On Those Who Work Magic, and What Each Sort Costs a Ruler

All magic, Your Grace, is based on the concept of Authority. There is an old word from Samarskand, and it captures the meaning better: Ustaadi, or your ability to affect the world. This means both willpower and hard-earned skill and knowledge but also every strength available: one’s magic, one’s material power, legal or instutitional abilities, every way of making the world do as you will. We now use the word Authority, but I remind you of the old meaning for a reason. A Master of the Lesser Theoretical University may have magic that can grow crops, from their Authority; but a farmer who has cultivated the land for forty years may have just as much, or even more.

Your Grace has Authority, as well. It stems from your power that is legal; it stems from the loyalty your people have to you; from your competence; from respect; even from enmity. Keep this in mind. Magic is a way of harnessing Authority and stamping it more forcefully on specific things or deeds. This is the simplest reduction I can think of.

Now, scholars have long attempted to impose order on the variety of magical practice. The simplest division I can offer Your Grace is one of method: those who work by intuition, and those who work by system. But this method is no longer regarded as useful, so I will try to summarize here how Singhapura classifies and sorts its practitioners.

Of the Seven Dependent Originations of Being

I. Primals

Primals are the purest expression of inherent personal power. They impose themselves upon the world, and the world yields, depending on the strength and will of the one imposing. Many great heroes of history fall into this category; so do a number of tyrants, kings, legends . . .it is not known whether all Emperors of Singhapura have been Primals, but the present Adhiraj almost certainly is.

Ultimately, Primals, Your Grace, are grown, not made. You can teach a man to do the right thing, but there is no discipline or instruction book that can make one a hero. A way of spotting early Primals in your ranks is to look for those who have a skill and vigor and presence that exceeds what a rational man might expect. It is often said that those hermits who take to the wild and to the high fastnesses of the world become Primals through their own exertions.

A Primal in Your Grace’s service is therefore a considerable asset, but a Primal in opposition is a problem. It is difficult to discover their strengths and difficult to decipher their true weaknesses. Johan the Grim, who is said to have founded Daub, was said to be impossible to slay within its borders, resurrecting to such an extent that he nearly became a religious figure; his assasination at the hands of Singhapura proved that his actual power was to create doubles of himself who could share their thoughts between them, and having one safely squirrelled away at all times.

Likewise, the Bandit Prince of the Gontreach, for example, is a force that Wattle’s armies have been completely unable to capture; it may be because he is as fleet of foot as the stories say . . . or he may be capable of disguising himself, or a hundred other things to the same effect.

Their weakness is sophistication. Your Grace will find Primals useful for the application of certain types of personal force, but not a great range of deeds.

II. Binders

In this category we place those who use their power to understand and manipulate hidden Sympathy, or connections between things and people, thus binding them. The most common is the local witch or Vedic, however they term themselves - people who use the kingdom of plants, consumables, and the powers of place and local sympathies. The more famous are the Galdorcraeft traditions and the Hasselbad bards of the North, who use knotwork and stones and song. The alchemists of Lusia, working with rare metals and esoteric substances, can be said to be Binders of a sort.

Binder magic is extraordinarily difficult to systematize and nearly impossible to predict with precision. It depends a great deal on the magician, on their understandings and intuitions, and on circumstances. For example, we know from the bards that a person who does not believe himself to be a musician will never be one, however great his underlying power. The entire enterprise relies on a certain relationship between the magician and his own self-conception, or self-delusion, elevated to an art.

I will say from my observations that the Vedics are probably the lowest order, closer to folk wisdom than true magic, perhaps. Wards, simple healing, growth of crops, perhaps some rain or sunshine - these are village magics, often passed down through apprentices or invented off the cuff, and almost never compatible between practioners.

Nevertheless, they are everywhere, and perhaps there is some use to them, but I will leave that to Your Grace to decide. The Bards are profoundly irritating but there is many a story from Ealdorfold where a Bard, being struck by inspiration, sang of a great victory, and turned doomed men into powerful heroes. Galdors are forbidden to set foot outside Ealdorfold, and thus rare. The Singhapura consensus is that they are the most powerful of this class, but heavily limited by connections to hearth and home and their runestones. The few travelling Galdors we have acquired are strong in their native lands but profoundly weak outside their domains. Your Grace should probably beware of any runestones appearing in Wattle or Daub.

III. Invokers

Those who draw their power from an external source we call Invokers. This is the path of faith, in its broadest sense: the practitioner shapes himself to the requirements of a higher power and becomes, for a while, a vessel for something greater than his own Authority. What the Invoker gains in power he surrenders in autonomy. He is constrained, always, by the nature and requirements of what he channels.

The major Invoker traditions Your Grace will encounter in Daub and in the Empire are:

Firstly, the Haugris Church. The Church claims to draw from the Divine Corpus of the Great Raavan, philosopher-king-god of the ancient Samarskand. Their approach is semi-systematic, codified in the Paramanu Thesis, which gives them more predictability than most Invoker traditions. Church practitioners are bound by whatever tenets of the Church they specialize in. A healer can heal, an Arbiter can fight, but rarely do these abilities coincide.

Secondly, the Temple of Eighteen, which focuses on practitioners meditating and doing certain deeds with the goal of Inheriting the Virtues of their Litanies - the practitioner becomes, temporarily, an avatar of a specific divine principle. Or, as the Church says, they workship Yakshas and become their avatars. Official Singhapura policy is currently not to antagonize the Temple needlessly, even though the Church is aggressive in its expansions.

Your Grace already knows of the issues between the Temple and the Church, especially those that spiral into the realms of governance. Though I grew up in Singhapura, I would suggest that the wise approach is to favor neither, but to make both work to maintain their footholds. The Church, for example, comes with healing and access to reliable messenger services - at the cost of Singhapura and the Church hierarchy knowing everything that passes through them.

The Temple may be quieter, but as a wise man once said, it is a reed that bends in the wind. Its organization has survived many purges and wars, and has learned a great deal about doing much with very little. that Much of modern-day magic derives from precepts and sutras first expounded by the Temple.

The Paladins operate on a simpler principle: live by the code, and the Light provides. Elsewhere, Lusian sorcerers work through contracted entities rather than deities; the power is external, but the relationship is negotiated rather than devotional. Many Lusian Archmages are said to have at least one contracted Yaksha (or, as they say, a Summon) that would, in the very least, match the Paragons of Singhapura. This is a powerful deterrant; nobody will risk war when the end result, regardless of victory, is total devastation for both sides involved.

We suspect that Rosantic spellcasters, with their Grimoires (and sometimes decks of cards, as I’m told is now fashion), may also themselves be Invokers, drawing from the power of their Ascended, though there are arguments for placing them in other traditions. Most of our evidence comes from early studies of mercernary Orders, and that information may no longer be as accurate as we would like.

The danger of an Invoker is not the Invoker himself but whatever stands behind him. When Your Grace considers the loyalty of an Invoker in her service, she must ask not only whether the man is loyal, but whether the power he channels has interests aligned with your own. The Temple Invoker serves Your Grace until his Litany requires otherwise. The Haugris Invoker carries the Church’s interests into every room he enters. They may be of great power, but Your Grace is well advised to regard them as vessels of foreign agents rather than those strictly under your command.

There is a further observation worth making. It is rare for an Invoker to be a person of low personal Authority, because some degree of inherent power is always required to establish and maintain the connection to an external source. However, it is not unknown for foolish Invokers to be corrupted, puppeted or outright destroyed by the powers they seek. They therefore represent a double threat. The Haugris Church, out of its own self-interest, can be relied on to keep a careful eye on potential Invokers. The Litanies of the Temple and Raavan and the Light are not the only things out there.

IV. Ritualists

We come now to the Taprobane System, and to the Lesser Theoretical University, which we name as working in the Ritualist tradition. Ritualists work through language and logical structure. The Pattern is the simplest unit. If Your Grace thinks of an essay, then Patterns are the words, and the Ritual is the complete thing: a composition of Patterns complex enough to sustain itself.

Many Patterns are standardized; many Rituals are standardized; the result is the ability to break down problems into smaller ones, architect solutions, assemble them, and share them across the Empire. This is a type of power that no intuitive tradition can match. One may hand a trained practitioner a Ritual and he can execute it without understanding how it was built, in the way that a soldier may pick up and use a sword without having to forge it from scratch.

I am not exagerrating when I say that Ritualism is to magic what the written word is to literature. Much as an architect hands her plans to a foreman, who can go on to build a hundred houses from one plan, a single new Ritual can spread the length of the Empire and allow thousands to do new works. This is Singhapura’s greatest strength: this is how the empire builds its formidable roads and towers and armies and keeps its people fed.

The costs are the costs of all systems: the more complex they are, the more there is expense, specialization of knowledge, gatekeeping and the competition of peers . . . and dare I say a certain brittleness?

There are minor differences between the workings of Taprobane and Daub’s LTU. In Ritualist magic there must be a device for converting language to effect. We call this the compiler. Taprobane employs a device known as the Universal Ritual Interpreter. The LTU uses a device known as Rossum’s Universal Translator, which designed deliberately to omit support for certain complex Patterns, so as to be cheaper to manufacture. Both universities have together made significant strides in the theory and application of magic; the relationship between the two institutions is one of near-equivalence and some degree of competition and mutual territorialism.

Your Grace benefits from this situation in the same way that you benefit from the tension between the Church and the Temple: two rivals who exhaust their ambitions on each other have less room to maneouver around you.

At the far extension of the Ritualist tradition stands the Iron Pagoda, founded by the Paragon Sangamitta, formerly of Singhapura. The Iron Pagoda treats all existence as mathematical ideals and deviations from them; to the best of my knowledge, their work is about describing the relationships between concepts in a formalism that other systems cannot approach. It plays in a space of high energy and extreme specialization; it is not the kind of magic useful to most people, but it is the kind of magic that could end the world if something were to go wrong inside it.

Your Grace is unlikely to require the Iron Pagoda’s services. But you should, however, know that it exists, in the same the way that a prudent shipmaster knows where the powder magazine is located.

V. Consumers

Consumers are an oddity that no existing system has satisfactorily explained. The original name for them was Peretha Aathma, or souls of greed, but . . . we have since adopted less hostile language. Consumers are able to eat, or drink, or otherwise take into their bodies certain things that give them abilities related to those substances.

A famous case is the Glass Witch, who reportedly ate glass and impale people with glass spears and even bend light; unfortunately for her, she was also extremely fragile, and it turned out nothing could protect her from being flattened by a boulder swung by an irate Taprobane Master. Or the Ash Beast that roams the Waste, who is said to be a man driven mad, consuming the fire of the sun to constantly burn and immolate everthing around him; he is said to be peaceful, and even helpful sometimes, but only at night, and only if he cannot be seen.

Not everyone can consume anything. We have heard of Druids in Ealdorfold who can eat fruits and bark and leaves to become poisonous, or regrow limbs, and so on. There is one general in Singhapura who is said to eat iron before battle to turn his body to the hardest steel. But underneath this there seems to be some idea of Sympathy; certain people are drawn to certain things, but as to why, and how, we do not yet know to hazard a quess.

The counsel I can offer is limited. In the instance of a Consumer in Daub, the best I can suggest is to reason with them, or to hold them off until you can reach out to Singhapura.

VI. The Daemonic

The earliest classifications did not differentiate between the daemonic and Primals. We knew that the beings we call daemons, who occasionally interfere with our world, were kin to the Yakshas, who they call the world-walkers; we knew the Yakshas, in turn, obeyed the Great Old Ones of the daemons. It may even be (although it is often heretical to say) that Yakshas, gods, dieties, spirits, mythical beasts . . . it may be that all of these things are different names for the same type of being.

As our understanding has developed, it has become clear that the daemon world has its own formal architecture of magic; it boasts its own universities and traditions, and much of it appears to be an attempt to reverse-engineer what they call the Word of God. For what purpose, we do not yet understand, but there is some indication that our Ritualist tradition and theirs are similar in intent, if not in ability. Much of what Taprobane systematized was influenced, at a remove of several generations of theorists, by daemonic universities.

As for practicalities, daemons concern Daub in one of three ways. Firstly, some can and do cross over to our world. They tend to be extremely intelligent (as Your Grace no doubt knows) and seek host bodies; a rare few tend to be extraordinarily capable and powerful enough to create their own. I would strongly caution Your Grace to attempt reason rather permit the, shall we say, more zealous approaches of the Church.

Secondly, the Yakshas - the so-called world-crawlers - are potent, if secondary figures in Haugris mythology, and are occasionally very real, especially in areas of great magical disturbance, like the Waste. There is a force of Yakshas specifically known as the NAAGA division that considers it their duty to punish particularly outrageous and powerful magic, especially those that might lead to mass annihilation (such as with Himakatupura) or damage the causality of the world in some way. The Church considers these to be enforcers of the Will of Raavan.

The most appropriate approach to a Yaksha is to retreat and pray in silence. We do not know by which means they operate. At best they might be curious. At world they approached like some sort of natural disaster.

The third are the Hollows. These are the gaps in reality that manifest in the Waste. I believe you call them Portal Worlds here. They are the main sources of the Relics on which Daub and Wattle depend. Our best knowledge is that these are deliberately made in some way by daemons, possibly to help their younger and weaker kind grow in what they consider to be safe, contained spaces. A significant portion of Daub’s commercial and military advantage rests on the equivalent of training facilities built by beings that look on us like adults do at a particularly precocious and annoying toddler.

VII. The Diefic

The Empire worships the inheritance of a death and a legend: Great Raavan, who learned and codified all magic, and passed it down to all humans as his legacy. There is power there, but whether it stems from an active will is beyond me to say.

The Litanies of the Temple of Eighteen exist. From time to time, a Litany has been known to appear, often in the face of great injustice or suffering.

The Light of the Paladins is the one most faiths regard with jealousy, for its powers seemed to be freely given; however, it appears to be much weaker.

Great Yama, said to be on of Raavan’s enforcers, and a daemon in the NAAGA division, is worshipped in Nagenapura in the East as a protector. Many households in the provinces will have a small shrine with a clay lamp; an offering to Ginisundara Devi, a minor goddess of hearth and home. Mahasona, said to be an ancient general under Raavan, is a dread figure whose name translates to mass grave; graveyard-keepers and soldiers smear ash on their hands in his name, and mothers use old stories of him to terrify unruly children. The iconography of Ratnamaris, said to be a god of the sea and of money, is often worn by merchants and sailors of Basnapura. The Rosantic have their Ascended. In Tangowan, they worship the Monsoon Sister and Ina Rasa and dieites said to live in hearths and trees.

Are the gods merely powerful daemons? Are they Primals that have gone far along their path? Consumers? different categories of beings altogether? Your Grace need not resolve the theology. The only advice I can offer is that even when the beings themselves are rare, faith is still very real in the hearts and minds of people. Those devotions are a force just like any other, and must sometimes also be tended.

In Conclusion

By now Your Grace must have realized that you govern a territory in which this whole spectrum lives or has some effect. Even if Your Grace does not directly dabble in magic, you must understand and make use of the kinds of people who use them, and the relationship between the Lesser Theoretical University and those magicians who work by older, less systematized means - especially the Haugris Church and the Temple of Eighteen.

If Singhapura has shown the North one thing, it is that institutions are far more powerful, and far more long-lived, than individuals. The North is full of memories and the tales of heroes and cunning trickters, but institutions with unique capacities inevitably develop political power and confidence to match. Your Grace must keep a weather eye at all times on these things.

Folio V · Of Magic

Transcribed by Victor Konara