His eyes went back to the tumbled rubble that had been the Merchant Association building.
As he stood there, another question came to mind, an old question, one that he had asked himself more than once. Why exactly had he been exiled? It had not been just because he had avoided real responsibility. Or that he had been self-centered. Or even because he was a natural ordermage.
After all he had been through, he could see that, at least in the case of the magisters of Nylan, his exile had not been a personal thing for the magisters-except maybe for Kadara. They’d honestly worried about what he might do. But why? Hamor allowed both kinds of mages, and the land didn’t seem any poorer. If anything, more folk were better off. And Fairhaven…
He moistened his lips.
Perhaps that was part of the answer to both questions.
In Recluce, and especially in Nylan, commerce and trade had to serve order. So did the view that the magisters of Nylan had of order and what sort of magery was accepted. The Nylan Merchant Association had to follow those unspoken yet ironclad rules. Nothing could be allowed that conflicted. In Nylan, the rules were frozen in the words of The Basis of Order; in Land’s End, nothing that suggested any change was allowed. Beyond that, did that many really care? Deybri did…and some others, like Khalyt the engineer, or Thorl, but most wanted life to go on peacefully and without unpleasantness, and if a director of the Merchant Association pocketed a few hundred more golds, so long as it wasn’t obvious, no one cared, or cared that much.
They only cared if their view of order happened to be challenged, as Rahl had done, if totally inadvertently.
Yet, was Hamor any different? It, too, had its rules. In Hamor, magery was governed by rules, as it was in Recluce, but almost all forms of magery were allowed. In reality, the rules and practices of magery served commerce and trade, something Rahl had not understood because everyone insisted vigorously that the mage-guards did not protect commerce.
Yet, in practice, as Rahl realized, looking at the ruins before him, the greatest protection of commerce was the maintenance of order and the separation of magery and commerce. If mage-guards were required actually to serve commerce, in time they would come to control it. That was why mages could not be engaged in commerce in Hamor. In that way, at least, Hamor was more honest.
When Rahl thought of it in that fashion, the difference between Hamor and Recluce was both profound and so obvious, yet nowhere had he actually read or heard those differences spelled out that clearly. And those differences told him that there never would be a place for him in Recluce, a realization doubly ironic as he prepared to return there on a mission he had not asked for or sought.
He smiled, sadly and wryly, as he turned from the ruins, the ruins of his own past, in a way, and began to walk back toward the harbor. He glanced up at the sky, but the clouds had thickened, and he didn’t expect sunlight, not for a time; but the sun would shine, in time, not on a scrivener or a clerk, but on a mage-guard of Hamor.
And he would see Deybri…but would it be in an entirely new light?