Divine System: Land of the Abominations-Chapter 326: The Trials Begin (7).

Three things happened every day.

Morning: the arena, Vane, the doctrine. Afternoon: doctrine sessions in a windowless room on the second floor, Brother Edric’s even voice moving through Church history and the theology of the Seals and the organisational structure of the Orders with the thoroughness of someone who had resolved the material into its most efficient form and was now simply delivering it. Evening: whatever Nero decided to do with the remaining hours, which was usually some version of reading, or lying on the bed thinking, or both.

The routine had a weight to it that was not unpleasant. He had lived without routine for long enough that having one felt like a kind of structure he could push against, and pushing against structure was more useful than pushing against nothing.

The doctrine sessions were interesting in the way that accurate information was always interesting, which was to say that some of it confirmed what he already knew and some of it added detail to things he had read in the book Lyon had handed him early in his stay, and some of it was genuinely new and went into the notes he kept in the margins of the session documents without being asked to. 𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶

Edric covered the Five Orders in the first week — their histories, their Seals, the theological framework the Church used to explain why the corruption each Seal produced was not corruption in the morally significant sense but sanctified transformation. Nero found this framework interesting for the same reason he found most institutional frameworks interesting, which was the specific way its premises had been arranged to close off certain questions before they could be asked.

He kept his expression neutral throughout and said nothing.

In the second week Edric moved to the history of the current period — the Defilement, the Church’s response, the Red Mother’s appointment and the restructuring it had produced. Nero listened to this with more attention than he brought to most things, because the Defilement had destroyed Gor and emptied the land he had grown up in and driven hundreds of thousands of people toward city walls that had, in at least one case he knew personally, been kept closed. Edric described this period with the same even delivery he brought to everything else, which was doing a particular kind of work, and Nero understood the work it was doing and said nothing about that either.

After one of these sessions — the fourth or fifth, he had stopped counting — he was walking back toward the mess hall when he became aware of someone falling into step beside him, and looked sideways to find a girl approximately his age with short dark hair and the sort of expression that suggested she had just decided to do something and was committed to doing it regardless of how it was received.

"You don’t take notes during the session," she said.

"No," Nero agreed.

"But you write in the margins of the documents afterward. I’ve seen you."

He glanced at her. "Are you watching me?"

"Everyone is watching you," she said, with a flat frankness that made it clear this was not personal. "You’re the commoner candidate. It would be strange if people weren’t watching you." She paused. "I’m Maret."

"Nero."

"I know." She seemed to consider whether there was anything else to say and to conclude there wasn’t, and turned down a side corridor without further ceremony.

Nero continued to the mess hall. He ate, and thought about what she’d said, and concluded she was right and that it didn’t change anything, and went to his room and read for an hour before sleeping.

The conflict between the doctrine and his instincts was consistent and specific and Vane identified it with new precision approximately every third session.

"You’re flowing," Vane said, one morning, watching Nero run the sequence against a post. "Stop flowing."

"It’s faster," Nero said.

"It’s familiar," Vane said. "Which is not the same thing. Familiar feels faster because it requires less conscious effort. You have spent time with a weapon that rewards circular movement and penalises linearity. This doctrine does the opposite. Until you have run the Crimson Crucible sequence enough times for it to become as automatic as your old habits, it will feel slower. It is not slower. It is simply unfamiliar." He watched for a moment. "Again."

Nero ran it again, consciously suppressing the circular follow-through that wanted to happen at the end of each strike, forcing the motion into the straight committed line the doctrine required. It felt wrong in the way that correct things felt wrong when the body had not yet accepted them.

"Better," Vane said. "Again."

This was, Nero had come to understand, as much praise as was available in this context, and he had accordingly recalibrated his understanding of what constituted positive feedback.

The other candidates had their own versions of the same problem. The broad-shouldered young man — whose name turned out to be Aldric — had excellent form and a tendency to recover too slowly after a committed strike, which Vane pointed out with the same direct brevity he used for everything. A girl named Senna had the opposite problem: fast recovery, tentative commitment, the sequence arriving at its intended destination but without the force the doctrine required. There was a quiet young man on the end of the line whose name Nero hadn’t caught who did everything almost exactly correctly and seemed to be made uncomfortable by this, as though being correct was a condition requiring explanation.

Nero watched all of them when he could, because watching people learn a thing was one of the fastest ways to understand the thing they were learning. Vane seemed to understand this about him — there was a quality to the way Vane watched Nero watch the others that was not disapproval — and on one occasion said, without specifically addressing anyone, "Observation is technique. Remember that."

After a session in the fourth week, Nero was racking his practice spear when Aldric stopped beside him. He had the easy physicality of someone who had grown up doing physical things and the slightly assessing quality of someone who categorised people reflexively.