What One Foe Could Not See

The records for this day are short, and none of it is an event. There is no journey in them, no stranger, no fight. There is one entry, under his own name, and it is about a pistol.

The last we have of him before this, he was in Qabarat with Whaloss, on papers good for a week, in a city that frowned on people carrying weapons. The notes for this day do not say where he was, or who did the work, or what it cost. They say only that his static arc pistol had been changed, and then they say what it now did.

He copied the description out in full. Not a summary of it — all of it, limits included. I have read a great many of his notes by now, and he did not usually spend lines on things he could carry in his head. I think he wanted the limits written down where he could see them. That is a guess. The page is what is certain.

What the change did was narrow. Once in a day, after he fired the pistol at someone — whether the shot found them or not — he could go unseen by that one person for a few moments. Only that one. Everyone else in the room would still see him plainly. And the moment he attacked again, at anyone, it was over.

The Field Canon has a section that grew out of exactly this kind of entry. Novitiates find it disappointing on first reading, because they expect a section on concealment to be about vanishing.

ON CONCEALMENT — hiding from a single watcher (later additions)
Concealment from all is rare and costly. Concealment from one is often enough.
Choose the one. It is the one whose eyes are on you now.
A weapon may carry a working that blinds a single foe to its bearer.
It wakes after the bearer strikes. Whether the strike lands does not matter.
It holds for a short time only, and only once in a day.
Any further attack ends it, against that foe or any other.
All others still see you. Do not forget the others.
Use it to break contact, not to make it.
Move while unseen. Standing still wastes it.
A hidden bearer who fires again is found again.
(Kopalo, from field notes.)

— the Field Canon, on Concealment, later additions

Most of those lines are his notes with the grammar taken out. The Canon added the advice; his page only gives the rules of the thing. But the line I would underline is Do not forget the others, and it comes straight from him. Of everything in the description, that limit is the one he copied with no change at all.

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There are animals in the forests the order keeps that hide this way. They don't disappear. They are hard to see for one particular hunter, in one particular light, and plain as day to everything else that passes. The one who taught me said this was not a lesser kind of hiding but the ordinary kind, and that the other kind mostly belongs in stories.

The moth on the bark is not gone.
It has only agreed with the tree.

— the Observances, from the Readings on Stillness

He did not write anything after the description. The entry ends where the limits end. I have come to read that as a kind of agreement too.