Recorded beneath Greytower, three days after the tournament. The subject fought the fifth match and lost it in seventeen seconds. She did not give a name and I did not ask. My own notes, made at the time, are in brackets.

(She made tea with a great deal of attention and then didn't drink any of it. She's perhaps thirty, the last practitioner Cross faced before the final, and the only witness so far who'd written her account down before I arrived. She gave me nine pages and then talked for two hours, and the two hours contradicted the nine pages in one important place.)

Scholar: Start with what you built.

Witness: A cage. Standing resonance in the flagstones, six pillars, and the arena floor at Greytower is very good stone for it, which is part of why the tournament is held there.

(She had her hands round the cup.)

Witness: It is a structure the opponent must move through, and every step inside it costs them, because the frequency interferes with their own working. Against a practitioner of my tier or below, it usually ends the bout in about a minute.

Scholar: And it lasted seventeen seconds.

Witness: Four seconds of that was them crossing the sand before they reached the first pillar.

Scholar: What happened at the first pillar?

Witness: It stopped.

(She said it evenly.)

Witness: I have thought about very little else. They passed the first pillar and the first pillar was no longer carrying a frequency. They passed the second and the second stopped. It went in order, at their walking pace, which was slow.

Scholar: They were dismantling them.

Witness: No. That is what I wrote on the first night, and it is the thing I now think is wrong.

(She put the cup down without having touched it.)

Witness: Dismantling requires an opposing frequency. Interference is two waveforms meeting and cancelling, and cancellation leaves residue. It leaves the stone warm and confused for hours, and you can read it afterwards. I read that floor myself the next morning, with permission from the tournament master, and there was nothing in those six stones. They had been neither cancelled nor overwritten.

Scholar: Then what?

Witness: They were carrying nothing, and they had no memory of having carried anything.

(She looked straight at me for the first time.)

Witness: Memory-stone does not forget. Our House is built on it. And six flagstones in Greytower have forgotten seventeen seconds.

Scholar: Is that possible?

Witness: It is not possible. I watched it, and I read the stone afterwards.

(Her voice hadn't risen, but the precision had slipped slightly. She noticed, and stopped for a moment.)

Witness: Forgive me. I have not slept especially well.

Scholar: Take your time.

Witness: Practitioners defeat my workings all the time, and I would not be talking to you about that.

(She turned the cup a quarter turn.)

Witness: The difficulty is that Hollowglass understands Aura as frequency, and frequency requires a medium, a thing that vibrates. My entire training rests on there being something to carry the note.

Scholar: And near them there wasn't.

Witness: There was nothing to carry anything.

Scholar: Silence, then.

Witness: Silence is a frequency of zero amplitude. It is perfectly measurable, and I could have worked with it. This was the absence of the property by which measurement occurs.

(A pause.)

Witness: I have been trying to write a sentence about this for three days, and I have not managed one.

Scholar: Others have described it as cold.

Witness: I have heard, and I object. I have been rude to two people about it.

Witness: Cold is a quantity. If the courier had told me they were cold I would have been delighted, because I could have measured it.

Scholar: What word would you use?

Witness: I do not have one, and I have looked.

(She said it flatly.)

Witness: I have been through the Deep's index for anything that behaves as an absence of medium rather than as an opposing force, and what I found is the reason I agreed to speak to you.

Scholar: Please.

Witness: There are four entries under the relevant classification. Three are about the Deepening, and they do not apply, because the Deepening takes and this took nothing. It simply was not there. The fourth is sealed.

Scholar: Sealed how?

Witness: It is listed in the index with a reference and no content, and the reference resolves to an archivist's authority rather than to a shelf.

(She'd gone very still.)

Witness: I have requested it twice through proper channels. The second refusal was courteous and came faster than the first, which I do not think was an accident.

Scholar: Do you know what's in it?

Witness: No. I know it is older than the classification system it is filed under, which means somebody re-indexed it deliberately at some point, and chose to keep it findable and unreadable.

(She finally picked up the tea, found it cold, and put it back.)

Witness: That is a choice a person made. I would very much like to know why, and I have decided it is unwise to ask a third time.

Scholar: Let me put the Greytower theory to you. That Cross is Ironvale.

Witness: That theory is being repeated by people who need this to be a swordsman.

(She was dismissive here in a way she hadn't been about anything else.)

Witness: Ironvale broadcasts. An Ironvale practitioner drawing is one of the loudest events in the dominion, and their doctrine says outright that hiding what you are is a failure of nerve. I would have recognised a loud thing being quiet. This was something else entirely.

Scholar: Then what's your position?

Witness: We have all been asking what technique they used. That is the wrong question, and I asked it in my nine pages like everybody else.

(She pushed the pages an inch toward me.)

Witness: The right question is what they are. I could hold that question in my head for only a few minutes at a time before I became frightened.

Scholar: One more. What did it feel like, from inside the cage?

(She took a long time over this.)

Witness: There is another account, which is in none of the pages.

Scholar: Go ahead.

Witness: I build with sound. I have done since I was eleven. Everything I know how to do, I do by listening, and the world is extremely loud if you are trained to hear it. I have never in my life been anywhere quiet.

(Her hands were flat on the table.)

Witness: It walked into my cage and there was a place in the world with no sound in it, and it came toward me at walking pace. Every nightmare I have had since has been completely silent.

Scholar's note. This is the fifth witness account and the fourth to describe an absence rather than a concealment. It's the only one that gives me physical evidence I can check for myself. I have checked it. Six flagstones in the Greytower arena floor carry no impression of the tournament, in a floor where I could read the other five matches without difficulty.

I also record that there's a sealed entry in the Whispering Deep's index describing something that behaves as an absence of medium, that it predates its own classification, and that a Hollowglass scholar in good standing has been refused it twice.

I have no standing in the Deep and no obvious route to that entry.