Chapter 23: Vael Attempts to Stand Between His Apprentice and What His Apprentice Has Seen

From the private log of Senior Resonance Warden Cion Vael, recovered from the water-throne diplomatic archive on Nubis, partially transcribed by the Bureau of Institutional Memory. Entry dated four days after Owan Callis's second unsupervised meditation. Hollt's prefatory note reads: 'I reproduce this entry in full. I make no annotations. I find that I cannot.'

He waited until Owan was asleep.

This is, the compiler feels obliged to note, itself a datum of some significance. In three years of shared quarters, shared exercises, shared calibration sessions and late readings and the ordinary intimate proximity of a mentor's household, Vael had never in his documented practice waited for anything. He was a man who moved through decisions with the deliberateness of someone who had made them considerably earlier and was only now informing the world of their conclusions. The waiting—the specific, watchful, hour-long attendance beside the door of the room where Owan lay on his back with his eyes closed and his breathing at last regular, the fractional hourly checks Vael describes performing through the door's narrow window—was not patience. It was the behavior of a man who required his apprentice to be, for a specific period of time, safely insensible and therefore protected from the ability to object.