think the church is fitting."
Father Maron stepped aside, and the two men passed through the doorway, Carrick first, then Vane, and the old priest followed behind them, pulling the door shut with a soft click that sounded, in the stillness, very much like a lock being turned.
Inside, the chapel smelled of dust and tallow and the faint, sweet rot of the lilies that Old Hettie had placed upon the altar three days before and had not yet thought to remove. Vane took a seat in the front pew, uninvited, and stretched his legs before him as if he were settling into his own parlor. Carrick remained standing. His hand had not moved from the pistol.
"Before we begin," Vane said, "I wonder if you might tell me what brings you to Hollow's Creek. The town has had a quiet year. The harvest was decent. The new preacher has settled in well." He gestured to Father Maron, who had taken a seat in the clergy stall and was looking at his hands as if he had never seen them before. "We've had no need of circuit riders or, if I may be blunt, of bounty hunters."
"You know why I'm here," said Carrick.
"I know what the letter said. I know what Father Maron has probably told you, though I confess I do not know what Father Maron knows, the good man being so careful with his truths." Vane permitted himself a small, dry smile. "I know that your father was a man who asked a great many questions in this town, five years ago, and that those questions were considered, by some, to be impertinent. I know that he was asked to leave. I know that he did not leave immediately, and that when he did, he was seen to be in a state of considerable agitation. I know that he wrote certain things in a journal that he carried with him. And I know that he died, somewhere upon the road, of causes which were never satisfactorily determined."
"You know more than that," said Carrick again.
"I may," said Vane. "I am a man who knows many things. It is the nature of my position. I know the price of corn and the price of conscience, and I know that they are not, in this valley, the same."
From somewhere in the nave, a board creaked. Neither man looked toward the sound. They both knew that the church was not empty, that the town was never empty, that there were eyes behind the shutters of the windows and ears pressed to the thin walls of the buildings adjoining. Vane had arranged it so. He always arranged it so.
"Then let us speak plainly," said Carrick, and the measure of his voice broke, just slightly, on the second word, as if the plainness he demanded was something he had to reach for across a great distance. "My father was murdered. I do not say this as a man who grieves, though I do grieve. I say it as a man who has read the coroner's report and who has read the journal, and who has walked the road where the body was found, and who has spoken to the woman who laid him out. He was not robbed. He was not set upon by bandits. He was killed in a manner that I have seen only once before, and that was upon a homestead in the western territories, where a family of five was found in their beds with silver dollars upon their eyes and the sign of a thing called the Pale Hymn cut into the wood of the door."
Vane did not move. He had not expected the son to know the name. He had not expected anyone to know the name, outside of a very few, and the very few were not men who spoke of what they knew.
"Pale Hymn," he repeated, softly, as if tasting the words.
"Yes."
"And you believe that whatever killed your father is here. In Hollow's Creek."
"I believe that my father came here chasing that thing, and that he was silenced by it, and that the men who silenced him are still breathing the same air that I am breathing now."
The light through the eastern windows had begun to thicken, taking on the amber of late afternoon, and the shadows of the candlesticks upon the altar stretched out long and thin, like fingers reaching for something they could not quite grasp. Vane could feel his heart beating in his throat, a sensation he had not experienced in many years, and which he did not enjoy.
"You are making an accusation," he said.
"I am stating a fact."
"There is a difference."
"Is there?" said Carrick. "In this town?"
Father Maron stirred in his stall. He had not spoken since the chapel door had closed, and his silence had been so complete that Vane had almost forgotten he was there, which was, Vane suspected, precisely the effect the old man had intended. Now he lifted his head, and the light caught the silver of his hair, and his face was the face of a man who had been carrying something for a long time and had at last felt the weight of it shift.
"Mr. Carrick," he said, and his voice was gentle, and careful, and very tired. "Before you say any more, I must ask you to consider what it is you hope to gain. Your father was a good man. I knew him, in this town, for the brief time he was permitted to remain, and I can tell you that he was a man of conscience, which is to say he was a man who saw things that other men had agreed not to see. He came to me, the night before he left, and he spoke of the Hollow's Ridge homestead, and of the family that had been found there, and of the symbol that had been cut into the floor, and of the silver upon the eyes. He spoke of these things with a kind of horror that I had not heard from a man before, and I have heard a great many men speak of a great many horrors. He asked me whether the church, in its wisdom, had any record of such a cult, such a sign, such a practice. I told him, as I am bound to tell you, that the records of this parish are incomplete, and that what I could not find I could not confirm, and that what I could not confirm I could not in good conscience deny."
"And did you find anything?" said Carrick.
"I found references," said Father Maron. "Old references. In a ledger that had been bound in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and seven, and that had been kept by a predecessor of mine, a Father Callum, who had served this town in the early years of its founding. Father Callum was a meticulous man. He recorded births and deaths, and he recorded the sacraments, and he also recorded, at the back of the ledger, in a hand that became increasingly unsteady as the years progressed, certain events which he described as 'visitations' and which he attributed to 'the Hymn of the Pale.'"
"What were these visitations?" said Carrick.
"They were killings," said Father Maron, simply. "Families, principally. Settlers who had come into the valley and who had, by some means, drawn the attention of the thing that Father Callum described. The killings were always the same. The blood was taken. The eyes were covered. The sign was cut. And the bodies were left, for the birds and the weather, in positions that suggested not rage but ritual, as if the dead had been arranged for the viewing of someone who was not there."
Vane listened. He had read the ledger, years ago, in the small hours of a night he preferred not to remember, and he had understood then that the thing which had been done could not be undone, and that the only question remaining was the question of management. He had managed it. He had buried the ledger in a place that no one would find. He had arranged for the departure of the circuit preacher, by means that he preferred not to recall. He had paid certain men, and he had threatened certain others, and he had, in the long run, preserved the peace of Hollow's Creek at the cost of his own sleep, which had never been sound, and which was now, he understood, about to become significantly less so.
"You have read the ledger," said Carrick, looking at him.
Vane did not bother to deny it. "I have read many things," he said. "I am a man of business. Reading is part of the trade."
"And you knew what my father was hunting. And you did not help him."
"I did not hinder him, either," said Vane. "I merely failed to assist. There is a legal distinction, though I do not expect you to appreciate it."
"I appreciate that you let him die."
The words hung in the air of the chapel, and the candles on the altar flickered, though there was no draft, and the lilies exhaled their sweetness into a silence that had become, in the space of a breath, a silence of a very different kind. Father Maron's hands, folded in his lap, tightened upon each other. The old wood of the pew beneath Vane creaked, as if the church itself were shifting in its foundations.
Then, from the vestibule, came the sound of the outer door opening, and of boots upon the stone, and of a voice that Vane knew, that Carrick did not yet know, that Father Maron had been dreading since the moment the letter had been placed in his hand. The voice belonged to a man who had been waiting, as Vane had instructed him to wait, in the alley behind the trading post, and who had come now, at the appointed hour, to ensure that the conversation in the chapel did not proceed in a direction that the mayor of Hollow's Creek could not control.
The man stepped into the nave. He was broad, and he was quiet, and the pistol in his hand was the twin of the pistol in Carrick's hand, and the two weapons, held by the two men, pointed at each other across the width of the aisle, and the silence that had been a silence of accusation became a silence of arithmetic.
"Mr. Carrick," said Vane, and his voice had not changed, and his face had not changed, and the small, dry smile had not left his lips, though it had become, in the quality of its light, something that was no longer a smile at all. "I believe you should lower your weapon. The man at the door is named Abel, and he is one of my associates, and he is here because I asked him to be here, and he will do what I ask him to do, which is, at this moment, nothing, provided that you and I are able to conclude our conversation in a manner that is satisfactory to the town."
"And if it is not satisfactory to the town?" said Carrick.
"Then the town," said Vane, "will be required to make a decision. And I have found, in my experience, that the town, when it is required to make a decision, will generally make the decision that I have already made on its behalf. That is the nature of authority. It is not a thing that is given. It is a thing that is taken, and held, and occasionally, in moments of extremity, used."
The candles guttered. The lilies swayed. Somewhere outside, in the street, a dog began to bark, and the barking was answered by another dog, and then by a third, until the whole town seemed to be filled with the sound of animals giving voice to a disturbance that they could sense but that the men in the chapel, with their pistols and their ledger and their long, careful silences, had not yet been willing to name.
Carrick looked at the man in the doorway. He looked at the mayor. He looked at the preacher, whose head was bowed, and whose lips were moving in what might have been a prayer, and whose hands, clasped together, were white at the knuckles.
Then he did something that Vane had not expected, and that Father Maron had not expected, and that Abel, in the doorway, had certainly not expected. He lowered his pistol. He did not holster it. He held it at his side, loose, the way a man holds a tool that he is not yet finished using, and he walked, slowly, down the aisle, past the pews, past the candlesticks, past the altar, until he stood before the mayor, and the two men were face to face, and the distance between them was the distance of a single breath.
"I am not here to kill you," said Carrick. "Not today. Not unless you make me. I am here to find out what happened to my father, and I am here to find out who is responsible for the thing that the ledger describes, and I am here to put an end to it, if I can, in whatever way the Lord and the law will permit. And if you stand in my way, Mr. Vane, I will go through you. But I would prefer not to. I would prefer to have your cooperation, and I would prefer to believe that the man who has kept this town alive is not the same man who has kept it in darkness."