Cognus drew the bolts on the door of the arsenal room and lit the hand-lamp.
The room waited for her. It always was, in the way the rooms a working professional kept for the equipment of a life were always waiting, regardless of the duration of the absence between visits. The dark wood paneling along the walls absorbed the lamp’s small light. The workbench at the eastern wall held the sharpening stones in their wooden case. Small bottles of oil sat in the order she had placed them. The soft cloths lay folded in the rotation she had used since her early years in the trade. The twin curved blades hung on the wall mount above the bench in their sheaths, the leather darkened to near-black by the years of handling.
Cognus had not entered the room in some weeks.
The Drawn Breath had been operating since dawn at the steady state it reached. The Quiet Hands had been operating beneath it. The work she had done in the library and at the network’s administrative tasks had filled the hours that her trade had once filled. The room had not been visited because the room had not been needed. This evening it was needed. She closed the door behind her and threw the inner bolts.
From the bench she unrolled the small leather kit she kept for the pre-operation rituals. She had performed these rituals so many times across the years of the Huntress’s work that her hands moved without her supervision. The blades came down from the wall mount. She drew them, one at a time, examined the edges in the lamp’s light, applied a fresh coat of the dark non-reflective oil she preferred for night work, and returned them to their sheaths. The garrote in its coiled storage at the bench’s side received its standard inspection. The two small detonators in their lined case were checked, their charges confirmed, and replaced. The off-hand wrist sheath went on first. The twin sheaths at the small of her back went on second. The cloak of dark merchant-class cut, indistinguishable at any distance from the cloaks half the harbor district wore, went on last.
Cognus sat in the single chair across from the bench and worked the Drawn Breath at full state for some minutes. The Rite settled deeper than it usually settled. The room knew her. It was built for the version of her who did this kind of work. It received the Rite with the same indifference it had received the Rite the first time she had brought the practice into it.
When the Rite released her she rose. The lamp went out. She drew the bolts back, opened the door, and left the room as it had been left every other time she had left it for an evening’s work.
✦
Tovek’s distractions began at the eighth bell.
The first was a vendor’s cart of preserved fish overturning at the corner of the freight street and the harbor road, two streets south of Vorn’s route. The vendor had been paid to overturn it. He had been paid to be loud about it. He had been paid not to remember the small adjustment to the cart’s wheel that had made the tipping inevitable. He produced the volume of complaint and apology the moment required. The natural eyes of the harbor district at that intersection turned toward the cart. The sequence had begun.
The second distraction, ninety seconds later, was a freight loading accident at the central wharf. A pallet of cargo timber failed in its lift mechanism and dropped four meters to the dockside, splitting and sending a shower of long planks across the loading area. No one was injured. The lift operator had also been paid, also briefed. He produced the alarm and the recovery work that drew attention.
The third was a power flicker, two minutes after the timber accident, in the block of the harbor authority’s administrative office. Lights at three buildings dimmed, rose, dimmed again. Someone in the freight district’s utility maintenance had been compensated to ensure the relay produced exactly that sequence at that hour.
In the four-minute window the three events held the freight district’s attention. The route between Vorn’s office and his residence ran along a side street that under ordinary circumstances would have been crossed at the eighth bell by perhaps fifteen people. Tonight it was empty.
Cognus stood in the recessed doorway of a closed shop two-thirds of the way along the route.
Vorn passed her at his usual evening pace. He was tall for a Trandoshan and broad through the shoulders. The green-brown scaling of his hide was visible at the collar of his coat. The slight irregular shift of his gait — the habit a Trandoshan of his subspecies developed in middle age — registered at the limit of her peripheral vision.
Cognus stepped from the doorway.
The garrote went around his neck before he had begun to register that someone was behind him. She had brought the wire in the binding that did not cut but compressed. He attempted to reach back. His hands found the cloak, found her grip on the cloak, did not find the wire. She held the compression for the count it required to silence him. His weight dropped against her. She lowered him to the cobblestones of the side street with the controlled descent her training in carrying weight had given her.
The first of the twin blades came out next. The cut at the throat completed the kill cleanly.
The second blade came out next. She made three additional cuts at the chest and abdomen — wounds that did not match the throat cut’s angle or depth. The wrist blade made two short thrusts at the side of the rib cage. From the inner pocket of her cloak she drew the third weapon. It was a heavy single-edged tool blade of the kind a freight worker might carry for cargo work. She made two more wounds with it across the back and the upper arm. The three different weapons had now produced six different signatures across the body. Investigators reading the scene would have to account for the impossibility of a single attacker delivering this pattern of wounds in the time the operation had taken.
She disturbed the personal effects.
His coat was opened. His belt purse was cut and most of its credits taken — but not all, because a robbery that took everything was a different signature than a robbery that took most. His ring, which Trandoshans of his caste did not part with even in death, was left. The signal would read as confused robbery, as panic, as a perpetrator who had not known what to take.
The first detonator went at the base of Vorn’s skull. The second went across the upper face.
Twelve meters down the street, in the doorway she had used as her position, Cognus drew the small remote from her cloak and triggered the two charges in sequence. The first detonator destroyed the structural integrity of the lower jaw and the underside of the skull. The second, half a second later, took the upper face from the brow line down. The body remained. The body was identifiable, by clothing and build and location, as Sresch Vorn. The face that would have permitted forensic reconstruction was no longer available to be reconstructed.
The two small explosions sounded, at this distance and through the harbor district’s ordinary evening noise, like the smaller of the two sounds the freight district produced when a pallet failed. No one came running.
Cognus moved off down the side street toward the route home she had selected.
✦
The read came at the third turning.
The Drawn Breath was operating. The Quiet Hands were operating. Cognus had been moving through Daplona’s harbor periphery at the steady professional pace a returning operator used after this kind of work. The combination of the Rites at full state had been registering the city’s ordinary attentional patterns at the level she had grown accustomed to reading them. The read at the third turning was not ordinary.
Someone was paying attention to her.
The attention was not behind her. She tested the read with the small adjustments her training permitted. A step toward a shop window. A glance at a piece of the street that did not require glancing at. A half-second pause that an ordinary follower would have to reproduce and that the read did not reproduce. The attention was not generated by a follower at her back. It was generated by something at distance. A presence somewhere in the city — somewhere in Daplona, somewhere within whatever radius the read was operating at — was paying specific attention to her movement away from the harbor district.
Not following. Reading.
She did not engage the read. She did not attempt to identify its source. She abandoned the route home she had selected and chose a different route that traversed the river district and the textile quarter and added perhaps forty minutes to the return. Whatever was reading her would, she suspected, lose her in the diversions or would not. Either outcome was acceptable. She did not turn to look behind her at any point in the longer route. She returned to the estate by the rear gate at the eleventh bell.
Cognus walked the corridor to Zannah’s study without changing out of the working cloak.
✦
Zannah was at the desk.
The lamp at its low setting threw the small steady light Zannah preferred for evening review. Two folds of correspondence had been opened and set in the right-hand position. A datapad in the active state held what appeared to be Vesh’s monthly summary of the freight authority’s slot allocations.
Cognus inclined her head.
“The Vorn matter is closed.”
“Acknowledged.”
“There is a second matter.”
Zannah looked up from the datapad.
“On the return from the harbor district I registered a presence reading me. Not following. Reading from distance. The radius at which the Drawn Breath caught the attention was longer than the radius at which I expect the Rite to operate. The reader did not, by my assessment, identify the operation I had completed. The reader identified me. I altered the route home and lost the read in the textile quarter, or it released me when the textile quarter became inconvenient to maintain the read across.”
Zannah considered her for some moments.
“Withdraw to your quarters and change. Report back to me here when you have done so.”
“Yes, Master.”
✦
In the evening Zannah had been, before Cognus’s arrival, working through a report from one of her acquisitions intermediaries on the activity of the rare-text market across the Mid Rim.
The report had been routine until the third page.
On the third page, the intermediary noted that a copy of a treatise titled On the Inheritance of Hands had surfaced through a private estate sale in the Aluran system. The volume had been acquired by a buyer whose identity had been routed through three intermediary tiers and could not, by the report’s author, be determined. The acquisition had closed at a price the report’s author flagged as remarkable. The author had appended his own brief note: In thirty years in this trade I have not seen this title surface. I have not been certain it was extant. Whoever bought it knew it was real before any of the rest of us did.
Zannah had read the page twice and set the report down.
Senn-Vec the Late was a name that did not appear in the standard catalogues of any Sith library Zannah knew of. The volume had been written in the era before the era before the era. It predated the Republic. It predated the original Sith Empire that had preceded the Republic. It belonged to a stratum of antiquity from which only fragments and references had survived into any subsequent period. The volume should not exist. The volume existing as a physical artifact in the modern rare-acquisitions market should not be possible. The buyer who had acquired it had moved through three professional intermediary tiers. The acquisition had closed at a price that flagged it as remarkable. The buyer had known what the volume was. The buyer had had the resources and the network to take it cleanly off the market before any of the rest of the field had identified its surfacing.
The buyer’s prior acquisitions, listed elsewhere in the report, formed a pattern. The pattern had been visible to Zannah for some months now. The Senn-Vec acquisition was the apex. Anyone who could acquire Senn-Vec was operating at a level the field was not supposed to support.
Zannah set the report in the third fold and made no entry in the second-system catalogue. The catalogue was for thoughts she had named. This was a thought she had not yet named.
Cognus returned to the study, having changed.
“Sit.”
Cognus took the chair across the desk.
Zannah looked at her for a moment. The gold of her eyes held in the lamp’s light. She did not speak immediately.
“The presence that read you,” Zannah said. “Describe what you registered. The texture of the attention. Not what it did. What it felt like.”
Cognus considered the question.
“It was professional. It was patient. It was not the attention of someone who had located me by accident or who was confirming a suspicion. It was the attention of someone who knew where I would be, knew when I would be moving, and was using the moving to read me. It did not move when I moved. It received what the moving showed it.”
“The radius.”
“Longer than the Drawn Breath should reach. I did not test the upper limit. I assume from the length that the reader was not in the harbor district or in the textile quarter. Possibly not in Daplona at all.”
Zannah set her hands flat on the desk.
“Withdraw. Eat. We will discuss this further in the morning.”
“Yes, Master.”
Cognus rose, inclined her head, and withdrew.
✦
The first holo arrived at the twelfth bell.
The household’s communications array — concealed in the small annex off the study — produced the brief two-tone signal that meant an encrypted message had landed in the Pelu channel. Zannah crossed to the annex and activated the projector.
The image stabilized after the standard half-second of static. Pelu’s small blue figure flickered into the center of the projector’s field, the soft hum of the carrier wave audible underneath the image. He was at his Nal Hutta workspace. The light around him was the dim red-violet of his preferred working illumination. His hands were at his sides, folded in the small formal posture he used for reports rather than transactions.
“Mistress.”
“Pelu.”
“One of my intermediaries has gone quiet. The third-tier broker who handles my eastern route arrangements has not responded to the standard check-in for twelve days. This is longer than is professional. I am not certain whether the silence is operational or otherwise. I will investigate and report.”
“Acknowledged.”
“There may be no significance. I am informing you because the silence has crossed the threshold at which professional silence becomes inquiry.”
“Acknowledged. Continue the investigation.”
“Mistress.”
The image cut. The carrier wave dropped. The annex returned to its standing condition of quiet.
Zannah stood at the projector for a moment. She did not return immediately to the desk. She walked to the high window of the study and looked out at the western reach of the estate grounds. The bamboo at the lower garden moved in the warm westerly that came up from the canyons.
Returning to the desk, she set Pelu’s message in the fourth fold. The Vorn report from Cognus was in the first fold. The acquisitions report was in the third. The fourth was Pelu. Three signals had now been received in the same evening, and the fourth was about to arrive.
The second holo came at the second hour past the twelfth bell.
The two-tone signal in the annex repeated. Zannah crossed to the projector. The image stabilized. Pelu’s figure was different this time. He was not at his workspace. He was in what appeared to be a private safehouse, the lighting harsher, his shoulders set in the posture he used when the news he carried was the kind of news that required different posture.
“Mistress.”
“Pelu.”
“The intermediary has been found.”
“Where.”
“In a flat on the lower levels of Bilbousa, in a state I will not describe through this channel. The matter requires an in-person discussion. I will travel to a meeting point of your choice in the Mid Rim within the standard period. I would ask that you receive the report there rather than asking me to relay further details now.”
Zannah considered him.
“Was the intermediary working on a matter I had commissioned.”
“He was working on a matter we had not yet discussed in detail. I he intended to bring it to you on the routine schedule. The matter touches the acquisitions you have been pursuing over the past year.”
The radius around Zannah, the Veiled Course at its operational baseline, registered her own pulse adjusting by a small degree.
“A meeting point,” she said. “I will provide the coordinates within forty-eight hours. Travel under your standard cover. Bring nothing to the meeting that connects to the matter.”
“Mistress.”
“Pelu.”
The image cut. The carrier wave dropped. Zannah remained at the projector for some seconds longer than the protocol required.
When she returned to the desk she did not sit immediately.
The four folds in the right-hand position now held: the Vorn closure, the report on the Senn-Vec surfacing, the first Pelu holo, and the second Pelu holo. Cognus had registered a presence reading her in Daplona. The Senn-Vec volume had been acquired by a buyer who should not exist. Pelu’s intermediary had been found in a state Pelu did not want to describe, and the matter touched the acquisitions Zannah she had pursued.
The signals were not connected.
The signals were not, yet, connected.
Zannah sat. Her hands lay flat on the desk. The lamp at its low setting threw the steady light it she threw all evening. Outside the high window, the warm westerly continued its rise from the canyons. The household ran on toward the deeper hours of the night.
The lamp went out under her hand.
Zannah did not go to her rooms.
Zannah remained at the desk, in the dark, with the four folds at her right hand and the silence of the architecture she had built around her. She let the looming take whatever shape it would take in the hours before morning.