Divine System: Land of the Abominations-Chapter 328: The Trials Begin (9).

The examination hall was the Red House’s cathedral, which Nero had passed the entrance of many times and never gone inside.

It was larger than the rest of the building suggested it should be — forty-foot ceilings, stone columns along both walls, and at the far end a massive painting of a man in crimson armour holding a severed demon’s head, the demon’s eyes — all hundreds of them, covering the head’s surface like a disease — looking out at the room with an expression that was difficult to read at this scale and probably deliberate. Beneath the altar, carved into the stone: *Through change, strength. Through strength, salvation.*

Long tables had been arranged across the floor in rows. Each seat had a document face-down on the table in front of it and a pen beside it and a small clay pot of ink. The candidates filed in and found seats and the Church Chroniclers who had arranged the room moved along the edges without speaking.

Nero sat toward the back of his group’s allocation, which put him close to the wall and slightly away from the nearest candidate on either side — not a deliberate strategy, simply the result of arriving at the tail end of the group. He set the cloth-wrapped spear across his knees and looked at the painting at the far end and waited.

When the Chronicler at the front of the room said *begin*, he turned the document over.

Forty questions. He scanned the full list first without answering anything, the way he had done in Jacob’s simulated examinations in the preparation room — getting the full shape of it before committing to any specific part, understanding where the time should go. The early questions were doctrine: the Five Orders, their Seals, their foundational histories, the theological basis for the Seal system and the Church’s explanation of corruption as transformation rather than degradation. He knew these. He had sat through Edric’s sessions three times a week for six weeks and he had paid attention, and more than that, he had read around the edges of what Edric covered, in the books Lyon had made available and in the book he carried in the Mark, which contained perspectives on Church history that differed from Edric’s version in ways that were interesting and that he would not be writing down in this room.

The middle questions moved into Abomination classification — grades, behaviours, identifying characteristics, the taxonomy the Church used and the reasoning behind it. He had learned this partly from the sessions and partly from direct experience, and the direct experience produced answers that he was careful to frame in the session’s language rather than his own, which would have been more accurate and considerably more suspicious.

The final section was runic theory and corrupted zone geography. He slowed here, not because he didn’t know the material but because he did, more than he should, and the question was how much of what he knew to put on the page. The geography questions were safe — zone classifications, boundary conditions, the Church’s official mapping of the Defilement’s spread. The runic theory questions required more care. He answered what a candidate from a standard cohort session would know, correctly and completely, and left the rest in his head where it belonged.

He finished with twelve minutes remaining and set the pen down and looked at the painting again.

The demon’s head had that many eyes because it had been made from many things, the records suggested — a composite entity, assembled rather than born. He thought about that for a moment with the detached quality of thought that came when there was nothing left to do but wait, and then the Chronicler at the front said *pens down* and the examination was over.

---

The results were not announced immediately. The candidates were escorted back to the courtyard in the same groups they had arrived in, and the waiting that followed had the specific texture of waiting that couldn’t be shortened by anything — the kind where the outcome already existed somewhere and would arrive when it arrived, and the only variable was what you did with yourself in the meantime.

Jacob found a section of wall to lean against and leaned against it with the complete conviction of someone who had decided that the waiting was simply a portion of the day to be gotten through. Arthur stood with his arms folded, talking intermittently to two other candidates Nero didn’t know, the conversation easy and social in the way Arthur’s conversations always were in public, which bore very little resemblance to how Arthur actually spoke when the public quality wasn’t required.

Nero stood with his back to the courtyard wall and watched the crowd.

Two hundred candidates was too many to know, but patterns were visible even in a crowd this size — the clustering of family connections, the body language of candidates who had trained together, the particular quality of isolation that surrounded the candidates who had arrived from smaller garrisons with no obvious social gravity pulling them into any of the larger groups. He counted perhaps thirty candidates in that last category, himself included, technically, though Arthur and Jacob’s proximity provided a kind of gravity even when neither of them was currently standing beside him.

The Chronicler with the administrative authority appeared on the steps again after perhaps two hours, and the courtyard went quiet.

"Non-combatant candidates whose scores qualify for Order evaluation will receive individual notification within the hour." He looked at his document. "All remaining combatant candidates will report to the designated staging area at dawn tomorrow for Stage Two." 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

He went back inside.

Stage Two. The Cull. Seven days in the outer sections of Malady’s Garden with nothing but a weapon and three days of rations and the understanding that the Abomination population had been deliberately agitated before they arrived.

Jacob pushed off the wall. "Well," he said, without any particular inflection.

"Tomorrow," Arthur said.

Nero lay on the bed that night and looked at the ceiling.

Tomorrow.