Of Magic, and Its Uses in Governance

The chapters that follow concern magic. I understand that my previous attempt - The Basics of Magic and Practical Applications for Governance - was insufficient; Your Grace complained of the lack of political utility and the overdense explanation of theory.

There is a particular species of error to which rulers are prone in their dealings with magic, and it tends toward one of two equally ruinous extremes. The first is to ignore magic entirely, on the grounds that it is the province of specialists and therefore no more the ruler’s concern than the details of tanning or glassblowing. The second is to treat magic as an infinite factory of wishes - to approach every difficulty with the assumption that a sufficiently powerful practitioner can resolve it, and to commit resources and reputation to magical solutions without understanding what those solutions cost.

Your Grace rules Daub. Daub sits at the intersection of more magical traditions, more active disciplines, and more unresolved consequences of past working than almost any other city in the known world, the Great Northern Waste being, as it were, a permanent demonstration. Avoiding magic in Daub is not a position that is available to you.

Thus I have attempted my quest a second time: to describe it at the level a ruler requires rather than the level a practitioner requires. I have here concerned myself largely with results, principles and the boundaries of what can reasonably be demanded, and have left aside the technical apparatus that fills the Taprobane libraries.

I have also assembled for Your Grace a sampling. There are thousands of potential Patterns and hundreds of Rituals, many of which are minor variations upon each other. Rather than exhaust Your Grace with a complete accounting, I have assembled here a broad repertoire of well-known workings drawn from the syllabus against which I myself was examined at Taprobane.

Most of these Rituals originate with Taprobane or with the Lesser Theoretical University of Daub. The compiler differs between the two institutions: Taprobane Rituals require the Universal Ritual Interpreter, while LTU Rituals assume the availability of a Rossum’s Universal Translator. Most practitioners of genuine competence carry discs or plates of tempered steel or bronze with both compilers etched upon them, and can draw a weaker but more portable alternative - the Ritual called Turing’s Array - from memory if need be.

This is not a guarantee that all of them can be cast. Some require groups; some are possible in theory, but are functionally suicidal for the individual practitioner; some carry subtler prerequisites that my brief descriptions may do not fully convey. Your Grace should be warned that workings of large magnitudes require enormous suitably enormous compilers, and thus these are often formae, which take many days to inscribe and much effort to carry without being noticed. Examined together, however, they should give Your Grace a sound understanding of what magic can accomplish, and what it cannot. I have arranged them in practical order, as much as the subject permits.

For serious study I recommend the abridged Ustaad, Volumes One to Sixteen from Taprobane University Press, originally written by Paragon Bolgoda and translated by myself; if your Grace desires but the principles and simpler workings, my own Art of Magic will serve.