Zannah opened the library on the second morning.
The doors had been closed since the night she left for Ambria. The floor smelled faintly of fresh oil. The windows had been cleaned recently enough to catch the morning sun without scatter, and the long teakwood reading table at the room’s center bore the small even sheen of having been polished, perhaps, the day before. The shelves were as she had left them. The volume she had closed last, at the table by the western window on the night before her departure, was still in the position she had closed it.
She stood at the threshold for some moments before she went in.
Cognus, behind her, watched without comment. The library was longer than the hallway had suggested. The shelves ran the full length of both side walls, two stories tall, accessed by a narrow gallery at the second level. A single tall window at the far end let in the western light. The room smelled of paper kept in a climate-controlled space for ten years, and of the fresh oil at the floor, and of the cold quiet a room produces when it has been waiting longer than it was built to wait.
Zannah crossed to the table by the western window and laid her hand flat on the closed volume. She did not open it. She drew her fingers down the spine, once, in the way a craftsman tested the edge of an instrument that had been put away for a season. Then she turned and crossed back to the central table.
She drew a different volume from the third bay, set it on the table, and marked a page with her thumbnail.
“You will work the Rite for an hour after dawn,” she said. “The library is yours from then until the household requires you elsewhere. You will read what I leave on this table. When I return in the evening you will tell me what you have read and what you think it meant.”
“Yes, Master.”
“You will not catalogue anything. The catalogue is mine.”
“Yes, Master.”
Zannah looked at Cognus across the table for a beat longer than the instruction had required. Whatever she was reading in her apprentice this morning, she did not name. She left the library.
Cognus took the chair at the central table and opened the book.
✦
The property broker arrived on the fourth day.
His name was Gennar Vesh, a Givin of long acquaintance with the Omek accounts, and he had been managing the household’s liquid arrangements through three intermediaries during the absence. Jerris showed him to the small reception room behind the front entrance. Allia met him there at the appointed hour. Cognus, working in the library above, came down at the signal.
Vesh’s exoskeleton was the pale white of his species, his eyes set deep in the orbital sockets that gave Givin their characteristic skull-faced appearance. He wore the dark suit of a Daplona financial agent. He had brought a flexible datapad and three sheaves of physical correspondence, which he set on the low table without comment.
“Mistress Omek. Welcome back.”
“Mr. Vesh. Thank you.”
“Your accounts are in the order you left them. I have prepared a summary of the discretionary movements I made in your absence. Twelve items over the period. None significant.”
“Acknowledged.”
Vesh inclined his head in the small, precise inclination Givin used in formal commercial settings. He gestured to the correspondence.
“Three matters require your decision. The Pellaeon route lease is up for renewal in seventy days. The Daplona harbor commission has restructured the docking fees in a way that will affect your scheduled imports next quarter. And the Telerian estate has made a private inquiry as to whether you would consider a partnership on the Mid Rim spice routes. They were polite. I did not respond.”
“You will not respond.”
“Understood.”
“The Pellaeon lease will renew. The harbor commission can be addressed in the standard manner. Send Mr. Telerian a courteous decline. We are not entering the spice trade.”
“Yes, mistress.”
Vesh pressed three contacts on his datapad and the matters were settled. He did not ask after Sepp. He did not ask after the new associate seated at the corner of the room. He had not been with the Omek family long enough to have known Sepp personally, and his profession did not encourage him to ask after persons whose absence had not been formally explained. He concluded the meeting with the same precise inclination with which he had begun it and was shown out.
When the door closed behind him, the woman behind the desk was no longer Allia.
“Vesh handles the surface accounts,” Zannah said. “The other accounts you will meet in time.”
“Yes, Master.”
✦
On the seventh day Hessa Tann was discovered to have died.
Hessa had been an information source in the Daplona spice market, a Twi’lek woman of late middle age who had served the Omek interests for fourteen years. Notification reached the household through a second-tier broker who had been sitting on the news without realizing it was news. Hessa had passed quietly in her sleep some six standard months before, of a wasting illness common to her species in the later decades of life. Her affairs had been settled by a daughter who knew nothing of the Omek family by name and had received only a small standing payment routed through three intermediaries.
Zannah read the notification twice at her desk in the study. She set it aside. She sent Cognus to confirm.
Cognus took the afternoon transport into Daplona’s spice quarter. She visited the daughter at her place of business — a small textile shop two streets back from the public market — under a cover identity prepared for her that morning. She purchased a length of cloth she did not need. She asked, in the tone of an old friend of the mother, after the circumstances. The daughter spoke of the illness, of the slow decline, of the quiet end. There was no element in the account that did not align with what the second-tier broker had reported. The daughter herself was without artifice.
Cognus paid for the cloth, expressed condolences in the appropriate degree, and returned to the estate by the eighth hour.
She reported.
“Coincidence,” Zannah said.
“Yes, Master.”
“She was a good operator. We will not replace her in that market for some time.”
“No, Master.”
Zannah returned the notification to the relevant fold in the study’s correspondence drawer. Hessa Tann was closed. Cognus returned to the library. The volume Zannah had set on the central table that morning waited for her to finish it.
✦
In the second week Cognus was given her first independent task.
It was small. A long-time supplier of household provisions on the Pellaeon route had restructured its pricing. The pattern suggested the supplier had taken on a new partner and was no longer offering the rates the relationship had earned. Allia did not require the supplier’s loyalty back. She required confirmation of who the new partner was, gathered in a manner that would not communicate Omek interest.
Cognus left the estate at midmorning.
She returned at the eighth hour with the new partner’s name, the timeline of their entry into the supplier’s arrangements, and a clear assessment of what the partnership was worth in actual credits. Three streams of information from three sources. None of them had registered her presence as Cognus. None of them had been told her question. All of them had been induced to volunteer what she required by routes that did not connect.
Zannah received the report at the desk in the study. She read it through. She set it down.
“Good,” she said.
“Thank you, Master.”
“That was faster than I expected.”
“I have had practice.”
Zannah looked up from the report. She looked at Cognus across the desk for a beat longer than the answer had required. Whatever the look meant, she did not name it.
“We will discuss the supplier tomorrow,” she said.
Cognus rose to withdraw. She had reached the doorway when Zannah spoke again.
“Set Harth.”
Cognus stopped.
“The body in Cesko was his,” Zannah said. “The mind was not. The arrangement he referred to was the arrangement that emptied him. Whatever did the emptying continues to operate, and Harth — whoever Harth is now, wherever he is now — is the only living person who knows what it is.”
“We have the false holocron.”
“We have the work of his hands. It will yield what it yields when the library is in a state to read it. That will be months. Possibly longer.”
“The trail from Cesko.”
“Was prepared to be cold by the time we walked through the door. He moved before we arrived. He moved before he knew we were arriving. He moved on the schedule he had been given.”
Cognus considered that. Pelu had reported the Force-presence at the second-floor window unmoving for nine days. The body in the chair had not been Harth in any meaningful sense for at least that long. The trail Harth had taken was nine days cold before they had landed on Nal Hutta. By now it was weeks.
“So he is gone,” Cognus said.
“He is gone in the way a man is gone when the network he might have used is the same network we would use to find him. Every broker we approach for a trace is a broker he can also approach. Every operator we ask to watch for him is an operator we have just told he is being watched for. We will work the question. We will work it patiently. We will not move on it until the work the false holocron yields tells us where to put a hand.”
“Yes, Master.”
Zannah looked at her across the desk. The gold of her eyes held in the late light from the window.
“He is the loose end I cannot close yet,” she said. “Hold him there with me.”
“Yes, Master.”
“Withdraw.”
Cognus withdrew.
In the corridor she registered that the Master had been startled, briefly, by the speed of the work, and had elected not to communicate the registration. The Rite of Quiet Hands was teaching her, in its slow way, to read what others had not intended to communicate. She was, she suspected, going to become better at reading it than the Master had calibrated for. She set the suspicion in the category of things her Master might one day require her not to have noticed.
✦
Idris Marran arrived at the front gate on the fourteenth day, without an appointment, in a small private vehicle.
He was a Daplona merchant of nine years’ professional acquaintance with Sepp Omek and had crossed paths with Allia at perhaps a dozen functions over that period. He imported textiles, primarily from the Outer Rim. Jerris received him in the foyer and inquired, with the calibrated regret of a senior steward, whether the mistress was available. The mistress was. Marran was shown to the reception room.
Cognus was not introduced. She remained in the library as instructed.
The conversation in the reception room ran for thirty-seven minutes by the household clock. When Marran left, he left at the same pace and through the same gate at which he had arrived.
Zannah returned to the study. Cognus was sent for.
“Marran asked after Sepp,” Zannah said. “Twice. Once in the standard form one merchant uses to ask after another, and once in the form one uses when one believes the other has been absent for longer than would be ordinarily explained.”
“What did he hear.”
“That Sepp is on Dweem, completing an extended acquisition that has run longer than the original schedule. That Allia returned ahead of him because the household required her presence. That Sepp will return when the work permits.”
“And he received it.”
“He received it because it is a credible answer and because he is a polite man. He will not press again for some weeks. By then we will have decided whether Sepp is to return in the manner the household expects or in the manner the household does not.”
Cognus did not answer. The question of how Sepp Omek concluded his absence was the Master’s question. The Master had been holding it since before Ambria, and had not yet resolved it, and would resolve it in the time the matter required.
Zannah rose from the desk.
“The clock has begun,” she said. “We will move accordingly.”
“Yes, Master.”
The reactivation continued through the third week and into the fourth. Operators were confirmed or replaced. Accounts moved. The library’s central table held a different volume each morning. Cognus worked the Rite at dawn, read until evening, and was deployed at the Master’s discretion on tasks that grew, by small degrees, less small.
On the twenty-third day Sepp Omek’s documented schedule passed the halfway point of his extended Dweem acquisition.
Zannah made a small mark in the calendar she kept at the side of her desk and did not speak of it.