Silas came back the next morning with clean vestments and a prepared expression.
Han recognized the expression. He had seen it on men who had been embarrassed by something physical—a fall witnessed by subordinates, a flinch at the wrong moment—and had spent the intervening hours constructing a version of events that allowed them to remain upright in their own accounting. The expression was the visible seam of that construction. It held if you didn't press it.
Silas stood at the entrance to the Purge Pit and did not cross the threshold.
"You're being reassigned," he said. His voice was level. His right hand, hanging at his side, was not. The fingers moved in a small, involuntary sequence—index, middle, ring—the way hands moved when the nervous system was managing something it hadn't finished processing. "Personal attendant. Effective this morning."
Han set down his instruments. He looked at Silas with the specific quality of attention that communicated nothing—no surprise, no gratitude, no suspicion—and said, "Understood."
Something moved through Silas's prepared expression. Not relief exactly. Something adjacent to relief but darker, the emotion of a man who has chosen a solution he knows is inadequate and is committing to it regardless because the alternatives are worse. He couldn't report what had happened. Han understood this with the clean simplicity of arithmetic. A Holy Light Executor, humiliated by a soulless pit worker, on his knees in the Cathedral's basement—the institutional damage of that story was not survivable. So instead: promotion. Proximity. The comfortable fiction of surveillance.
Keep the variable close, Silas had decided. Keep it where it can be watched.
It was, Han thought, a reasonable instinct applied to an incorrect understanding of the situation.
He collected his documentation, filed it in the correct drawer, and followed Silas up the stairs.
The light hit him like a physical object.
He had known, abstractly, that the Cathedral's upper levels were bright. He had heard it from the other workers, on the rare occasions workers spoke—it's blinding up there, all that glass and gold, they build it that way on purpose, makes you feel small. He had filed this as data and assigned it no particular weight.
The reality was different from the data.
The nave was built to do something specific to human neurology. Han catalogued this in the first ten seconds: the ceiling height calculated to make the body feel structurally inadequate, the light through the stained glass manipulated by the angle of the windows to fall in columns that implied vertical axis, that implied something descending from above toward something small below. The gold was everywhere and it was not decorative. Gold at this density was a statement about the relationship between the institution and the concept of value—the Church owned both, and this room was the proof.
Worshippers moved through the nave in the patterns of people who had learned to move carefully in a space that belonged to something else.
Han walked behind Silas and looked at everything.
The columns were load-bearing and thick enough to stand behind completely. The side chapels had curtained entrances that a man could pass through without being visible from the main floor for approximately four seconds—enough, at walking pace. The Executors stationed at the cardinal points of the nave kept their attention on the worshippers, not the architecture—a predictable error, the prioritization of known threat categories over environment. The gap between the second and third columns on the eastern wall was wider than the others. A structural adjustment, probably, from a repair at some point—but the widening meant the sight line from the northern Executor's position had a blind spot approximately two meters wide.
Han catalogued this and filed it under a category he had not previously needed.
He was aware that he was doing this. He was aware that three years in the Purge Pit had produced no equivalent behavior—that he had never once looked at the drainage channels in terms of concealment, never assessed the Purifiers' entry pattern in terms of timing. The part of him that had done this cataloguing had arrived last night, with the cold weight and the borrowed memories, and it was interested in the Cathedral in a way that Han himself had never been.
He noted this. He did not stop cataloguing.
The flash came without warning, as erosion always does.
A Cardinal emerged from the sacristy corridor—old, heavyset, moving with the careful dignity of a man whose joints had opinions. His robes were deep crimson, the specific shade that indicated direct appointment by the Holy Seat rather than elevation through the standard clerical ranks. He was speaking to an aide without looking at the aide, which was the body language of a man who had not genuinely looked at another person in a very long time.
Han saw him and the rage arrived.
It was not his rage. He understood this in the same instant that it hit him—understood it the way you understand that the sound you're hearing is from outside the building rather than inside, the intellectual knowledge doing nothing to reduce the volume. The rage belonged to Asmodai, specifically to the version of Asmodai who had stood at the edge of a city he had not burned and watched men in crimson robes begin their work below. It was sixty years old and it was fresh. It came up through Han's chest with the force of something that had been held down for a very long time and had found, in Han's body, the first available channel.
His right hand moved toward the Cardinal.
Han's left hand caught his right wrist.
He stood completely still. From the outside, if anyone had been watching—Silas was not watching, Silas was performing the focused gait of a man with authority and a destination—he was simply a worker pausing to adjust his sleeve. From the inside, he was applying pressure to the rage the way you apply pressure to a wound: not trying to eliminate it, not arguing with it, just restricting its ability to go where it wanted to go.
The Cardinal passed six meters away and disappeared into the nave without ever registering Han's existence.
The rage subsided. It did not disappear. Han had the clear and specific understanding that it would not disappear—that it had settled somewhere below his sternum, in the same place the cold weight lived, and that it would be there the next time something triggered the relevant memory, and the time after that, and the time after that. He was carrying sixty years of someone else's unfinished business and the business had not agreed to remain unfinished simply because its original owner was dead.
He adjusted his sleeve and walked on.
This was the cost, he understood. The inheritance was real and the invoice was real and the invoice would come due on its own schedule, not his.
He filed this under: constraints to account for.
Silas's office was on the third floor of the administrative wing—not a large office, not a prestigious position, but a room with a desk and a filing system and a window that looked onto the Cathedral's inner courtyard. The desk was very organized, Han noted. The organization of someone who felt controlled by details and managed that feeling by controlling details. The filing system was alphabetical rather than categorical, which was a choice that prioritized finding a known thing over discovering an unknown pattern.
Useful to know.
His duties, such as they were, amounted to: presence. Silas wanted a body in his peripheral vision that he could frame as oversight, and in exchange Han would be provided with access to the administrative wing, the Cathedral's general circulation areas, and—more relevantly—the filing room on the third floor's eastern corridor, which was open to attendants during working hours.
Han spent the first day learning where everything was.
He spent the second day locating the Church's internal communiqués on active purification operations.
They were not difficult to find. The filing system was alphabetical. Operations were filed under O. The entry he was looking for was three folders back from the front of the relevant drawer.
Operation: Lantern's End. Target designation: Shadow Market node, lower city fourth district. Scheduled purification: fourteen days. Authorization: Cardinal Voss. Objective: elimination of contraband Authority artifacts and associated personnel.
Han read it twice, returned it to its exact position, and closed the drawer.
The Shadow King had operated out of the lower city's fourth district for the last eleven years before the Church had finally cornered him eight months ago. His death had been documented in a file Han had processed personally—another arranged corpse, another wound with edges that didn't correspond to the official account. The Church had taken his body.
They had not, apparently, swept his infrastructure.
Fourteen days. Han did the relevant arithmetic. The Shadow King's legacy fragment would be in whatever the Church hadn't found yet—the parts of his operation that had survived him, the nodes that hadn't been flagged. When the Church moved on the market, they would find the fragment or they would destroy it or they would seal it.
Fourteen days to reach it first.
Han noted this, filed it under immediate priorities, and went to find Silas to ask about the schedule for the following week.
He saw the Saintess on the fifth day, from across the Cathedral's central courtyard.
He had not been looking for her. She had simply appeared in his field of vision while he was mapping the courtyard's exit routes, and he had stopped the mapping in the involuntary way that the eye stops when something bright moves against a dark background.
She was surrounded.
Not crowded—surrounded was the correct word, because it was not accidental. A formation of attendants, Paladins at measured intervals, petitioners held at a distance that communicated access as a curated experience rather than a natural one. She moved through the formation the way light moved through the Cathedral's stained glass: filtered, directed, arriving at its destination in the shape the architecture had decided for it.
She was listening to an elderly woman. Han couldn't hear the words across the courtyard's width. He could see the quality of the Saintess's attention—the specific orientation of a person who has learned to receive suffering without absorbing it, to be present with pain in a way that transformed it into something manageable for the sufferer without the accumulation becoming unmanageable for herself.
It was a trained posture. Han recognized training.
He also recognized, with the detached accuracy of someone who had spent three years watching the Church perform its functions, that the training was not the whole story. She was doing something with her hands—a small movement, her fingers finding the elderly woman's and pressing once before releasing. It wasn't in the liturgical gesture catalog Han had observed. It was just a person holding another person's hands.
The cold weight in his chest said nothing about this. Asmodai's memories had nothing to file on the Saintess—she was too young, her elevation too recent.
The nothing was, in its own way, clarifying.
She was twenty-three and she had been handed a role in a story written before her birth, and she was performing it with what appeared to be genuine care for the people inside it, and she did not know—could not know, from inside the formation, inside the filtered light—that the story had an architecture she hadn't been shown.
The bells had rung for Han.
The doctrine said she would be sent to find him.
He looked at her for three more seconds, completing the range estimate and the intervening obstacle count with the part of his mind that did that automatically now, then returned his attention to the exit routes.
He had fourteen days.
He left the courtyard through the blind spot between the second and third columns on the eastern wall, and no one saw him go.
End of Chapter 2