Divine System: Land of the Abominations-Chapter 317: Market Dealings.

Nero noticed that Brother Edric never spoke about what the Divine Will currently wanted, or why it had not intervened more directly in a situation that had clearly escalated past what the early Church had been designed to contain. He noticed that the attrition figures Edric cited for historical engagements were always rounded, and that the doctrine explanation for why so many Templars died in their first years of service — that they were still "achieving unity with their Seals," which was a phrase that covered an enormous range of physical and spiritual violence without committing to any of it — was delivered with the confidence of someone who had repeated it enough times to stop hearing the gap between what it described and what it actually meant.

He did not say any of this. There was nothing to gain from saying it in a room where Brother Edric was taking notes and everyone else was either already thinking it or would not find his saying it useful.

On the third day of doctrine sessions, during a discussion of the founding of the Crimson Crucible that had been going for longer than its content seemed to justify, a candidate named Sevet, who had been almost completely silent through both previous sessions, said, "Brother, what happens to Templar Seals when a Templar dies?"

The room shifted. It was not a dramatic shift — no one moved, nobody spoke — but the quality of attention changed, and Nero found himself genuinely curious about the answer for the first time all morning.

Brother Edric paused, and in the pause there was the specific rhythm of someone deciding which version of an answer to give. "Seals return to the Church’s keeping," he said, carefully. "The spiritual markers are reallocated through established protocols."

"Are they given to new candidates?" Sevet asked.

"The process is more complex than direct transfer," Brother Edric said.

"But the Seals are reused," Sevet said, with the pleasant, patient tone of someone who has decided on a line and intends to follow it to the end.

"Elements of them may be incorporated into the preparation of new candidates, yes," Brother Edric said, and then he moved on with the deliberate momentum of a man changing subjects before the current one gets any deeper.

Nero filed this away with the particular attention he gave to things that were deflected rather than answered, and went back to listening.

After the session, in the corridor, Sevet fell into step beside him without preamble. She was slightly taller than Nero, with dark skin and the unhurried posture of someone who moved through spaces they had already decided were theirs. She had not spoken to him before this.

"You look like you’re memorizing things," she said.

"I’m listening," Nero said.

"You look like you’re listening to a different conversation than the one being spoken," she said, and her tone was not accusatory, just observational, in the way of someone who makes observations as a habit rather than a tactic. "I do it too, sometimes."

Nero considered this. "The Seals question," he said, because she had done something in that room that was either brave or strategic, and he wanted to know which she thought it was.

"I wanted to see which part of it he would avoid," she said. "He avoided the part about where they go before they’re reallocated, which is the interesting part."

"What do you think the interesting part is?" he asked.

She glanced at him. It was the first fully direct look she had given him, and in it was the assessing quality he had come to recognize in the people at the Red House who were going to matter — the ones who paid attention to things rather than appearances, who measured differently. "I think the Church has been running a closed loop for longer than Brother Edric is authorized to discuss," she said, and then she turned into the door of the dormitory wing, leaving Nero in the corridor with that thought and no particular expectation that she would follow it up.

He stood there for a moment, and then he walked back toward the yard, because Vane had said the afternoon session would involve spear weight drills, and there was, regardless of everything else, that problem with his habits to work on.

The Red House corridors were loud with the sound of the garrison at its midday noise — voices from the mess, the clanking of someone moving equipment down the eastern staircase, a dog somewhere that wasn’t supposed to be inside and didn’t seem to know it. Nero moved through it and thought about Strut’s parting words, and about the closed loops that Sevet had described in the way of someone naming something she had been thinking about for longer than one doctrine session, and about the particular weight of the spear he had been assigned, which was still slightly forward of where he wanted it.

He had time, probably, to correct the latter before the former became urgent.

He was not certain about the order of the other two.

By the end of the second week, Nero had a reasonably accurate picture of everyone in the cohort, which was more than most of them had of him.

This was, he suspected, partly deliberate on their part and partly the natural result of how cohort dynamics sorted themselves in the early stages. The nobles clustered together at the social edges of each session the way water found its level — not maliciously, not even consciously, but with the settled ease of people whose habits of association had been built over years and did not require active maintenance to remain in effect. They spoke to him when circumstances required it and not much beyond that, and he did the same, and the arrangement suited everyone reasonably well.

Garet was the partial exception. Not because he sought Nero out in any pointed way, but because they had been paired on the first day and Vane had not separated them since, and shared proximity over sufficient repetitions developed its own low-grade familiarity regardless of what either party intended. By the end of the first week Garet had stopped announcing what weapons he had trained with before picking one up, and by the end of the second he had started adjusting his footwork without being told twice, which was progress in Vane’s vocabulary and borderline enthusiasm in anyone else’s.