Recorded in the Lowlands, three weeks after the tournament. The operative fought the second match and lost it in thirteen seconds. Anonymous by House instruction rather than personal preference. My own notes, made at the time, are in brackets.

(We met in the same room where I'd interviewed Kess months before. This one was younger, mid-thirties, with the same trick of being completely still without seeming tense. They agreed to meet only after I named Greytower, and I think somebody above them had decided the information should get out.)

Scholar: You fought them.

Operative: Second match of the day. Thirteen seconds.

(They said it without expression.)

Scholar: Walk me through it.

Operative: I had a plan and it was a good plan. Cross had taken the Vaulin apart eleven seconds earlier and walked through a thorn binding as though it were absent, so I discarded anything that relied on holding them and went to control instead.

(Their hands stayed flat on the table.)

Operative: I am Intent, water-connected. In an enclosed space my advantage is field work. I lay three overlapping zones of frozen air before the opponent closes, which forces their movement into channels I choose. It is standard and it is reliable, and I have used it for most of my working life.

Scholar: And the fields failed.

(A pause.)

Operative: My own House has already had me go over this. The fields held. Nothing shattered them and nothing overcame them. There was a line advancing in front of them at walking pace, and behind the line my working was simply absent.

Scholar: What did that feel like from your end?

Operative: Like being unmade in a direction.

(They thought about it for a moment.)

Operative: I retain the memory of holding three fields. I retain no memory of losing them.

Scholar: Then they closed.

Operative: Then they closed, and it was slow. Everyone reporting this says they were fast. I have fought fast people. They walked, at an ordinary pace, and nobody could act on it because there was nothing to act on.

Scholar: Meaning?

Operative: Meaning I read opponents for tells. That is the work. Weight shift, breath, the moment a practitioner commits to a draw, the pull in the air a half-beat before a working lands. All of it comes from the fact that doing something requires preparing to do it.

(Their fingers spread very slightly. It was the first movement I'd seen from them in ten minutes.)

Operative: They never prepared to do anything. They arrived and the thrust was already finished. I called yield because my guard was open and I am not stupid.

Scholar: Sablemire's function is identification. What's your classification of them?

Operative: I do not have one, and that is the reason this conversation was authorised.

Scholar: Explain that.

Operative: We can identify anyone.

(Flatly.)

Operative: Give me an hour with a practitioner and I will give you their House, their approximate tier, their Source, their training generation, and a fair guess at who taught them. It is what we are for. The dominion works partly because we can do it and everyone knows we can.

Scholar: And Cross?

Operative: Nothing.

(A long pause, and the only one that didn't seem planned.)

Operative: I found no signature at any point across six matches. There was no draw, no radiation or leakage, and no residue in the sand afterward, and there is always residue in the sand afterward. I read the arena myself four hours after, and there were five practitioners' traces in that ground and a clean path through the middle of them where Cross had walked.

Scholar: Could it be suppression?

Operative: No. Half the Heartlands is saying suppression, and it is wrong.

(They leaned forward, very slightly.)

Operative: Suppression costs, and it has a shape. Finding that shape is my skill, and I have found it on people who believed themselves undetectable. Here there was no shape, because nothing was being done.

Scholar: Is Sablemire looking for them?

Operative: Yes.

Scholar: Have you found anything?

Operative: No. I am authorised to tell you that much.

(They sat back.)

Operative: We have had three weeks, five roads out of Greytower, and a description a child could carry. We have located nothing. Nobody can place them at an inn or a meal or on a horse, and that does not happen. I have run recoveries on people who were actively hiding with resources behind them, and I have never come away with nothing before.

Scholar: What's your assessment?

Operative: That we cannot track them because our tracking is built on a thing every practitioner does, and they do not do it.

(They said it without any inflection.)

Operative: If that is correct, then the whole apparatus by which this dominion keeps account of dangerous people cannot see one person. And they know it, or they would not have signed a tournament book.

Scholar: A personal question, if you'll take it.

Operative: You can ask.

Scholar: What was it like, standing across from them?

(They didn't answer for long enough that I'd begun to take the question back.)

Operative: There is a thing we teach recruits about the Boundary Lands. If you go into a place where nothing is making noise, do not work out why. Leave, and work it out later, somewhere else.

(Their hands went flat again.)

Operative: I have needed that instruction only a handful of times, and it has never once been wrong. I was standing in an arena in front of five thousand people, and everything in me was telling me to leave.

Scholar: And you stayed.

Operative: It was a tournament. There were rules and a crowd and a man with a whistle.

Operative: The rules are what kept me there. I have thought about that a great deal since.

Scholar's note. This is the fourth account to describe an absence rather than a concealment, and the second to describe an involuntary physical urge to leave. It's the only one that has given me a negative result of forensic value: no residue in the sand, in an arena that held five other practitioners' traces for four hours.

I've never before known Sablemire to authorise the release of an operational failure, and I think the release says more about how worried they are than anything the operative told me.