The memory was old and Zannah was holding it open.
Zannah was in the small private chamber off the south wall of the main hall, the room she had taken before she left for the duel and had not entered since her return. The door was closed. The shutters at the high western window were closed. The single lamp she had left lit was at the low setting that produced enough light to see her own hands by and not enough to see them by clearly. She was on the meditation cushion. Her hands rested on her thighs. The Working had been running for some minutes already. The held thing inside her, the memory she had brought into the Held Breath’s suspension, was beginning to yield to the examination the Working permitted.
The memory was of an afternoon in Bane’s study early in her training. She had been perhaps fifteen, perhaps a little older. Bane had been at the long desk where he conducted his philosophical work. She had been in the chair across from him, where the apprentice sat for the lessons that consisted of words rather than the practical work of the body. He had been reading aloud from one of the orthodox treatises he required her to know. He had stopped, mid-passage, to ask her a question.
The question had been whether the Sith who refused the demands of personal hunger ceased to be Sith.
The orthodox answer was that they did. Hunger was the only honest motivation. The practitioner who refused it was the practitioner who diluted their access to the dark side, and the diluted practitioner was, by the standards of the doctrine, no longer a vessel for it.
The orthodox answer had been hers to give. She had given it cleanly, in the cadence Bane preferred, with the economy of phrasing he had trained her toward. He had accepted the answer with the small inclination of his head that meant a lesson had landed. They had returned to the treatise. The afternoon had continued. The matter had been closed.
The Held Breath compressed the moment. Held it. Did not let it move.
Zannah watched the apprentice she had been speak the orthodox answer. She watched the words leave the apprentice’s mouth before the apprentice’s mind had finished examining them. She watched Bane accept the words with the inclination of his head. She held the moment in suspension and walked, slowly, around it.
The girl had said what Bane wanted to hear because the girl had not yet learned to distinguish between an answer she had reached and an answer she had been trained to reach. The orthodox answer was not wrong by the doctrine. The orthodox answer was wrong because the girl had not arrived at it. She had recited it.
Zannah held the moment.
The Working had become, by the months of practice she had given it since the conception, a state she could enter and inhabit without conscious management of the duration. The conscious work was the examination. The Working held while the examination occurred.
The minute mark passed. The mark she had reached with Velt passed. She did not slow.
At what she estimated as the ninth minute, the spirit who had been silent across the whole of the work spoke.
‘Stop,’ Bane said.
Zannah did not stop.
‘Stop, apprentice.’
Zannah did not engage him. The Working continued. The memory continued to be held.
‘The lesson was correct. You answered correctly.’
‘I answered the answer you wanted,’ Zannah said. She did not say it aloud. The chamber registered no sound. The exchange was happening in the architecture inside her where the spirit had been carried since the duel. ‘That was not the same as answering correctly.’
‘It was the same.’
‘It was not.’
‘You are using the work you built alone to dissect a teaching of mine. You will stop.’
‘No.’
The word was clean. It had no weight on it that was not the weight of the word itself. She had not raised her voice. She had not tightened the Working. She had simply said no, and the no had been a full answer.
Bane registered the no.
He had spent ten years inside the consciousness of an apprentice he had not chosen to make a Master. She had become a Master. She had now become a Master refusing to be his apprentice in the residue of the conversations he could still attempt. The architecture of the refusal was not a thing he had a tool to dismantle. The Working she was using was a tool he did not have. He had never had it. He had never been able to teach her. The work she was performing with it was the work of an apprentice who had built, in the years he had brokered the texts that built her, something he could not match. The memory she was dissecting was his teaching. His teaching had no mechanism to defend itself against the kind of attention this Working permitted.
He pushed.
Zannah felt it. The push was not loud, the way the staircase had not been loud, but it was direct, the way a hand pressed against a closed door was direct. He was pressing against the Working. He was attempting to break her concentration. He was attempting, more specifically, to introduce into the suspended moment some small disturbance that would force her to release it before the examination was complete.
Zannah held the Working.
She held it through the push. The push intensified. She held it. The push intensified again. She held it.
Something in the architecture of her concentration fractured.
It did not fracture as a vessel under pressure fractured. It fractured because two adjacent pressures, each individually sustainable, had become together unsustainable. The Held Breath was sustaining a memory that did not want to be sustained. The Working was being sustained against the resistance of the spirit who was inside the practitioner doing the sustaining. The two pressures had been compatible for some seconds. They were no longer compatible.
Zannah released the Working.
The release was not graceful. She felt the moment of release in her diaphragm before she felt it in her hands. The Held Breath let go. The memory snapped forward through the years it had been suspended across. It resolved, finally, in the chamber where she currently sat, older by the years she had lived since than the apprentice who had recited Bane’s doctrine.
The pressure in her right eye did not let go with the Working.
She registered the pressure as something separate from the Working, as one registered a pain that had been waiting beneath another pain and was only now perceptible in the absence of the masking one. The vessel had broken some seconds before the release. She had not registered the breaking because the Working had been occupying every channel she was using to monitor her own state. The vessel had bled into the white of her eye for those seconds and was, now, in the absence of the Working, beginning to register as the small persistent ache of a small vascular failure.
Her right hand, resting on her thigh, had begun to tremor.
The tremor was fine. It was not the gross shaking of a hand that had failed to produce a movement. It was the small involuntary signal of a nervous system that had been asked to support more than it could support. In the moments after release the system had begun to discharge what it had not been able to discharge during the work. The hand would tremor for some hours. The eye would clear in days, perhaps a week.
Zannah accepted both costs without comment. She had paid them. The Working was hers. The memory had been examined. The doctrine she had been taught, early in her training, had been seen finally with the eyes she now had instead of the eyes she had then.
‘You will pay more,’ Bane said. The voice was not loud. It was not contemptuous. It was the voice of a man who had lost a position he had not known he was defending until he had lost it. ‘Each time. The next will cost more than this. The one after that more again.’
Zannah did not answer him.
She rose from the cushion. Her legs were uncertain. She took the moment to find them.
The lamp at the chamber’s low setting threw her shadow against the far wall. The shadow held the small unevenness of the tremor in her right hand. She could not see her own eye, but she could feel it, and she could estimate from the feel of it that the visible bleeding into the white was small but unmistakable. Anyone who looked at her face for the next several days would see it.
Crossing to the door, she registered that she had not closed it as fully as she ordinarily would. The door was, in fact, ajar by perhaps two centimeters.
Cognus was in the corridor.
She stood at the cover’s assigned distance, hooded as the household required when she was in any space the staff might pass, hands at her sides. She had been there for some uncertain duration. Her face was the face the Quiet Hands produced when the Quiet Hands had been operating for a sustained period. Her precognition, by the small adjustments of her stillness, had registered that something had occurred in the chamber that required her presence. The next thread, the one that would have told her what, had not arrived.
She did not ask.
Zannah did not explain.
Cognus inclined her head — the small precise inclination that acknowledged her Master without inquiring after her Master’s state. Her eyes touched, briefly, the white of Zannah’s right eye. They touched the right hand, which Zannah had not yet successfully stilled. They returned to a respectful middle distance and did not return to either site again.
“The library,” Zannah said.
“Yes, Master.”
They walked the corridor toward the library at the cover’s assigned spacing. Zannah’s gait was steady by the time they passed the second arch. Her right hand, in the loose fold of the trader’s sleeve, continued to register the cost of what she had done. The eye would clear when it cleared.
In the library she took the chair at the western-window table. Cognus took the chair at the second bay. The day’s assigned reading had been waiting on the central table for some hours. Cognus opened it. Zannah did not open the closed treatise that still sat at her elbow. She sat with her hands folded and watched the western light begin its slow climb down the wall.
The chamber off the south wall of the main hall was, by the time the household began the evening rotation, returned to its standing condition of disuse.
Bane did not speak again that day.