Earlier:

  Dalliance's Divinations class was awkward, and it wasn’t Dalliance's fault.

  "Who here has cast an area divination? Show of hands?" asked the Detective. She paced before the board like a restless cat.

  Very few hands were raised, Dalliance's among them.

  "There are many types, from echolocation to direct tactile sense of the world, or your element in it: many variants with a specific application, in which they alone shine. What is the commonality? Their potential for misuse.

  Picture if you will: a spell allowing you to feel everything in contact with what what you touch touches. Excellent for mining, wouldn't you say? But then suppose an unscrupulous mage touches your shirt—"

  There were sounds of distress from somewhere in the room.

  "There's a student," she said, "in this very room, with something similar." She didn't volunteer more information, for which Dalliance was thankful.

  "My point," she said, "is this: there's no formal ethics class at the King's College, but before we move on to the few spells I will teach you that do not warn your intended target that they're being watched, we are going to go over what is and isn't appropriate. What will, and will not send you to prison."

  "Divination, by definition, is hardly the most ethically fraught discipline. We are not necromancers twisting the spirit, or mentalists twisting the mind. Nevertheless, it is my own area of expertise, and I would dare to say my own approach skirts upon the bleeding edge of ethics, and thus this topic hits close to home. So—a preamble to this discussion of a most contentious topic—some food for thought: which is supreme, one's right to autonomy or privacy? What do the two overlap? Can one have their autonomy without their privacy?"

  "As mages, you have a great deal of largely unearned power. A man on the street may have a skill, even one emulating magic (all skills are not created equal) but is not the match of a mage. A mage can learn new spells. Thus, mages are more powerful, in the long run. Furthermore: mages are people. And people are idiots. Because of this, there's been a lot of idiocy done with spells, resulting in the empire drafting lots of rules about the use of spells—a few you might know, and more you've probably never heard of. Why is that?"

  Dalliance raised his hand. He knew this one.

  "Is it the Inquisitors?"

  "Precisely. Unethical use of magic is not only horribly uncouth, it is also in many cases illegal. And the Inquisitors don't bother with extenuating circumstances as context. If you do the crime, they kill you, or pass sentence—lop off your fingers, or whatever the case may be."

  Dalliance cringed.

  "Theft of a man's thaumic token? They'll take your hand, down at the watch-house. Theft of a lady's privacy? They'll take a finger. We're not worth as much as tokens of economic exchange, but you'll still be marked a Peeping Tom for life."

  The irony in her tone was savage, but her voice changed when she noticed the stricken look on Dalliance's face.

  "Dalliance here. A farm accident took some of his fingers, and at his age, nobody would suspect anything else. But in a few years, when he's of the right age to have peers missing digits of their own—could be you, Laken, or Gus over there—then people will wonder. I recommend using gloves."

  She turned back to the board.

  "For this reason," she went on, "when I say you do not scry on the lady in her bathtub, I do not want you to hear she doesn't want me to have fun. I want you to hear that they will cut off my fingers if they catch me. Do you want to take the risk?"

  "And so: principles of ethical use of magic." She began to enumerate them on the board.

  "I will borrow from the Gremantle's Catechism, as for these purposes it will serve us just fine—with some amendments. The worst thing on the Catechism's list is the taking of a life—'where there's life there's hope,' presumably." She snorted. "There are two categories of spell worse than unlawful killing, in my view, and the view of the law: irresponsible use of mental magics, and lesser methods of coercion. Magical enslavement, whether perpetrated from within or without, is unlawful. They will destroy your mind, because knowledge of such a spell can only have been obtained with intent to use it for ill—there is no benign use. Then they will kill you, and will destroy your soul so you can never be brought back at all, and leave the cycle of existence forever."

  The room was quiet. "They do this, so that the knowledge of the spell will pass from the world. Because mentalism is so corrosive."

  "So. On we go. If you kill with magic and it is found to be unlawful, you will be killed. Perform harms by magic, you will owe a restitution penalty—fines, fingers, what have you. Theft of information, or goods, or labor, or mana—falls under this same prohibition category. You will pay restitution."

  Dalliance wondered idly whether things viewed using [Prediction] counted. Probably not. It wasn't magic, at least, it was a skill, and if this was a highly convenient conclusion suspiciously unsupported by any factual knowledge, Dalliance wasn't entirely unaware of that fact.

  "You will not interfere in duels! You will not interfere in commerce! . . . ."

  If Divinations class had been awkward, Incantations was worse.

  "Do ut des."

  The professor looks around the room expectantly. "I can see that many of you recognize that phrase, the invocation of which begins liturgical events, prayers, and that sort of thing. This is an old language, simply stating 'I do so that you will do'. Reciprocity. That's the backbone of society: I pay the merchant, and he gives me new shoes. I give thanks so that you feel appreciated and do not spit in my food. Reciprocity is the structure beneath everything. It underlies commerce, religion, and diplomacy. Little wonder that the gods in their wisdom built Mana to work the same way."

  He pulled out the chair from behind his desk and turned it to face the class, sitting. "Common wisdom would suggest that when you give mana to the spell the spell consumes the mana to do the work, like coal fed to a steam engine. This is correct on the broad strokes, but not quite the whole picture. Mana is not necessarily used to perform a function: there isn't something about fire mana that causes fire, in particular, though Mana consumes it to create fire effects. What it is is closer to the truth is that you are communicating to the Mana. It doesn't understand human thought, so you have to speak to it with something it will understand. Thus, you give it fire mana and it understands you to be hoping to do something with fire."

  He gestured.

  "I sit here. You stand in front of me. You have cards in your hand. One has fire on it, one has water on it, and so on. I am the Mana, and you hand me a card. Now I know something I didn't know before about what you want me to do for you. If you keep giving me the same card over and over again, I will know that you want me to continue doing . . . do you see? Do you see why you must sustain spells? Similarly, if you give me two cards with different things on them, I know you want me to use them in combination somehow. That's all it is: if you give me a lot of cards that say fire I know you want a lot of fire, or something really hot. I am trying to understand you, but I do not."

  "The mana you give it, as a token of exchange, tells me two things: that you want me to begin, and the first clue about what. Beyond that, we have incantation, gesture, and geometry—and so we narrow it down further, until what we want has been successfully communicated. Communication is the central problem, really, from which all other problems in Magic descend. The Mana will not read your mind. It doesn't know how. It is said that Mana was made for dragons—dragons are telepathic by nature—and likely interfaced with the Mana directly via their thoughts. We don't know for certain, but they also used some words, some gestures, as shorthand, which is where humanity began. Working from that small list of gestures and syllable syllables for invocation, consistent use defines new things, such as: since every time we're inside a circle, we want a boundary that is circular, the Mana eventually figured out circles. To summarize: magic is an ongoing negotiation with the Mana to not only expand its knowledge of what we want but also incorporating the whole history of the relationship of humankind with the Mana.

  "For some things—and these are almost certainly inherited, older than any human tradition—there is only one correct answer."

  He drew a squiggle on the board.

  "This is fire. Not the concept of combustion. This is fire, as the mana understands it, and nothing else will serve. The same is true for many elements, and for many of the fundamental relationships between parts of a spell—between creature and object, part and whole, and so on. These you will simply commit to memory."

  "Numbers, on the other hand, are flexible. Two plus twelve is fourteen. I could say fourteen. I could say two sevens. The mana will understand fourteen regardless. Many things in spellcraft admit this kind of variation."

  "Targeting is another. I might say what is within the circle—" he traced a small ring on his fingertip "— and that is one sort of touch spell. Or I might press two objects together and designate contact directly. Both create touch effects. They are not the same spell."

  "If I say do this to what I can see, the spell binds to my sight. If I say do this to what I indicate, it binds to my designation. If I say do this to what I touch, it binds to contact. The distinction matters."

  "Pretend I have crafted a spell in the form of a long knight's lance—assume for the moment that such a spell functions. If I bind it to sight—if I can see it—then when I look at you and extend the lance, it may strike you. It will not strike my horse, because I am not looking at my horse."

  He paused.

  "But if I bind it to contact—whatever this touches—I have created a magical weapon that discharges on impact. Regardless of what I want at that moment. These distinctions will matter to you very soon."

  "You will each attempt spellcraft this term, and in those that follow. Careless phrasing produces results you did not anticipate. This is the mild version of the problem."

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  "The severe version is paradox. You will not craft self-referent spells. You will not craft recursive spells. You will not craft a spell that attempts two simultaneous effects in contradiction with each other. The first two rules you will revisit later in your education and discover where they may be bent somewhat. The last is not a rule. It is a law."

  "When a spell attempts paradox, the mana cannot perform it. What it does instead is return the magic to you." A pause. "Into your soul. And the mana performing the effect and the mana you supplied may be entirely different affinities—and it is a profoundly unpleasant experience to have your soul filled with a mana that is not yours. In an extreme case, it may alter your affinity. Temporarily. Or not."

  He let that sit for a moment.

  "Imagine casting nothing, ever again, without the use of a mana engine."

  A sobering thought.

  "It is to prevent this that I will be restricting your vocabulary this term. Were I to allow free combination of every symbol in your spellbooks, you would produce permutations whose meanings even I might not recognize. We will instead use the Syllabary Framework of Octavius—the first serious attempt to catalogue standard symbols, and a system still used by the Enchanters' Guild and the Alchemists."

  "For your final examination, you will cast a working hex or charm effect. As this is a class of aeromancers, I will tolerate a certain sameness of result. There are only so many things air may do: lift, cut, carry, press, disperse. Those who wish to bind their work to a mana engine and extend their reach beyond simple atmospheric effects may do so. That ambition will earn extra credit."

  He tapped the cover of his book.

  "Page one, everybody."

  Dalliance dutifully turned to page one.

  He saw familiar symbols—fewer than he had expected. Thirty for aiming and selecting a target. A dozen for target type. A dozen more for channeling mana. The remaining sixty described effect.

  “This simplified Syllabary,” the instructor said, “is also employed by the Enchanters’ Guild and the Alchemists. With these symbols it is impossible to design a self-referent spell, a recursive spell, or a spell capable of paradox.”

  He tapped a symbol in his book. It flared with golden tracery in theirs.

  "The Syllabary begins with targeting. Thirty symbols—scope, filter, selection. You will notice this is a large portion of the framework. There is a reason for that."

  "Consider a spell affecting everything you can see. Sighted—" he tapped the symbol "—that is your scope. Already you have a problem. You can see a great many things. So we filter: living." He tapped again. "Now we have only living things within your visual field. Still too many, in most circumstances. So we narrow further: looking at. The thing your gaze is directed toward specifically. And then: this."

  He looked up.

  "Four symbols, and we have not yet said a single word about what we intend to do. We have only identified the target. Do you see why targeting comprises a third of the framework?"

  "Now. Effect. For the classics, there may be one symbol—the accumulated shorthand of a great deal of negotiation with the mana, compressed by long use into something manageable. For novel work, you may need pages. We will return to that problem later in your education. For now: illumination."

  He tapped a fifth symbol.

  "One syllable. Among the oldest effects we know. Makes things glow—proportional, straightforwardly, to how much mana it receives. Simple." A pause. "Except that we have not finished. We have told the mana what to illuminate. We have not told it what part."

  "So: within things I can see—" tap "—the form of this one." Tap. "As perceived from my position."

  "That is the spell. Sighted, living, looking at, this, illuminate, sighted, form of this." He set down the chalk. "Seven symbols for a spell that makes someone glow faintly. The effect itself is one syllable. The rest is geometry."

  He looked around the room with the air of a man about to be generous.

  "I recommend one thaum at a time, lest you blind yourself."

  He set down the chalk.

  "This is actually the long-form of a targetting interface which is also standardized elsewhere -- to remind the caster what the Mana thinks is targeted, in case he has forgotten. Worth the mana expenditure, believe you me. Now . . . ."

  He recast, changing one of the syllables. Effluvia, in the front row, began to glow faintly.

  "You will have noticed that the targeting chain we just walked through is fixed once spoken. Sighted, living, looking at, this—the mana has its answer, and that answer does not change unless you tell it to. For many spells, that is exactly what you want. For many others, it is not."

  "A variable is a value you intend to update while the spell is in motion. You flag it as live when you define it, and the channel stays open. If you named your target by looking at them, you update it by looking somewhere new. If you named a number by gesture, you update it by gesturing a new one. The input method determines the update method. The mana is still listening on that channel, and it will follow."

  "The hand signs tell it which channel."

  He held up his right hand, thumb and forefinger touching.

  "Variables one and two. Open is one. Closed—" he pinched them together "— is two. Left hand, same fingers: three and four." He moved through the pairs methodically. "Thumb and middle, right: five and six. Thumb and middle, left: seven and eight. Thumb and ring, right: nine and ten. You have sixteen variables available to you. This sounds generous."

  A brief pause.

  "It isn't."

  "When you begin walking through a spell of any complexity, your list of variables expands quickly. You do not get extra hands. You would not want them—you cannot hold sixteen live values in your mind simultaneously as it is, let alone more. For anything requiring that degree of flexibility, you want a mana engine, a partner, or ritual geometry. Common practice is simply to keep the variant parts of your spell at the front, and commit to the remainder being fixed from the moment of casting. Do not leave channels open that you have no intention of using."

  The professor held up his right hand, thumb and forefinger open, and looked slowly across the room to another student. The light followed his gaze, smooth and immediate.

  "Variable one," he said, "is the target. I am updating it by looking. The spell does not care that I have moved on—it simply follows the open channel."

  He closed his opposite hand, and the light went out.

  "This is minimize. All five fingers splayed is maximize."

  Of course.

  “Young man.”

  Dalliance had raised his left hand.

  “I cannot perform that sign. Is there another way?"

  Silence.

  The professor smiled gamely. “Doubtless, we shall still find a sufficiency of perfectly adequate spell aids for you.”

  He did not sound convincing.

  Dalliance managed a weak smile in return.

  It was a very long class.

  Dalliance left for Penitents’ Hall with his book underlined in neat, unforgiving ink: the list of glyphs in the Syllabary he could not cast except by ritual or written medium. Those requiring five fingers, or another form of mana.

  Nearly four fifths of them.

  He could cast one in five glyphs unaided.

  Of the control gestures, over half of them required all five fingers in some configuration. He didn't know whether missing fingers counted as extended or closed or neither, but it didn't matter, really.

  He had almost begun to believe he would outgrow the restriction of lacking fingers.

  Now?

  After class, he had been told he might wear a written board at his chest and touch it to substitute for certain gestures.

  Looking at the array of forms he could not make, this was scant comfort.

  Rot in hell, Da, he thought viciously.

  “Alms for the poor?”

  Dalliance heard Earnest before he saw him.

  His friend stood at the same street corner as before, worn bell with bronze clapper in hand, acolyte’s tabard clean but threadbare. The wooden alms box bore the Temple’s symbol in stark relief. Passersby parted around him as water around a post.

  “Very useful shift,” Dalliance said dryly, pulling up the small stool Earnest was allowed between donors. “I just don’t think they’re in the mood.”

  Earnest smiled a half-smile. “I think this is as bad as it will get. And I am still in the fresh air.”

  A breeze dragged black factory smoke through the alley. Dalliance sniffed theatrically. Earnest ignored him.

  “It's a chance to do some good,” he said, voice bright despite the forced edge beneath it.

  “If things hadn’t been so busy—”

  “It’s life,” Earnest said. “You only have so much mana. If you cast all your spells, then take me into a dark forest at night, that would be a stupid choice.”

  Dalliance shrugged helplessly. They'd go hunting eventually, but he just didn't have that many ends on the proverbial candle. Work, class, food, homework, and now Earnest. It had been too much.

  When they had last spoken, he had fully intended to do exactly that—split himself five ways. But if he wanted to compete in practicals, he needed materials, which cost mana. And spare mana.

  “I think I’m about there,” he said.

  He'd found a nice place to hunt. If there was just more time in the day.

  "You look a little glum," Earnest noted as the passing crowd thinned and he got the time to really look Dalliance over.

  "Oh," said Dalliance with a long, drawn-out sound. "I don't know that I've got anything new to complain about. Just, I have to make a spell—" he sounded forlorn, saying a sentence that he knew he once would have done almost anything to be able to say, "—for finals, and I've been trying to figure out how to make one that I can cast with only a few fingers."

  Earnest gave him a look. "It's horrible what happened," he said, "but is eight of ten fingers really that bad?" He sounded a little disbelieving, like he thought Dalliance was having him on.

  "Well," said Dalliance after a little thought, "you're passing the control of what you're currently doing with the spell—" Dalliance realized that he wasn't communicating very well but pushed through anyway. "—back and forth between your hands, because the spell needs to know where to go, and it needs to know whether it needs to maybe arc on the way there, to go over someone's head or go around something. Or if I've picked something up, it needs to know if I want it to rotate on the way from where I got it to where I'm putting it. And that's nothing compared to people who are casting, say, a fireball, but they don't want it to hit their friend, and so they need it to only blow up everywhere else."

  Earnest seemed to be following, so Dalliance chanced continuing.

  "There's—it's like if the spell is Whimsy, but she's got a blindfold on, and I'm yelling to her what to do. Except she has to do it with another friend, also blindfolded, and they're doing something together, and you have to yell at that friend. And then there's a third friend, maybe, for some spells, or a fourth. And so they each need someone yelling at them to tell them what to do. And so that's what my hands and mouth and where I'm pointing them and what I'm looking at—they all kind of work together to tell it what it needs to know, so it can do the thing you want the spell to do. And one of my hands isn't good for some of the signs."

  "That sounds stupid," said Earnest. "If it's like that, how could anyone do magic?"

  "Well," Dalliance said, "Most spells don't need all that. If I cast [Gust], all it really cares about is how much magic I gave it to work with. And if I cast [Breath of Fog], it cares how long I cast it for. And I think that's why they're beginner spells—because there's less to go wrong."

  "But you can't really control them," Earnest finished. "Man, this whole time, I thought you were a real mage."

  "If you weren't wearing that habit, I'd have smacked you for that." Dalliance complained.

  "It's got to have some benefit," said Earnest airily. "It's certainly not the glamorous life you might have imagined, being an acolyte."

  "I'd figured you'd be mostly scrubbing floors," Dalliance admitted.

  His friend looked at him ruefully. "You're not far wrong. And there's lots that comes with it I wouldn't have thought of," he admitted.

  Dalliance raised an eyebrow, inviting his friend to elaborate.

  "Well," Earnest said, "who do you think takes roll at the judgments?"

  "For the Gremantle's temple?"

  Dalliance repeated. This was so outside his experience or interest that he'd never given it a second thought. He didn't even know they took roll.

  "Yeah," said Earnest. "They want to know who was there, for posterity, so no one can say that the judgment was made without everyone getting the opportunity to speak up. Or, so—it's the acolytes," he said, because Dalliance was clearly not going to ask. "Acolytes do it. And do you know how the acolytes do it?" he asked.

  "With a pencil and paper?" guessed Dalliance.

  "No," said Earnest, "because you can erase that. It's with a pen, which means I've been learning cursive." He paused. "And calligraphy, or at least the basics, and how to sharpen your pen nib, and how to sand the page down, and what blotting paper is for. I didn't think I was going to be a scribe," he bit off the word. "Bet my signature is better than yours, though," he said, as if the idea had suddenly occurred to him, and not been the point of the whole diatribe at all.

  "No way," said Dalliance. He'd always liked writing his last name, Rather. He found the big R nice and angular, and easy to get a good swoop on the first and last strokes.

  "Absolutely not."

  "Come to the temple sometime," Earnest challenged him.

  And of all the things going on in his life, Dalliance realized the most fun and interesting thing was suddenly the prospect of winning a handwriting competition with his old friend.

  "You did that on purpose," he realized.

  "Did what?" Earnest asked innocently.

  Dalliance squinted at him.

  "Don't know what you're talking about," Earnest lied.

  "Gremantle's Temple, right?" asked Dalliance, speaking each word precisely.

  "I'll be there in the evening," confirmed Earnest.

  "So will I," said Dalliance, an odd bit of cheer working its way onto his face.

  He’d had an idea.

  And that idea had given him another.