The ceremony had been going for three hours, and Kael Mourne had spent most of it calculating exits.
There were four doors in the Hall of Proclamation. The main entrance behind him, sealed now by the ceremonial guard. Two side passages flanking the altar, both concealed behind tapestries depicting the First Gods in various poses of divine generosity. And the service corridor near the east wall, half-hidden behind a pillar, which the stewards used to ferry offerings without interrupting the proceedings. That one was unlocked. He had checked.
He had not intended to check. The knowledge had simply accumulated the way useful knowledge always did, quietly and without his permission.
"Kael Mourne." The High Priest's voice carried the particular resonance of a man who had spent decades projecting authority into large rooms. "Step forward."
He stepped forward.
The Hall of Proclamation held four hundred people when full. Today it held three hundred and twelve, seated in rows of carved stone benches that had not been designed for comfort. The nobility occupied the front third, identifiable by the quality of their boredom. Behind them, the senior clergy, who at least had the honesty to look nervous. And at the very back, the administrative staff of the Grand Temple: scribes, archivists, junior priests who had drawn short straws for this assignment and would spend the next several hours standing.
Kael walked the length of the central aisle. His footsteps did not echo, which he found faintly disappointing. A room built for ceremony should at least reward ceremony with decent acoustics.
The High Priest, Aldren Veth, was a small man who wore his authority in layers of embroidered white. He was also, Kael had concluded after three separate meetings, genuinely intelligent. This made him more dangerous than the merely ambitious priests Kael had encountered during his years at the university, before the university had decided his particular kind of intelligence was not the kind they wished to house.
That decision had led, through a sequence of events that Kael still found structurally improbable, to this moment.
"Kneel," said Veth.
Kael knelt. The stone floor was cold through the thin fabric of the ceremonial trousers. He noted this without complaint, because complaint would not change the temperature of the stone.
The ritual took another forty minutes. There were words in Old Thenan, a language Kael read fluently but which Veth pronounced with the confidence of a man who had memorized sounds rather than meanings. There was anointing oil, which smelled of cedar and something sharper underneath, something medicinal that Kael could not identify. There were three separate instances of the assembled congregation responding in unison, which they did with the slightly ragged timing of people who had rehearsed but not enough.
At the end, Veth placed a thin chain around Kael's neck. The pendant was iron, not gold, which surprised him. A disk with a symbol he recognized: the Opened Mouth, the mark of the Translator.
"Rise, Kael Mourne," said Veth, and something in his voice had shifted, something that sounded almost like apology. "Seventeenth Translator of the Divine Tongue. Voice of the Gods to the mortal world."
Kael rose. He turned to face the assembled hall.
Three hundred and twelve people looked back at him. Some with reverence. Some with calculation. A few, near the back, with the vacant politeness of the professionally present.
He did not feel like the voice of the gods. He felt cold, and faintly irritated, and aware that the service corridor near the east wall was still unlocked.
He did not use it.