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, invalidates the whole prayer—those who live by the letter of the law die by the letter of the law, and you can’t have it both ways—and the soul of some evil rich bastard has a nasty five minutes in the blissful Hereafter, until the next
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