The Ascension ceremony started at dawn.
That was the point.
The Goddess had ascended at first light, or so the scripture said, and every year the Church recreated the moment by making three hundred people stand in a cold cathedral at an hour when no reasonable person wanted to be vertical.
Raziel had his robe on before the bell finished ringing.
Old reflex.
He found Lucian in the corridor looking like a man who had been awake for twenty minutes and was furious about it.
His hair was doing something architectural.
"Don't," Lucian said.
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You had a face."
"I don't have a face at five in the morning. I don't have anything at five in the morning."
They walked to the cathedral with the rest of the novices, a slow river of white robes and half-closed eyes moving through the dark courtyard.
The torches along the path were the only warm thing in the world at that hour.
Someone ahead of them was already praying under their breath, getting the jump on it.
Lara fell into step beside them at the cathedral doors.
She looked awake, which was either dedication or a Gift Raziel hadn't catalogued yet.
"Did you sleep?" she asked him.
"Some."
She looked at him the same way she had after the welcome address two days ago, that specific attention that meant her gift was running in the background and had flagged something without being able to name it.
She had been doing it on and off since they got back.
He had been pretending not to notice.
He held the door for both of them and filed in.
***
The Grand Cathedral in full ceremony was a different building from the one Raziel walked through on ordinary days.
Every candle lit. The stained glass throwing color across the stone floor in long strips of red and gold.
The smell of incense so thick it had weight.
And the sound, three hundred people in a room built to make sound do what it was told, every breath and shuffle amplified and returned.
Raziel took his place in the novice rows and did what he always did in large gatherings.
He counted exits.
He checked sightlines.
He noted which Paladins were at which positions and whether any of them were watching the crowd instead of the doors.
Then he found Marius on the platform and watched him.
The man was composed. He was always composed in public.
That was the skill, the thing that made him dangerous, he showed exactly what he chose to show and nothing else.
He chose to show today was a devoted priest delivering the holiest address of the year with his whole heart in it.
Raziel had confirmed the Soul Contract two days ago.
He knew what was behind the performance now.
But knowing and proving were different things, and right now he had neither the standing nor the evidence to do anything useful with what he knew.
So he watched and he waited.
"My dear children of Zhalyr," Marius began, his voice filling the cathedral the way it always did.
"Today we celebrate the day our Goddess ascended—"
Lara's elbow touched his arm.
Just contact, and then she leaned close enough to speak under the opening prayer.
"Something is wrong in here," she said. "I've felt it since we came through the doors. It's coming from the back corner."
Raziel did not look at her.
He looked at the back corner.
The air there was distorting at the edges.
Not visually, not yet, but in about ninety seconds it would be.
He could feel the specific cold of it from forty feet away.
An Impure Resonance Specter.
He ran the math fast.
The ceremony's ritual energy, made richer and darker by Marius's corrupted pact bleeding through the altar work, had acted as a beacon.
The thing had followed the signal in.
It would fully materialize in the next two minutes, at which point everyone in the building with any sensitivity at all would feel it.
Then three hundred people would turn around and see a spiritual anomaly manifesting in the back corner of the Grand Cathedral during the holiest ceremony of the year.
The Inquisition's response to that would be thorough, prolonged, and pointed directly at whoever had been standing nearest to it.
Lara was going to feel it get worse. There was nothing he could do about that.
What he could do was kill it before it got that far.
"Pray," he said quietly.
"What?"
"Close your eyes and pray. Whatever you're feeling, prayer is the correct response."
She looked at him. He could feel it even though he was not looking back.
"Raziel—"
"Eyes forward, Lara."
She went quiet.
He shifted in his seat. The stone pillar was to his right, close enough to touch without it looking like anything except a novice adjusting his posture after twenty minutes on a hard bench.
He let his hand rest against it, fingers loose, palm flat.
He reached for the Paragon Light.
The drag was worse than it had been.
Every time now there was more resistance, like the channel was narrowing.
He pushed past it, found the thread of it underneath, and started moving it down his arm.
Nothing that would register as a power use to anyone watching him from the outside.
His hand looked like a hand resting on a pillar.
The warmth reached his palm and he pushed it into the stone.
VMMM.
The pulse traveled down through the pillar, into the foundation, spread out through the floor. He tracked it by the faint vibration in his feet as it moved.
Twelve feet. Twenty. Thirty.
It hit the Specter.
The distortion in the corner buckled hard.
It shook at a frequency that had no business existing in a place this old and solid, and then it compressed inward and collapsed.
Gone.
The cold at the back of his neck disappeared.
Raziel lifted his hand off the pillar and put it back in his lap.
His legs were shaking from the knee down. He locked his jaw and held still.
"...and may the light of Zhalyr guide us always," Marius intoned from the front.
"For Zhalyr!" The cathedral answered.
Raziel let out a slow breath through his nose. Kept his eyes forward. Kept his face at exactly the level of moved-but-composed appropriate to the moment.
Lara was staring at him.
He could feel that too.
***
The blessing queue after the ceremony was the slow part.
Every novice shuffling forward in line to receive the seasonal mark from the priest of their rank, fifteen minutes of standing still while incense continued doing what incense did.
Raziel was three places from the front when he felt the other set of eyes.
He finished his place in the line, moved forward when the person ahead of him moved, accepted his blessing from Father Clement with the appropriate expression of gratitude.
Then he turned, as people turned when they were done, naturally, heading for the side aisle.
Marius was at the main altar.
He was not blessing the next person in line.
He was watching Raziel.
Not with the vague suspicion from the welcome address.
Something more specific than that.
The expression of a man who had been building a case and had just received new evidence that fit exactly where he needed it to fit.
Raziel held it for one second.
Then he looked away first and walked toward the side door.
The stone of the cathedral was cold under his feet.
The incense was finally thinning out near the exit.
Behind him, without looking, he knew Marius was still watching.
'He saw something,' Raziel thought. 'He doesn't know what but he saw enough to stop being curious and start being certain.'
He pushed through the side door into the grey morning air.
Two days ago, he was a person of interest.
Today he was a project.