Sister Marienne was where he had left her, or near enough, standing beside the candle rack on the left side of the nave, trimming wicks with small silver scissors. She did not look up when the door groaned open.
"That was fast," she said, without turning around. "You either read very quickly or you didn't read at all."
"I read it."
"And?"
He stepped closer. The chapel was empty except for the two of them. The frescoes watched from the walls.
"I had a question."
"I told you to come back for questions, but not this fast."
"Is it possible," Dante said, "that there are more than six gods?"
Sister Marienne's hand stopped.
The scissors froze mid-cut. The wick she had been trimming hung between the blades, half-severed. She did not move for a long second.
Then she turned around.
The face she turned on him now was not the one that had handed him a book fifteen minutes ago. That face had been sharp, dismissive, faintly amused by the runaway boy playing at piety. This face was closed. The eyes were the same pale color, but the warmth, what little there had been, was gone entirely. What was left was a woman who served an institution with very clear rules about very specific questions.
"No," she said. The voice was flat. "There are not."
"But the Heptarchy, the name itself —"
"Is a name. Old, meaningless, carried over from a time before proper doctrine. It does not signify anything. There are six gods. There have always been six gods. There will always be six gods. This is the teaching of the Church of Solis, and it is not debatable."
And then —
A notification appeared in the corner of Dante's sight, clean and sharp.
[SIXTH SENSE: ALERT] [DETECTED: VOYEUR, status scan active] [Passive concealment available. Activate?] [YES] [NO]
(She's scanning me.)
He thought YES without hesitating.
[Concealment active. Blessing hidden. Class hidden. Surface competences hidden. Warning: concealment is basic-level only. Against an experienced Voyeur user, your status will appear as a blank, which is itself distinctive. She will see no Blessing registered to any god. She will read the stain on your soul, the mark of a Tainted Soul.]
He watched it happen on her face.
The cold sharpened into something worse. Her eyes, which had been merely institutional, went hard. Her mouth thinned. She regarded him the way you regard a stain on white cloth. Not with hatred, exactly, but with the flat certainty that the thing in front of her should not exist.
"Reietto," she said.
The word was quiet and absolute.
(Reietto. Outcast. She sees the stain. She thinks I'm empty, a defective, a reject, a thing the crystal spat out. And she's right, technically. The stain is there. The seed is hidden inside the stain. But from the outside, all she sees is the nothing.)
[Noted. Priority: acquire better concealment. Without it, any soul-reader will identify you the same way.]
Sister Marienne turned back to her candles. The conversation was over. But she spoke once more, over her shoulder, in the voice of someone performing a duty.
"The almshouse behind the chapel gives bread at midday on the seventh day. I am the one who distributes it." A pause. "If you come, I will not serve it to you. Find another way to survive, reietto. You will not find charity here."
She did not look at him again.
He stood in the nave for a few more seconds. Then he walked out into the square, the Eptarina a small weight in his chest pocket beside the note from his mother, and crossed toward the Guild.
The Guild door hit him on the way in.
Not metaphorically. The heavy oak swung outward from the inside just as he reached for the handle and caught him square on the left side, on the wound, under the ribs, right on the cauterization, and for one perfect instant the pain was total. His breath went out of him. His legs buckled. He went down into the packed earth with both hands breaking his fall and one knee hitting something sharp.
Above him, laughter.
Four men coming out. Big, armed, smelling of beer and leather. They stepped around him as if he were a puddle. The one at the back, the biggest, stopped and looked down.
"What a little flower," he said cheerfully. "The door won? In my day they had to swing metal at us to get us in the mud."
He kicked a small arc of dirt across Dante's legs as a parting gesture and walked on. The others did not even look back.
Dante lay in the dirt for a second, breathing through his nose.
(ALICE.)
[Wound is intact. Painful, not re-opened. Bandage held. Sit up when you can.]
He sat up. Stood carefully. Dusted himself off.
(Patience.)
[Patience.]
He pushed the door the rest of the way open with his shoulder and walked into the Guild.
Inside was warmer and cleaner than he had expected. The stones of the floor had been scrubbed so many times they were polished at the high-traffic spots. The long tables, half-occupied at this hour, had the dark sheen of wood that had absorbed four generations of beer and oil. A fire in a stone hearth at the back of the room was crackling.
The board was the first thing that drew his eye. It dominated the right-hand wall, a massive pegboard, covered in papers and parchments and a handful of leather-wrapped slates. Job postings. Bounties. Contracts.
A huge man in battered iron was standing in front of it.
Even at this distance, Dante could see the scale of him. Easily six and a half feet, built like he had been assembled out of older and larger men. Three long scars on the right side of his face, one across the eyebrow. A greatsword on his back whose hilt alone was longer than Dante's forearm. He was studying the board with three other men, all of them armored, all of them carrying themselves with the specific ease of men who had survived things.
Dante stopped inside the door and watched them, without meaning to.
He was staring. He knew he was staring.
(I want that.)
The thought arrived before he had time to be embarrassed by it.
"I wouldn't stare at him for too long," said a voice at his elbow.
He jerked.
The voice was female, dry, calm, and coming from behind a long wooden counter he had walked past without noticing. The woman behind it was in her thirties, brown hair pulled up in a no-nonsense knot, sleeves rolled. She watched him over the rim of a ledger with the amused patience of someone who had seen a thousand first-timers.
"Sorry," Dante said.
"I'm not who you should apologize to. I'm not the one you've been staring at. That would be Ulfrick." She nodded at the big man. "Last winter he brought in a Lesser Lindwurm's head on a hay cart. Year before that, I'm told, he pulled the arms off a Black Bear with his bare hands. I didn't see it myself. With Ulfrick, I'm never quite sure."
"A — a what wurm?"
"Lindwurm," she said patiently. "Wingless cousin of a dragon. Smaller, meaner. Tends to settle in old ruins. The Lesser ones are merely the size of a small house. Greater ones are what the stories are about."
She set her ledger down.
"You're new. You want to register as a Hunter."
"…Yes."
"Name."
"Virgil."
"Age."
"Sixteen."
"All right, Virgil, sixteen, nothing else to your name. I'm Erika. Listen before you pay anything, because I'm going to save us both time." She did not write anything down. Not yet. "Registration costs ten silver coins. That buys you a licence card, a medallion, a file in this ledger, and a starting rank. The starting rank is Iron. Iron is a rank for picking. Herbs. Furs. Roots. Mushrooms. Depending on how the aptitude test goes (written first, then physical), you could be placed as high as Bronze, which opens escort work and basic bounties."
Dante's eyes went to the board.
"From there, you climb. Bronze and Silver are the blood of the Guild: caravan guards, escort work, bandit bounties. Half of them die in their first year. Gold and Platinum are the ones whose strength decides whether a village is doomed or rescued. They take the contracts nobody else can take, and they get paid accordingly. Emerald and Diamond are the ones you hear about in the bards' tales: the people who kill things that shouldn't exist."
She paused.
"Master and Grand Master are different. Most of them don't take bounties anymore. They hold positions: at court, with regents, with kings. They're the most sought-after rank for occupation work. They advise, they guard, they lead. If you reach Master, you'll never want for work. You'll probably never reach Master."
She said it without cruelty. Just the truth.
"And above all of that?"
Erika weighed him for a second, as if deciding whether to bother.
"Above all of that, there is the rank of Epigone. An Epigone is... there isn't a clean translation. It means something like inheritor of the divine, the mortal who carries the highest expression of a god's power. The one whose Blessing has been pushed further than any other living practitioner. There are, at the most, a handful alive at any time. Most gods have one. Some don't."
She paused again.
"Two years ago, the Epigone of the Sun, Iulus Magnus, died. He had held the rank for over a decade. He was the most powerful Hunter in the Empire. His death left a seat empty that hasn't been filled since. The Church of Solis has not announced a successor."
(Iulus Magnus. The Epigone of the Sun.)
(Two years ago.)
(Leon.)
The thought landed with a clarity that surprised him. In the Hall, four days ago, when Leon had touched the crystal and Solis had knelt, when Solis had pressed his enormous forehead to the marble floor in front of a sixteen-year-old boy from Dante's literature class, that was what it had meant. Leon had been given The Sun. Rank Ten. The highest Blessing of the highest god. He was not filling an empty rank. He was filling Iulus Magnus's seat. He was the new Epigone of Solis.
And Erika didn't know.
Nobody in Oakhaven knew.
The announcement hadn't traveled here because the Heptarchy had not announced it yet, because the summoning itself had not been announced, because twenty children pulled from another world was not the kind of thing you told people about while you were still deciding what it meant.
(I know something the Guild doesn't. I know the new Epigone of the Sun is a sixteen-year-old boy who was reading in class four days ago. And I can't tell anyone, because I can't explain how I know.)
"And..." he tried to keep his voice steady, "and if I don't have ten silver?"
Erika looked at him. There was no pity in it. Just comprehension.
"Then you do what everyone in your position does. You find paying work outside the Guild. Knock on doors. Ask around. Farmers, craftsmen, stablehands, anybody who needs an extra pair of arms and is willing to pay for it. Save ten silver. Come back."
"Does that usually work?"
"Sometimes. Not always. Oakhaven is small. People here don't trust strangers, and they trust strangers with no papers and no references even less. You'll hear a lot of no before you hear a yes. That's the way it is."
She picked up her ledger.
"Two pieces of advice, and then I have other people to see. First, don't lie about what you can do. Word travels faster in this town than legs. If you tell a farmer you can handle oxen and then you can't, nobody in Oakhaven will hire you for a month. Second, try the south side of the village. The craftsmen on the main road get asked twice a week by boys like you. The farms on the outskirts see fewer faces. They might have more patience."
"Thank you, Erika."
"Don't thank me yet. Come back with ten silver and I'll thank you."
She was already turning to another client, and Dante understood that the conversation was over.
He walked out of the Guild.
Four days ago, Leon had been a boy in his literature class. Now a god knelt for him. And Dante couldn't say the name aloud to a single living soul. He had ten silver to earn and no one to tell. So he went to find a door to knock on.
