The Drawn Breath answered her on a morning when she had stopped expecting it to.
Cognus was on the small mat in the eastern wing’s outer chamber. She had taken the room for the dawn work because the eastern light arrived earliest there and because the household’s morning rotation passed it last. She had woken at the fifth hour, washed, dressed, eaten the small piece of dried fruit she allowed herself before practice, and taken the mat at the sixth. The Rite of Quiet Hands had operated through the washing and dressing without her supervision. The Drawn Breath had been waiting, as it had been waiting through all the months of dawn practice since the library, neither resisting nor cooperating, registering her efforts and offering nothing back.
This morning it offered something back.
Cognus closed her eyes. She placed the breath at the diaphragm. The chest did not lift. The throat did not pull. The diaphragm drew, and the rest of the body, after the long accumulation of mornings, permitted the drawing without resistance.
The room acknowledged her.
It was small. The acknowledgment was small. The air at the level of her shoulders moved, very faintly, in a current that was not the household’s air-handling and was not her own breathing. The current moved toward her. It held there. It returned, after some seconds, to the room’s ordinary indifference. It had not been there before this morning and the eighty mornings before it.
Cognus opened her eyes.
Her face produced no expression in the small mirror that hung on the chamber’s far wall. The Quiet Hands had operated through the moment of acknowledgment without her supervision, which she registered now as a second-order confirmation. She had been a vessel the dark side entered briefly and the vessel had not registered the entrance on its surface. The Rite had performed as the Rite was meant to perform.
She finished the practice. She rose. She did not speak of the morning to her Master at breakfast. The Master had not asked. The Master had said, on the day she had taught her the Rite, that the result of the work was a slow accumulation and not a thing the practitioner reported. Cognus had taken the instruction at the time as discipline. She understood it now as protection. The practitioner who reported each small advance to her teacher would, she suspected, find the teacher’s expectations quietly recalibrating to the reports. The recalibrated expectations would cease, in time, to match the work.
In the library she went to her assigned reading.
✦
Three days later Allia sent her into Daplona’s spice quarter on a network task that had nothing to do with the practice and everything to do with the practice.
The task was small. A second-tier broker in the spice market had been overheard, by an Omek-adjacent operator, expressing curiosity about why Allia Omek had been making certain quiet acquisitions through channels that were not Vesh’s. The broker had not yet acted on the curiosity. Allia required confirmation that the curiosity remained inert. She required the confirmation gathered without the broker registering the request, and she required the broker himself observed for the small physical signals that indicated whether his curiosity was professional or had become something more.
Cognus took the morning transport into Daplona. She wore the merchant-class clothing the cover assigned her and the hood the Huntress required, drawn close in the public quarters where her face might still be recognized by an old client.
Cognus entered the broker’s shop on a pretext of inquiring after a small quantity of Daplona spice for personal use. The broker — a Pantoran of late middle years, bald, tattooed across the cheekbones in the asymmetric pattern his clan favored — received her with the courtesy his profession required. She asked her questions. He answered them. She paid for the small quantity she had requested and prepared to leave.
In the moment of preparing to leave she registered something she had not registered before in the field.
The Quiet Hands had been operating through the entire conversation. The Drawn Breath had been operating beneath it, at the diaphragm, drawing in its slow steady rhythm. Together the two Rites had produced, in her, a state of operational quiet she had not been aware she was in. The broker had been responding to her differently than he would have responded to her before the apprenticeship. He had been giving her answers more quickly, with less hedging, with the small unconscious adjustments of a man who was talking to someone he had decided was not a threat without examining the decision. She had not asked him for that posture. The posture had arrived because of what she had been doing without doing.
She left the shop with her small package and the answer to her actual question. The broker’s curiosity was professional. It would not become something more in the foreseeable.
Walking back to the transport she registered, separately, that the work she had just done was work she could have done a year ago by other means. She would have used different routes and produced different residues. The product would have been the same. What was different was that this morning she had used no force at all. The Rites had used force on her behalf, quietly, without her supervision, in a register she was only this week beginning to read.
Cognus returned to the estate at the seventh hour and reported to Zannah at the desk in the study.
Zannah received the report. She looked at her apprentice across the desk for a beat longer than the report had required.
“Withdraw,” she said.
Cognus withdrew. In the corridor she registered, again, that the Master had been briefly surprised and had elected not to show it.
✦
The first volume from Pelu arrived in the fifth month.
It came in a courier capsule routed through three intermediaries Allia had used during the years before Ambria, none of whom were currently active in any account the surface ledger acknowledged. The capsule contained one of the three texts Zannah had requested — the second of the two that had not been in active circulation for sixty years. It was bound in the dark leather of late-Republic Sith production, the script on the spine a dialect of Sith Cognus had not yet learned to read.
Zannah set the volume on the western-window table where the original treatise still sat closed. The two volumes side by side made a small geometry the room had not held before.
That evening she gave Cognus a fresh document, copied in her own hand, of a foundational text Cognus had not yet been assigned.
“Read it twice,” Zannah said. “We will discuss it on the seventh day.”
“Yes, Master.”
“The volume on the western table is mine. You will not read it. You will not ask after it. When the time comes I will tell you what it contains.”
“Yes, Master.”
The library’s second-system catalogue, by the end of the fifth month, had thirty-seven entries.
✦
The Sepp decision crystallized late one evening in the fifth month, at the desk in the study, after the day’s correspondence.
Zannah had been working through the day’s correspondence and had reached the small folded letter from a Daplona peer. Marran, again, who had now asked after Sepp three times in writing and once in person across the months. She set the letter down without composing the reply she would, eventually, send. She did not pick up the stylus. She sat with her hands folded on the desk’s teakwood surface and looked at the small calendar at the side of the desk.
The marks on the calendar had accumulated. The Sepp absence had passed the original Dweem schedule. It had passed the extension she had communicated to Vesh in the first month. It had begun to approach the duration at which a sister of Allia’s evident competence and resources would have been expected to take action. The fiction Allia had been performing was that she was a concerned sister managing a brother’s prolonged absence with patience. The fiction was beginning to require a different shape.
She decided.
The deciding was brief. The deciding had, in some sense, already been made on the hauler outbound from Ambria. She had begun, on that transit, to think through the architecture of the years she would now spend in this house. She had recognized that Sepp Omek as a continuing public figure was not architecturally compatible with the work that would be done through the woman who occupied his name. The deciding, this evening, was the formal recognition that the work she had outlined on the hauler would now begin.
Sepp would die on Dweem.
He would die in a manner that produced a body, because the absence of a body would generate the wrong kind of inquiry. He would die in a manner that the local authorities on Dweem would investigate and conclude as either accident or natural cause, because either of those produced the kind of grief that closed inquiries. The mechanism, the timing, the operational architecture of the death, would be engineered through a contact she had used before for matters of this register and had not yet activated for this work.
She set the calendar back at the side of the desk. She wrote, on a fresh sheet, the brief encrypted message she would send in the morning to Pelu, requesting Pelu introduce her to the contact she had in mind. She sealed it. She set it aside.
Bane did not speak.
This, she registered, was its own information. Bane had occupied the Sepp body for ten years. He had known Sepp better than Sepp had known himself in the latter years of his life. That was the kind of knowledge that came of one consciousness inhabiting another consciousness’s habits and tics until the habits and tics were no longer separable from the inhabitant’s own. Bane had views on the body she had just decided to dispose of. Bane was withholding them. The withholding was a position. The position was that the spirit who carried her would not be heard arguing for the preservation of a fiction that had served its purpose and was now becoming a liability.
Or the position was something else, and she did not yet have the evidence to determine what.
She did not engage him. The decision was hers and she had made it.
In the days that followed she began to construct the shape of the absence.
Allia wrote a letter to Marran in which she expressed, for the first time in their correspondence, a small specific concern about the latest report from Dweem. The phrasing was careful. The concern was not catastrophic. It was the kind of concern one professional shared with another in the early stages of recognizing that something might not be quite right. Marran would respond within the week with appropriate sympathy and would, Allia knew without having to model it explicitly, mention the exchange to two or three peers in the course of his ordinary social rotation.
In the routine quarterly review with Vesh, Allia raised a single careful question about whether any of Sepp’s recent account signatures had looked at all unusual. Vesh confirmed that all the signatures had been routine. Allia received the confirmation with the small frown of a sister who had hoped for confirmation that something was wrong. Vesh did not comment on the frown. He had, by this point in the relationship, learned which expressions were not his to comment on.
To Jerris, in passing one morning, Allia remarked that she might soon need to consider traveling to Dweem in person. The remark was offered in the rhythm of a thought aloud rather than an instruction. Jerris received it with the calibrated neutrality of his position. Within the week, by the household’s standing rhythms, the remark would reach two members of staff who were not Jerris. From them, by the standing rhythms of the staff’s extramural social arrangements, the remark would reach the household’s peers in the Daplona corridor. It would reach them in the form of Mistress Allia is considering traveling to Dweem to check on her brother personally.
The shape was being constructed. The community was being prepared.
The body had not yet died. The community had begun to feel the absence the death would, in time, confirm.
Cognus registered the new texture without comment. She had been an apprentice long enough now to read what her Master was doing and to refrain from naming it. The Sepp decision was the Master’s. The orchestration was the Master’s. The apprentice’s role, for the present, was to continue the work she had been given and to be available when the operational phase required her.
The household ran on. The library’s second-system catalogue gained its thirty-eighth entry, and its thirty-ninth.
The clock advanced.