The 9th of Aggrave, Year 373 P.R.F. (High Lunar Cycle)

  The Cetimos Ministry of Summoning’s Testing and Isolation Facility #2, on the outskirts of Drebos Altimas

  Once again we were gathered together, all five of us, after Rudolpho used some minor working to invite Master Thomas up to the rooftop patio to join us. Seated once again in the circle of chairs, but this time with a few differences.

  Not everyone had settled on the same seating as last time for one thing, although I did continue to favor the same chair I had originally selected. While waiting for Master Thomas, Rudolpho had prepared more water glasses, so each had one somewhere close to hand. There was once again an awkward air to the whole thing, but it was a different flavor of awkward than before. For better or for worse, I still found hard to say. And Hesra had repositioned one of the scattered small tables so it now sat in the center of our circle, with my recently-conjured tray of Emergency Bandages as a centerpiece.

  Of all of us, I had the impression it was Master Thomas who was the most eager to ask questions at the moment, or perhaps just had the most questions to ask. But I doubt he was any more unaware of the awkward tension than the rest of us, and seemed unsure if he should try to breach it. Rudolpho had seemed to settle back into his more usual self during the wait, which both meant that I wasn’t quite sure what he might be thinking, and also meant one of his many smiles was firmly back in place. Hesra, best as I could tell, still seemed determined to play the peacemaker, or such was my guess.

  And Lady Elutria… I’m not really sure where things stood with her, or with us in general. Which in one way, I suppose that’s exactly what her apology, however forced, was meant to accomplish. We still weren’t on good terms, but I wasn’t quite sure if we were still on bad terms, either. Compared to how I felt about her when Master Thomas and I spoke during breakfast, before anyone else arrived, I guess that’s an improvement? Maybe? Or maybe it should only be viewed as an opportunity for things to improve. Valuable, in that I’m not sure it’s something we possessed before, but still not to be confused with an actual improvement itself.

  As it was, anyway, Lady Elutria sat off to one side from me. Not quite across the circle, not quite next to me on either side. Not quite separate from anyone else, but not quite near anyone, either. Of the group, but maybe not in it. Her noblewoman’s bearing and posture were back, tightly held as if it were some kind of mask to wear. Her gaze was focused unwaveringly on Hesra, or perhaps some feature of the mountainside that was simply in the older woman’s general direction. Either way, a difficult angle for me to accurately gauge whatever expression might be appearing on her face.

  Hesra drew a deeper breath, and then decided to finally break our silence. “So Secia, I didn’t quite catch everything, but do I understand this… hmm… these objects are something you formed from your magic?”

  I still wasn’t quite clear about where the nature of our magics might or might not overlap; the idea that there could even be more than one set of rules magic could function by and still be magic was entirely foreign to me. I was slightly nervous about overstating anything I might be capable of. Still, however reluctantly, I nodded.

  “Rudolpho was telling me about some of the limits of the magic you practice. Specifically, about using magic to create physical objects.” At first I spoke slowly, each word winched from some deeper well. But now I hurried to add, “To be clear though, these won’t last forever. Rudolpho had mentioned something about permanency, even if I can’t quite recall the exact words. And these aren’t permanent. How long they last will vary. Sometimes a day, but it can be both shorter or longer than that if someone carries them into a dungeon. But never forever,” I squeaked out.

  Rudolpho opened his mouth to say something, but Master Thomas beat him to it, and the older man relaxed back into his seat, eyes twinkling. His curiosity now unbarred, Master Thomas launched words like a flurry of arrows from a ranger’s bow. “That’s incredible! A day? Even for so small an object, it would take a team of mages or an entire array of specialized enchantments to create something so intricately detailed and have it last anywhere near as long. A whole day, truly? What is it? What can it do? How did you do it? How much of your magic do you have to devote to it, to keep renewing it from moment to moment?”

  I blinked at this. “I… What? It exists, and it will continue to exist until the spell exhausts itself naturally. So, nothing, I guess? I mean it’s just a simple healer’s charm… They’re bandages, that’s really all they are. I mean, yes, magic bandages of course, but… I’m sorry, did you say a whole team of mages?”

  “It’s self-sustaining? That’s remarkable! I mean the things we could learn… Oh, the possibilities! When we are able to bring you into the city, we’ll have to get you to cast this spell in front of the archanists for them to decipher. They’ll write entire tomes about this, Secia! Tomes!”

  Rudolpho’s radiant smile dimmed ever-so-slightly, although his grin still stretched ear-to-ear. Paternalistically, he broke the other mage’s excited reverie. “I’m sorry, young Master Thomas, but it doesn’t work that way. Secia could cast this spell a dozen times each for every archanist in the world, and we’d never be able to replicate any aspect of her spell. There may be one or two insights we can glean to improve our own spellcasting in other ways, but this feat you see before us will remain Secia’s and Secia’s alone.”

  Master Thomas tore his gaze away from me and the bandages, and turned confusedly to face the archmagus, asking plaintively, “But surely… It’s not like I’ve forgotten what my instructors taught me, but this is something different, isn’t it? Yes, our conventional understanding of magic says that what Secia has done is impossible, but we’re looking directly at proof that it can be done. Will you deny the evidence of our eyes?

  “I know that some of this accomplishment is only feasible because the summoner’s bond helps to facilitate things, but the summoner’s magic is our magic! And Secia’s here, on our world, crafting spells powered by and that function within the astral firmament of our reality. So surely, it’s just a matter of picking apart the mechanism of her spell, as well as the framework that the summoner’s bond provides for it to function…”

  Rudolpho had begun shaking his head sadly halfway through Master Thomas’s impassioned plea, but even as the strength faded from his words, he still managed to rally for one last, “But surely…”

  “No lad, I’m sorry, it’s not. How can it be within Secia’s reach but not ours? You speak of Waingeit’s Paradox. For a little over one hundred and seventy years, archanists everywhere metaphorically hacked and clawed at the problem, from every conceivable approach and angle…,” and with a brief glance at me, “…including some that don’t bear talking about. And they got nowhere, no progress at all. Finally, that grandest of scholars Tremuda Vinith managed to put the question to rest when she managed to prove mathematically that the Paradox was, in fact, unsolvable.

  “To fully comprehend the workings of what allows a summoner’s bond to empower summons such as Secia to perform such impossible feats, one would need to simultaneously have a perspective that was entirely outside of and divorced from our reality, as well as also possessing a perspective completely within and bound by our reality, all at the same time. And even if, somehow, you managed such an impossible viewpoint? The math shows that the summoner’s bond would temporarily cease to function at all so long as it was subject to such observation, still denying you any actual data to extract some insights from. It truly, simply, cannot be done.”

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  The elderly man’s voice softened, “I know how hard that can be to accept. But please trust me when I say I know exactly what I’m talking about here. Studying Vinith’s Fourth Theorem until one understand the framework that conclusion is built on, and then drafting a paper in an attempt to either disprove the theorem or reaffirm it from a different angle, is one of the required milestones to becoming an archmagus.”

  A bemused Hesra chimed in with “I, too, know just how frustrating that can be. The second time I assisted a summoning, we summoned a young man named Fredix Stren. He was some kind of artificer on his world, and he showed us how he could magically link several slate tablets by briefly submerging them in a specially-prepared bath of a liquid crystalline solution. Once linked, anything drawn onto the surface of one slate tablet would leave behind an impression. Not just on that one slate, but for all of them simultaneously. It was a marvel! Instant communication, of any number of written messages, images, or diagrams regardless of their complexity, in complete disregard of the distances involved! Oh, I had such grand plans for what we could do by establishing a nationwide exchange of these tablets!

  “Alas, no matter how many times he showed me how it was done, it only worked if he was the one to do it. Even with that limitation, I still hoped we might put together a grand communication exchange of some kind, but his summoner herself knew better. We could, and did, benefit from a similar but much smaller communication array for a number of years. Almost two decades. But then Fredix insisted on breaking the summoner’s bond that empowered him. Once he had, all of the tablets he’d constructed immediately stopped working.”

  At that, I inserted myself into the conversation, “He broke the bond? Why?”

  Hesra shifted her focus from Master Thomas to me. “Politics, mostly. The tablets were just as much of a boon for us as Fredix himself had suggested they might be. At first, things were straightforward enough. Recognizing the value of what he could offer, as well as the need to carefully prioritize how it should be implemented, he was placed under the direct protection of the Dovmar, first among equals of the Dovinimum, the ruling council of Cetimos.

  “The Dovmar saw to it that the tablets were established exactly where they’d do the most the good, linking the farthest flung outposts of the nation directly with its capitol. I mean, there was probably a little horse trading going on,” she said, with a brief, almost guilty, look in Lady Elutria’s direction, “but by and large it was done fairly, and beyond reproach. The thing of it was, since anything written got shared indiscriminately with all other tablets - the more tablets that were added to the exchange, the more widely any and every bit of news got shared, across the whole of the nation. The instructions each outpost was given limited the tablets to certain uses, primarily emergencies and other items deemed ‘urgent’… I don’t know, but somehow I got the impression the limited context for what was to be shared actually managed to make things worse at times, although I’m not entirely certain of that.

  “As the number of slates that made up the exchange continued to expand and as a result came in to the hands of a widening number of people, a few bad actors started to use the tablets to engage in political or economic intrigue - either by trying to use confidential information to their advantage, or by deliberately sharing things that were not entirely true in one fashion or another.

  “And then poor Fredix tried to help solve the problems by clarifying that when he made new tablets, he didn’t have to link them to the existing collection of tablets. He could put together and add to multiple independent exchanges simultaneously. Well, once people knew that, they started trying to get Fredix to build private competing exchanges instead. Having now seen for themselves just how much of an advantage the slates could provide when things were still working well, nearly every member of the Dovinimum was campaigning to secure an exchange of their own, for them and their member interests. Finally, when Fredix could stand it no more, he petitioned his summoner to break their bond, and she agreed. And then we had no functioning slates to use at all.”

  Hesra smiled wryly at me. “It’s a hard lesson for us to learn, how we all lose if we start fighting over the gifts a summon can offer us. And a mistake we’ve seemingly repeated several times over, throughout the course of our history. Thankfully for you, it was only seven years ago that Fredix’s bond was severed, so the memory is still quite fresh for us. Not quite so much for everyone, admittedly, but much of the membership of the Dovinimum still remains unchanged from Fredix’s day, and the more senior a Centimos official of any stripe is, the more keenly they feel chagrined at any mention of our hand in the ‘Fredix Folly’.”

  “What happened to him? Fredix, I mean. After he broke his bond?” I cautiously asked.

  “He still lives as a guest of the Dovmar, on their estate. The Dovmar fully acknowledged that the true folly of the “Folly” was ours and ours alone, and how even referring to these events by Fredix’s name is rather misleading. He provided good service to Centimos and the Dovmar, with his tablets giving us the advance warning we needed to fend off two attempted invasions by ‘our gracious neighbor to the northwest’. And on a different occasion, the tablets helped to prevent the beginnings of a plague from growing into an epidemic, and Fredix deserves our continuing thanks for all of it.”

  “Don’t go getting any ideas,” warned Lady Elutria, speaking for the first time since we’d sat down. “Fredix is a special case. Force me to break your bond, and you can spend the rest of your days as a homeless, magicless slum dweller.”

  Hesra raised a cautionary eyebrow in Lady Elutria’s direction, but she showed no concern that I could see at the older woman’s apparent disapproval. So I ventured to ask, “So is that an option then? If I really insist, you’d just break my bond and let me go free?”

  Something about Lady Elutria took on a triumphant air, and Hesra sighed. It was Rudolpho who answered me aloud, though. “Yes, Secia. Not here and now, but if when our assessment is over, if you truly insist on it, then yes. We’ll assist you with the steps you need to take to begin formally petitioning to have your bond broken, and continue to support you through the process so long as you want us to.”

  “Formally petition?”

  “A summoner breaking the bond with their summon is no small thing. The Ministry of Summoning has a process in place to carefully document such things. Mostly to ensure that a summoner doesn’t break the bond punitively, without good cause. But if you yourself ask for the bond to broken, well, that’s not looked at trivially either, Secia. Once done, it’s permanent. The petition process exists to ensure you know exactly what the choice you’re making means, with all the consequences to follow. Even if you think you understand, they’ll talk you through it, just to be sure, including providing you with additional time to think things through, to really consider what that’ll mean for you.”

  I’m not exactly sure why I did what I did next. Maybe I was trying to extend her an olive branch, since we were supposed to be starting over, or maybe it was just that she had yet to show any desire to soften or sugarcoat her answers, at least when it came to me. But I turned to Lady Elutria and asked her, “Is that true? It’s really an option?”

  “Yes, it is. We finish our assessment, we register you, we get you on the books. And if you’re too stupid to know just how grateful you should be that I’m upholding my oaths, plural, oaths to maintain this bond with you, then yes.” She grinned. “Just say the word, and we’ll hand them your application for a bond hearing petition with the form sitting right on top of your registration paperwork. An interview, a couple of reports, a pair of hearings, and we’ll be done. Per-man-ent-ly quit of each other,” she finished, drawing out each syllable of the word “permanently”, as if savoring it.

  “I didn’t realize there would be so many steps involved, but it’s good to know the option exists,” I said, doing my best to look nonplussed about how much enjoyment Lady Elutria suddenly seemed to be getting from this conversation.

  If anything, Lady Elutria seemed even more pleased by my response. Confused, I tried to puzzle out why.

  *What has everyone been discussing, practically since sitting down? The bond. Rudolpho never did clarify just how much insight it gives her, but he did mention one thing.*

  Honesty? Mistruths? But I hadn’t said anything I hadn’t meant, did I? Thinking through the words I had spoken aloud, I still couldn’t figure out where my own thoughts were trying to lead me. I truly hadn’t known how much work it would take to convince everyone to let Lady Elutria break our bond - that much seemed inarguable to me.

  So what was the rest of it? “…but it’s good to know the option exists?” But it was a good thing to know, wasn’t it? Why wouldn’t I want to know what all of my options are, given how things have gone so far? Why wouldn’t I be happy to know of this now? I couldn’t be unhappy the option exists?

  Could I?