The room held a table, two chairs, a cabinet, and a coat rack.
The examiner was someone else, a younger man whose posture carried the particular economy of someone licensed above the tier his bearing advertised. He closed the door closed behind them.
"Wait for further instruction," he said, and the lock engaged from the outside. Mechanical, not Vis-operated. His footsteps stopped approximately ten feet from the door.
Taelith read the room.
Twenty feet by eighteen, ceiling at ten. One door, locked. One window, frosted light came through without detail. The table was solid wood, rectangular, pushed against the far wall with the careless permanence of furniture nobody had moved in years. Two chairs: one with arms and a cushion that had been sat on several thousand times, one without either. The cabinet stood left of the door, three drawers, wooden pulls, the gaps in the drawer faces saying unlocked without needing to be tested.
The coat rack occupied the corner nearest the window. Four hooks, dark wood, bolted to the floor. It had the particular patience of an object that had been doing one job for a long time and expected to continue.
On the table: a ceramic cup without liquid, a pen with a chipped cap, a stack of requisition forms dated four months ago. He read the top form. A supply order for the branch's maintenance department, twelve slate-styluses, a quantity that suggested either optimism or a department that broke things regularly. The handwriting was consistent. The form was paperwork that had ended up on this table for the same reason paperwork ended up on every flat surface in every institutional building he had ever entered: nobody had moved it.
He sat in the chair without arms. The cushioned one was more comfortable. The other was closer to the door and gave him lines to every object in the room. He noticed he'd made a tactical assessment of a space containing furniture and requisition forms, and did not examine this.
The silence had the quality of containment. Not absence but architecture. The walls were thick. The floor carried nothing. If the examiner was breathing ten feet from the door, the room wasn't sharing.
He waited.
The cabinet's drawers held, top to bottom: more forms, a box of chalk and a measuring tape, and nothing. The empty drawer was the most interesting thing in the room, which was not a high bar. He closed it and sat back down.
He looked at the coat rack. Four hooks. Dark wood. Nothing on them. He had established this already and was establishing it again because there was nothing left to establish.
Minutes accumulated. He counted them by the light through the frosted window. Duncarrow's coastal weather produced a specific rate of cloud movement that was readable even through frosted glass if you had spent enough time in the city. He'd been here three weeks. The light shifted in intervals that gave him an approximate count without precision.
Seven minutes. Eight. The room remained the room. The objects remained objects. Nothing had changed, activated, moved, or revealed itself. No instruction had come.
A room in a licensing exam that contained nothing to respond to was either a failed staging or a decision. The Accord's Duncarrow branch did not fail at staging. Not with Aldris running intake and an examiner stationed outside whose posture said this was not his first time standing on the other side of this particular door. The nothing was deliberate. The nothing was either the test itself or the space before the test, and the space before the test was itself a test of whether the candidate could distinguish between the two.
Twelve minutes. Thirteen.
The impulse had been present since somewhere around minute six. Not urgent, but professional. The low, steady awareness that his Arca sense was available, sitting at the edge of his perception the way it always did, offering the kind of information eyes couldn't provide. Residual emotional charges in surfaces. Vis signatures pressed into wood and plaster. The accumulated texture of a room that had been used for this purpose hundreds of times, holding the charge of every candidate who had sat in this chair and wondered the same thing he was wondering.
That data was there. He could feel its edges without reaching. He had been not reaching for thirteen minutes, and the not-reaching had become louder than the room.
He reached.
The construct filled the room before his Arca sense had finished opening.
Pressure first. The air thickened, the light through the window shifting from white to dense amber. Then geometry: the walls were where they had been and also wrong, the distance between the door and the far wall compressing and stretching in a way that made his spatial sense report two positions for everything. A mid-tier Arca manifestation, controlled and targeted. It was specifically designed to make the room he'd just spent thirteen minutes mapping unreliable.
He was off the chair before the disorientation settled.
The coat rack was the nearest object with reach. He pulled it from its floor bolts. Three years of infusing whatever was at hand made the Vis application automatic, and the wood took the charge the way institutional hardwood did: slowly, stubbornly, but completely. He swept it through the space between himself and the construct's densest concentration. The infused wood disrupted the manifestation's geometry where it passed, cutting a line of reliable distance through the amber distortion.
The construct reassembled behind the cabinet. He kicked the uncushioned chair into its path. It slid low across the floor, loaded with enough Vis to anchor a disruption field at floor level. The construct's lower geometry collapsed.
The pen was on the table where he'd left it. He infused it in the time it took to pick it up and put it through the construct's remaining focal point the way a needle goes through fabric. The amber light folded inward and was gone.
The room was a room again. Table against the wall. Cabinet with its drawers closed. One chair on its side. A pen embedded in the plaster above the window. A coat rack in his hands, the wood warm from sustained infusion, still holding a charge that would take a few minutes to fully drain.
Forty seconds. Maybe less.
The lock disengaged. The examiner opened the door and looked at the room with the expression of someone reading a sentence he'd seen before, but not in this particular handwriting.
"You can set that down," he said.
Taelith leaned the coat rack against the wall. It held the angle without the bolts, balanced on its own weight and the slight warp the infusion had pressed into the grain. He retrieved the pen from the plaster and placed it back on the table. He righted the chair. The room looked approximately the way it had when he'd entered, minus two bolt holes in the floor and a small puncture in the wall that hadn't been there before.
The examiner made a note on his slate. He lifted the pen up, tapping it against his chin. Then he made another.