The fifth bell sounded at the hour it always sounded, which was five o'clock in the morning, the hour it had sounded every day of the eleven years Daven had spent in the service of the Veil Guard, and which he had not required as an alarm in all that time, because he was awake before it.

He lay for a moment in the dark, as he did every morning, taking inventory. The ceiling of his quarters, plain plaster, a hairline crack running from the lamp bracket to the corner. The faint chill off the stone. The sound of the barracks coming awake below, boots on boards, a cough, a man swearing at a bootlace. His body reported on itself with its usual efficiency: shoulders tight, left knee sore from the old fall in the Kelvari passes, hands whole. All present. All correct.

He rose and dressed in the dark.

The training circuit began at the half hour. It was a five-kilometer course through the palace grounds, laid out in a loop that crossed the east garden, the training yard, and the outer walls, varied for terrain so that the body did not settle into a single repeated pattern. He had designed it himself, four years ago, when the previous routine had become efficient enough that it no longer produced the effects it was meant to. He ran it with his unit every morning. He ran it in front, at the pace of the slowest man in the first rank, which was a rule he had made and never explained.

Today the frost was heavy on the grass. It crunched under their boots. Ahead of him the sky was going from black to a deep slate blue, and the Tower stood against it in the west, a pale line that did not, he noticed, glow so much as hold. He had stopped looking at it directly some weeks ago. He had not decided to. He had simply found that his eyes slid past it, the way they slid past a thing that required a decision he did not yet have the authority to make.

He ran. His breath went out in clouds. He counted his steps, which was an old habit, a method of keeping the mind in a single place, and somewhere in the third kilometer he found that he had lost count, and that the number he was on was not the number he was supposed to be on, and that he had been thinking, for the last two hundred steps, of a woman's voice reading a sentence aloud from a page.

We would be working with people. That is harder.

He corrected his stride. He went on.

After the circuit, the morning briefing. After the briefing, the review of overnight reports. After the reports, the meeting with his lieutenant to plan the day's assignments. This was the shape of a morning, settled by practice and confirmed by result, the structural frame that supported everything else a day required.

Everything was as it always was.

Reth arrived for the meeting at the second bell, carrying two cups of tea. This was not a standard feature of their morning meetings. It indicated, in the vocabulary of things Reth communicated without stating them, that he had something to say and wished the duration of a shared cup to say it in.

Daven accepted the cup. He did not comment on it.

"You were in the records room last night," Reth said, sitting.

"I had reports to review."

"Past the second bell."

"The reports were thorough."

Reth drank. He had the look of a man composing the next sentence more carefully than the first. "I checked the log this morning. Standard practice for overnight use of the facility." He set the cup on his knee. "You signed out a non-operational file. The synthesis report from the Varath investigation. The one you and Scholar Solven submitted yesterday afternoon."

Daven said nothing.

"You were reading it at half past one in the morning."

"I had questions about the methodology section."

"The methodology section that you spent four hours reviewing with the Scholar before it was submitted."

"There were points I wished to revisit in light of the operational implications."

"At half past one."

Daven looked at his tea.

Reth looked at Daven.

"The operational implications," Reth said, in the voice of a man who is being very exact because inexactness would permit the other party to continue not acknowledging what was being discussed. "In the report you co-wrote. That you reviewed for four hours. That you then went back and reviewed again, alone, in the middle of the night."

"Reth."

"I am asking a direct question and I would like a direct answer. Were you reviewing the operational implications? Or were you reading her writing at half past one in the morning because you wanted to?"

The room was quiet. Through the high window, from the yard, came the sounds of the morning drill: the rhythmic slap of leather on leather, an officer calling a count, the crisp rasp of boots on gravel. It was a sound he had loved for eleven years. It had never before seemed to him that it was possible to hear a sound and not be in the place where it was made.

"Both," Daven said.

He remembered the day. He had not meant to, and it came on him as such things do, entire, without sequence. A bare stone room in the Kelvari barracks, a single narrow window with snow packed into its corner. An officer with a grey moustache and a ledger. Three witnesses in a row on a bench, one of whom was a younger, rounder Reth, twenty-one, rubbing his cold hands together and looking, with some alarm, at the sixteen-year-old boy who was about to bind himself for the length of his service.

The boy had held out his wrist. The officer had said, You understand what this is. The boy had said, Yes. He had not understood. He had understood only that it was a door, and that behind the door it was warm, and that nothing could reach him there.

Something in Reth's face adjusted. It was not surprise. It was the look of a man who had expected a long siege and been admitted at the gate. He drank his tea.

"All right," he said.

"Is that all?"

"No." Reth set down the cup. He did it carefully, so that the base met the wood without a sound. "I have known you since Kelvari. I was there the day you took the Oath. I thought then it was the most determinedly preventative thing I had ever seen a person do, and I have worked for you six years since, and in six years I have never seen you choose to be anywhere you were not required to be." He met his eyes. "You do not sit by windows. You do not stay in records rooms past the second bell. You do not read things twice. You have been doing all three."

Daven looked at the wall.

"I am not saying it is a problem," Reth said. "I am not saying you should stop. I am saying that I notice things, because that is what you employ me for, and what I have noticed is that you are paying attention to this person in a way that is not operational, and I think you know it, and I think the reason you went to the records room at half past one is that you needed to find out how you knew something, and the only way to find out was to go back to where it started."

For a long time Daven did not speak.

Outside, the drill went on. The count rose and fell. A horse whinnied somewhere in the stables, high and sudden, and was answered.

"She thinks in a way I have not met before," he said at last. He said it slowly, as a man crosses a floor he is not sure will bear him. "The way she moves from the evidence to the conclusion. The way she finds what a question is actually asking under what it appears to ask. I have read the Varath report a dozen times. I am not reading it for the findings." He stopped. Started again. "I went back last night because I was trying to understand whether what I find useful about working with her is a matter of method, or whether it is," and he stopped again.

"Whether it is her," Reth said, without any particular weight.

Daven did not confirm this. He also did not contradict it.

"Right," said Reth.

He picked up his cup again. The morning meeting went on from there, as it always did: the day's assignments, the shift rosters, a complaint about the quality of the new boots from the northern contractor, a question about a corporal whose wife was ill. Reth did not return to the records room. Daven did his work with the structure of his routine intact and working exactly as it was meant to work, and the thing Reth had said sat inside it like a changed variable that had not yet propagated through the rest of the system.

He had not meant to go. That was the fact he turned over, sitting through the afternoon with the roster in front of him. He had left the Registry Wing at a quarter past five. He had eaten in the mess. He had gone to his quarters, and washed, and lain down, and had risen again at the first bell past midnight, in the black part of the night, and dressed, and walked across the courtyard in the cold to the records room with a lantern in his hand.

The clerk on duty had been asleep. Daven had signed the log himself. He had taken the Varath synthesis from the shelf where it lay in a grey cover, and sat down at the long table under the single lamp, and opened it to the first page.

It was a good report. That was the simple truth of it. It was a well-argued, carefully constructed, scrupulously honest document, and he had read it before, over four hours, in her office, with her at the desk across from him and her pen moving in the margin. He knew its conclusions. He knew its limits. He had argued with seventeen of its sentences.

He read it again.

He read it slowly, the way a man reads a letter. He found that he could hear her in it. Not her voice, exactly, but the particular turn of her thought: the way she set down a claim and then, with a small scrupulous hesitation, qualified it; the way she put the truest sentence in each paragraph at the end, quietly, like a woman setting a cup on a table. He read the passage on the Tarens, the one she had written with the names removed, and when he came to the line about the roof, he stopped, and put his hand flat on the page, and sat for some time.

At half past one he had closed the cover. He had not known what he was looking for. He had known only that he had not found it, and that it was not in the report.

In the afternoon, he received the schedule for the coming week. It contained three joint sessions with the Registry Wing on the framework for the Fading response. He reviewed it, and entered each session in his planner. He did not add the notation he usually added to meetings, the brief assessment of strategic importance and the required preparation. He entered them and moved on to the next item.

He noticed the omission.

He went back and added the notations, as he always did. Then he looked at what he had written. Strategic importance: high. Preparation: review of current data. It looked, on the page, like the writing of a stranger, a careful, orderly man whom he had known a long time and could no longer quite place.

He moved to the next item.

Two hours later, passing the armory arch, he was stopped by a young corporal named Brun, who had been standing in the shadow of the armory arch for some time with the look of a man rehearsing a speech. He saluted. He was nineteen, with a fresh scar over one eyebrow and a way of looking at Daven as though he were not sure whether he was permitted to.

"Permission to speak, Commander."

"Granted."

"It is about my sister." The boy swallowed. "Her mark went last week. She is fifteen. She thinks it is her fault. She has stopped eating."

Daven did not move. The yard was loud around them, a farrier's hammer, a cart being backed into the armory door, somebody laughing too hard. "Has she seen a Registry scholar?"

"No, sir. They are not allowing visits. There is a line."

"Then I will see that she is seen." He heard how it sounded and amended it. "Tell her that it is not her fault. Tell her the scholars have established that the cause is not in any single person. I have read the report."

"You have, sir?"

"I have read it twice."

The boy's face did something complicated. It was gratitude and an effort to conceal it and a kind of awe, and Daven, who had not been looked at in that way by a soldier before, found it difficult to bear. He wrote a name on a slip of paper and gave it to the boy, with the name of Dara Sein's colleague at the southern office and a line in his own hand, and watched Brun salute and go.

He thought of a girl of fifteen who had stopped eating, and he thought: it is not a question of doing something about the Fading. It is a question of doing something about each of them.

He did not tell anyone he had thought this. He went on toward the stables, by way of the officers' hall, because it was shorter.

Afterward, passing the officers' tea table on his way to the stables, he stopped without having decided to. The selection stood in a neat row, the same row he had looked at six years without once looking. The Guard blend. The mess hall blend. A third, in a small dark tin at the end, that nobody ever took.

He stood in front of it for several seconds with his hands behind his back. He found that he was thinking of a woman in the common room of a Varath government office, measuring the temperature of the kettle with the back of one finger before she poured, with a small private frown, as though it were a problem she meant to solve. He had filed the observation under relevant context. He had not looked at it since.

He did not take the dark tin. He took the Guard blend, as he always did, and carried it to the stables, and drank it among the horses.

But he had stood there. And he noted that he had.

That evening he reviewed the day's completion before the last bell, as he did, at his desk in the Guard's administrative wing. The room was quiet. The lamp threw its steady orange light on the planner, open to the coming week with the three sessions marked.

They were the only items on the page he had read twice.

He closed the planner.

He sat for a time in the hour before the bell, with the quiet of the military section around him and the north window dark. He had been watching the Tower's decline for weeks, in the part of his attention he reserved for things that represented security concerns: steadily, clinically, cataloguing the rate of change and its operational implications. He noticed tonight that he was no longer doing that. He was not watching for the rate. He was watching for the thing it was losing, the quality that had been there in childhood and was now absent, that certainty of its own presence he had once described to a woman at midnight, and that she had written, in her clear hand, in the margin of her notes, as though it were worth coming back to.

He thought: I did not know anyone kept things like that.

He thought: she did.

He looked at his left wrist.

The black cloth lay across it as it always did, wound from the base of the thumb to two inches above the bone and secured with a flat knot at the edge. It was an old cloth, and a thin one. It had been replaced eight times in eleven years, each time with a new length from the Guard stores, each time wound by the same hands in the same pattern, and never once had he looked at what lay beneath it while the old one was off.

He put his right hand on the desk, flat, an inch from his wrist.

It would have been simple. It would have been the work of a moment: the knot, three turns, the cloth falling away. He had done it eight times. He knew precisely how it felt: the faint cool of air on skin that had not seen it in months, the small sting of a hair caught in the fabric.

He did not do it. The Oath held. It was his, and it held, and it would hold until he released it by his own determination or until someone with the authority to command him did, and he understood, sitting in the lamplight with his hand an inch from the knot, that he did not want it commanded. He wanted, if it came to it, to be the one.

He did not know why he wanted that. He knew that he did.

He sat there until the last bell sounded. Then he rose, and put out the lamp, and went to bed, and he lay for a long time with his eyes on the crack in the plaster, and the cloth stayed where it was, and he fell asleep without examining why he had remained at the desk so long.

In the middle of the night, he woke with the sense that someone had spoken his name.

It was nothing. The barracks were silent. The window was a pale square, the stars bright beyond it. He lay still. He put out his left hand in the dark, without meaning to, and touched the cloth, and found that it was warm, as though it had been resting beside a fire.

He lay for a long time with his fingers over it.

Then he turned on his side, and slept.