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 her greatness. Often this takes the form horses, weapons, cloth of gold, jewels, and other such costly tokens. I, being poor, have only my dreams.

What I possess does not shine and cannot be displayed at a banquet. It, however, perhaps more valuable to Your Grace. It is the accumulated understanding of a world that I have studied at some length and navigated at considerable personal cost. I have compressed into the volume Your Grace now holds, in the hope that it may serve you better than any horse or cloth-of-gold.

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.

I will not pretend the gift is without defect. The work is small where the subject is vast; I have spoken plainly where a more ambitious writer might have reached for ornament. I have not adorned these pages with the style of writing that seeks to impresses or exert a gravity by words alone, because it has been my experience that ideas dressed in fine sentences are often ideas that cannot stand in plain clothes. It it is my desire that this work should either pass wholly unhonoured, or that the truth of its matter and the importance of its subject should alone recommend it.

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 this argument: 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. I, who have spent the greater part of my career looking upward, have seen certain other things with a clarity that elevation might otherwise obscure. It is my hope that what I have seen from below will prove of some use to one who commands from above.

Read this work 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 below, she will find that the considerable misfortune I have been living with these past years has exceeded, by a great margin, whatever I might be said to have deserved.

Your devoted servant, Art, formerly of Singhapura, Now of the Daub Paladins.

Folio I

Transcribed by Victor Konara