At this Soeur Piété, who was in charge of the sacristy, moved slowly to the tiny cabinet where our few treasures were kept, and brought out the chalice and holy vessels for Communion. We seldom used these. I myself had taken the sacrament only once since my arrival, and our old Reverend Mother had been overawed by the finery of the treasures left by the black monks, ordering them to be kept safe and rarely allowing them to be seen at all. LeMerle broke that rule, as all others. There is an oven at the back of the sacristy for the baking of the holy wafers, but to my knowledge it had been twenty years since it was last used. Where he had got the wafers I can only guess; maybe he baked them himself, or maybe Mère Isabelle had one of the sisters make them. Bowing her head, Soeur Alfonsine carried the Host to LeMerle as he poured the wine into a dull-silver chalice knuckled with polished gems.

Mère Isabelle was first at the altar, kneeling to receive the sacrament. LeMerle put a hand on her forehead and took a wafer from the silver plate.

“Hoc est enim corpus meum.”

At those words I felt my hackles rise, and I forked the sign against malchance. Something was about to happen. I could feel it. It was in the air, like a promise of lightning.

“Hic est enim calyx sanguinis mei…”

Now for the chalice, huge in her small hands. Its rim was blackened, the uncut gems no brighter than pebbles. Suddenly I wanted to leap up and warn the child, to tell her not to drink, not to trust him, to refuse the false sacrament. But it was madness; I was already in disgrace, already under penance; I forked the sign again and could not watch as she parted her lips, drew the cup toward them and-

“Amen.”

The cup passed and moved on. Now Marguerite took Isabelle’s place in front of the altar, her leg quivering uncontrollably beneath her habit. Then Clémente. Then Piété, Rosamonde, and Antoine. Had I been wrong? Had my instincts deceived me?

“Soeur Anne.” Beside me, Perette flinched at the unfamiliar name, the unfriendly voice. The abbess’s tone was crisp, commanding. Any sweetness the Communion might have opened up in her was sealed up like honey in a bee’s cell. Perette took a step backward, heedless of the nuns at her back. I heard someone grunt as her bare heel stamped down on an unsuspecting foot.

“Soeur Anne, you will come forward and take the sacrament, if you please,” said LeMerle.

Perette looked at me in appeal and shook her head.

“Perette, it’s all right. Just go to the altar.” My whisper was hidden in the crowd. Still the wild girl held back, her gold-ringed eyes pleading. “Go on!” I hissed, pushing her forward. “Trust me.”

Perette knelt before him, conspicuous in her novice’s habit, her nostrils flaring like a dog’s. She whimpered a little as LeMerle placed the wafer on her tongue. Then he passed her the chalice. Her fingers closed around it and I saw her glance backward at me as if for comfort. Then she drank.

For an instant I thought I had been mistaken. His Amen rang clear in the bright air. He reached out to help Perette to her feet. Then she coughed.

Suddenly I was reminded of the monk of the procession in Épinal. The crowd drew away with just the same low sigh of distress, the fallen monk rolling to the ground, the chalice falling from his grasp.

Perette coughed again, leaned forward, then suddenly, shockingly, vomited between her feet. There was a silence. The wild girl looked up, as if for reassurance, then a new paroxysm of vomiting struck her, and she tried too late to cover her mouth. An appalling blurt of red sprayed from between her lips, spattering her white skirt.

“Blood!” moaned Alfonsine.

Perette clapped her hands to her mouth. She looked terrified, ready to bolt. I tried to reach her but Alfonsine got in my way, crying: “She defiled the Sacrament! The Sacrament!” Then she too doubled up coughing, and I was back in Épinal, watching as the crowd drew away from the stricken brother, hearing the human tide turn, crushing everything in its path. For a minute I could hardly breathe as the nuns in front of me backed me against the wall of the transept.

Then LeMerle stepped forward, and the sisters wavered back into uneasy half-silence. Alfonsine was still coughing, hectic patches of red standing out on her thin cheeks. Then she too bent over and retched, and a terrible wad of blood spattered the marble between her feet.

That ended all hope of rational discourse. In vain I tried to remind the nuns that Soeur Alfonsine had coughed up blood before, that this was the nature of her illness-the crowd heaved back just as it had in Épinal, and the panic began.

“It’s the blood plague!” cried Marguerite.

“It’s a curse!” said Piété.

I struggled against it, but their excitement had reached me too and I was drowning in it. My mother’s cantrip-evil spirit, get thee hence-calmed me a little, although I knew that it was a man, and not spirit, who had set this in motion. All around me faces mooned, eyes rolled. Marguerite had bitten her tongue and there was blood on her lips. One of Clémente’s flailing arms had caught Antoine in the face, and she was cursing, a hand clapped to her bloody nose. I’d seen a painting once, in a church in Paris by a man named Bosch, in which the souls of the damned clawed and clutched at one another in just such an ecstasy of savagery and fear. It was called Pandemonium.

But now LeMerle had raised his voice, and it rolled across the hall like the wrath of God. “For God’s sake, let us have respect for this place!” Silence returned, filled with eddies and small whimperings. “If this is a sign, and the Unholy One has dared to come upon us”-the murmur came again, but he stilled it with a gesture-“I say if the Evil One has dared assail us now in the very sanctity of our church, to desecrate God’s very sacrament-then I am glad of it.” He paused. “As you should all be glad of it! Because if a wolf threatens the farmer’s herd, it’s the farmer’s duty to flush that wolf out! And if a cornered wolf tries to bite, then what does that farmer do?”

We watched him, eyes wide.

“Does that farmer turn and run?”

“No!” It was a thin cheer, like a splash of spray above the rolling wave.

“Does that farmer weep and tear his hair?”

“No!” It was stronger now, more than half the sisters joining in the cry.

“No! That farmer takes what weapons he can-staff, spear, pitchfork-and he takes his friends and neighbors and his brothers and his good strong sons, and he hunts down that wolf, he hunts it down and kills it, and if the devil has made himself a home here, then I say it’s time we hunted him down and sent him back to hell with his tail between his legs!”

They were with him now, whimpering their relief and admiration. The Blackbird basked for an instant in that applause-so long since he had stood like this before a crowded house-then his eyes met mine, and he grinned. “But look to yourselves,” he went on softly. “If the devil has breached your defenses, ask yourselves how you let those defenses drop. With what unshriven sins, what secret vices have you fed him, in what shameful practices has he taken his solace during the unclean years?”

Once more the crowd lifted its voice, touched now with a new note. Tell us, it murmured. Guide us.

“The Unholy One may be anywhere.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “In the very Sacraments of our church. In the air. In the stones. Look to yourselves!” Sixty-five pairs of eyes flicked furtively sideways. “Look to one another.”

On that note LeMerle turned away from the pulpit, and I knew the performance was over. It was his style-opening, development, soliloquy, grand finale, and then, at last, to business. I’d heard that piece-or variations thereon-many times before.