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

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.

At the intuitive end stand the Sahaja. These are Binders, Vedics, druids, and the considerable chaotic inheritance of the North. They work by perceiving hidden connections between things and manipulating them. Their magic is flexible and low in cost. It is also, therefore, often weak, difficult to teach, to administer, to audit, and to replicate. A Vedic may serve Your Grace faithfully, but I know of few who have successfully imparted their teachings, or stood up to extended scrutiny of methods.

At the systematic end stand the Rachana. This is the approach of Taprobane, and of Daub’s own Lesser Theoretical University. Here, magic is akin to engineering and architecture. Patterns are the smallest unit, Rituals are composed of Patterns, and the entire edifice can be handed to a second practitioner who need not understand its construction to execute it. This is Singhapura’s greatest strength: the study of such magics will show Your Grace 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 brittleness in the failure mode as circumstances depart from design.

Your Grace governs a city in which both traditions are present, 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 — bears watching. Institutions with unique capacities inevitably develop political confidence to match; this is as true of the LTU as it is of the Merchants Guild, and the principle by which Your Grace manages the one should inform how she manages the other.

Of the Seven Dependent Originations of Being

Beyond the simple axis of intuition and system, the traditions proliferate into seven kinds as recognized by the Taprobane System. It is worth Your Grace’s time to understand each, for each kind of practitioner presents a different requirement when it pertains to their handling.

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. It is not known whether all Emperors of Singhapura have been Primals, but the present Adhiraj almost certainly is, and previous rulers of great repute must have been.

Primals, Your Grace, are difficult to oppose with both magic or the negation thereof. They possess no supernatural abilities, but often have a skill and vigor and presence that exceeds what a rational man might expect to be given to them. They represent a more primordial force, if you will. 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 of a different order than most.

Their weakness is sophistication. Your Grace will find Primals useful for the application of overwhelming personal force and for little else, but should not expect from them the feats that other kinds of practitioner can provide. The word used by scholars is primitive, though seldom to the face of the person being described.

II. Binders

The Galdorcræft traditions of the North are Binder magics; so are the singing and the knot-work of witches, the older traditions that predate any formal system. The principle is that personal power is used to perceive and manipulate the hidden Sympathy, or connections between things, binding them to varying degrees. The alchemists of Lusia, working with rare metals and esoteric substances, may be said to be Binders of a sort; so too, may the Vedics, who use the kingdom of plants, consumables, and the powers of place and local sympathies; but in my opinion the latter is of a low order of Binding, and more akin to folk wisdom than real craft.

Binder magic is extraordinarily difficult to systematize and nearly impossible to predict with precision, and it is dependent on both the particular magician and circumstances entirely outside his control. The clearest illustration is this: a person who does not believe himself to be a skilled Galdor 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. The competent Binder, therefore, is someone who has maintained, through whatever means, an unbroken confidence in that ability.

Your Grace should be advised that Binders can be easily countered by the magics available to us, but that a Binder in your service is often a liability. Their only grace is that they are difficult to detect, and thus make for good spies, but that fact stands for both good and ill. Of the Vedics, there are Vedics in almost every village in the far-flung ruralities, and even in every quarter of Daub; perhaps there is some knowledge, amidst the village gossip, of matters that may concern Your Grace, but the utility of that I must leave for you to decide.

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 the following. The Temple of Eighteen focuses on what they call Inheriting the Virtues of their Litanies — the practitioner becomes, temporarily, an avatar of a specific divine principle.

The Haugris Church claims to draw from the Divine Corpus of Raavan; their approach is semi-systematic, codified in the Paramanu Thesis, which gives them more predictability than most Invoker traditions, but is still within the tradition.

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. Rosantic spellcasters draw from their Grimoires, which are themselves sources of accumulated power.

The danger of an Invoker, stated plainly, 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 her 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. They therefore represent a double threat. We may gain some satisfaction from knowing that the relationship runs both ways: a man who prays but has little personal Authority is not someone to fear. The Haugris Church, out of its own self-interest, can be relied on to keep a careful eye on potential Invokers, and attempt to induct them either into their own offices or those of allied interest, such as the Paladins.

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 — a validated fragment of magical grammar; the Ritual is 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 even share them at scales that no intuitive tradition can match. I claim no falsehood when I say that Ritualism is to magic what the written word is to literature. 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.

There are minor differences between the workings of Taprobane and the LTU. In Ritualist magic there must be a device for converting language to effect; Taprobane employs a device known as the Universal Ritual Interpreter, and what the LTU uses, which is Rossum’s Universal Translator, is designed deliberately to omit support for certain complex Patterns, so as to be cheaper to manufacture. Nevertheless, while the LTU operates in territory that Taprobane has mapped, both universities have together made significant strides in the theory and application of magic; thus the relationship between the two institutions is one of near-equivalence and considerable mutual irritation. Your Grace benefits from this tension in the same way she benefits from that between the Church and the Temple: two rivals who exhaust their ambitions on each other leave less ambition for the direction she rules from.

At the far extension of the Ritualist tradition stands the Iron Pagoda, founded by the Paragon Sangamitta. The Iron Pagoda treats all existence as mathematical ideals and deviations from them, and therefore describes the relationships between concepts in terms of 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. She should, however, know it exists, in the way that a prudent person knows where the powder magazine is located, even if she has no intention of approaching it.

V. Dreamwalkers

Dreamwalkers are an oddity that no existing system has satisfactorily explained; I include them here because to omit them would be to leave Your Grace unprepared for encounters that do occasionally occur. Divination through dreams is a part of every culture we can name, even if only in myth; but some rare persons also possess the ability to act within their dreams in ways that produce consequences in the waking world. Whether the sutras apply to this in the ordinary way is genuinely unclear. No one has managed to instrument a dream; the theorists continue to dispute.

The counsel I can offer is limited. What I would suggest is this: a Dreamwalker is a practitioner whose working leaves no legible trail by any method currently available. Your Grace may find that quality desirable in a servant, but to befriend such a creature is to leave one’s own dreams vulnerable.

VI. The Daemonic

An earlier version of this classification grouped the daemonic with the divine; the boundary between gods and daemons was, in popular understanding, one of moral character rather than structural difference. 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.

I raise this not because Your Grace is likely to negotiate directly with daemonic institutions — though stranger things have occurred — but because the influence of daemonic scholarship is more considerable than is generally acknowledged. Much of what Taprobane systematized was influenced, at a remove of several generations of theorists, by daemonic universities and their own quest for a symbolic architecture of magic.

Furthermore, Tears — which are those gaps in reality through which magic leaks and artefacts arrive — are in many cases the product of daemonic crossings. The Waste has a permanent Tear inside it, which is why the artefact trade exists; thus a significant portion of Daub’s commercial and military advantage rests on a foundation built by accident by beings we cannot understand.

VII. The Diefic

There is a final category that no taxonomy of magic can honestly omit. The gods represent a class of power that preceded every system described above and has never been fully subject to any of them. Their number is beyond easy counting.

I will omit description of the Rosantic Ascended and the like, and instead will focus on the gods of the Empire and the North.

The Empire worships the inheritance of a death; Raavan’s passing and its consequences are the basis of the Church and thus the Empire. There is power there, but whether it stems from an active will is beyond me to say. The Litanies of the Temple of Eighteen are often said by the Church to be daemons of a higher order; I will not dispute theology, but I will include them here; from time to time, a Litany has been known to appear, often in the face of great injustice or suffering, and those who successfully invoke one do not survive its presence. 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 have retreated very far from its former activity, such that the Paladins of the day are weakened, a fraction of their former might.

Though the Church reigns in Singhapura, there are syncretic beliefs that still persist. Great Yama, said to be a guardian of Raavan, 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 as 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. Ratnamaris, said to be a god of the sea and of money, is present among charms and trinkets worn by merchants and sailors of Basnapura.

Your Grace need not resolve the theology of this matter. The advice I can offer is that even if the beings themselves are unreal, faith is very real in the hearts and minds of people. Those devotions, however weak, constitute a kind of magic of their own, and must sometimes also be tended.