Ira Dann arrived on a Tuesday, which Kael noted only because Tuesday was the day he had scheduled his first formal attempt at the Listening Ritual and the arrival of an unannounced assistant was a variable he had not accounted for.
She was twenty-four, younger than he had expected from the official notification, which had described her as a "senior Temple administrator with specialized training in Translator support." She was also carrying three bags, two of which appeared to contain books, and she had the particular economy of movement of someone who had spent time in environments where space was at a premium.
"Ira Dann," she said, setting the bags down in the reception room with practiced efficiency. "I've been assigned as your administrative assistant. I have documentation if you want to verify."
"I'll assume the Temple vetted its own assignment," Kael said.
"Most people ask anyway."
"Most people find it reassuring to check. I find it reassuring to assume the paperwork is in order and note when behavior suggests otherwise."
She looked at him with the expression of someone recalibrating. "Right. I was told you were direct."
"What else were you told?"
A pause. Fractional, but there. "That you were the most academically qualified Translator in the history of the appointment. And that you'd made it very clear you didn't want the position."
"Both accurate." He studied her. The bags with books, the careful way she had positioned herself with her back not quite to the door, the quality of her reading of the room when she'd entered. "What's actually in the bags?"
"Books. Personal materials. My appointment is residential, I'll be in the chambers two levels below yours."
"I know the room. It has a good view of the east courtyard and a poor view of the main gate. Whoever furnished it for you chose the bed placement incorrectly for the draft patterns of that floor."
She blinked. "I'll keep that in mind."
"The documentation you mentioned," he said. "Leave it on the desk. I'll read it this evening."
She left it. She did not seem offended. She also, he noticed, paused at the bookshelf near the door on her way out, eyes moving across the titles with the automatic cataloguing reflex of someone who read seriously.
He watched her go.
His assessment, preliminary and subject to revision: intelligent, trained in something more operationally practical than temple administration, assigned here for reasons that were not entirely the ones stated. The documentation would be genuine, the credentials would be real, and none of that would mean what it appeared to mean.
He read the documentation that evening. It was exactly as genuine as he had expected.
That night, before sleep, he sat with the unnamed ledger from the hidden archive and read further into it. The Translator whose journal it was had been appointed in an era he knew primarily from official histories, the kind of histories that described events in terms of their outcomes and omitted the texture of how those outcomes were reached.
The journal omitted nothing. It was the account of someone recording what had actually happened, with the flat precision of a person who had given up on making sense of it and settled for documentation.
"The ritual today," read one entry, undated, near the middle of the journal. "I heard something. Not the approved prayers. Not the language the Temple describes in its training texts. Something else. Something that came into my head like a splinter, and I do not mean that as a metaphor. It hurt in the way physical things hurt. I reported the approved experience to the High Priest. He recorded it in the official log. I have recorded this here."
Kael set the journal down.
His Listening Ritual was scheduled for Thursday. Two days away.
He slept badly. The dream was the same texture as before, that pressing at the inside of his skull, but this time there was something at the edge of it that was almost a shape, almost a direction.
He woke before dawn with his nose bleeding and the iron pendant feeling inexplicably warm.