The World and the Ducchess Within It

Being an Account of the Powers, Places, and Politics of Singhapura and Its Domains

To Her Grace, the Duchess of Daub:

It is the custom of those who seek the favour of a ruler to present themselves bearing gifts proportionate to their estimate of her greatness - horses, weapons, cloth of gold, jewels, and other such costly tokens. I have considered this custom carefully, and have concluded that I am poorly positioned to compete with it; what I possess of value is not portable in the usual sense, cannot be displayed at a banquet, and will not impress anyone standing at a distance. It is the accumulated understanding of a world that I have studied at some length and navigated at considerable personal cost, compressed into the volume Your Grace now holds.

Your Grace will recall my previous work, The Basics of Magic and Practical Applications for Governance, which found some use in your hands; this volume is its successor in spirit if not in scope - everything I have since learned, often by means I would not recommend, set down in a form convenient for a ruler whose time is not available in unlimited quantity.

I will not pretend the gift is without defect. The work is small where the subject is vast, and plain where a more ambitious writer might have reached for ornament. This plainness is deliberate. I have not adorned these pages with the kind of language that impresses at first reading and obscures at second, because it has been my consistent experience that ideas dressed in fine sentences for show are ideas that cannot stand in plain clothes. I have tried to offer Your Grace nothing that requires such assistance.

There are those who would hold that a person of my standing has no proper business addressing himself to the governance of Duchesses. I offer in my defence the same argument that a surveyor might offer: that to understand the mountains, one must first stand in the valley and look up at them, and that to understand the valley, one must have climbed high enough to see its full extent. Your Grace, who stands at a considerable elevation, sees certain things with a clarity unavailable to those below. I, who have spent the greater part of my career looking upward at powers that had every reason to be indifferent to my survival, have seen certain other things with a clarity that elevation tends to obscure. It is my hope that what I have seen from below will prove of some use to one who commands from above.

Read it carefully, Your Grace, and you will find in it the full measure of my wish for your success. Your Grace possesses both the talent and the fortune that genuine greatness requires. And if Your Grace should ever turn her eyes, from whatever height she has by then attained, toward those of us who remain in the lower regions, she will find that the considerable misfortune I have been living with these past years has exceeded, by a great, whatever I might reasonably be said to have deserved.

Your devoted servant,

Art. Of the Paladins, Daub.