Power, Han had concluded, was less about what you held and more about what you knew that other people didn't know you knew.
The restricted archives on the Cathedral's fourth floor operated on a filing system that prioritized secrecy over accessibility—documents sorted by clearance tier rather than subject, which meant that a person with sufficient clearance could find anything, and a person without it couldn't find the index that would tell them what they were missing. Silas's promotion to Senior Executor had moved his clearance from tier two to tier four. Han, as Head Attendant, had been issued a tier-three pass on the administrative logic that an attendant needed to retrieve documents his principal was authorized to read.
Tier three contained seventeen years of financial records that the Church's public accounts did not acknowledge existing.
Han spent four days reading them before he contacted Ivy.
The meeting point was her choosing—a laundry operation in the second district, the kind of business that generated constant legitimate foot traffic and constant ambient noise, where two people in a back room had natural cover. Ivy was already there when Han arrived, which meant she had arrived first deliberately, which meant she was still running threat assessment on him and wanted the positional advantage of having surveyed the space before he entered it.
Reasonable. He would have done the same.
She slid a ledger across the table without preamble. Cloth-bound, the cover worn in the specific way that indicated regular handling rather than age. Han opened it.
The entries were coded, but the code was a simple transposition layered over standard ecclesiastical accounting notation—the kind of thing designed to be deniable in casual inspection while remaining readable to anyone who needed to use the document operationally. Han read codes faster than plain text at this point. Three years of processing the Church's quietly inconsistent death records had given him that.
The architecture of the fraud was elegant in the way that long-running institutional corruption became elegant: the initial crime had been simple, probably opportunistic, but twenty-two years of refinement had produced something almost aesthetic. Tithes from fourteen parishes across the city's outer districts were being categorized as administrative losses before reaching the Cathedral's central accounts. The losses were documented with manufactured receipts from Shadow Market intermediaries—payment for services the Church officially didn't use, routed through entities that officially didn't exist, landing in accounts held under names that were, upon examination, variations on the names of seven senior priests.
Seven senior priests. Two Cardinals. One name that appeared only four times in the ledger but each time at a transaction volume that dwarfed the others.
Cardinal Voss. The same name on the authorization for Operation Lantern's End.
Han closed the ledger. "How many copies of this exist."
"One," Ivy said. "Now zero, since you have it."
"And the sources."
"Protected." She met his eyes with the directness of someone who had decided that the only viable position with him was complete transparency about the limits of her transparency. "I won't give you the sources. That's the condition."
Han considered this. The sources were less valuable than the ledger itself—the ledger was actionable, the sources were protective redundancy for Ivy's operation. Accepting her condition cost him nothing material.
"Agreed," he said, and watched her recalibrate at his lack of negotiation. She had prepared for pushback. The absence of it made her more uncertain than resistance would have. He left that uncertainty in place and folded the ledger into his coat.
He heard about the Saintess's visit before he saw her.
The administrative wing changed in quality when she was coming. Han had noticed this in the courtyard and noticed it again now, more specifically: the staff moved differently, a subtle shift in posture and pace, the way people moved in spaces they wanted to look good in. Doors that were usually open were quietly closed. The duty Paladin at the corridor's end straightened to a precision he hadn't been maintaining thirty seconds earlier.
Silas, when the attendant delivered the notification, touched his vestments in three places—collar, cuffs, the front seam—with the rapid unconscious sequence of a man checking his presentation.
Han noted all of this and positioned himself at the far end of Silas's office, beside the document shelves, in the place a Head Attendant would logically stand and in the place a person could most easily look at the room's other occupants without being the subject of attention himself.
The door opened.
The Saintess Seraphina entered with two attendants and the particular quality of presence that Han had observed from the courtyard and was now, at eight meters, recalibrating. The Holy Radiance she carried wasn't the aggressive radiation of an Executor's deployed Authority. It was ambient, as Silas's had been, but where Silas's ambience was the pressure of something trying to be noticed, hers was the pressure of something that had been noticed for so long it had stopped trying.
It moved through the room.
Han felt it reach him the way you feel air pressure change before a door closes—a fraction of a second of awareness, the environment registering a difference.
He went still. Not physically—he was already physically still—but at a level below the physical. The Shadow King's legacy had given him seventeen days of practice in the geometry of absence, and he used all of it now: the specific orientation of attention away from himself, the practiced redistribution of presence into the negative space between objects, the understanding that what the eye moved to was a function of contrast and that the solution to contrast was not concealment but dissolution. He didn't hide. He became the quality of the room that the eye moved past to reach the things it was looking for.
Seraphina's gaze moved through the office.
It found Silas, who straightened further. It found the desk, the commendation letter still displayed, the evidence of a successful operation. It found the window, the document shelves, the middle distance—
It paused.
Not at Han. Slightly left of Han, at the junction of the wall and the shelving unit, a point of architectural unremarkability that contained nothing of interest. She looked at it for approximately two seconds with the focused attention of someone who has heard a sound they can't place—the specific quality of a person whose instrument is telling them something their eyes aren't confirming.
Then Silas said her formal title, and her attention completed its movement past Han and into the social choreography of the visit.
Han breathed in, carefully, and noted that his hands were completely still.
Inquisitor Vane announced his investigation on the third day after the Saintess's visit, which meant he had been building it quietly for longer than three days—the announcement was the visible portion, and the preparation beneath it was what mattered. Han had become aware of the investigation through Ivy's networks on the second day, which gave him a twenty-four hour window between knowing and the Church knowing he might know.
He used eighteen hours of it to read Vane's file in the restricted archives.
Vane was meticulous—the specific meticulousness of someone who had survived the Cathedral's internal politics for thirty years by being right more often than the people who wanted him wrong. He had investigated eleven cases of Authority misuse that the Church would have preferred remain uninvestigated. He had closed eight of them. The other three remained open in the technical sense that a case can remain open when its subjects are senior enough that closing requires authorization that doesn't arrive.
He was currently interested in a Paladin named Osric whose cardiac arrest during a low-stress raid phase was, in Vane's documented assessment, inconsistent with the subject's medical history, physical conditioning, and the specific character of the Authority residue found at the scene.
The residue characterization was the problem. Holy Light misfire left a specific signature—the Church's own forensic literature described it clearly, and Vane had clearly read the literature. What he'd found at the scene matched the suppression pattern of an external Authority source rather than an internal one. He didn't have a category for it yet. But he was building toward one.
Han read the assessment twice and identified the investigative path Vane would take if left uninterrupted. It led, through four logical steps, to the bookshop basement. It did not yet lead to Han, because Vane didn't know Han existed in any capacity relevant to the investigation—he was looking for a villain with an Authority signature and Han was, on all official documentation, a non-combatant attendant with no registered awakening.
The question was not how to stop Vane.
The question was what Vane was most useful for.
Han thought about this for the remaining six hours and arrived at an answer.
The rival Inquisitor was named Harrow, and he appeared in the dirty ledger eleven times.
He was not one of the major architects of the fraud—his transactions were opportunistic, small-scale, the financial behavior of a man who had noticed a mechanism and used it without understanding it fully, which meant without taking the precautions the mechanism's architects had taken. His exposure in the ledger was cleaner, more traceable, more legible to an investigator who was given the right portion of the document and the right framing for what he was looking at.
Han did not give Vane the ledger. He gave Vane the specific eleven pages that documented Harrow's transactions, separated from their context, introduced through a channel that Vane's investigative instincts would lead him to consider reliable—a source within the Shadow Market's remaining operational network who had reason to want certain information moving toward official investigators, filtered through Ivy's logistics without Ivy's fingerprints on the transmission.
It reached Vane on the fifth day. Han tracked its arrival through the change in Vane's documented movements—the investigator's focus, which had been oriented toward the Osric case, rotated forty degrees toward the financial irregularities that had just presented themselves as more immediately actionable.
Harrow was suspended from active duty pending investigation within nine days. Vane's attention, fully occupied with a case that had documentary evidence and institutional momentum and the personal satisfaction of finally closing one of those three open files, did not return to the question of Osric's cardiac arrest.
It was not framing, exactly, Han decided. Harrow had taken the money. The evidence of his taking it was real. The selection of which evidence reached which investigator, and the timing of that selection—that was the art. The crime was Harrow's. The architecture was Han's.
He stood on the administrative wing's exterior balcony at the end of the ninth day, in the cold that came off the city at night, and looked at what he had built.
A corrupted Executor neutralized, converted into a useful fiction. An information network absorbed. A shadow infrastructure inherited. Two legacy authorities integrated. One investigation redirected. One genuine corrupt official delivered to accountability.
That last item was the one worth examining.
Harrow was corrupt. His removal made the Church's financial operations marginally more honest. Vane, pursuing the case with the satisfaction of a man doing the work he believed in, would likely find the remaining threads of the fraud—not all seven senior priests, not both Cardinals, certainly not Voss, because Han needed Voss's operation intact as both an ongoing intelligence source and a future instrument. But the lower tiers would be cleaned.
The Church would be, in specific measurable ways, better at what it did.
And what it did was maintain the order that had manufactured every villain whose legacy Han now carried in his blood. The institution that had folded Asmodai's hands and written the story before anyone had arrived to contest it. The order that would, when it needed a new villain, select one and build the narrative and conduct the purification and file the death and begin again.
Han had cleaned a portion of it. Not from any investment in its stated purpose—from the cold arithmetic of a man who understood that a strong enemy was more useful than a weak one when the strong enemy was also your current roof and your current access and your current invisibility.
A weak institution produced chaos. Chaos was unpredictable. Chaos produced the kind of attention that found things that careful planning had not yet made unfindable.
A strong institution produced predictability. Predictability was navigable. A man who understood the architecture of predictable things could move through them without disturbing the surface.
He had not helped the Church. He had calibrated it, the way you calibrated an instrument you intended to use—not for the instrument's benefit, but because an uncalibrated instrument produced unreliable results, and he needed reliable results from everything around him.
The city below was lit in its uneven way: bright where the Church's district maintenance extended, dim where it didn't, dark at the edges where the fourth district's infrastructure was still rebuilding itself under Ivy's quiet direction. His direction, now, at a remove of several layers.
The cold in his chest held two weights. The Shadow King's geometry had given him a new way to look at the lit and unlit portions of the city—not as a map of power but as a map of attention, the bright places being the places the institution watched and the dark places being the places it didn't, and the dark places being, consequently, the places where things could be built that the institution would not see until they were built entirely.
He had ten months before the Church's next major operation, based on the operational cycle documented in the restricted archives.
Ten months was sufficient.
He remained on the balcony until the cold became impractical, then went inside and closed the door behind him, and the darkness on the balcony settled after he left in the way that darkness settled in rooms where the Shadow King's legacy had recently been present—not all the way back to what it had been, retaining a faint geometry that hadn't been there before, occupying the corners with slightly more substance than the available light could account for.
End of Chapter 4