Divine System: Land of the Abominations-Chapter 319: Titled Deeds.

Nero listened to it without looking, and he thought about two weeks, and about the others after that, and he turned back to the post and ran the extension again.

The doctrine sessions happened in the same low-ceilinged room three mornings a week, and the instructor was a Brother of the White Prophets named Edric who had a gift for making accurate information feel less interesting than it was.

He was not a poor teacher, exactly. He knew the material thoroughly and he delivered it without error, and on the occasions when candidates asked questions he answered them with a precision that suggested genuine depth of knowledge rather than the surface familiarity of someone who had memorised what they needed to recite. The problem — if problem was the right word — was that he taught the Church the way a cartographer describes a territory he has never personally walked: accurately, comprehensively, and with the specific flatness of someone who has resolved the landscape into symbols and is no longer troubled by the texture of the ground.

Nero sat at the end of the semicircle and listened, and he wrote nothing down, and he made a careful habit of keeping his expression at the particular neutral that was not visibly skeptical and not visibly credulous but simply attentive, because attentive was the safest thing available in a room where the instructor was a Church official and at least half the candidates were from families with strong Church affiliations.

The early sessions covered the Five Orders — their histories, their structures, the specific nature of their Seals and the theological framework the Church had constructed to explain why the corruption that accompanied each Seal was not corruption in the morally significant sense but rather transformation, a sanctified alteration of the human body in service of divine purpose. Nero found the theological framework interesting for different reasons than it was intended to be interesting. The logic was consistent, as long as you accepted the premises, and the premises had been arranged with the care of someone who understood that certain questions needed to be answered before they were asked rather than in response to them.

On the fourth session, Edric began covering the history of the Defilement — the current phase of corruption spreading, its scale, the Church’s response and the theological interpretation of what it signified. He spoke about it with the same even quality he brought to everything, and this evenness was, here, more noticeable than it had been on other topics, because the Defilement was the thing that had destroyed Gor and emptied entire regions and driven hundreds of thousands of people to crowd outside city walls until the Church decided to make the problem administratively simpler, and the evenness that covered all of that with the same tone used to describe the history of the Ironherd was doing a particular kind of work.

"Brother," said Sable, who had in three weeks said approximately twenty words total inside the doctrine room, "how many people were displaced by the Golgotha expansion in the last two years?"

Edric considered this. "Precise figures are difficult to establish, given the nature of the displacement."

"Approximately," Sable said.

"Several hundred thousand," Edric said, carefully.

"And of those, how many were processed through Church resettlement programs?"

A pause, shorter than it should have been for a question whose answer Edric didn’t know, which meant he did know and was deciding whether to give it. "The resettlement programs were significantly strained by the scale of displacement," he said. "Capacity was not sufficient to accommodate all who sought it."

"How many died," Sable said. It was not phrased as a question.

The room was very quiet. Edric looked at Sable with the expression of a man who has been asked something that is entirely within the scope of the subject being discussed and has no technical grounds for refusing to address it, and who is therefore required to address it in a way that does not make the session something other than what it is supposed to be.

"The records from that period are incomplete," he said. "The circumstances made accurate accounting difficult. What the Church can confirm is that every available resource was directed toward mitigating the impact as effectively as possible given the constraints of the situation."

Sable said nothing else. She looked at her hands for a moment, and then back at the chalkboard, and the session resumed.

Afterward, in the corridor, Nero fell into step beside her without particular intention — they were heading in the same direction, toward the mess hall, and the corridor was narrow enough that walking side by side was simply what the space produced.

She didn’t look at him.

"You knew the answer before you asked," Nero said.

A beat. "I knew what the answer wasn’t going to be," she said.

"Why ask, then?"

She considered this for a moment in a way that suggested she was deciding whether to answer it honestly or not at all, and then she said, "I wanted to see how he handled it. Whether he’d lie outright or deflect." She paused. "Deflection was the polite option. I wasn’t certain he’d take it."

Nero thought about what he knew about the purge outside Liedenstorm’s walls, and about the specific quality of the deflection Edric had produced, and about how different it was to deliver an evasion cleanly versus deliver it in a way that acknowledged its own nature. "He’s not lying," Nero said. "He’s describing the Church the way the Church describes itself."

Sable glanced at him then — a brief, sideways look with the measuring quality he had seen from her before and that he now understood was not a habit of suspicion but of accuracy; she was someone who looked at things to know what they were rather than to decide what to do with them. "That’s a fine distinction," she said.

"It matters though," Nero said.

They reached the mess hall. Sable stopped at the door and looked at him for a moment longer, and whatever assessment she was conducting reached its conclusion without her sharing it. "My family is from outside Verath," she said. "Near Golgotha’s eastern edge." She said this the way someone states a fact they have decided the other person might as well have, without emphasis, without asking for anything in response to it. Then she went inside.