Divine System: Land of the Abominations-Chapter 324: The Trials Begin (5).

Thursday arrived with the particular quality of late-season cold that came down from the Niel Mountains after dark — not the damp cold of the outer districts but something drier and sharper, the kind that cleared the head and made the air feel more precise than it had any right to.

The preparation room Lyon had apparently lent the key to — or had the key borrowed from without entirely consenting — was a small stone chamber off the medical wing’s secondary corridor, used during training cycles to store equipment between procedures and currently not in use for anything except the storage of three empty cots and a table that had survived more decades of purpose than was obvious from looking at it. It smelled of carbolic and old wood, and the single lamp Jacob had placed on the table produced enough light to see by and not much more.

Jacob was already there when Nero arrived. He had positioned himself at the table’s far end with his waraxe propped against the wall beside him and a clay flask on the table in front of him, the possession of which Nero decided not to ask about for the same reason Arthur had not asked about the key. He looked at Nero when he entered and then at the door behind him.

"Arthur’s coming," Nero said.

"He’s always five minutes late," Jacob said, without heat. It had the quality of a fact established through sufficient data to be reliable.

Nero sat across from him and set the bottle he had brought — two copper coins’ worth of something from the Red House’s lower supply store that was not amber Norde spirit but was at least not water — on the table between them.

Jacob looked at it. "What is that."

"Cheap," Nero said.

Jacob picked it up and examined the label with the expression of a man prepared to accept the situation but wanting the record to reflect his feelings about it. Then he put it down and unstoppered his clay flask instead and poured two measures into the two cups that had apparently also come from somewhere, and pushed one toward Nero.

They sat in the lamp’s limited light and the sharp cold smell of the room, and the silence between them had the quality of silence between people who have established they don’t need to fill it, which was a different quality from the silence of people who don’t know what to say.

Arthur arrived four minutes and fifty seconds later, closing the door behind him with the particular care of someone who has decided that whatever they’re about to do is best done without attracting administrative attention. He looked at the table, at the flask and the bottle and the two cups, and he pulled the third chair from the wall and sat down and poured his own measure from the bottle without comment, which Nero thought was probably the most diplomatic response available.

Jacob looked at all three of them and then at the table and then back up, and whatever internal preparation he had been doing appeared to conclude itself.

"Assessment," he said. "First stage. Written and oral. Some of you have an advantage here and some of you don’t." He looked at Nero specifically, with the directness that was Jacob’s default mode of communication, which was not unkind but was also not interested in softening anything unnecessarily. "How much do you know about Church doctrine and the Order histories?"

"Enough to follow the sessions," Nero said. "Not enough to excel."

"How much of the runic theory have you covered?"

"More than the sessions go into."

Jacob’s eyes sharpened by a fraction. "From where?"

Nero said nothing.

Jacob looked at him for a moment and then, with the efficiency of a man who has decided the source is less important than the depth, said, "Can you demonstrate?"

"Not here," Nero said. "Not in a way that would help you evaluate it."

A pause. Jacob accepted this with the equanimity of someone who had encountered answers that were not full answers before and understood they were sometimes the only kind available. "The Assessment isn’t testing depth of knowledge," he said. "It’s testing breadth, recall, and the capacity to reason under the specific pressure of formal examination. If you know the material, the second two are trainable." He looked at Arthur. "You’ve sat formal examinations before."

"Many," Arthur said.

"Then you know what the structure feels like. The time distribution, the way questions are sequenced to build cognitive load, the difference between a question testing recall and a question testing inference." He looked at Nero. "Have you ever sat a formal examination?"

"No," Nero said.

"Then we are going to simulate one," Jacob said. "Tonight, and several more times before the Assessment. I will write the questions. Arthur will time. You will answer, and we will evaluate the answers not for correctness alone but for how you allocate time and where your thinking stalls." He picked up his cup. "The point of the Assessment is not to fail candidates who lack knowledge. It’s to identify non-combatant candidates and to establish a baseline ranking that the later stages will build on. A poor performance doesn’t eliminate you — it assigns you a starting position, and that position determines the difficulty of the Gauntlet grouping and the complexity of the final mission." He set the cup down. "In other words, your Assessment score determines how hard the rest of the Trials is. Performing adequately is not sufficient. You should perform as well as possible."

Arthur was looking at the table with the expression of someone who had heard this before and was deciding how much of it he agreed with. "The non-combatant track produces different pressures," he said. "Aldous Mordain will have been preparing for the Assessment specifically for years. Outscoring him is probably not a useful target."

"I’m not talking about outscoring Mordain," Jacob said. "I’m talking about not leaving points on the table through unfamiliarity with the format." He looked at Nero again. "The Church doctrine I can cover in three sessions. The Order histories will take longer if your foundation is thin — how thin is it?"

"I know the Five Orders, their Seals, their general function," Nero said. "The histories are partial."

"Where do they get partial?"

"Before the current Red Mother."

Jacob made a sound that was not quite a sigh. "That is where the examiners will focus. The Red Mother’s appointment period is the most politically significant restructuring of the Church in two centuries and every Order examination asks about it from a different angle depending on which Order is setting the questions." He looked at Arthur. "Crimson Crucible’s angle?"

"Military authority and the re-centralisation of Templar command under the Church hierarchy rather than regional commanders," Arthur said, without hesitation.

"White Prophets?"

"Prophetic legitimacy. The theological basis for the appointment, specifically the Vigil of the Sixty-Three and what it’s held to have produced."

"Ironherd?"

Arthur considered. "Resource allocation. The Ironherd position is that the current period of expansion into corrupted zones was enabled by the Red Mother’s reorganisation of supply chains between Orders."

Jacob nodded, once. "Verdant Ash Sea?"

"Medical doctrine," Nero said.

Both of them looked at him.

"The Verdant Ash Sea’s position on the Red Mother’s appointment period centres on the revised protocols for handling corrupted individuals," Nero said. "The period immediately after her appointment saw a significant shift in how the Church defined the boundary between treatable corruption and grounds for immediate elimination. The Ash Sea was involved in setting those protocols." He looked at his cup. "Edric covered it in the fourth doctrine session. Most of the cohort had stopped paying full attention by then."

The silence lasted a moment.

"Hm," Jacob said, with the inflection of someone updating a calculation. He looked at Arthur.

Arthur’s expression was the one he wore when something had confirmed what he suspected and he was filing the confirmation without making a production of it. He looked at Nero with the steady quality that was Arthur’s version of something warmer than he would put into words in a room like this one. "Write the questions," he said to Jacob. "Let’s see how he does with the format."

Jacob reached into his coat and produced a folded set of papers that had clearly been prepared before this meeting, which was entirely consistent with Jacob, and unfolded them on the table and pushed them toward Nero.

"You have thirty minutes," he said. "Begin."

The lamp threw its limited warmth across the three of them, the cold pressing at the walls from outside, and Nero pulled the papers toward him and read the first question and thought about six weeks and about what he was and what the Assessment was designed to find, and he picked up the pen Jacob had produced from somewhere and wrote the first word, and kept going.