Of Transit and Intelligence

These are workings related to the crossing of distances in some way. Many of the most useful workings have to do with communication. Given the scope of Your Grace’s operations, I think you shall immediately see how useful these can be.

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

Transports the caster’s astral body or soul (the distinction is still hotly debated) 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 cheap, and a great Ritual for teaching new students how to shunt costs from themselves to materials - but for most practitioners it does nothing at all: as with politics, you must know people before you can get through the door.

For the select few, Timmet’s First is of remarkable value. The daemon plane is a strange and mesmerizing city, and air and water are freely available. The daemons formally observe our activities, and in some cases take a more active hand, but they only seem happy to lead people to what they call “conference rooms” (of which we believe there are millions) and let us be. We cannot remove things from the daemon world (this has been tried, and all records sealed), nor can we trade objects, but we can communicate as normal.

This allows, for example, spymasters from across the entire Empire to meet and exchange information regardless of distance. Some (very) high-level political scandals have even involved romances conducted this way.

Obviously such a Ritual is controlled to some degree: at the Taprobane Imperial University, only faculty are ever introduced to daemons. I suppose similar rules exist at LTU. Nothing prevents daemons from introducing themselves and abducting people. The degree of information about the daemon world that can be shared varies widely depending on what the daemons call “visa permissions” - even I cannot write more than this, or name daemons of my acquaintance, without some kind of permission.

Without this the words simply vanished from my mind. This is classified as a protective magic of a degree and sophistication that Taprobane’s Cognitohazard Department has spent over fifty years and vast sums trying to break it, with very little success.

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. Others believe that this is similar to the Waste, which generates Hollows or Dungeons seemingly ad infinitum. The cost of this Ritual is continuous and very high; there is a specialised research 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.

This Ritual is used primarily in military operations where the logistics justify the extreme expense. It also requires the careful calibration of masses. For reasons we don’t quite understand, 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 position is impossible to calculate. Using it on people inevitably results in a shower of body parts.

Taprobane requires magicians who would use this spell to attend classes on both legal scholarship and with alchemists (who work with precise quantities). My understanding is that LTU only authorizes its use for weights below that of the average sack of rice.

Nandamitra’s Mother

This is most widely used long-distance communication Ritual in the corpus. Your Grace will like this one: it is 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.

This Ritual is based on another called Gajaba’s Thread (which I will explain later here), reworked so as to apply to speech. It creates a thread between two points, with speech travelling in both directions. The cost of magic is borne equally between both parties; a long conversation over a great distance is therefore a shared expense.

Its primary weakness is that this connection is difficult to modify for more parties (experimental results of twenty people talking simultaneously have been achieved, although only under ideal conditions). It 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 are two Rituals - Onella’s Intercept and The Man in The Middle - that were been designed specifically to catch this signal and enable others to listen in or even manipulate the conversation. Your Grace should avoid it at all costs for sensitive communications. Nevertheless, it sees a great deal of use in small-formation battlefield tactics. And by secret societies, star-struck lovers, conspiracies, and so on, but those generally always get found out.

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. THis makes it cheap but making pathing very difficult to control. Its military utility is considerable and it is widely employed. Taprobane-trained scouts regard it as standard equipment.

Its weaknes iss that 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, for example - the caster often dies. Severe bleeding in the brain is guaranteed. Experienced scouts do not use it alone.

Gajaba’s Leash

Another modification of Gajaba’s Thread. This one allows tracking: 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. It is considered a standard tool even by Singhapura’s Charter Knights when pursuing fugitives.

The critical limitation is that the Thread is bidirectional. A person who is senstitive to magic will feel it immediately; even an ordinary fellow will, in time, become aware that they are being followed. Any general Adept-level practitioner can follow the Thread back to its source. The Leash can be cut cleanly by Sapumal’s Sundering, and other workings can even send Rituals back along the Leash to the origin. This is Singhapura’s courts now specify in their warrants that multiple Leashes - from different directions and squads - be attached to restrain criminals.

Patali’s Whisper

Encodes a short message - the practical limit is a few spoken sentences - into a physical object. This can be retrieved at a later time (usually not more than a day) by touch or by the uttering a 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 even as an activation ritual for self-opening doors and gates. Unfortunately, the Whisper tends to erode materials very quickly, so even metal tarnishes within weeks if used regularly.

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 attempted change or intrusion. It is standard for diplomatic missions out of Singhapura, and a matter of professional habit for any competent practitioner. This is usually paired with Volta’s Fist for an automatic defense mechanism.

The irony is that Kanaka’s Mirror is itself perfectly visible to magical senses. The basic version is regarded as the equivalent of strolling naked into an enemy camp wearing a large wooden sign saying “attack me!” The more sophisticated approach is to pulse, or to run the Mirror intermittently, on an irregular schedule or at such speed that it can’t be seen easily. This, of course requires considerable discpline and practice.

Mahendra’s Decoy

Creates a false magical signature at a specified location. The Decoy can be set to mimic whichever class of signature the caster specifies. Military applications can 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 Decoy is also one of our most reliable wayss of observing Heart Sutra workings. Decoys must be completely plausible in context to sustain themselves. For example, an arrow being a little off the mark is plausible, but replacing a marching army with a circus always fails (and yes, it has been tried). Volta’s Lantern, in particular, can easily break down weak Decoys. Taprobane doctrine is that the observer has to be able to believe what they are seeing.

In Conclusion

Again, Your Grace, this is not comprehensive, but I would like your attention on these particulars. Daub is a great power in the North, but in terms of Singhapura’s military it is equivalent to one outpost. What is valuable is the potential economy and the political control you can bring to the table, and magics like these are crucial for these efforts. Almost every working I have listed here is well-known and can be used in some way for military, justice, trade, or even ordinary civilian convenience - for example, a Gajaba’s Leash can track a merchant caravan and help make sure goods flow on schedule. I will leave Your Grace to dream up the applications.

Folio VIII · Of Magic

Transcribed by Victor Konara