Vespers was at five-thirty, which gave him two hours in his room before he needed to be anywhere.
He spent the first hour at the desk with Daniel's decoded sections, working through the marginalia with the focused attention of a man who needed something to do with his hands and his mind while the rest of him caught up with where he was. The decoded sections were yielding more as the total percentage climbed - the cipher's internal logic becoming more legible as the decoded portions illuminated the undecoded, the way a photograph develops in a darkroom, the image emerging from what had been undifferentiated grey. He made four notes on the legal pad and stared at the third one for a long time.
The third note said: the notation distinguishes between what is held and what is known to be held. There is a category in the system for materials whose existence the keeper is aware of but which are not in the keeper's direct custody. He had missed this distinction in the earlier decoded sections because it was subtle - a single character difference in the notation, consistent across all decoded instances, which he had initially taken for a scribal variation. It was not a scribal variation.
He wrote: there are materials the chain knows about that nobody in the chain currently holds.
He sat with this.
The bell rang at five-fifteen. He gathered the papers, capped the pen, and went to find the church.
The church was at the center of the monastery's layout, which was itself a statement about what was at the center of everything else. Stone, like the other buildings, with a low ceiling and plain wooden choir stalls facing each other across the nave in the traditional arrangement - the monks on both sides, the guests in a small section at the back, behind a low wooden screen that was more suggestion than barrier. The light at five-thirty in early July came through the west windows at a low angle, turning the limestone walls a color between gold and amber that was, Joshua thought, not accidental - the builders had known what the light would do.
He found a seat at the back. There were four other guests, none of whom he recognized. The monks filed in from a side door in their black habits - twelve of them, as Ambrose had said, ranging in age from what looked like late thirties to very old, moving with the specific quality of people who have done this same thing at this same hour for so long that it has become as natural as breathing.
Ambrose was already there, seated in the guests' section, and nodded at Joshua when he sat - a greeting that acknowledged his arrival without creating a conversation, which was the right greeting for this room at this hour.
The office began.
He had attended the Liturgy of the Hours before - at ordinations, at conferences, at the handful of monasteries he had visited for research. He knew the structure. What he was not prepared for was the quality of it here, which was different in a way he couldn't locate immediately and then could: there was no performance in it. The monks were not singing for the guests. They were not singing for each other. They were doing what they did at five-thirty because it was five-thirty and this was what five-thirty was for, and the guests were present the way a window is present to light - receiving something that was happening regardless.
The psalms moved through the choir in the traditional antiphonal pattern, one side answering the other, the ancient words passing back and forth across the nave with the unhurried rhythm of a conversation that had been going on for fifteen hundred years and would continue after everyone in this room was gone. He followed in the booklet Brother Thomas had given him. He knew some of the psalms from childhood - the ones his grandmother had kept on a card above her kitchen sink, the ones that had surfaced in his reading without his seeking them. Others he didn't know. All of them, known or unknown, had the quality of old water - something that had been moving a long time before it reached him, carrying things dissolved in it that he couldn't see but could taste.
He was not praying. He was attending. He wasn't sure there was a difference.
After supper - simple, in the refectory, eaten in silence while a monk read from a text Joshua didn't recognize - Ambrose found him in the cloister garden and they walked for half an hour in the warm evening.
Ambrose asked what he had found in the decoded sections. Joshua told him about the notation for materials held at a distance - the distinction between what the keeper had and what the keeper knew existed. Ambrose listened without expression and then said: yes. There are things the chain knows about that have not been in anyone's direct custody for a long time. The monastery's library has some information about what they are. He would show Joshua tomorrow.
Joshua asked about Aldric Renner.
Ambrose was quiet for a moment - one of his calibrated pauses, but shorter than usual, as though he had decided that here, in this place, less management was required.
"Aldric Renner is the fourth generation of his family to be involved in the recovery effort," Ambrose said.
Joshua stopped walking.
"The recovery effort," he said.
"There are people," Ambrose said, "who have understood for a long time that certain materials exist - materials that describe the ordering in enough detail to constitute a serious argument for its recovery. They want those materials. Not to destroy them." He paused. "To control what is done with them. To ensure that if the ordering is recovered, it is recovered on terms they can manage."
Joshua stood in the warm evening in the cloister garden of a Benedictine monastery in the Missouri Ozarks and looked at Ambrose and felt the specific sensation of a framework reorganizing itself - not collapsing, reorganizing, all the pieces still present but suddenly in different relationships to each other.
"He's not an academic," Joshua said.
"He is an academic," Ambrose said. "He is also the other thing. Both are real." He began walking again. "He came to you through a real colleague with a real recommendation. His publication record is genuine. His interest in the notation system is genuine. Everything he told you was true."
"Then what -"
"He didn't tell you everything," Ambrose said simply. "There is a difference between what is false and what is incomplete."
They walked in silence for a while. The bell rang for Compline. Above the cedar forest the sky was going dark, the first stars showing at the edges.
"What does he want," Joshua said.
"He wants to know what you have," Ambrose said. "And he wants to know how much you understand about what you have. And eventually, when the time is right in his judgment, he will make you an offer that will seem entirely reasonable." He paused. "He is very good at reasonable."
The bell finished ringing. From inside the church the monks' voices began, low and steady, the last office of the day.
"What do I do," Joshua said.
"Nothing yet," Ambrose said. "Come to Compline."
He went to Compline.
He sat in the back of the dark church - the lights had been lowered to near-nothing, the only illumination the sanctuary lamp and a single candle at the lectern - and listened to twelve monks sing the Salve Regina in the dark, which was the last thing they did every night before the Great Silence, which was the silence that lasted from Compline until after Vigils, the silence in which God was given the night.
He was not sure what he believed about whether God needed to be given the night, or what that meant, or whether the category it belonged to was one he had access to. He was sure about what he heard - the voices in the dark, the old Latin words, the accumulated weight of the same song sung in the same place at the same hour for eighty-one years, which was a small number set against the centuries the song had been sung before the monastery existed and would continue to be sung after every person in this room was gone.
Salve Regina, mater misericordiae. Hail, Holy Queen, mother of mercy.
He knew the words. He did not know, precisely, what he was doing with them in his mouth. He said them anyway.
Ambrose had told him to come to Compline and he had come and the only action available to him in this dark church at this hour was to be present to what was happening, which he was, which he found required nothing further of him.
Afterward, in the Great Silence, he walked back to his room through the warm dark. The cedar forest was full of sound - insects, a nighthawk somewhere, the specific quality of Ozark dark which was darker than river-bottom dark because there were no lights across the water. He stopped on the path for a moment and stood still.
He thought about what Ambrose had said. He thought about Aldric's framework, which was real and coherent and which did not include the chain making a living claim on anyone's life. He thought about the parking lot and the forty-three minutes and the thing he had no instrument to measure. He thought about Mara's sentence - closer to not seeing the difference - and about what it would cost to close that remaining distance.
He did not examine any of this at length. He was tired and the Great Silence was real and the night was warm and full of sound.
He went inside. He went to bed. He lay awake for a while in the small whitewashed room, the crucifix above him in the dark, the cedar forest outside the window.
He was not afraid.
This was, he recognized, new information.