The hauler broke atmosphere over the eastern canyons and the bamboo was the first thing Cognus saw.
She had seen it before. The capture run had brought her in along the same approach lane, at a different hour, in a different vessel. The bamboo had been the same. It ran in dense vertical stands across the canyon floors. It broke at the rims into sparser growth across the plateaus. It gave way to the cultivated estates of the Daplona corridor in the long northern valley. The light at this hour was westerly and warm. The shadows under the bamboo were the color of wet stone.
She did not register the recognition aloud.
Zannah stood at the bay’s viewport for the descent. The cloak was put away. The trader’s greys had been replaced with a layered tunic in the deeper umbers a wealthy Daplona merchant would wear for a return from extended off-world business. Neither formal nor traveled-in. The cut precise enough to suggest tailoring done locally and recently enough to suggest the wearer maintained accounts at the right houses. The saber-staff was at her hip beneath the coat. The leather case from the cabin was inside a soft satchel slung at her shoulder. The false holocron’s containment case was inside the satchel as well.
Allia Omek was returning home.
The hauler’s freight pad was a private one, a half-kilometer downriver of the estate proper. It was leased through Omek family channels and unremarkable to anyone who did not know how to read the absence of public registration. The pilot set down at the appointed hour and held position. The ramp opened. Two figures in the unmarked livery the household used for transport waited at the base of it with a small ground vehicle.
Allia stepped down first. Cognus followed at the half-step distance the cover assigned her.
“Welcome home, mistress.” The older of the two figures inclined his head. He was a Bothan of some years, lean and narrow-faced, the cream of his fur gone gray at the temples and along the line of his jaw. “The household has been notified. Master Jerris is expecting you within the hour.”
“Thank you, Telar.”
“Your associate, mistress?”
“Cognus,” Allia said. “She will be with the household for the foreseeable. Her quarters in the east wing, please.”
“Yes, mistress.”
Cognus inclined her head to Telar in the precise degree the cover assigned an associate of unspecified seniority. The Bothan returned the gesture in the precise degree his position assigned a member of staff acknowledging a guest whose status had not yet been assessed. Both gestures were offered without warmth or its absence. The household was a place where transactions of recognition occurred at the speed of standing arrangements.
The vehicle moved off along the river road.
The Daplona ran on their right, broad and slow at this season, the water the color of old copper where the late sun caught it. The bamboo stood thick across the far bank in the canyon system that ran westward into the highlands. On the near bank the cultivated land of the Omek estate began at a low stone wall and extended past the road on both sides for the better part of a kilometer. Cognus had walked this wall not many weeks ago, in darkness and at a different pace.
Cognus watched it pass without registering the recognition aloud.
The estate proper resolved through a bend in the road. It was a long structure of pale stone, two stories at the main block and three at the eastern wing. The roofing was the dark slate common to wealthy Daplona properties. Deep verandas ran along the front, the kind the climate required. The grounds had been kept. The hedges were trimmed. The bamboo at the western boundary had been pushed back from the perimeter wall in the steady, patient way the household pushed back things that wanted to encroach. Five-point sensor arrays sat unobtrusively at the gate posts and along the outer wall, their casings weathered enough to read as old fixtures rather than recent installations.
The vehicle slowed at the gate. The gate opened. The vehicle proceeded up the long drive.
Allia did not speak. Cognus, beside her, watched the front of the building approach. She felt something she had not anticipated. It was the weight of a place she had previously entered as a hunter being approached, this time, as a guest. She set the weight aside.
The house steward was waiting at the front entrance.
Master Jerris was a Mirialan in his middle years, pale-skinned and carefully marked with the geometric facial tattoos his species used to record family lineage and household tenure. His were extensive. He had been with the Omek family for the better part of three decades, which the tattoos communicated to anyone who could read them and which Cognus could read with effort. He wore the dark green of senior household staff. His expression as Allia stepped from the vehicle was the calibrated welcome of a man whose mistress had been away on business. She had now returned, neither expected on this day specifically nor unexpected.
“Mistress Allia. Welcome.”
“Master Jerris. Thank you.”
“The house is in order. Your correspondence is on the study desk. Master Sepp’s study has been kept as he left it, as you instructed. The eastern wing has been aired for your associate.”
“Thank you. We will rest before dinner. Tell the kitchen to expect us at the eighth hour.”
“Yes, mistress.”
Jerris inclined his head, glanced once at Cognus with the same calibrated neutrality Telar had shown, and stepped aside to permit them entry. The household followed its protocols. The mistress had returned. The associate had been received. Specific instructions had been issued. The day’s remaining work was now operational rather than ceremonial.
They entered the house.
The main hall was as Cognus remembered it. She did not allow the recognition to surface in her face or in the small adjustments of her body the Rite of Quiet Hands had begun, this morning at dawn, to discipline. She had crossed this floor not long ago at a different pace, with a different intent, with a different occupant of the house. The pale stone underfoot had been the same. The long teakwood table at the hall’s center had been in the same place. The high windows on the western wall had let in the same warm westerly light, slightly lower in the sky then, the season slightly forward of where it now sat.
She had taken Bane from a room past the second arch on the right.
She did not look toward that arch.
Allia did. It was a small movement, contained, the eyes traveling and returning, but Cognus registered it. The Master had registered the same arch and the same room beyond it, for entirely different reasons, and had arrived at the registration through entirely different paths. They both knew what was on the other side of that arch. Neither said.
Jerris saw nothing of either glance. He had been with the household long enough to read what the household required him to read and to be unaware of what it did not. He continued his briefing on standing accounts and routine maintenance as he led them toward the central staircase.
Allia stopped at the foot of the stairs.
She had stopped because something had stopped her.
It was a small thing. The hand at her side had begun to lift, very slightly, in the direction of a small carved panel set into the wall at the base of the staircase. The panel was decorative — an inset of dark wood, scaled with the geometry of the staircase, unremarkable. Sepp Omek had touched that panel as he passed it. Every time. For ten years. The hand at Allia’s side was the hand Sepp had reached with, on the body Sepp had occupied, in the home Sepp had thought of as his.
The hand stopped halfway through the gesture.
Allia returned it to her side without comment. Jerris had paused, professionally, three steps up the staircase, awaiting his mistress. Cognus stood at the cover’s assigned distance and watched.
‘He kept the panel oiled,’ Bane said, from inside her. ‘I did not realize he had.’
The voice was not loud. It was not contemptuous. It was the voice of a man encountering a small intimate detail of a life that had been his and had ended. Without preparation he had registered that the ending had not been complete in the way he had assumed.
Zannah did not answer him.
‘Allia,’ Bane said.
Zannah did not answer him.
Bane settled into the silence he had been holding since Cesko, but the silence was different now. It was the silence of a man who had broken his own discipline and would not be permitted, by his own pride, to elaborate on the breaking. He receded. The small physical pull at Zannah’s right hand subsided.
She climbed the stairs.
Cognus followed, at the half-step distance, registering that something had passed across her Master’s face at the staircase that was not the Master’s face alone. She filed the registration in the category that did not yet have a name.
The day proceeded.
In the late afternoon the household had withdrawn to its standing duties. The eastern wing had been settled to Cognus’s satisfaction. Allia and Cognus met in the study at the rear of the main block.
The study was Allia’s, not Sepp’s. The distinction mattered. Sepp’s study sat across the main hall, behind the second arch on the right, kept as he had left it per the standing instruction Allia had renewed this morning through Jerris. Allia’s study was smaller, lined with shelves along three walls, the fourth wall a tall window looking onto the western garden and the bamboo beyond. The desk was teakwood, plain, much used. The chair behind it was the chair Allia had used for ten years. She sat in it now.
Cognus took the chair across from the desk.
“The household will adjust to your presence,” Allia said. “Telar and Jerris are competent. The kitchen is excellent. The grounds staff are not to be engaged in conversation about anything other than the grounds. The east wing is yours. You will use it as you require.”
“Yes, Master.”
“Tonight at dinner the household will be told that you are my business partner from the Pellaeon route. We have known each other for two standard years. Our arrangement is recent and exclusive. They will not require further detail and will not, in any case, ask.”
“Yes, Master.”
“The library is in the west wing. We will begin there tomorrow.”
“Yes, Master.”
Allia looked at Cognus across the desk for a long moment. The gold in her eyes had returned, in the hours since the staircase, to its ordinary depth. Whatever Bane had said to her, and whatever she had not said to him, had been set aside in the disciplined manner everything was set aside in this house.
“The house remembers,” Allia said. “We will work around it.”
“Yes, Master.”
Cognus rose. The Master had not dismissed her in words, but the conversation had ended in the way conversations ended in this house. The next operational matter had become more useful than the present one. Cognus inclined her head and withdrew.
In the corridor she paused.
Through the study’s closed door she could hear nothing. The Rite she had begun to work this morning had taught her, already, that listening at doors required a different kind of attention than the listening she had developed in her professional years. She did not yet have the discipline to apply it well. She did not try.
Cognus walked through the main hall toward the eastern wing.
Past the second arch on the right she did not look. The room beyond it was the room beyond it. The work of the present day had been completed. The work of tomorrow would begin in the morning.
The house received her steps without comment.