The monks offer up prayers for the dead twenty-four seven, using precisely calculated forms of liturgy of known and proven effectiveness, the same formulae over and over again, like lawyers conveying a freehold, while unending ages run. My job is to sidle up to a choir monk in full flow; slip in through his ear, eye socket, or open mouth; and distract him, insinuating into his mind an irrelevant, mundane thought, sapping his concentration so that he mumbles, lets the stress fall on the wrong syllable, gets a word wrong or in the wrong order, maybe misses out a whole phrase. That, naturally,
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