Bargaining
YC 1189
Unlike these dedicated scholars, who seek to redefine the world in terms of magical equations and ratios, most thaumaturgists learn the system well enough to utilise the spellcraft helpful to their own interests and purposes, and don’t overly concern themselves with attempting to explain the sunrise as a series of functions.
Librarian Arro Sanjiet,Commentary on Restin Lim’s‘On Thaumaturgy’,YC1002
The noon sun shone through the whirling crystal of the aleph, casting a shifting light onto the mosaic that Ifan had called the World Clock.Fola fought the urge to sit and watch it through the afternoon.How it was meant to be read was clear enough—larger, slower moving dots of light represented minutes, hours, days, and even longer segments of time, while the tiny motes that flitted through the pattern stood for shaved fragments of a moment, drifting through those larger pools as slivers of brilliance so bright it hurt to look at them for long.Some moved so quickly the eye could not hope to track them, and she suspected a close examination would yield even smaller, swifter motes—time on a scale that mattered only to those diminutive creatures who measured the fullness of their lives in days, hours or minutes.
While Fola worked, she could not help but wonder how the First Folk might read the clock.Was there some scale at which immortality yielded to the drudgery of time?Or might one of the aleph’s makers stand and watch the play of light as a continuous blur, less motes and pools in motion than a solid pattern, all that movement captured in a single moment of perception?
So much of mortal experience was defined and bounded by time.Even mortal thought and feeling were mediated through it.What was fear but an anticipation of a possibility yet to come?Pleasure but a distinct moment, sublime as much for its transience as for its potency?Even those in the City who had lived hundreds of years felt the inevitability of death, no matter how long delayed.
Mortalkind might struggle for a thousand centuries and never pierce the veil of time, never begin to comprehend how the First Folk understood the world.The only hope for that understanding was communication—to reach out, to have the incomprehensible rendered and explained into comprehensibility.Fola had understood this from a young age.It was not scepticism of mortalkind’s ability, as some of her detractors had argued.It was realism.A recognition of how all things were mediated.The world, to any mind, was no more than light playing through a prism.
Even the dead were trapped by time.Theirs was an existence devoid of motion.The light not a blur as time stretched out towards the infinite, but fixed in place, both sun and crystal armillary frozen in the moment of death.Damon asked about this from his perch on a bench he had dragged over to watch her work, where Llewyn and Siwan, too, sat and watched.Colm leaned against the curtain wall, massaging his bandaged arm and subtly taking the measure of the castle’s defences.Spil and Harwick had followed one of the count’s servants to a guest apartment—prodded, presumably, by the same long-delayed needs that had driven Colm and Fola into bed together the previous evening.
The count, too, had disappeared inside the castle.In his stead he had left behind his court druid, a sour old woman with antlers and raven’s feathers braided into the stringy remnants of her hair.She leaned heavily on a gnarled staff of rosewood and watched, saying nothing and lending no aid, merely observing to ensure Fola did nothing to damage either the aleph or the mosaic beneath it.
‘If ghosts are only shreds of memory, how can you strike a deal with them?’Damon pressed, undeterred by Fola’s half-answers.She was no teacher, and in fact took little enjoyment in reducing the complexity of things to help others begin to understand them.Ironic, she recognised, given her mission to conjure up the souls of the First Folk and compel them to do just that.
She stood, stretched the stiffness from her back, and moved on to the next symbol her magic circle required.Frog hopped over to her and vomited up another piece of thaumaturgist’s chalk.The court druid muttered in disgust.
‘They aren’t only shreds of memory,’ Fola said, surveying her design.What next…?Bleed it, all this chatter is making it hard to hold the thing in my head.‘They are power, too.Something like a spell cast in desperation at the moment of death.Their apparent “personality” is inherited from the memories of the dead, and gives that power its direction.But like any power, it can be redirected.’
Ah, yes.Fola knelt and returned to writing.The work would go so much faster without so many distractions.
‘If a ghost is just a spell, couldn’t you just unmake the spell?’Siwan added her own question.‘Afanan talked of such things, from time to time.Spells and counter-spells.’
No wonder she and Damon get along so well.They are both so insufferablyinquisitive.A thought that tickled; Arno likely would have said the same thing about her, twenty years ago.
‘It’s simpler to prevent a change in the world from happening than it is to unmake something once it’s taken hold,’ Fola answered.‘A ghost is a spell already cast.Once something exists, it’s easier to reshape it, or redirect it, than to remove it entirely.Take this castle, for instance.’She gestured to the walls around them.‘It might be converted into homes for several dozen people, or a factory for making things, or a hospital… I don’t know.Far easier, that, than to dismantle it stone by stone.Changing what something does is less difficult than destroying it.’
‘The way you talk about these things is so strange,’ Siwan observed.‘Afanan taught me something of magic.Yours is so different.Circles and runes in ink or chalk instead of gemstones, and all this theory… Afanan spoke of spirits and stones.Natural forces in the world and how they could be shaped.’
‘It’s not really that different,’ Fola muttered, searching for an avenue of explanation, half tempted to tell these children to just shut up and let her work.She shot Llewyn a disgruntled look.He responded with a shrug.Afanan must have done most of the child-rearing among the troupers.
Fola took a slow breath and reached into her purse.She stood and brandished a gold royal, letting it flash in the light for Siwan to see.‘How much grain would this buy in the Hierophancy of Goll, far to the east of here, beyond the heart of the world?’
Siwan tilted her head and laughed.‘Surely near the same amount as here in Parwys.Gold is gold, isn’t it?’
‘Ah, but thegold itselfis not the only thing that matters.’Fola turned the coin, showing the crowned bear of Parwys stamped on its face.‘This gold is marked by the royal mint of the House of Abal.Its value is tied to the authority of the king—to levy taxes, for example, which as I understand these things, must be paid in the currency of the kingdom, and to pay his soldiers and watchmen.In Goll, this would be only worth its weight.There, the legionnaires are paid in silver crescents, and taxes must be paid in the same.Gold is reserved, as the official colour of the hierophant’s authority, for palatial decorations and royal garments.’
‘All right,’ Siwan said.‘But what does that have to do with magic?’
‘The currency derives its power from the authority of the ruler,’ Fola said.‘Outside its country—the system of economy and governance it exists to support—a coin becomes only a lump of metal.Just so, a piece of quartz or garnet may hold some significance and special power within the system of magic Afanan wielded.The system I work within is different.’She gestured with her piece of chalk towards the function she was drawing.‘Rather than gems, thaumaturgy deals in symbols.I, and any thaumaturgist, would argue that this makes our way more precise, and therefore more useful.And, in fact, we would argue that the gems in Afanan’s system were just a stand-in for the symbols in ours.Afanan, however, might have made just as strong a case for her way of wielding magic.’
Siwan shook her head firmly.‘I see what you’re saying, but magic isn’t like a coin.If I travelled from Parwys to this Goll place, the magic Afanan worked to… The magic in me would be the same.It would still be powerful, even if no one else in the kingdom understood it.’
‘Girl has a point,’ Colm cut in, crossing from his place by the wall.‘If no one recognises a tin bit as money, it’s no more use to me than a shaving from a teacup, but magic doesn’t get its power from people the way that money does.’
Fola glared at him—resentful, first of all, for his taking Siwan’s side, and secondly, for coming up with a much clearer example than her own to illustrate her point.‘That’s true.Currency has its power because of a shared belief between people—kings, institutions, subjects.Magic is not an agreement between people.More an agreement between the one who wields it and their own mind.’
‘An agreement with yourself?’Siwan said, baffled.
‘Like a promise,’ Damon observed.He nodded solemnly.‘A goal.Or a decision.Something like that?’
‘In a way,’ Fola said.‘If you want to accomplish a goal, it’s far easier if you really believe that you can accomplish it, no?’She grinned ruefully.‘If you lacked a real belief in your abilities on the stage, it would be that much harder to strut around in front of people making silly faces.’
