Read Stormqueen! for Free Online Page B

and go. The man who allows his own thoughts to torment him is like the man who clasps a scorpion-ant to his breast, bidding it bite him further.”
Allart repeated the exercise, and at the end of it, the memory of his brother had vanished from his mind. He has no place here, not even in my mind and memory . Calm now, his breathing coming and going in a small white cloud about his mouth, he left the cell and moved silently down the long corridor.
The chapel, reached by a brief passage through the falling snow, was the oldest part of the monastery. Four hundred years ago, the first band of brothers had come here to be above the world they wished to renounce, digging their monastery from the living rock of the mountain, hollowing out the small cave in which, it was said, Saint-Valentine-of-the-Snows had lived out his life. Around the hermit’s remains, a city had grown: Nevarsin, the City of Snows. Now several buildings clustered here, each one built with the labor of monkish hands, in defiance of the ease of these days; it was the brothers’ boast that not a single stone had been moved with the aid of any matrix, or with anything other than the toil of hands and mind.
The chapel was dark, a single small light glowing in the shrine where the statue of the Holy Bearer of Burdens stood, above the last resting-place of the saint. Allart, moving quietly, eyes closed as the rule demanded, turned into his assigned place on the benches; as one, the brotherhood knelt. Allart, eyes still closed by rule, heard the shuffle of feet, an occasional stumble of some novice who must still rely on the outer instead of the inner sight to move his clumsy body about the darkness of the monastery. The students, unsworn, with minimal teaching, stumbled in the darkness, ignorant of why the monks neither allowed nor required light. Whispering, pushing one another, they stumbled and sometimes fell, but eventually they were all in their assigned places. Again there was no discernible sound, but the monks rose with a single disciplined movement, following again some invisible signal from Father Master, and their voices rose in the morning hymn:
“One Power created
Heaven and Earth
Mountains and valleys
Darkness and light;
Male and female
Human and nonhuman.
This Power cannot be seen
Cannot be heard
Cannot be measured
By anything except the mind
Which partakes of this Power;
I name it Divine…”
This was the moment of every day when Allart’s inward questions, searchings, and dismay wholly vanished. Hearing the voices of his brothers singing, old and young, treble with childhood or rusty with age, loosing his own voice in the great affirmation, he lost all sense of himself as a separate, searching, questing entity. He rested, floating, in the knowledge that he was a part of something greater than himself, a part of the great Power which maintained the motion of moons, stars, sun, and the unknown Universe beyond; that here he had a true place in the harmony; that if he vanished, he would leave an Allart-sized hole in the Universal Mind, something never to be replaced or altered. Hearing the singing, he was wholly at peace. The sound of his own voice, a finely trained tenor, gave him pleasure, but no more than the sounds of each voice in the choir, even the rusty and untuneful quavering of old Brother Fenelon next to him. Whenever he sang with his brothers, he recalled the first words he had ever read of Saint-Valentine-of-the-Snows, words which had come to him during the years of his greatest torment, and which had given him the first peace he had known since he left his childhood behind.
“Each one of us is like a single voice within a great choir, a voice like no other; each of us sings for a few years within that great choir and then that voice is forever silenced, and other voices take its place; but every voice is unique and none is more beautiful than another, or can sing another’s song. I call nothing evil but the attempt to sing to