Zannah read the treatise through twice before the morning light reached the western window.
It was a small bound volume of perhaps two hundred pages, the leather worn pale at the corners from the years it had spent on her own shelf and on Bane’s before her. The treatise was a Sith philosophical work of the late Brotherhood period, anonymous in its authorship, doctrinally orthodox in its argument. The dark side as the only honest expression of will. Power as the only honest currency between practitioners. The doctrine Bane had refined into the Rule of Two had grown from soil this volume helped to till. Zannah had read it for the first time at twenty-four, at Bane’s direction. She had accepted its arguments with the assent of a young apprentice whose teacher had just placed in her hands the foundation he expected her to stand on.
Zannah had closed the volume on the table by the western window on the night she left for Ambria.
This morning the volume was open. She had not opened it expecting to disagree with it. The last reading in her memory had been a reading she had performed under Bane’s direction. Bane’s direction had not survived Ambria. She wanted to know what she would find in the text now that she was reading it without him standing behind her.
What she found was a book that was the same book.
What had changed was that she could now hear the questions the book had not asked.
The treatise spent forty pages establishing that the dark side rewarded honest hunger. It spent another forty arguing that practitioners who pretended to other motives — service, balance, defense of the weak — were practitioners who diluted their own access to the well. It spent the final hundred and twenty pages elaborating, with patient, lawyerly detail, the techniques by which a practitioner kept their hunger pure.
Nowhere in any of those two hundred pages did the treatise ask whether hunger was the deepest available motivation. It did not ask whether the well it drew from was the only well. It did not ask whether the practitioner who kept their hunger pure for forty years became something other than a vessel for it.
Zannah closed the volume on the page she had been reading. She did not return it to its place on the western-window table. She set it instead on the central reading table at the room’s center, where the dual-track work would begin.
Zannah rose.
The central table was a long teakwood plane, deep enough for three open volumes and four catalogue sheets to lie flat without overlap. The Omek family catalogue had been organized for ten years by acquisition date. The ledger system had satisfied the inheritance audits the family had occasionally been required to provide. It had told Zannah nothing she had not already known about the contents of her own shelves. That catalogue would continue. She had no reason to disturb a system the household understood and the household’s peers expected. The household’s tax accountants would receive their annual summaries. The Omek estate would continue, on paper, to maintain a respectable but unremarkable private collection of Old Republic philosophy and middle-period rhetorical work.
Beneath the surface catalogue she would now build a second system.
The second system would not be organized by acquisition date. It would not be organized by author or by century or by any of the conventional armatures a private collection of educated means might use. It would be organized by the questions the treatise this morning had not asked.
From the drawer she drew a fresh catalogue sheet.
She wrote, at the top, in the Sith script she had been taught as an apprentice and had never had cause to write in this house: The well. Its depth. Its other waters.
She paused. She considered what she had written. She did not strike it through. She set the sheet face-down on the central table, beneath the closed treatise, where the household would not see it during the morning’s cleaning rotation.
The first entry of the second system had been made.
Cognus arrived at the appointed hour.
Cognus entered the library at the seventh hour and inclined her head to her Master, who was at this moment Zannah, the door closed and the household occupied below stairs with the day’s ordinary business. She had worked the Rite of Quiet Hands at dawn. She did not yet know whether the Rite had begun to take.
Zannah gestured to the chair across the central table.
“Sit. There is a Rite I will teach you today. It is not the Rite of Quiet Hands. The Rite of Quiet Hands is a discipline. What I will teach you now is a foundation.”
“Yes, Master.”
“The Rite of the Drawn Breath. Inherited. The text I am giving you was copied for me by Bane in the second year of my training, at the same age you are now. The text is older than him. It is older than the Brotherhood. It is, by some accounts, older than the orthodoxy that codified the Sith path into the form Bane and I inherited.”
Zannah drew a second small bound document from a shelf in the second bay and set it before Cognus. This one was longer than the document of Quiet Hands, perhaps sixty pages, the script considerably older.
“The Rite is the foundational practice by which a Sith places her breath in alignment with the currents of the dark side. It is the practice every other practice rests on. You will not work the higher Rites well, or the more advanced Workings at all, without it. You will work it morning and evening. You will work it in addition to Quiet Hands, not in place of it.”
“Yes, Master.”
“Read the text twice before this evening. We will work the first attempt together at the eighth hour.”
Cognus took the document and inclined her head. She did not yet open it.
“What was the volume on the western table this morning,” she asked.
Zannah did not turn from the central table.
“A treatise of Sith philosophy that I read at twenty-four and accepted then. I read it again this morning.”
“And.”
“And it is not a different book. I am a different reader.”
Zannah said nothing more. Cognus understood from the small set of her Master’s shoulders that the conversation had completed the work it was permitted to do this morning. Further questions about the western-window table belonged to a category of questions she had not yet earned the right to ask.
She did not yet withdraw to the second bay.
“Master.”
Zannah turned.
“Before I read,” Cognus said. “Show me the breath.”
Zannah considered her for a beat that was not entirely the beat the request had required. Whatever she was registering in the question, she did not name it. She crossed back to the central table. She drew the chair Cognus had not yet sat in.
“Sit.”
Cognus sat.
“The breath enters at the diaphragm. It is not held in the chest. It is not pulled in the throat. The diaphragm draws and the rest of the body permits the drawing. You will not feel the dark side at the first attempt. The Rite is not a key. It is a posture. The posture, practiced, makes the practitioner a vessel the dark side enters in its own time.”
“Yes, Master.”
“Watch.”
Zannah closed her eyes. Her shoulders settled. Her face did not change. Her chest did not visibly rise. But the air in the room moved, very slightly, in a current Cognus did not register through her ears or her skin. Her species had developed a small cellular awareness for atmospheric change, and the change registered there. The current was not strong. It moved in the direction of Zannah, as though the room had begun, in some subtle accounting, to acknowledge her presence as the principal feature of itself.
After perhaps thirty seconds Zannah opened her eyes. The air in the room returned to its ordinary indifference.
“That is the Rite at its operational baseline,” Zannah said. “What you saw is what a competent practitioner of twenty years produces without effort. You will not produce it tonight. You will not produce it in a year. You will produce, if you work the Rite faithfully, an approximation of it within five years that is sufficient for the work I will require of you. Read the text. We will begin at the eighth hour.”
“Yes, Master.”
Cognus rose, took the document of the Drawn Breath, and withdrew to the chair at the second bay.
Zannah returned to her own work.
Zannah drew a clean sheet of paper toward her on the central table and uncapped a stylus. She wrote nothing for some minutes. The Held Breath had begun on the hauler outbound from Ambria. It had refused her at the bench during the return transit. It had refused her again at the staircase on the second morning when Bane had broken his silence. The Working was a problem of holding without releasing. A force-pressure conceived and sustained without expenditure. Every inherited Rite she knew assumed pressure was a thing applied and then withdrawn, the way a hand pressed and then lifted. The Held Breath asked what was on the other side of a hand that did not lift.
She wrote: Hold. Not press. Hold.
She wrote: The Working continues because the Working is no longer being performed. It is being inhabited.
She set the stylus down. The Working did not, this morning, advance further than the two lines she had committed. But it had advanced two lines further than it had advanced on the hauler. The conception was sharpening. The sharpening would take however long the sharpening required.
In the late morning Cognus had settled into the second bay with the Drawn Breath document. The room had returned to the long quiet a library produced when its occupants were both reading. Zannah drew a separate sheet of correspondence stationery and wrote a brief, encrypted message.
The message was addressed to Pelu.
It requested the acquisition, through whatever channels Pelu thought appropriate, of three named volumes of late-Republic Sith philosophy. Two had not been in active circulation for sixty years. The third had likely never been in circulation at all. The message specified discretion. It specified payment in the standard arrangement, doubled. It did not specify urgency. The acquisitions were to arrive when they arrived, by routes that did not connect to any Omek account.
Zannah sealed the message in a courier capsule and set it aside for the afternoon dispatch. The channels she would use had served her in the years before Ambria for matters the surface accounts were not to touch.
The first acquisition under the second system had been commissioned.
Zannah returned to the central table, drew the closed treatise toward her, and began rereading the volume again. She would read it three times today. Each reading would surface a different layer of the questions the text had not asked. The second system’s catalogue would, by evening, have a second entry, and a third.
Across the table, in the second bay, Cognus turned a page of the Drawn Breath.
The library returned to its work.