The Faith Assessment was announced on a Tuesday, which was the Church's traditional day for administrative unpleasantness.
Han had known it was coming for six days. Ivy's network had flagged the requisition order for the Verity Lens—a tier-six artifact, one of four in the Cathedral's possession, used historically for heresy detection and, less officially, for the kind of internal housekeeping that didn't benefit from documentation. The Lens read the soul's structural signature the way a tuning fork read resonance: it produced a tone, and the tone's character told the operator what they were working with. Faith, doubt, corruption, void.
The void category was Han's problem.
Soul-less was not a theological classification the Church had a lenient response to. The doctrine was unambiguous: a person without a soul's structural signature was either dead, which was self-resolving, or something the Church's foundational texts described in terms that ended with fire. Han had read the texts in the restricted archives. He had read them carefully.
He had six days to solve a problem that had no clean solution, which meant he spent the first four days confirming it had no clean solution before spending the remaining two days on the only option that had ever been available.
He could not hide from the Lens.
He would have to break it.
The Grand Hall held three hundred people comfortably and was holding four hundred and twelve this morning—the full administrative staff, the Cathedral's resident Paladin company, and a selection of senior clergy whose attendance communicated that this was not a routine exercise. They stood in the configuration of people who had been positioned rather than people who had gathered: rows, precise spacing, the architecture of an audience assembled to witness something.
Cardinal Voss stood at the hall's elevated front with the Verity Lens on a stand beside him. The Lens was a disc of compressed Authority crystal approximately forty centimeters across, its surface the deep amber of old resin, internally lit with a light that moved through it the way light moved through something alive. Han had read its operational history. It had last been used nineteen years ago, and the subject of that assessment had not walked out of the hall.
Silas was three rows ahead of Han. His shoulders were rigid with the specific tension of a man who was not guilty of the thing being investigated but was guilty of other things and could not fully prevent his body from responding to the presence of official scrutiny as though it knew this.
Han stood in the fourth row and looked at the Lens and mapped what he needed to map.
The assessment proceeded from front to back, row by row. Each subject stepped forward, stood within the Lens's focal range, and waited. When the Lens read a clean soul signature, the light pulsed gold and the subject was dismissed. The process took approximately forty seconds per person. Han calculated: at current pace, his row in eleven minutes.
He spent nine of those minutes in complete stillness, and two of them beginning the thing he needed to begin.
The Lens was an artifact, which meant it was a constructed Authority object—designed by someone, built according to principles, operating within the logical framework of its construction. Han had learned, over two months of handling the Cathedral's sealed artifact inventory as part of his archival access, that all constructed Authority objects had a relationship between their function and their structural load. The Lens read soul signatures by emitting a specific Authority frequency and processing the resonance. Emitting that frequency at full hall range, continuously, for several hours, against four hundred subjects—
The cumulative load was calculable.
He had calculated it.
The Lens was operating at approximately seventy percent of its designed tolerance by the time his row was called. He knew this because the gold of its internal light had shifted two tones warmer over the preceding hour—the visual signature of an Authority crystal running hot, the artifact equivalent of a color change in heated metal.
Han stepped forward when his name was called.
He felt the Lens's frequency reach him and find nothing.
Not nothing like an empty room. Nothing like a hole—the specific negative space of a soul's absence, which the Lens was designed to recognize and flag. He felt it find the void and begin producing the tone that the void category generated, and he felt Voss, standing at the instrument, register the tone's character with the attention of a man who had been waiting for exactly this.
"Hold."
The hall stilled.
Voss moved around the Lens's stand and looked at Han with the focused assessment of a man who had spent forty years in institutional power and knew what threats looked like in the various shapes they arrived in. Han was, in every visible register, a Head Attendant in plain working vestments standing in the middle of a row of administrative staff. He had the face he had been practicing for three years—the face of someone present in a space without having any particular investment in what the space contained.
"Soulless," Voss said. Not a question. The tone of a man reading a result he had expected and was now managing the administration of.
"The record shows—" Silas began, from three rows back, the voice of a man calculating whether his own exposure was better served by distance or involvement.
"The record," Voss said, without looking at Silas, "shows what was filed. The Lens shows what is." He turned to the hall's right side, where Paladin Captain Aldric had been standing at formal rest since the assessment began—a large, composed man in full ceremonial plate, the kind of stillness that came from genuine capability rather than the performance of it. "Captain."
Aldric moved forward without hesitation, which told Han that the order had been pre-discussed, which told Han that Voss had been expecting to find something today and had arranged for the finding to have immediate consequences.
The hall was watching. Four hundred and twelve people, all of them now reconfigured from witnesses of an administrative process into witnesses of something else—the specific collective attention of an audience that understands it is about to see something that will need to be correctly remembered.
Han looked at Aldric and completed his assessment in the time it took the Captain to cross ten meters of floor. Full plate with the gaps that full plate always had: the interior of the elbow joint on the weapon arm, the throat above the gorget's top edge, the lateral knee, the hip rotation point where the tasset floated. Aldric's gait was right-weighted, a compensation—old injury, left hip, managed well but not completely. His sword hand carried the sword. His off hand was empty and close to his body, the combat-ready position of a man who used the off hand for control work.
He stopped two meters from Han and drew.
The hall held its breath.
Han looked past Aldric at the Verity Lens.
He did not reach for the pressure. He reached for the geometry.
The Shadow King's legacy understood light the way a locksmith understood locks—not as an aesthetic fact but as a structural one, a system with rules that could be engaged from the inside. The Grand Hall's illumination came from Authority-fed fixtures mounted at eight points along the upper walls, the light they produced directed downward and inward to cover the floor space evenly. Eight sources. Eight angles. Each one casting shadows in the specific directions that its position dictated.
Han found the shadows the way the Shadow King had found them for eleven years: not by looking at them but by understanding where they had to be, given the positions of the lights. He found them and he introduced the geometry of absence—not darkness, not a deployed Authority effect that the Lens or Aldric or Voss could register as a hostile action, but the Shadow King's specific understanding of negative space applied to the Lens's focal field.
The Lens was reading Han.
Han began reading it back.
The artifact's Authority frequency was a signal, and signals had sources, and sources had structural relationships to the objects that generated them. The Lens was already running hot. Han found the load distribution in the crystal's emission pattern the way you found a stress point in a material—by feeling where the resistance wasn't quite uniform, where the structure was compensating for something.
Aldric's sword came up.
Han didn't move. He let the pressure out, low and localized, directed not at Aldric's body but at Aldric's left hip—the compensation point, the place where the old injury had left a structural memory in the tissue and bone that responded to certain kinds of external Authority load the way old wounds responded to weather. Not a weapon. A key.
Aldric's left leg stuttered.
One step, broken, the foot coming down six centimeters off the line his body had committed to. Enough. The sword's arc, begun for a target that had been standing still, arrived at a target that was no longer in the precise position the arc had been calculated for. Han moved the remaining distance—not backward, sideways, inside the arc's radius where the blade had no leverage—and put his hand on the Verity Lens.
The overload was not an explosion.
It was a sound, first—the specific frequency of Authority crystal pushed past its load tolerance, which was not a crack or a shatter but a tone, sustained and rising, that every person in the Grand Hall felt in their back teeth before they understood what they were hearing. Then the light inside the Lens went from warm amber to white to something beyond white, the color of a system outputting everything it had because the regulation preventing that output had been removed.
The light hit Voss.
He was standing closest. The Lens was his instrument, and the frequency it was outputting in its unregulated state was calibrated to read the soul signature of the person operating it alongside the subjects—a standard anti-corruption measure built into the artifact's design, so that the assessor could not operate the Lens while carrying the exact categories of concealed corruption it was designed to find.
Nineteen years since it had last been used. Nineteen years of tithes and manufactured receipts and names in a ledger.
The light read Voss the way the light had been designed to read, and it produced a tone that was not the clean gold of an honest man.
The hall heard the tone.
Four hundred and twelve people stood in the Grand Hall of the Cathedral and heard the Verity Lens—the Church's own instrument, activated by the Church's own Cardinal, paid for by the Church's own tithes—produce the sound of a corrupt soul, and the soul it was reading belonged to the man who had called the assessment.
Han was already in the third row, having moved there in the seconds of the hall's collective shock, standing between two administrative clerks who were both staring at the front of the hall with the expressions of people whose framework for the day was undergoing rapid structural revision.
Aldric had stopped. The Captain was looking at Voss with the specific quality of a man whose loyalty was to an institution rather than a person, calculating in real time what the institution required of him now.
Voss collapsed.
Not dramatically—the way old men collapsed when something internal gave out, the body deciding quietly that it was done. He went to his knees and then to his side and the Lens's light faded as the operator connection broke, the tone cutting off in the middle of its sustain, leaving the hall in the specific silence of four hundred and twelve people who had all just heard the same thing and were each trying to determine what it meant for them individually.
Han stood in the third row and looked at his hands.
They were steady.
He heard about the Saintess afterward, through Silas, who heard it through the clerical network that processed significant events into institutional narrative before they became institutional record.
She had been on the upper balcony. Observational attendance at the Faith Assessment had been on her schedule as a routine oversight function—the kind of presence that indicated the Holy Seat's interest in the Cathedral's internal integrity without requiring formal intervention.
She had watched the entire sequence.
The official account, assembled with impressive speed by the surviving senior clergy, described the event as: a Verity Lens pushed beyond safe operating parameters by an overzealous assessment, resulting in blowback that had exposed the operator's own corruption. Divine mechanism, the narrative said. The instrument of false judgment turned against the false judge. There were precedents in the theological literature. The story fit the literature well enough that the literature appeared to have been waiting for it.
Han had read the literature before he touched the Lens. He had known the story it would produce.
Silas, relaying this account, had the expression of a man who was reassessing everything he thought he understood about his Head Attendant and finding the reassessment deeply uncomfortable. He had not yet arrived at any conclusion that felt stable enough to act on. Han expected him to remain in that state indefinitely, which was a useful state for Silas to be in.
"The Saintess asked for the attendant manifest," Silas said, at the end of his account. He said it carefully, in the tone of information being delivered to someone the deliverer suspected might have opinions about it.
"Which manifest."
"All administrative staff present in the hall." A pause. "She reviewed it personally."
Han considered this. Seraphina had been on the balcony. She had watched a sequence that the rest of the hall had processed as institutional drama and Divine mechanism. She had then requested a manifest, which meant she was looking for something specific, which meant she had seen something that the official narrative didn't account for.
She had felt the void in the hall during the assessment—he had felt her feel it, the pause of her attention in a place that contained nothing. She had been watching when Aldric's step broke. She was twenty-three years old and she had been trained since childhood to read the signs of Authority at work in the world.
He did not know what she had concluded.
He knew she had concluded something.
Ivy's message arrived that evening, through the dead-drop system they had established in the second district's laundry operation. Single sheet, the coded notation they had agreed on, three lines.
Sighting confirmed, eastern reaches. Kingdom of Varath. Subject: remains of the Blood Alchemist. Church expedition dispatched—fourteen days ahead of you.
Suggest moving quickly.
World is paying attention.
Han read it twice and burned it over the lamp in Silas's office, watching the paper become ash with the specific focus of a man calculating the distance between where he was and where he needed to be.
The Blood Alchemist had been dead for thirty years. His legacy had been listed in the Abyss Remnants archive as unrecovered—one of the fragments the Church had never located, which the Church's records attributed to thorough destruction and which Han's reading of the same records suggested had been deliberately lost, misrouted, the fragment of a man who had known things about the Church's institutional history that the Church preferred remain unremembered.
Fourteen days ahead.
He looked at the ash in the lamp's base.
Two legacies in his blood. Two weights living in his chest, learning each other's geometry, building a shared language from the combined vocabulary of a Tyrant's authority and a Shadow King's invisibility. He understood, in the cold arithmetic of what he was becoming, that the next one would change the balance again—that each inheritance was not addition but transformation, the previous state becoming the foundation of a new one, the man he had been in the Purge Pit increasingly theoretical.
He was not troubled by this.
He filed it under variables to monitor and began planning the route to Varath.
Behind him, on the wall of Silas's office, his shadow sat at a slightly different angle than the lamplight required. It had been doing this for several weeks. Han had stopped noting it as anomalous.
Some things, once inherited, simply became the new shape of the world.
End of Chapter 5 — End of Volume One
In the eastern kingdom of Varath, in a ruin that three separate Church expeditions had failed to fully map, something old and red and patient had been waiting for the right inheritor.
It had been waiting for thirty years.
It recognized, at a distance it should not have been able to perceive, the approach of something that carried the right kind of emptiness.
It began, in the way that legacy began, to remember.
Volume Two: The Blood Compact — Coming Next