The briefing following the Varath trip occupied the morning of the day after their return, a formal session in the central council chamber with the senior scholars, the relevant court officials, and Lady Verun, who was present with the consistency of a fixed navigational point.

Naia presented the Varath findings. Daven provided the operational and administrative context. The room was quieter than it had been in the earlier sessions. She had expected the usual scatter of objections and the cheerful, grinding obstruction of men who did not wish to be told what they already feared. What she found was a room that listened. A scholar from the western desk wrote very fast. A magistrate in the third row had gone grey. Someone near the back coughed once, and then did not cough again, as though conscious that the sound had been too loud.

They moved through the material with the efficiency of two people who had spent twelve days in the same working environment and had developed a functional shorthand for which of them carried which part of the information and how to hand it off without a gap. He took the Varath harbor administration. She took the facilitation data. When she reached the slide on the Tarens, he began to speak, without being asked, about the long eleven years, and she watched the whole room lean toward his voice and thought, with an odd lurch, that he was better at this than she was. He did not alter the data. He simply put a human being behind it, and the man in the third row went from grey to white.

She was aware, in the way she was aware of things she was not looking at directly, that their efficiency was visible to the room. She was aware because she had attended enough two-person presentations to know what inadequate coordination looked like, and this was not that. This was something that required familiarity, and the familiarity was only three weeks old, and she suspected that the people in the room, who spent a good deal of professional energy observing institutional relationships, were noting it.

Lady Verun wrote in her notebook.

A magistrate in the second row raised a hand before she had finished closing the Taren slide. "Scholar. The Tower. Is it true that it changed on Monday?"

"It is true." She did not soften it. "I measured it yesterday. On the scale I have used for six weeks, the reading has moved from four to seven in four days. It has moved more in four days than in the whole of the preceding six weeks."

A low sound ran through the chamber, a sound she had heard once before, in a courtroom, after a verdict.

"Does that mean," the magistrate said, and stopped, and tried again. "Is there a figure at which it goes out?"

"Ten is the darkest pane on my ring. I do not know what ten means. I do not know that it is a threshold, or only the limit of my instrument." She looked at him steadily. "I would not wish to promise you a number I do not have. I can say that the change is accelerating, and that the time in which we can afford to be slow is shorter than it was last month."

No one spoke. At the back of the room, Daven shifted his weight, very slightly, and she was aware of it as one is aware of a change in air pressure.

"Thank you," said the magistrate, in a very quiet voice, and sat down.

Afterward, the dispersal from the council chamber carried them in the same direction for a stretch of corridor, because the Registry Wing and the military section both lay to the east of the central chamber. It was a fact of palace geography, not a choice either of them had made. They walked the corridor together without speaking, which was unremarkable, and left each other at the junction where the Wing's staircase diverged from the passage to the military section, which was also unremarkable.

What was not unremarkable, though neither of them observed it, was the colleague from the northern desk who was approaching from the east end of the corridor and who arrived at the junction at about the moment they separated. He was a fleshy man with a quick eye and a habit of collecting remarks the way other men collected small coins. He continued past them and around the corner, where Lena Cae happened to be organizing a stack of loose pages from the archive.

"Scholar Solven and the Commander," he said, in the tone of a man filing an observation into the conversation as casually as a ledger entry. "Returning from Varath together."

"They went to Varath together," Lena said, without looking up from her papers. "It was a joint investigation."

"Of course." A pause, with an event folded inside it. "Do you happen to know whether their Bond is," another pause, "significant? In terms of the Fading research?"

Lena put down the page she was holding. She looked at the northern desk colleague with the expression she had developed for exactly this kind of question, the expression of someone who had not heard the subtext, was not interested in the subtext, and would be responding to the surface and nothing else. "All Bond data is significant for the Fading research. That is the nature of the investigation."

"Quite. Of course. I only meant," the colleague said, and then seemed to reconsider what he had only meant, and concluded with a generalized noise of agreement and drifted away.

Lena looked after him. Then she picked up her papers and resumed sorting them, with a slightly harder snap of the sheets than strictly necessary.

She did not mention it to Naia.

Lena's day, meanwhile, had begun at the sixth bell with a cup of tea in the Wing's common room and a conversation she had not wanted to overhear.

"They say he carried her papers," one clerk was saying, low, to another. "The whole length of the corridor. At Varath. She did not even have to ask."

"They say they shared a room."

"They did not share a room. They had a meeting room. It is different."

"That is what they would say."

Lena took her tea to the window. She stood with her back to the room, as she did when she wished to look as though she were studying the weather, and drank it very slowly. There was a quality in the clerks' voices she knew well from three years in the Wing. It was not malice. It was something simpler and more difficult to dislodge: the delight of people who had been frightened for a long time and had at last been handed a story that was not about the Fading.

She did not blame them. She would have been tempted to tell the story herself, if it had been about anyone else.

On the floor below, in the advisory section, Lady Verun sat at her desk with the notebook from the morning briefing open before her and reviewed the notes she had made during the presentation. She kept two sets. The first recorded content, and was exact and methodically ordered. The second recorded observation, and lived in a separate section at the back of the book, written in the compressed shorthand she had developed over thirty years at court.

The observation notes from this morning were brief.

They read: coordination without instruction between speakers. Complementary structure, no visible planning. Response pattern suggests extended proximity. Bond status.

Beneath this, underlined: confirm with Registry records.

Beneath that: memo to H.M.

She closed the notebook. She drew from her desk the thin Registry access file she had been compiling for the past ten days and opened it to the current page. She had endorsed the coordination order three weeks earlier on the strength of a suspicion, nothing more, a thing she had noticed in the intact roll and had not been willing to say aloud until she could say it with evidence. The suspicion had been sitting in this file for twenty-one days. She had not looked at it since the day she wrote the order.

Bond Reference 7741-S. The most recent automated check had run that morning. The Bond remained fully intact. The intensity reading from the system had, in fact, increased since the last check.

She looked at this for some time.

Then she took up her pen and began to write her memo to His Majesty.

The memo was short. She had learned, over thirty years, that short memos were read and long ones were filed.

To His Majesty, from the Advisory Council, in confidence. Regarding the present condition of the Registry. The investigation led by Scholar Solven and Commander Kairu has produced findings that merit Your Majesty's attention. Among them is a fact not yet disclosed in open session. Of the eleven thousand active Bonds currently recorded in the Registry, one only has remained wholly intact throughout the present decline, and its intensity is increasing. The Bond is the one that joins the two investigators. I attach the automated readings. I do not claim to understand the mechanism. I submit that the Council should consider whether this circumstance, rightly handled, might be of use to the empire, and I recommend that no step be taken without the consent of the two persons concerned.

She read it through, and paused over the last clause. It was not necessary to the argument. She had put it there on instinct, from some deep place in her that had survived thirty years of court, and she did not strike it out.

She sealed the memo and gave it to the courier herself, standing in the corridor, watching until the man had disappeared round the corner of the stair.

In the military wing, the news arrived a good deal more bluntly.

"The men are saying the Commander has a Bond," Reth said, setting a cup of tea on the corner of Daven's desk. He said it exactly as he might have reported that the roof of the stable was leaking. "I thought you had better hear it from me. There are six versions. In four of them he is in love. In one of them she is a spy. In the sixth it is a very elaborate wager."

Daven did not look up from the roster he was signing. "Which version has the most adherents?"

"The first. It has the advantage of being what everyone would like to be true."

"And you?"

"I take no position. I am a logistics officer." Reth leaned against the wall. "Do you wish me to correct any of them?"

"No."

"Not even the spy?"

"She is a Registry scholar. They would hardly recruit someone so conspicuous."

"I shall pass that on," said Reth gravely, and left the cup where it was.

Daven drank the tea. It was not the usual Guard issue, and he did not ask where it had come from. When he set the cup down, he found that he had been looking at the roster for a full minute without seeing a single name on it.

That afternoon, Daven came to the Registry Wing to confirm a point from the morning's briefing, a small administrative discrepancy between the figures Naia had cited and the operational records he had cited, which had to be verified against a primary source before the final report was submitted.

He knocked on the open door of Naia's office. It was a departure from his earlier practice of simply appearing in the doorway, and from his earlier practice of not knocking at all, and it occupied the middle ground between the two in a way she registered without comment.

"The administrative figure for Varath's eastern district office hours," he said. "Your data gives forty-two service days a year. My records have forty-four. I need to know which is correct before I finalize my operational report."

"The forty-two is from the regional scholar's working data. The forty-four is probably from the official directory, which has not been updated since the branch manager reduced the hours two years ago." She pulled the relevant file and found the confirmation page. "Forty-two is accurate."

"Thank you."

He left.

When he had gone, Naia sat quite still for several moments with the confirmation page in front of her. The room smelled faintly of the cedar he carried on his coat. She became aware that she was listening, as she had once listened for him in a conference room, for the sound of his boots on the stair, and that they had not retreated at the pace she had come to expect. They had stopped, once, at the turn of the corridor. A few seconds. Then they had gone on.

She did not know what he had been doing there. She told herself it was a matter of no importance. He might have been checking a latch, or consulting a pocket watch, or simply drawing breath.

She turned the page in front of her and read the forty-two again, aloud, in the empty room, as though the number might have changed.

The visit had taken forty seconds. A colleague from the archive section, who happened to be retrieving materials from the shelf at the end of the corridor when Daven arrived, and who completed the retrieval with some thoroughness after he had gone, mentioned the visit to two others before the afternoon session ended.

By the time Lena brought the evening correspondence in, the news had passed through four separate conversations and had acquired, in the course of them, a number of details that had not been part of the original observation. Lena set down the correspondence. She did not mention the four conversations or the details they had acquired.

Naia was working on the acknowledgment mechanism framework and was at the part of the work that required sustained attention and did not permit interruption. She did not look up from the document when Lena came in.

"Any correspondence requiring an immediate response?"

"The northern archive confirmation, and two meeting requests from the senior scholars. I have put them in the priority tray."

"Good. Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow." Lena lingered in the way she sometimes lingered. "Naia."

"Mm."

"Nothing. The correspondence is sorted. I will see you in the morning."

She left.

Lena came back at the eighth bell, after the correspondence had been delivered and the corridor had emptied, and stood in the doorway for a time without speaking.

Naia was at her desk. She did not look up. "If you have a question, please ask it. I am in the middle of a paragraph that will not conclude."

"It is not a question." Lena came in and sat down in the chair across the desk, which she did not do at that hour. She folded her hands. "I wanted to say something about what people are saying. In the Wing."

"I am aware that people are saying things."

"I do not mean the gossip. I mean the way it is being said." Lena stopped. She seemed to be searching, with real care, for a sentence that would not be received as an intrusion. "They are happy. That is the strange part. They are talking about you and the Commander as though it were good news, and I thought you should know. Because I think you may be expecting the other thing."

Naia put her pen down. She looked at the window, where the Tower stood outside in the dusk, a thin column of pale light, and she found she could not answer for a moment.

"I am not expecting anything," she said.

"Of course not."

"I have a great deal of work."

"I know you do." Lena stood. At the door she paused, and looked back with her eyes very bright. "I only wanted you to hear it from someone who was not trying to get anything from you."

She went out.

Naia sat with her hands on the desk. She had a paragraph that would not conclude, and now she had something else that would not conclude either, and she was not able to distinguish clearly between them.

Naia worked until the building was quiet and the Tower's diminished gold was the only light visible through the window. She did not stand near the window. She sat at her desk, which was the correct position for the kind of work she was doing, and the fact that she was not standing near the window was the natural consequence of where the desk stood relative to the window and had no significance beyond that.

She told herself this with a certain degree of precision.

She finished the section. She put down her pen. She looked at the Tower. It was thinner than last week. She made a note of it, dated it, and placed it in the observation file. The acceleration in the figures was visible even to casual observation now. They were running out of time to work at the pace academic rigor preferred.

Down on the first floor, in a room she could not see, Lady Verun's memo had already gone. In the advisory section a confirmation had arrived from the Registry's automated system. In the corridors a conversation about Registry scholars and Commanders had been conducted and concluded and would be conducted again tomorrow by different people with additional details and the particular interpretive confidence that gossip acquired as it moved through a building.

Naia closed the file and went home through the evening city, where the Tower's diminished gold fell across the familiar streets and the people in them moved through it without looking up. You stopped noticing the things that had always been there, even as they were becoming less than what they had always been.

At a crossing near the south gate she stopped, though she had not planned to, and turned her head and looked up at the Tower for the length of a breath. The light on it was steady and thin. It did not look like a thing that was going out. It looked like a thing that was being very careful with what it had left.

She was aware of her wrist. She did not touch it.

She went on home.