The Songs of Sabbath

Gabriel missed his entrance.

It had never happened before. Not once, in all the gatherings he had led the third company, had the measure passed him by while ten thousand voices waited upon his hand. The absurdity was that he had been listening more carefully than usual. From the far side of the great court a lower company had offered a phrase he knew as well as his own name, and the answering voices had returned it with a note he could not remember hearing. It seemed to rise from beneath the music rather than from any one company. Gabriel turned his head to find its source, then glanced toward the conductor, wondering whether Lucifer had intended that small alteration. By the time he looked back, the place where his company should have entered had passed.

Lucifer caught it without turning his head. From his station nearer the throne, where the whole assembly could see the movement of his hands, he raised his left hand by less than the width of a finger. He held the gesture for the smallest part of a measure. The companies around Gabriel settled with him, and what might have sounded like an interruption became a rest so precisely placed that the gathered host seemed to have been waiting for it all along.

One beat.

Then Lucifer released them. Gabriel lifted his hand, and the voices under his direction entered exactly where they should have. A thousand answering parts carried the phrase onward, the lapse disappeared within their harmony, and Gabriel exhaled before remembering that he had no need to be afraid of one missed note. Across the court, Raphael was grinning at him. Gabriel pretended not to notice. Raphael widened the grin until even from that distance it became an accusation.

Lucifer continued as though nothing had happened. Of course he did. It was one of the reasons they loved singing under him. He could have stopped the assembly and called attention to Gabriel's mistake; he could have made ten thousand singers aware that their leader had lost his place. Instead he had made room for them to find it again. Lucifer never humiliated anyone. What he knew of music was matched by what he knew of the beings who offered it, and when he conducted, the smallest company did not feel small.

Gabriel found the music again and allowed his attention to travel with it. The great court opened around the sapphire expanse before the throne, but it did not end where his sight ended. Terraces ascended beyond one another in luminous curves; bridges linked places so distant that a voice arriving from one seemed to belong to another world. Companies were gathered along the heights and across the lower reaches, each with its place, each listening as attentively as it sang. Light lay upon the surfaces beneath their feet, not as a reflection from some distant lamp but as a clarity through which the colors of the court could be seen without fading. The sapphire near the throne was deeper than any other blue Gabriel knew. At times he could almost imagine looking through it into forever.

Heaven did not echo. Echo was something empty places did. Heaven answered.