“This is pointless.” Mikhail Haverford, Lord of Haverford, General of the Armies of the South, suddenly appeared in the doorway. In fact, he near enough filled the doorway – a shade under six and a half foot tall, broad shouldered and powerfully muscled. The other inhabitants looked up at him in surprise.
“This.” He gestured at the maps covering the table. Careful chalk and charcoal markings showed the deployment of their own troops and their most recent guesses and intelligence for the deployment of the enemy’s.
“Making battle plans is pointless Mikhail?” Mikhail’s son-in-law, Johann. Topicarch of Haverford.
“Absolutely fucking pointless. If I had come in here earlier and replaced this with maps of the situation twenty years ago, could anyone tell me they would spot the difference? Honestly” He glanced round at the other faces in the room in turn but continued before anyone could work out if the question was meant to be answered or not. “I’ve just been swearing in new soldiers. Talked to a lad, guess how his great grandfather died? In this fucking war. This is now the fourth generation of this kid’s family to fight here and he’s not alone. This” another sweep of his arm “is fucking pointless. It’s not working. Strategic maps haven’t changed in four generations. The Diarchy is starving, we’re running low on iron, Land!, we’re running low on soldiers. Won’t be long before there’s not a single crime in the place that isn’t punished with the penal legions. You think being marched south to die is the right punishment for, I don’t know, for selling short pints of ale? Because it will be soon. It’s pointless. We can hold them, they can hold us”
“We can only hold them” Levi – Captain of Mikhail’s Household guard – said mildly “because of this. If we stop looking at their movements, stop planning ours in response, then this war will be over very quickly and not in our favour”
Mikhail gave him the glare of someone who knows the other person is right and slumped in his chair to stare angrily at the maps.
“So. Old growth continues to hold Miner’s Ridge and likely will until the winter. When they weaken we can…” Levi continued.
“What haven’t we tried?” Mikhail suddenly burst out. “I’m serious. Sanctity of the War Council and everything. What haven’t we tried, who haven’t we asked for help? Who can kill a bunch of trees? Can we get a Fire Elementalist? What about them?”
“It’s been tried,” Ruben, Duke of Miller’s Wood, Quartermaster of the Armies of the South “A few times in fact. In conjunction with alchemical fire from the City States. It’s effective at the outer reaches of the jungle, assuming the weather is favourable, but the inner is moist enough that the fires need…shepherding … if they’re going to burn through them and we can’t keep Elementalists or Alchemists alive long enough in there to be able to do that. So we can push them back towards the denser jungle but we can’t hold the land we take. Plus, of course, the dangers of volatile chemicals or insane fire worshippers. We could try again, but I’d be surprised. If Fire Elementalists were able to burn down entire rainforests there would be no rainforests. They simply don’t have that level of power, they’re not the damned Necromancer or anything.”
These were educated and sophisticated men, none of them gave the little bow of respect to the east that was common amongst peasants when Her name was mentioned. There were one or two nervous chuckles though and a couple of quick glances in that direction.
“So that’s where we are then. The only thing we haven’t tried is sending a ship to ask the Necromancer?”
“We’ve actually tried that as well. Several times. None of them returned”. No great surprise there. There was a seemingly inexhaustible supply of people who believed that just because none of the people before them who’d gone to petition the Necromancer for this or that had ever returned didn’t mean she wouldn’t greet them with open arms and grant their stupid whims.
“You know,” Jesse, Duke of Riverend mused – as much to himself as the room “I’ve never really understood the difference between the Necromancer and, just, normal mages.”
“Well, apparently there’s no fucking difference. Neither are any use to us. One won’t talk to us, the others... Well, if our problem was that we wanted to turn a blue plate into a slightly different shade of blue then sure, bring on the mages. But that’s not our problem.”
“I’m serious. She’s a mage, from what I understand. My Seneschal is a mage. What’s the actual real difference between them?”
“Well…” Mikhail trailed off to join the others in staring in thought - a question they thought they knew the answer to but apparently didn’t.
“My Treasurer is a mage. Best one I’ve ever had, kind of mind that likes magic also likes meticulously organised household accounts. Someone get him up here.”
What’s the difference?
“The…the difference between the Necromancer and me, my Lord?” He looked terrified, but despite that managed to nod respectfully towards Her.
“Is this your first War Counc…fuck, of course it is. OK. In this room, I’m Mikhail. If I’m wrong, you say ‘Mikhail, you’re wrong’ and I don’t get mad. If you disagree, you say ‘I disagree’ and give your reasons. If I don’t understand something I ask and you clarify and no-one thinks anyone is stupid. We won the war in the Northern Duchies but that doesn’t mean there weren’t lessons to be learnt. And yes, the difference between you and the Necromancer. She could end this war with a click of her fingers right? She’s a mage, you’re a mage. Why can’t you?”
“Well. Errrm. Yes, she probably could. Not with a click of her fingers, she’d need to say some things but that’s neither here nor…” he was cut off.
“No. Start there. She’d say some words. Why don’t you just say those words? Do they only work for Her?”
“No, my Lord, errr, Mikhail. Sorry. No, anyone who says them would have the same effect, as far as we know. We just don’t know what words to say.”
“Hocus pocus, iggle figgle, this war is over”
“Well, no. This war is over is too…OK, my Lord. When we cast a spell what we’re doing is saying something in a language in which it’s impossible to lie. So to end the…” cut off again.
“So you couldn’t say this war is over because that would be a lie?”
“No. The other way round. When we say something in that language reality reshapes so that it isn’t a lie. So when I, errrm, may I?” He gestured towards a stick of chalk on the table and, at Mikhail’s nod, took it and muttered a long phrase under his breath. The chalk he held suddenly grew a half inch. “What I did there, in brief, is I said I am holding something as long as my index finger. And reality changed so that I wasn’t lying.” Turning a small piece of chalk in to a slightly larger piece of chalk was precisely the sort of parlour trick mages were known for. Useless, in short. There were considerably more rolled eyes than gasps, but Mikhail leant forwards and despite the lack of rank in the room, others followed his lead.
“So you could just say ‘All the enemy soldiers are the length of my index finger’”
“No. I don’t know the word for soldiers, or enemy, and there…there probably isn’t one. You see, the language of magic is, well, we call this the Problem of Precision. Or some people do, not me. But, you see there are a lot of words in our language that we don’t really know what they mean. Errrrm. Enemy and soldier are both like that.”
“This is a War Council man. I think we know who the enemy are.”
“Well, no. Not…you see, it’s not…OK. There has been a lot of debate, you have been generous enough to allow me to use messenger birds to communicate with other mages? And there has been a lot of debate over the past few decades about what ‘wearing’ means.”
“Wearing like ‘I am wearing clothes’? I know what wearing means.”
“No, errrm, my Lord, Mikhail, with respect, we don’t. We…we fill in some gaps in our heads. So, if I made a mark on you with this red chalk, would you say you were wearing red chalk?”
“Of course not”
“No. But, imagine, if the King’s courtiers and the fashion and suchlike, imagine if they all started having some red chalk marks on them and it was fashionable. Would you say they were wearing red chalk.”
Mikhail stared at him for a moment before shrugging. “Fucking stupid fashion but I can see them doing it. And yes, damnit, I would”
“You see. And if I took a bolt of unworked cloth and draped it over myself no one would say I was wearing cloth but if I embroidered it a bit and draped it over me differently, we’d say I was. And…well, there are lots of examples. Our language, most languages, aren’t very precise. But the magical language is. One word means one thing and our words mean lots of things and we just kind of, between us, we kind of work out…but we can’t do that in the magical language.”
“So you’ve spent decades between you working out how to say ‘I am wearing my hose’ when you’re actually not and having them magically appear. I guess that saves time in the morning”
“Oh no, my Lord. We can’t say it in the magical language. We’ve just been clarifying what exactly a statement like that would look like. We don’t know the magical word for wearing. Or hose for that matter.” He looked in abject terror at the expressions of the solid, practical military men in front of him and continued weakly “It’s a, it’s a puzzle, my Lord. It’s interesting trying to work it out, you see…and besides we haven’t actually…the Intention controversy is still…” He stopped digging.
There was silence for a few beats before Mikhail waved a hand. “OK. Forget that. Move on. The difference between you and the Necromancer is that she speaks the language better than you?”
“Basically yes. We have, over the years, we, not me, other mages, we have catalogued the problems with magic and we’re pretty certain she knows the answers to them.”
“Is me asking what the problems with magic are going to make me wish I hadn’t?”
“Errm, my…my Mikhail?”
“Never mind. What are the problems she’s solved?”
The problems with Magic
“Well, different…, there are different lists. But the one I use is Collections, Limits, Measures, Plurals, Pronouns and Time. Errm. Some people add Research but that’s a different type of problem and it doesn’t really…And some people say there’s only Nouns and Precision or even just Precision and they have a strong argument. My Lord. But I think those categories are too big to be…” he trailed off again, muttering “useful” all but inaudibly.
“Mikhail. Errr, I’m sorry man, I don’t know your name” Johann of Haverford eventually spoke up, gesturing vaguely at the mage.
“Julian, my….”
“Mikhail. Julian. Forgive me, but is this productive? We know that our mages can’t turn this war. Julian here outright insists he can’t. Doubtless the Necromancer could but Julian isn’t the Necromancer” in fact Julian looked horrified at the thought “so…is this productive?”
“My vote is yes.” Ruben of Millers Wood “Mages are a tool that are available to us, they are a tool – one of very very few – we haven’t tried. For the ten minutes this conversation will take, let’s explore the possibilities.”
Johann shrugged, conceding the point, and gestured for Julian to continue. “But” Mikhail cut him off with a finger “be concise, man. What is the problem” he held up one finger “how does it affect us” he held up a second.
“Yes Mikhail.” He seemed happier with a structure to the conversation, it was almost possible to see the mental ticklist being formed. “Collections refers to words that describe a, well, a collection. Like Army, for example. Or Weapon, or…Building. It’s just not very clear what’s part of an army and what isn’t. So are blacksmiths part of an army? Is an ornamental sword a weapon, or a tankard in a bar fight? When does it start being a weapon, when does it stop? Errrm. This means I can’t use any spells that effect, say, the enemy army or anything like that. We can’t…we can’t really define those words very well. Limits, errrm. This…I’m sorry I don’t know your name, but this man here is in front of me. But is the wall behind him? Or the room on the other side of that wall? Or, let’s see, what direction am I facing? Dus A Thanal? That’s about two hundred miles? Or so? In front of me. The Green Sea? The Karadic Ocean? And so on and so on. All of those things could be reasonably said, in magic, to be in front of me. Casting a spell on, for example, the piece of metal in front of me would affect a fair amount of all the metal in the world. Although in practice it’d probably just result in the person who tried to do it dying”
“Why?”
“Errrm, we call it Efficiency but it’s a bit of a…of a euphemism. Errrrm. Shall I come back to it later and carry on with the problems” he saw his lovely ordered conversation sailing away and made a frantic snatch for it.
“Yes. What else is there? Time?”
“Measures, Plurals, Pronouns and Time, Mikhail. Time is about two things. First we have to say when an effect happens. So earlier I said something like ‘The piece of chalk closest to my hand will be the length of my index finger when I finish this sentence’. Because otherwise the spell begins from the beginning of time, we think, and that causes all sorts of problems. It’s also about how time changes, because, well, at this time of year, the sun has been up for several hours at the southern border by the time it rises over the Northern Duchies. ‘Now’ and words like that break down over long enough distances because it stops being clear what ‘now’ means. At this instance or at this relative time. Or, again, at least that’s what we think is happening. We don’t know how magic works. So that means that casting spells at a distance is very hard, Limits means that as well.”
“What problems are caused by a spell beginning at the beginning of time?”
“Ah, OK. Well lets say I could say something like ‘Every enemy is a carrot’ and win this war at a stroke. But if that began at the beginning of time, then there would be no enemies so I would never have cast the spell. So they wouldn’t be carrots. So I would have cast the spell. So they would be carrots. So I would never have cast the spell. And so on.”
“And that would kill you?”
“Almost certainly, yes. Efficiency, again. Plurals is easy. In our language we, normally at least, make plurals by adding an ‘s’ to the end. But not always. We simply don’t know how to pluralise words in the magical language. So we have to cast the same spell twice to affect two objects and so on. Measures is about our units of inches, feet, hours, all the rest of it. We don’t know the words for those, or what units are used. So we have to say ‘the length of my index finger’ or similar. It’s OK for length but can be a real problem for time. Errrm, we did them out of order and I’m…Pronouns. Again, we simply don’t know how to use pronouns. Endophoric and deictic references in general, in fact. So everything has to be fully specified in a single clause, which gives a limit to how…errrr..how complicated an idea can be.”
“But you think the Necromancer has solved these. Or learnt the required words or however you wish to phrase it” Ruben asked with interest. “How?”
“Well, I mean, if we’re going to start cataloguing everything we don’t know or understand about the Necromancer then…” he trailed off with a shrug.
“What about efficiency” This was Mikhail again, brusque “It seems like the most useful thing we’ve got out of this. How does it kill people?”
Efficiency Kills
“Errrm. OK. Earlier, when I made the chalk bigger” he fiddled with it absently as he talked “As I say, that’s not what I said to do…sorry, used the word ‘say’ a lot there. But you understand me. I said make it the same length as my index finger. Now, there’s actually a lot of ways that could have happened. It could have made the chalk longer, which it did. It could have made my index finger shorter though. Or changed how we, humans, the Diarchy really, measured things. Or, well there’s actually loads of ways, when you think about it. And I didn’t say which one I wanted. Now…a lot of this is conjecture but we’re pretty certain we’re right. The magic, the reshaping of reality, chooses the most efficient thing to change. The easiest thing. Making a stick of chalk longer is one thing, making my finger shorter involves a lot more fiddly work with, like, blood vessels and nerves and my sense of proprioception. Changing how we measure things would mean changing the minds or the thoughts of everyone who used the old system. Making the chalk longer is the easiest, the most efficient.”
“And sometimes the most efficient way to fulfil a request is to kill the person making the request” Levi said with a chuckle.
“Well, yes. Basically. I mean, as far as we can tell. It turns back time a little bit so the request was never made and kills the person so they don’t just…just ask it again. Again, we can’t know for sure because, well, obviously. But it seems like that’s what’s happening.”
“So not only kill the person making the request but then pretend it never happened in the first place?”
“I suppose so, yes. It happens with ambiguous spells as well. Usually they just fail, if you’re not clear. But if it could mean something or if it’s…it’s difficult to explain, if it’s badly worded so it’s a much bigger effect than what you intended…like if I said change the chalk in front of me so it’s the same length as my index finger. Like I said with the Problem of Limits. Well, in that case it’d be easier just to…”
“Just to not bother and kill you”
“Errrm. Yes. At its core.”
“So could you” Mikhail, eyes unfocused on the back of the room and speaking slowly, working everything through in his head “write a spell that’d definitely kill you and then we get the enemy to read it out?”
“Well, yes, theoretically. We don’t know the original written form but we’ve developed our own way of writing the words. But the pronunciation is important, if they pronounced it wrong then nothing would happen. And, I mean, I don’t really see…write it on a piece of paper and leave it around in the hope they fall over it and then one by one read it out loud?” The problem-solving fever was briefly on him, discussing the workings of magic with his peers until with a sudden gasp of horror he realised he wasn’t with his peers. “I mean…I don’t think…there are problems…my Lord Mikhail.”
“Told you man, in this room we speak freely. Don’t worry.” He dismissed the stammering with a wave of his hand. “You’re right anyway. OK. Could you write a spell that it’d be more efficient to kill the speakers and the listeners? Something like “Anyone who hears this will…hmmm.”
“Errrm. I can’t immediately see…” he was silent for a while, turning the piece of chalk over and over with a frown “it’s too complex for me to work on on my own, I think. If I make a list of people who might be able to help can I give it to you for approval? Nothing jumps out as impossible for me but there’s…” He shrugged.
“Yes. Write the names and what you know about other mages, don’t tell anyone I don’t specifically allow. It’ll give you a change from arguing about what wearing means.”
“It will, my Lord. May I?” He gestured to the door, eager to get on with a new problem, and was dismissed with a nod.
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