The holo platform at the consultation room’s center came alive at the third hour past the morning meal.
Aris Demici stood at the room’s eastern wall, in front of the small reading lectern he kept there for the moments before a holo connection completed. His left hand rested on the lectern’s edge. His right hand was at his side. The lamp at the corner of the room had been lit against the morning’s gray light. The Hetton estate’s library wing had been cool since dawn; the warmth would not arrive until the local sun cleared the eastern hills, which would take another two hours.
The platform’s indicator confirmed the connection’s status. Encrypted, single-source, scrubbed at both ends. The operative was secure on her end. The room around her would be a holding chamber she had rented in transit, configured to give nothing back about her current location.
The image rendered.
Nivara Tess stood at the chamber’s center in the operative’s working register. Mid-career human female. Dark coat over working clothes that had been chosen for the kind of low-profile travel her trade required. The image rendered her at a slight angle that suggested she had positioned herself in front of the holo source without sitting. Standing reports were her preference. She had filed her materials standing for every prior client he had worked with.
She inclined her head at him in the small register the consultation permitted.
“Master Demici.”
“Ms. Tess.”
The honorific the household used in business correspondence with her. She accepted it without comment. She had asked, two contracts ago, whether he would prefer a different form of address; he had told her the current form was sufficient. She had not raised the question again.
“The report is prepared. I have organized it in the structure you specified at the engagement’s commencement. The planetary investigation’s findings first, the witness collection second, the physical evidence at the complex third, and the subject’s body in detail fourth. The duration will be approximately twenty minutes if you do not interrupt for questions, somewhat longer if you do. I have additional material organized for follow-up questions on any of the four sections.”
“Proceed.”
She did not begin immediately.
Aris registered the small delay. The delay was new. The seven prior reports she had delivered to him across the past three years had begun with no delay between his instruction and her commencement. Her hands rested at her sides in the standing posture her operative training had built into her professional presentation. The left hand had moved a fraction of an inch toward her hip and then back. The shift had not been deliberate. She was aware of her own posture in his presence in a way she had not been at the prior reports.
Aris did not name what he had registered. He waited.
“The planetary investigation,” she began. “The Garqi authority closed the official inquiry on the third day after the incident. The closing finding was filed as gang-style commercial violence with unidentified perpetrators and unclear motive. The investigation did not pursue the perpetrators across the Hegemony or request assistance from neighboring planetary authorities. The closing was procedurally clean and operationally premature. I assess the closing as the result of either contractor pressure on the Garqi authority or independent decision by the authority’s senior investigator that the case offered no productive avenue.”
“Continue.”
“The witness collection. Three civilians were on the street outside the complex at the time of the team’s withdrawal. A human male vendor at his cart approximately fifty meters toward the central exchange. A Twi’lek female pedestrian with a child of approximately six years walking toward the market. An older human male in the doorway of a shop opposite the complex. The vendor and the older male provided cooperative interviews. The Twi’lek female declined initial contact and remained unavailable through my collection window.”
“Their reports.”
“The vendor reported three operators emerging from the complex’s service corridor at the rear, moving at a steady supporting pace through the street, exiting the block within approximately forty-five seconds. He described two of the three as women. The third he described as male and human, carrying what he identified as a heavy blaster rifle in shoulder-rig carry. The two women he described as carrying what he termed red blades. He described the blade carried by the woman supporting the other as active, producing the characteristic crimson light, with the bearer holding it in her right hand because her left was occupied supporting her companion.”
Aris’s left hand tightened against the lectern.
The motion was small. The holo on her end would not transmit it. He registered the motion in himself and held the rest of his presentation steady.
“The older male’s report.”
“The older male confirmed the vendor’s description in its essentials. Three operators, two women with red blades, one male with a blaster. He added that one of the two women appeared to be supporting the other physically — her arm across the other’s shoulders, her free hand carrying the active blade. He estimated the supporting woman’s height at approximately a meter and three quarters, the supported woman somewhat shorter. He could not provide further detail on either woman’s features because they had moved past his position at a pace that did not permit close observation.”
“The Twi’lek female.”
“Unavailable. I assess that she had registered the team’s passage in detail and elected to remove herself from the district before secondary inquiry could reach her. I located her current residence on the Twi’lek’s family rotation through the harbor district records, but she had departed the city by the time I attempted contact.”
“Acknowledged. The physical evidence.”
Tess produced a small datapad from her coat and consulted it. The consultation was her own organizational practice; the contents were available to her from memory but she preferred to verify her recall against her written notes when reporting to a client at this tier. The verification practice had earned her her positions across her career. Aris had paid the additional fee her practice required without comment at every prior engagement.
“The physical evidence at the complex was extensive. The middle section of the office complex had been structurally compromised at multiple load-bearing positions. The walls had collapsed inward within hours of the team’s departure, as I have included in the attached photographic documentation. The corridor walls showed similar treatment. The bodies recovered from the complex numbered eleven, distributed across the rear corridor, the conference room, and the corridor leading to the front office. Each body showed multiple lightsaber wounds, in patterns consistent with the team having returned to each body during the destruction phase to apply additional cuts beyond those that produced the original death. The cuts were not random. They had been organized in patterns I have been unable to recognize from the operational vocabulary of any criminal organization I have worked against.”
“The patterns.”
“I have included photographic documentation of all eleven patterns in the materials file. I do not have the analytical training to interpret them. They appear deliberate, repeated across multiple bodies, and consistent in their formal vocabulary.”
“Acknowledged. The subject’s body.”
She consulted the datapad again before continuing.
“The subject’s body was in his private office at the front of the complex. The body was intact externally. There were no surface wounds. The cause of death was not immediately apparent to the planetary investigators or to the medical examiner who conducted the initial assessment. The examiner subsequently performed a full cranial examination and discovered the cause. The subject’s brain matter had undergone complete structural failure. The skull was intact. The matter inside was the consistency of thick liquid.”
“The signatures of the failure.”
“Blood from the corners of both eyes, from both nostrils, and from both ear cavities, in patterns consistent with cranial pressure produced from within. Slight distension of the cranial vault detectable on close measurement. The body’s position against the wall behind his desk, slumped to the floor, with a small pool of blood at the head’s resting position. The examiner’s report attached.”
Aris’s left hand had not released the lectern.
“Was there any external evidence at the body. Anything left at the position, anything placed, anything configured around him.”
“No, Master Demici. The body was unmodified beyond the cause-of-death signatures themselves. The desk was intact. The office was undamaged. The operators did not destroy the office or modify the body after the death.”
“Acknowledged.”
Aris stood at the lectern for several seconds without speaking.
Tess waited at the chamber’s center in her standing report posture. She had completed the four-section structure she had organized the report into. She had not yet provided any of the follow-up material she had prepared. She was aware that the client had not asked the question the prior reports had taught her he would ask first after the structured delivery. The absence of the expected question registered with her as the second indication of the client’s state. The first had been the small tightening she had not been certain she had observed at his left hand during her recounting of the vendor’s description.
She held her position and waited.
“The departure pattern,” Aris said.
“The team departed the city in a small commercial freighter that had landed at a private pad on the eastern outskirts approximately twenty minutes before the operation began. The freighter departed atmosphere at twenty-eight minutes after the first reports of disturbance reached the planetary authority. The freighter produced no traceable registration. I attempted to follow the departure track through commercial traffic records and was unable to reconstruct the vessel’s destination. The track terminated at the planet’s atmospheric boundary.”
“Acknowledged. Your assessment of the operators.”
The question she had expected. She delivered the assessment she had prepared.
“Three operators of substantial professional caliber. Two of them deploying lightsabers of the Sith register. Red blades. Single emitter on the supporting woman’s weapon. A design I could not confirm on the second woman because her weapon was not active during the withdrawal. The third operator carrying conventional weapons with the professional discipline of an operator of significant experience. The three operating as a coordinated team with apparent role specialization. The supporting woman appeared to be in a reduced operational state at the time of withdrawal, requiring physical support from the other woman to maintain her pace through the street. The reduced state had not been present at the team’s entry to the complex.”
“Continue.”
“The reduced state suggests one of two possibilities. Either the supporting woman sustained injury during the engagement that the destruction phase did not visibly produce, or the operation itself drew upon resources I do not have the analytical training to assess. In the latter case, the practitioner experienced the drawing as a cost. I am providing the second possibility based on my limited understanding of practitioners of the type I observed in the evidence. I do not represent the assessment as analytically grounded.”
“Acknowledged.”
Aris did not respond to the assessment. He had registered it. The acknowledgment was sufficient.
“Your conclusion.”
“The operation was professionally executed against the subject as a deliberate killing with specific signatures applied to the body and specific patterns applied to the operational structure of the complex. The operators were practitioners whose category I am not trained to identify. The departure was clean. The investigation will not produce additional information beyond what I have collected. I assess the work as complete on my side and await your further instructions.”
“Acknowledged.”
His left hand released the lectern.
His left hand returned to his side as his presentation required. The motion was deliberate. Tess registered the deliberate quality and recognized that the client had been holding his hand at the lectern across the last fifteen minutes of the report without releasing.
“Ms. Tess.”
“Master Demici.”
“The report is complete and operationally satisfactory. The materials file will be reviewed against the report’s structure. You will receive payment through the standing channel within three standard days. Your next assignment is being prepared.”
“Acknowledged.”
“In the interim you will travel to the Lyran III holding location and remain there until contacted. The location has been arranged for thirty standard days. You will not return to your standing residence during this period. You will not engage other clients during this period. You will not communicate with parties outside the standing channel during this period.”
“Acknowledged.”
“The travel documentation has been filed through the secure channel. Departure within twelve hours.”
“Acknowledged.”
The instruction to travel to the holding location had been delivered with the same measured cadence as the rest of the instructions. Tess registered the instruction and the cadence and the absence of any expression. Neither reading resolved. Whether the holding location was for her protection or for the convenience of someone who would need to be able to reach her at a known position later, both remained available. She did not ask for clarification. The professional register of the consultation did not permit the question.
“Master Demici.”
“Ms. Tess.”
The holo closed.
✦
The consultation room held the quiet the closing produced.
Aris stood at the lectern for some minutes without moving. The morning had reached the position where the eastern hills’ shadow had begun to recede from the library wing’s tall windows. The cool of the room remained. The lamp at the corner held its small steady light.
The report had landed in him in two distinct registers. The first was the operational register he had configured himself to receive across the past two months as he had organized Tess’s engagement and waited for the deliverable. That register was satisfied. The operation against the subject had been executed by practitioners of the highest professional caliber, with doctrinal signatures whose recognition he had been preparing for. The operational register confirmed what he had expected.
The second register was where the report had not landed cleanly.
Two women.
Aris stood at the lectern and held the words and did not move.
The signature in the subject’s body was Senn-Vec. The Hands Within, deployed at full application, leaving the precise pattern of evidence Senn-Vec’s Treatise on the Inheritance of Hands described in section seven of its operational guidance. Anyone reading Senn-Vec at his depth would produce that body. There were perhaps twenty-five copies of the Treatise in surviving existence. He had one of them. He had been operating under the working hypothesis that one other copy survived in active use. The user of that copy was the practitioner he had been tracking through the Pelu trail across the past fifteen years.
His working assumption had been that the user was Bane.
The witnesses had reported two women.
The two women might both be Bane’s. The Banite line was Master and apprentice. Both could be operating against the subject at Garqi under Bane’s direction, with Bane present at the operation in some way the witnesses did not register. Or Bane might be absent from the operation, with the apprentice handling the work. Or the second woman might be an apprentice of an apprentice in some extension of the line he had not accounted for. Multiple possibilities remained available.
Bane might also be dead.
The thought arrived with the same measured cadence the report had taken. Bane might have died at some point in the past year, the past two years, the past five. The Banite line might have continued past his death as Master and apprentice, with the woman supporting her companion through the street at Garqi the current Master and the supported woman the current apprentice. The witnesses had not been able to provide enough detail to confirm either possibility. The reduced state of the supported woman could be the cost of the Working applied to the subject, which would mean the supported woman was the principal practitioner who had performed the killing. It could also be injury from the engagement that had escaped his observation. Both remained available.
There was not yet enough information to resolve any of it.
The Banite line might continue in some arrangement he could not identify. The practitioners might not be Banite at all. The Pelu trail he had been tracking for fifteen years might belong to operators he had not accounted for. The Senn-Vec corpus might be read by more than one party.
The cloud held.
Aris stood at the lectern with the cloud held and did not attempt to disperse it. The dispersal would require information he did not possess. The dispersal would come when he had collected the information that permitted it. The collection would now begin.
After perhaps four minutes he moved.
✦
Aris crossed from the consultation room into the library proper.
The library wing extended thirty meters along the estate’s southern face. The eastern half was lined floor to ceiling in shelving that held the texts inherited from Hetton’s collection. The western half was lined with the shelving that held his own acquisitions across the years. The two collections had been kept separate. The shelving designs differed in finish and in the shape of their carrying frames; an observer with the right knowledge could read the seam between them at fifty paces. He had not consolidated the two collections into a single arrangement because the seam itself was useful. He read from one or the other depending on what the day’s work required. He did not mix them.
The working desk sat at the wing’s center, between the two collections.
Aris crossed to it and lowered himself into the chair. The desk held the materials he had organized for the morning’s work before the holo had opened. A single bound codex sat at the right hand of the desk. Leather of an unspecifiable provenance. The binding was worn at the spine in the way ancient codices wore when they had been read by their owners across the centuries before reaching their current possession. A small annotated working notebook at the left hand. The notebook held his own marginalia and analytical work on the codex’s content across the past eleven years.
The codex was A Treatise on Spectral Resonance, by Senn-Vec the Late.
The codex was the rarest text in the library. He believed only three copies survived in any condition in the galaxy. He had acquired his copy through a chain of intermediaries that had cost him the equivalent of a Demici subsidiary holding across the years it took to assemble. The acquisition had been completed nine years prior. He had been reading it across the years that followed in the slow patient way the Treatise required.
The codex remained closed.
The working notebook came to the desk’s center under his hand. He opened it to the page he had filled the previous evening. He took the small writing implement from the notebook’s spine sheath. He composed the next entry.
The entry was a working communication to a contractor he had retained six years prior and had not activated in the intervening period. The contractor operated in Daplona under deep cover as the proprietor of a small commercial property assessment firm. The proprietor’s work was legitimate. The proprietor’s additional role was the kind of role Aris paid for: observation, slow accumulation of intelligence about specific commercial entities in the Daplona harbor district, with deliverables produced only when the principal requested them.
The entry assigned the proprietor a new principal target.
The target was the Drekka Freight commercial entity. The entity had been recently acquired by a Daplona aristocrat of the name Allia Omek, sister to the late Sepp Omek, operating from the Omek estate in the harbor district’s eastern reach. The proprietor was instructed to develop a working intelligence picture of the Omek estate, its household composition, its commercial activity, the patterns of its principal’s daily movement, and any unusual operational signatures the household produced. The proprietor was instructed to develop the picture across the next ninety standard days at a deliberate pace that would not register with the household’s own intelligence apparatus. The proprietor was instructed to provide the first deliverable at the ninety-day mark.
Aris composed the entry, encrypted it, and entered it into the working communication channel that connected to the proprietor’s standing receiver.
The assignment for Tess came next.
The assignment was the activation of a new operative cell in Daplona, with Tess at its center as the cell’s principal observer. The cell would integrate with the proprietor’s commercial assessment firm. Tess would operate as a junior associate of the firm while she conducted her own primary observation of the Omek household. Tess would join the firm at the close of her thirty-day holding period at Lyran III. Her cover identity would be prepared through the secure channel during the period.
Aris composed the assignment, encrypted it, filed it through the secure channel that would reach her in the morning.
The two communications were the first concrete actions he had taken in response to the report. They were not the response he had been preparing across the past two months for delivery against the practitioner he had assumed was Bane. That response remained held. The materials he had organized for it were still in the secure cabinet at the wing’s far end. They would remain there.
The response would be developed against the practitioners he was now setting out to identify.
✦
The afternoon passed at the library’s slow standing pace.
Aris performed the household’s minor commercial obligations through the routine correspondence the day required of him as House Demici’s reclusive branch head. He acknowledged three intra-House communications from his cousin the senior branch head at Carannia. He filed a routine acceptance of a charitable solicitation from one of the Serenno cultural foundations the House nominally supported. He addressed two minor accounts in the Demici subsidiary holdings he managed in his personal capacity.
None of the correspondence required interior attention.
The interior attention sat with the cloud through the afternoon’s rotation. The cloud did not resolve. The cloud also did not produce additional anxiety as the hours passed. He had learned, across his five decades of operational concealment, to hold uncertainty in the place that did not require dispersal until the dispersal arrived.
In the late afternoon the household servants brought the meal he took at his working desk on the days he did not travel into Carannia for evening obligations. He ate at the desk in the standing pattern of solitary meals he had maintained across the years.
The eastern hills’ shadow lengthened across the floor.
The lamp at the corner needed adjustment as the evening light began to fail.
✦
Aris opened the codex at the seventh hour past the morning meal.
The leather of the binding was cool against his hands. The cool was the same cool the codex had always carried. He had not been able to determine the source. Whether the cool was a property of the leather, of the inks, of the materials Senn-Vec had bound the work in, or of something else — he had stopped speculating. He registered the cool at each opening and turned to his reading.
The reading he turned to in the evening was the section the day’s recalibration had brought to his attention.
Section eleven. On the Carried Presence.
The section concerned the conditions under which one practitioner’s spectral resonance could be carried within another practitioner’s living architecture. Senn-Vec wrote the section in the archaic Sith of the period three thousand years prior. Marginalia in three later hands ran across the centuries. Aris read both the original and the marginalia, holding the various commentaries as he read the original passages they referenced.
The carried presence is not a matter of summoning. The dead who are summoned are dead who have been called from the outside. The carried presence is a matter of holding. The presence is held within. The carrier holds the carried as a vessel holds water. The difference is that the water is also will, and the vessel is also will. The two wills exist within the same architecture across whatever duration the architecture can sustain.
Aris read the passage twice.
The conditions of the carrying are not common. The carrier must be a practitioner of substantial discipline. The carried must be a practitioner whose death has been recent enough that the spectral resonance has not yet fully dispersed and whose intent toward the carrier permits the holding. The carrier and the carried must have been in direct contact at the carried’s death. The transfer must be deliberate on the carrier’s side and acceded to by the carried.
The passage settled on a second reading.
The signatures of the carrying are not obvious to the casual observer. The carrier appears externally as a single practitioner of her ordinary configuration. The signatures emerge in the architecture beneath the carrier’s external presentation, in small detectable adjustments that a sufficiently sensitive observer could read if the carrier permitted herself to be read. The carrier rarely permits this. The carrier guards the carried as she guards her own interior, because the two are now the same interior.
The third passage required three readings.
The marginalia in the first hand belonged to a Sith of the era two thousand years prior. Aris had identified the hand across the years; he had not been able to confirm the writer’s name. The first hand noted: We have not seen such carrying in our age. The discipline required exceeds what our practitioners produce. The carried presence is a doctrine that may be theoretical only.
The marginalia in the second hand was from the period one thousand years prior, in Aris’s assessment. The second hand noted: The Brotherhood of Darkness does not pursue the carrying. The doctrine is preserved against the possibility that some future practitioner will discover the means our age cannot.
The marginalia in the third hand was Aris’s own, in his archaic script, dated four years prior: No surviving record of operational carrying. The Working in development draws from spectral residue without requiring carrying. The carrying remains theoretical for the present work.
Aris read his own marginalia and held the codex open at the section.
The evening light through the western window had thinned to the last copper of dusk. The lamp at the corner was now the room’s primary illumination. The library wing held the cool it had held since dawn, with the small additional cool the evening had produced as the day’s warmth dispersed.
The section stayed open before him. No new marginalia went into the working notebook yet.
The Working he had been developing — the Wasting — drew from spectral residue at the channel he had constructed across the past decade. The channel reached outward to the residue of the dead and drew through itself into the target’s interior. The Wasting did not require carrying. The Wasting required only the channel and the residue and the target.
What Senn-Vec described in section eleven was something different entirely. A practitioner held within another practitioner. Will inside will. The architecture sustaining both.
The Treatise had been his reading across nine years. Operational application for section eleven had not surfaced beyond its position as a structural reference for the broader doctrine of spectral resonance the work treated.
Whether the section had operational application now, he did not know.
The question registered with him.
The information to answer it was not yet his.
The cloud held.
The evening moved toward the deeper hours of the night.
Aris sat at the desk with the codex open at section eleven. The working notebook lay closed at his left hand. The lamp’s small steady light fell against the codex’s leather and the ancient ink of Senn-Vec’s original Sith. The Hetton estate ran on at its standing evening rotation. The household servants completed their final rounds. The library wing held the cool the deeper hours required.
Aris Demici read the section once more, slowly, and let the reading settle into the place his interior held the questions he could not yet answer.
The Wasting continued in its development at the place beneath the reading.
The cloud continued at the place above it.
The night moved on.