Of Transit and Intelligence

The workings that follow concern themselves with distance: crossings, contractions, and the transmission of intelligence across it. Your Grace may demand these of her practitioners; as a caution, may I urge Your Grace to be aware of those same practitioners who may hold such capabilities without her oversight.

Timmet’s Threshold of the World, also known as Timmet’s First

Transports the caster’s astral body or soul, the distinction remaining genuinely unclear, to a transitional realm for formal congress with daemons. This became possible with the consent of daemons after the success of the first Sin-Eater Legion. Entry and exit are tightly governed; the Ritual will not activate unless a counterpart on the other side consents to the intrusion. It is a cheap working, but for most practitioners it does nothing at all, for a reason Your Grace will appreciate in politics: you must know people before you can get through the door.

Timmet’s Hall of Ten Thousand Turnings, also known as Timmet’s Second

Transports the caster to a second transitional realm between planes. Unlike the first Ritual, this one leads a series of endless hallways and rooms, each leading off from the others, containing no air and no water. It is suspected to either be an abandoned realm; enquiries with knowledgeable daemons have resulted in signs that say SITE UNDER CONSTRUCTION on the doors. There are traces of older civilisations in the form of artefacts and partial structures of unknown origin. Survival requires continuous energy expenditure. Some believe that these are remnants of the Graveyard Sutra residue from extremely large, extremely old magic, possibly from Samarskand. The cost of this Ritual is continuous and very high; there is a specialised division at Taprobane University called the Halldivers that treats this as their professional domain.

Timmet’s Exchange of Equal Masses, also known as Timmet’s Third

Teleports the caster by swapping their mass with an equivalent volume of material at the destination. The cost formula is distance squared multiplied by mass squared, which makes long-range use ruinous. The preparation required is considerable; the Ritual is used primarily in heavy construction and military operations, where the logistics justify the expense. It also requires the careful calibration of masses - for reasons yet unknown, when the position of the swap is tightly specified, the volume of material involved becomes impossible to define; when the material is too clearly defined, its subsequent position is impossible to calculate. The Taprobane university requires magicians who would use this spell to attend classes on legal scholarship and courtroom argument.

Nandamitra’s Mother

The most widely used long-distance communication Ritual in the corpus, named not for its creator but for the opening words of the original test message: my mother wants to know if you are coming for dinner.

The mechanism is another Ritual called Gajaba’s Thread, reworked so as to apply to speech. It creates a thread between two points, with speech travelling in both directions by mutual consent, and the cost of magic is borne equally between both parties. A long conversation over a great distance is therefore a shared expense. Its weakness is that this connection is difficult to make private without other Rituals of obfuscation and decryption. The signal, as we call it, travels through whatever natural conductors exist between the two points; in cities, the workings of the Iron Sutra forces it along trees, stray animals, and sometimes even people. There is a Ritual called an Intercept and another called The Man in The Middle that has been designed specifically to catch this signal and enable a third to deceive both parties. Your Grace’s advisors, if tempted to rely on this Ritual, should avoid it at all costs for sensitive communications.

Malavika’s Distant Witness

Detaches a portion of the caster’s sensory awareness and projects it forward as an invisible observer, capable of perceiving sight and sound at the location it occupies. It travels by the Water Sutra’s principles and cannot be rushed or compelled; it finds the most available path, which is not always the most direct one, and cannot pass through complete barriers of worked stone or dense metal. Its military utility is considerable and it is widely employed. Taprobane-trained scouts regard it as standard equipment.

The failure mode Your Grace must understand is this: the Witness is the caster’s actual awareness. The caster’s body remains behind, insensate and entirely undefended, for the duration. If the Witness is detected and destroyed - by Volta’s Lantern, by a practitioner skilled enough to seize and collapse it - the caster suffers the equivalent of a severe blow and may be incapacitated for some days afterward. Experienced scouts do not use it alone. Your Grace should never permit a practitioner to deploy this Ritual without a physical guard posted at their body; to do otherwise is to leave a trained asset lying helpless on the ground while their mind is elsewhere.

Gajaba’s Leash

A development of Gajaba’s Thread, adapted for purposes of tracking rather than connection. Where the original Thread links separated parts of a single entity, the Leash attaches one end of a Thread to a specific person or object, established through physical contact at the time of casting, and allows the holder of the other end to sense the location and general condition of the target at will. It is the standard instrument of Singhapura’s Charter Knights when pursuing fugitives, and is in regular use by the intelligence for the monitoring of persons of interest.

The critical limitation is one learned at considerable expense, and which Your Grace should hold firmly in mind: the Thread is bidirectional. A person of any meaningful magical sensitivity will, in time, become aware that they are being tracked. A trained practitioner can follow the Thread back to its source. The Leash therefore cannot be concealed. It can be cut cleanly by Sapumal’s Sundering, and other workings can even send Rituals back along the Leash to the origin; which is why Singhapura’s courts now specify in their warrants that multiple Leashes be attached at all times to subjects in prison.

Patali’s Whisper

Encodes a short message - the practical limit is a few spoken sentences - into a physical object or a person’s body, for retrieval at a later time by touch or by the utterance of a specified phrase. Unlike Nandamitra’s Mother, the message is stored rather than transmitted; there is no signal to intercept. It is used extensively in dead drops, for sealed orders, and others.

The Iron Sutra governs which materials will hold a Whisper reliably. Organic materials - seasoned wood, worked leather, human bone - retain it cleanly for days or weeks. Alloys hold it poorly; a Whisper encoded in iron or bronze often decays within hours. Encoding in a living carrier is peculiarly difficult.

Kanaka’s Mirror

A continuous passive Ritual that alerts the caster when their person or location is subjected to magical observation, tracking, or scrying. It operates through Mirror Sutra principles: the practitioner’s understanding of their own magical presence becomes sensitive to any intrusion upon it. It is standard equipment for high-value diplomatic missions out of Singhapura, and a matter of professional habit for any practitioner who has, in the course of their career, accumulated enemies of sufficient competence.

The irony is that Kanaka’s Mirror is itself perfectly visible. Any practitioner running Volta’s Lantern will see it as clearly as a lamp in a dark room. It announces that the person carrying it has something worth protecting and expects surveillance. A ruler’s ambassador who arrives wearing Kanaka’s Mirror has told the host court something before she has opened her mouth. The more sophisticated approach is to run the Mirror intermittently, on a schedule irregular enough to provide genuine warning without providing a permanent beacon. The discipline this requires is, in practice, considerable.

Mahendra’s Decoy

Creates a false magical signature at a specified location: the convincing appearance of a practitioner at work, an active Ritual in progress, or an accumulation of magical residue suggesting recent and significant workings. The Decoy can be set to mimic whichever class of signature the caster specifies. Military applications range from drawing enemy scouts toward empty ground to persuading an adversary’s magical analysts that a force is positioned elsewhere, or that a fortification has been more or less heavily worked than it has. It is maintained at a continuous energy cost proportional to the complexity of what is being imitated.

The Heart Sutra is the binding constraint; the Decoy must be narratively plausible to sustain itself. Volta’s Lantern, in particular, is adept at breaking weak Decoys that make no sense in context. Taprobane doctrine as an examination topic is that the most effective Decoys are those that are completely plausible. The analyst’s eye, having found one real thing, extends a measure of trust to what surrounds it. This principle, Your Grace will observe, is not unique to magic.