The examination hall was the Red House's cathedral, which Nero had passed the entrance of many times and never gone inside.
It was larger than the rest of the building suggested it should be — forty-foot ceilings, stone columns along both walls, and at the far end a massive painting of a man in crimson armour holding a severed demon's head, the demon's eyes — all hundreds of them, covering the head's surface like a disease — looking out at the room with an expression that was difficult to read at this scale and probably deliberate. Beneath the altar, carved into the stone: *Through change, strength. Through strength, salvation.*
Long tables had been arranged across the floor in rows. Each seat had a document face-down on the table in front of it and a pen beside it and a small clay pot of ink. The candidates filed in and found seats and the Church Chroniclers who had arranged the room moved along the edges without speaking.
