Who Turned from Light to Weight

27.

The beast died. The journal gives the killing stroke to another of the crew and doesn't say which. Killed it! It is the only exclamation on the page, and it is for someone else's blow.

Light given is not light lost.

— the Cycle, II.5

28.

Grek's robot, ED210, went into the hut first. Body parts, the size of a person of middling height. A broken desk. A fouled bed with strange stains. Crates, canvases, junk and debris.

Do not enter a room you have not looked into.
Send the eye before the body.
Let the one who can best bear the first blow go first.

— the Forms, Form 12

29.

In the middle of it stood an operating table. On it lay an elebrian, one of the pale, large-eyed people of Eox, taken apart. A datapad lay by the body.

What is opened shows what it was made of.

— the Cycle, I.6

30.

Then there was a second fight. The journal doesn't name the enemy. This time he did not gather light. He gathered weight, and drew the dark matter close around him like armor. He struck four times, and every blow went home. Then it was dead, and they found a sack of belongings.

Who turned from light to weight, and every blow went home.

— the Long Names, Zigu, 12

In 25 his light was spent on the beast. Surely that is why he turned to weight.

31.

Then the journal turns to what they learned. It doesn't say from where. I think from the datapad by the body. Xurantha had been with the Corpse Fleet for a long time. She had met with a Captain Zeera Vesh. The Fleet had assumed the crew was coming. It had spies with the Ambassador.

Every hidden mass is found by what bends around it.

— the Cycle, III.8

Who learned the enemy had been waiting for him.

— the Long Names, Zigu, 13

32.

One entry ran long, and it was about Vesh. He had been enlisted to slow the crew down. A Harving Nesix was being recruited. And Vesh had been arranging events so that it would look as though the Corpse Fleet had been busy.

What holds does not hurry.

— the Cycle, III.4

In 16 I set this verse beside a number at the Ministry. Here the enemy sent a captain to make the crew wait, and he wrote that down too.

33.

Two more lines close the page. Thunderstrike streetsweeper, the name of a gun, with nothing to say whose. Then Captain Vesh - estimated, and a blank where the estimate should be. The journal stops there.

Where the record ends, stand.
Do not step into what you cannot see.

— the Cycle, I.5

Why would he start to weigh the captain and leave the scale empty? Surely he meant to come back to it.