The next day Erid returned in truth. He was clean – and clean shaven – and wore fresh clothes with fold marks on them. After they had breakfast, Essan excused himself, citing the need to prepare for his journey to Haethea, though what preparation there was left to do for it Kaleb couldn’t fathom.

“Hmmm… well then, shall we begin?” Erid said as they sat down in the hotel room they had acquired for the week, drawing up a chair while Kaleb sat down on a pillow.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Hiding yourself like this should be reasonably easy for you now that you have learned more of a sensory approach to field generation. But it is still challenging. It requires a great deal of subtlety and control to do it well. Though, those that can do it well can do more than simply suppress their field’s sensibility – the truly exemplary can use it to suppress all minor oscillations, such as sound, vibration and – if one is truly skilled – heat and even light.”

“You mean… you mean people can become invisible?”

“Ah no, sadly. It usually just results in visible noise, like a heat haze – though if you’re out in the mists, that can work to your advantage. But it works very well against sensory field generation at the level of fields themselves. Sensory field generators aren’t using their eyes to sense things after all, they are using the rods and coils and spikes of their arrays…” Erid paused for a moment, before returning to the invisibility theme, “In theory you could create an invisibility field, but it would require… an awful lot of concentration and practice, and I don’t think anyone could acquire that ability easily. None of the most advanced users of this technique that I’ve met were able to do that. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t sneak anywhere they wanted. Most people don’t look where there isn’t any reason to, and are overly reliant on sensory fields to detect unwanted intrusions into places.”

“Right”

“The method is quite simple, really. You’ve got to maintain a shell around yourself that diffuses the higher potential of your capacitance from the lower potential of the surroundings. This means that first you have to understand the ambient field. You’re already on your way to doing that. There is always the parallel field, and there is always the noise of other people’s fields, of the pillars reflecting certain kinds of fields, of other interferences. Even the mist has its own flavour of field generation.”

Kaleb perked up at this “really?”

“Everything reacts to fields, or even acts with relation to a field, we wouldn’t be able to do anything with them, after all, if they didn’t attract or repel anything else, would we?”

“Oh… I never thought of that.”

“Yeah, it is funny to think about the relationship of fields to inanimate objects… but the pillars really do… oh… never mind.” Erid seemed like he was about to say something, but then he stopped short. Kaleb opened his mouth to ask what Erid was trying to say, but stopped himself. He was, he suspected, already being taught things that were, in a way, secret. It wouldn’t do well to undermine that trust by asking too much of it. His situation, in every way, was still precarious, and Erid was really the only reason he was here at all. He felt a swell of gratitude instead at this thought, and shut his mouth. He could still make some connection though, from what Erid said, it seemed, though he couldn’t be sure, that there might be something relating here to Iowara’s pillar fragment, that place he’d begun his journey on, so many cycles ago, and its mysterious attractive field.

They began the exercise. Under Erid’s watchful eyes, Kaleb tried to modulate a shell around him to resemble what he could detect of the ambient field effects. It was immediately, Kaleb felt, like tripling the mental labour of sensing an individual's capacitance arrays. At least this time he had little trouble detecting the flow and fluctuation of field generation within his own body – he’d been exercising that particular muscle enough to know the sensation well – but the ambient flow of the field was less easy to pinpoint. Mostly because it was so quiet. Even though the parallel field was incomparably more powerful than anything that anyone he knew could sustain for long, its constant presence, its subtlety, and its uniformity served to make it seem relatively absent. There was no differentiation he realised – there was no difference from one point to another, especially when within its grasp. Its uniformity meant that he found it hard to distinguish it from anything else. However the real challenge of the exercise, and one that he could not overcome, even after a bell and a half of working on it, was the actual modulation of the shell about him to resemble the ambient field. He couldn’t even make the shell properly. Eventually, Erid began to look concerned while Kaleb tried his best to avoid looking too frustrated. It was impossible! He thought. He just couldn’t get a hang of the technique that Erid was trying to get him to put together. Suddenly Erid leapt up and hit his forehead.

“Fuck” he said

“Wh-what is it?” Kaleb wondered if he’d let his instructor down.

“I just realised. Or rather, I just remembered. You don’t have any control at all, do you?”

“Huh?”

“Here” Erid reached into his pocket and extracted a small metal coin, which he suspended over his hand on a small field. “Try doing this” He raised and lowered the coin on his field in a smooth up and down motion, as if it were a vertical pendulum.

He tossed the coin to Kaleb, who fumbled with it and dropped it, his right hand still bound in a cast. He held the coin in the palm of his left hand, and then raised it up on a delicate set of spheres of pressure, one from each finger. The coin rested at the point of their conjunction.

“Hmmm” Erid watched thoughtfully

Kaleb raised and lowered the coin on these fields by making them more and less intensive. He tried not to grimace as he watched the faltering trajectory of the coin. It was jerking around in response to his fields, and the uneven pressure they exerted on the coin. He not only rarely used multiple fields at once, he never normally used them for anything as fine as a coin. He could hardly feel it, and its presence in the parallel field barely registered against his puissance. It was hard to control! He remembered Erid’s demonstration with the cup of tea and felt a blush of shame spread over his face.

“Yes, I see the problem.” said Erid. “alright” he clapped his hands “we’re changing tack. You're going to alternate between raising and lowering the coin and rotating that coin around your hand – and not let it fall for one hour.” Kaleb tried to do what Erid had said, and move the coin into a rotational field based around his hand, but it dropped out of his control immediately.

“Once you can do that, then we’re going to go back to try this disappearing act. So there’ll be twice the work for you now…” Erid smiled darkly. Kaleb somehow felt as if he were caught up in a strange psychological complex. He didn’t know what Erid had experienced at the hands of his own trainers, but it hardly seemed fair to want to take it out on him now! “These sorts of exercises” Erid indicated the coin on the ground “were done daily in the brethren from the time of induction into it. The kids would learn control first and foremost. Discipline and Clarity, some of the principles of the brethren, upon which we based our philosophy and approach to life. And if you get them right, other more crucial things would follow… They believed such techniques led people to develop them, that these exercises gave focus to the body and to the soul… I am sorry” Erid abruptly bowed his head “ I don’t mean to lecture you. You aren’t an inductee, and we decided – Essan and I, I mean – not to treat you as such. I also didn’t intend to set you an exercise you couldn’t complete … you’ve made a lot of progress already, and because of it, I just forget sometimes, the different worlds that we come from. But I promise that once you’ve got the basics down, you’ll have no trouble.” Erid raised his head and smiled “But! Control will have to wait until you’re all better” he said, grinning now, and Kaleb stopped from reaching down to pick up the coin and met his eyes in worry, “in the meantime…” Erid smiled “you’re in cable city to see the place, right? Let’s do some sightseeing!”