Personal analysis. Not for publication. Five interviews, two site examinations, four months.

Where I have got to

Nowhere, and I'm writing this file to say so properly instead of going on implying it.

I have five accounts from five Houses, physical evidence from two examinations of the arena, and no explanation that survives contact with any of it. Every theory I've built has been knocked down by the next interview, and the theories other people have built for me are worse, because they were built by people who need this to have an answer.

I'm recording the failure in detail. Five Houses have produced confident answers in the past fortnight, and all of them are wrong.

What is actually established

By facts I mean things more than one witness reports and nothing contradicts.

Cross entered the Greytower tournament under a mark rather than a name, and wore nothing that identified them. They fought six matches and won all six, none lasting longer than thirty-one seconds, then declined the prize, ignored the tournament master, and left through the gate on foot.

No practitioner present detected any Aura signature at any point, and the practitioners present included a Sablemire operative whose profession is detection.

Five of the six defeated report that their working failed in no manner they recognise:

• roots that stopped being roots;
• frozen fields that went absent along an advancing line;
• seven images that were never searched;
• six resonant pillars that went out in sequence;
• a burning edge that stopped burning before it was touched, and a duellist who couldn't find his own connection for about half a second.

There were two site examinations. The Sablemire operative read the arena sand four hours afterward and found the traces of five practitioners, with a path of nothing walking through the middle of them. I read the floor myself the following morning and confirmed the Hollowglass claim. Six flagstones in the cage line hold no impression of Cross's seventeen seconds, in a floor where I could recover the other matches without difficulty.

What the Houses believe, and why each of them is wrong

Every House has fitted Cross into its own framework, which is what Houses do, and the interesting thing is that all five frameworks fail at the same joint.

Vaulin wanted them to be integration, a practitioner who'd outgrown a single doctrine. Tender Olesk gave this up himself before I arrived, and has landed somewhere more honest and more disturbing.

Sablemire wanted them to be an operation, a reconnaissance or a capability assessment, someone gathering the shape of five Houses in an afternoon. The behaviour fits, but their own operative says plainly that the absence doesn't. Suppression costs something and has a shape they know how to find, and they found nothing.

Ironvale has been handed the theory that Cross is theirs, and has rejected it more forcefully than I've seen any House reject anything. Their witness pointed out, correctly, that an Ironvale practitioner drawing is one of the loudest events in the dominion, and that their doctrine treats hiding as a failure of nerve.

Saltmarch couldn't read them at all. For Dawnstride that's a professional failure rather than a curiosity, and she's been the most useful witness precisely because she treats it that way.

Hollowglass got closest and is the most frightened. Frequency requires a medium, and there was nothing to carry the note.

The common failure is this. Every explanation needs Cross to be doing something, and every witness who was within four feet reports that nothing was being done.

The theory everyone is repeating

That they're Ironvale, or Ironvale-trained, or Ironvale's undocumented second discipline.

They fought quietly, directly and without waste, and Ironvale is the House people associate with swordsmanship. That's the entire basis. A stranger who's good with a blade must come from somewhere, and Ironvale was the obvious guess.

Both Ironvale witnesses I've spoken with reject it. Vaulin rejects it. Saltmarch laughed at it. Hollowglass called it the theory of people who need this to be a swordsman.

I'm striking it from my working notes, and recording that I spent three weeks on it.

What I have ruled out

Suppression. Five detection methods from five Houses found nothing. Suppression leaves a shape and costs whoever uses it. It also can't remove residue from sand or memory from stone.

High tier. Presence and above can't be concealed, and would have been felt across the market. Three witnesses who've stood near Presence say independently that this was nothing like it.

Mundane skill. It doesn't survive the flagstones, the sand, or the duellist's missing connection.

Cross-House training. That would produce more signature rather than less. Every technique in the dominion is a thing you do.

That's everything I came in with.

What is left

An absence that walks.

Four of five witnesses reached the word absence on their own, without consulting each other, and each objected to somebody else's way of putting it. The Ironvale witness said a hole. Olesk said a person-shaped absence of anything at all. The operative described a line advancing at walking pace with nothing behind it. The Hollowglass scholar rejected the word cold at length and couldn't supply a replacement.

Dawnstride is the only one who separated the two questions, and I think she's right that they are the two questions.

Is the nothing something Cross carries, or is the nothing what Cross is?

Everybody else skipped past that, and so did I, for two months.

Two details I cannot interpret

The first. A Greytower armorer told me, unprompted, that the blade had a core of some metal she didn't recognise, running the full length of the tang and wrapped under the grip leather. She has maintained tournament blades for forty years. She said it wasn't steel and was heavier than it should have been. She'd asked to see it properly and been politely refused.

I have no idea what to do with this. It may be nothing. Swordsmiths use all manner of things and I'm no swordsmith. I record it because she volunteered it, and because she was the only person in Greytower who asked about the sword.

The second. There's a sealed entry in the Whispering Deep's index, filed under a classification for phenomena that behave as an absence of medium rather than as an opposing force. It predates the classification it sits under, which means somebody re-indexed it deliberately and chose to keep it findable but unreadable. A Hollowglass scholar in good standing has asked for it twice and been refused, the second time faster than the first.

On my own conduct

The sealed entry is the only door I haven't tried, and I haven't tried it because I can work out what would happen.

I have no standing in the Whispering Deep. A request from me would go to an archivist, and an archivist has refused a scholar of their own House twice in a month, courteously, faster the second time. I'd be refused more courteously and rather faster than that, and the refusal would tell them that somebody outside the Deep now knows the entry exists.

I keep running that and getting the same answer, and I don't like it.

Where they went

Nowhere that anyone can find.

Sablemire has been looking for three weeks with five roads, a description and institutional resources, and has produced nothing at all. They can't place Cross in a bed or at a meal or on a horse. Their operative told me flatly that this doesn't happen, and that the reason it's happening is that every method the dominion uses to keep account of dangerous people is built on a thing every practitioner does, and Cross doesn't do it.

If that's correct, the dominion has no way of keeping account of Cross at all. And they know it, because they walked into a tournament, signed a book, beat five Houses in front of five thousand people, and left the money on the table.

I'd been treating that as eccentricity, and I don't any more. I think it was a demonstration, and I don't know who it was for.

Open

1. What was in the sword.
2. What is in the sealed entry.
3. Whether the nothing is carried or constitutive.
4. Who the demonstration was addressed to.
5. Whether I intend to keep going, which I keep writing down and not answering.