The Choir of Saint Veradine

The hymn of Saint Veradine has eight verses. It has had eight verses for eleven hundred years, and every child in Hive Ossary can sing them before they can read. When the Inquisitor arrived, the choir was singing nine.

Nobody in the congregation noticed. That was the first thing she wrote down. Four thousand worshippers, a Mass every evening, and not one of them could tell her when the ninth verse had started, or what it said. They sang it with their eyes closed and forgot it by the time they reached the doors.

The Precentor, Ilse Marrow, kept the choir’s hymnals in a locked press behind the organ. Each book had eight verses printed and a ninth written in by hand on the facing page, in the same hand every time. The ink tested as ordinary. The hand did not match the Precentor’s, or anyone else’s in the cathedral.

Under questioning, the Precentor said the verse had come to her in a dream, and that she had only written down what the Saint had asked for. She said this calmly and without fear. She said that the Saint had been very lonely for a very long time.

The Inquisitor had the verse read aloud to a servitor with its audio cortex removed, and then had the servitor transcribe the vibrations from the floor. The ninth verse, it turned out, was not in High Gothic. It was a name, repeated, sung backwards and slowed until it sounded like a prayer.

The Bishop of Ossary knew. He had known for six years. His defence was that attendance had never been higher.

The choir was disbanded that night. The Precentor was given to the flames on the cathedral steps, and she sang on the way up. The Inquisitor ordered every hymnal in the hive pulped and reprinted, and sat in the front pew for the next evening Mass to make sure the congregation stopped at eight.

They did. Mostly. A few of the older women hummed on for a bar or two after the organ fell silent, then looked about them, puzzled, as if they had lost their place.