A muted gasp rippled through the room. Barro and Haivel exchanged a glance, then looked away. Trika’s father glared at his daughter, who had lowered her eyes to the floor, no longer flaunting her beauty as a seductive weapon.
“And,” Perran continued, “I caution you, Trika, to think how your actions can influence others. Emotions are easily manipulated in certain circumstances. Perhaps this will teach you to be more considerate of those around you. And so, by the authority vested in me, I conclude my judgment. In the name of the Son of the Sun and Vkandis Sun Lord, so shall it be!”
Levron had never felt more relieved to depart a town after a judgment. He rode next to Perran, for the first time in two days feeling unburdened by what lay in the future.
“I want to thank you again,” Perran said. “I asked a great deal of you, and I hope you understand the need. What you told me illustrated in detail how people can behave so badly. It’s always a shame to see these things happen, but I’m willing to wager this won’t be the last such case I’m called to judge. Only next time, you won’t be so intimately involved.”
“It was my duty,” Levron replied, warmth flooding his heart at Perran’s apology. “Yes, it was draining. Yes, I wish I didn’t know the three of them. I will say this, your judgment was superb. I found it amazing to see how you dealt with Barro and Haivel. Fining Trika the fifty copper soleri to be paid half to Barro and half to Haivel meant each of them left court owing nothing to the other, and a bit better off besides.”
Perran chucked. “Do you think she will have learned anything?”
Levron thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Probably not. It will take more than a fine to change her, unless her father reins her in at last. Perhaps it might happen one day when someone she truly loves spurns her.” He lifted his head, took a deep breath of the fresh scents of the fields that stretched off from the roadway. “I will tell you this: I never want to return to Streamwood. If there’s another case to be tried there, I beg you . . . please find a substitute.”
Perran laughed and lifted the reins, urging his mount to an easy canter. Levron touched his heels to his horse and caught up, a smile touching his face warmed by the late afternoon sun.
Chapter 17 - Under the Vale - Larry Dixon
Misty and I are asked some very clever and insightful questions when we’re doing Q&A sessions at conventions. One thing I invariably say is, “A Star Trek™ writer once told me, ‘I have one brain to get it right, and the fans have a hundred thousand brains to find what I got wrong.’ ” There are fans and there are Fans, and the True Believers memorize every detail, and how it all comes together, and they make webpages, trivia games, and databases and keep track of all details. We love that. It’s awesome.
We put amazing levels of worldbuilding and research go into even the most casual mentions and tertiary characters. Well, it’s amazing to us anyway. We could be easy to impress. We might be weak compared to a lot of writers, especially role-playing-game writers, but it sure feels like a ton of development. Even when something gets just a passing mention or is glimpsed in the background, there’s been thought put into it. Plus, there are in-jokes, and meta-references, and braided or circular storytelling that have as much to do with stand-up joke framework (warmup, first callout, setup, gag, punchline, callback) as with screenplay or prose structure. Some person or building in the background might be important six books down the line. In one interview we laughed and said we always have four pages of notes for a two-line reference.
This essay shows a little bit of what that forethought is like. And you know what? This is our job, seven days a week, writing and drawing and researching every single day, and we still get things wrong all the time. But I promise you, we sure do our very best for you.
My specialty is the How and Why Things Happen Department. Here are some insights into the Hawkbrothers, the hertasi, and just what a Vale is—and what it’s for.
About 1150 years ago from the “current” point in the Valdemar/Velgarth timeline (circa Perfect Day and Transmutation), the paired disasters known as the Cataclysm occurred. And it was a mess. A deity-level, impossible-to-fix-instantly mess. The seventy-some years before the Cataclysm were called The Mage Wars, because Velgarth’s native magic fields had been harnessed like never before by cabals and individuals. In the centuries before, magic work had been at what might today be called journeyman level at best, and those who used sorcery had few, if any, mentors. Spellwork was mostly experimentation. Experimentation was often lethal. Magery wasn’t a career choice for a long life. Some of these early wizards did keep notes, though, and the ones that didn’t die in a flash of Mage-shaped embers passed their notes along. And so, schools of thought regarding magic and what could be done with it led to those that could eventually be called Adepts.
These Mages often became more than tyrants and more than leaders. They became strategic weapons. Alliances and one-time deals shaped the courses of tribes and nations alike. Just having the social favor of a Mage could be enough to stop a rivals’ invasion of your duchy or hunting grounds. A warlord of great strategic ability could employ a Mage for tide-turning battle tactics, and the Mage would be kept safe and comfortable by the warlord all the rest of the time. Everybody—and let me stress that, everybody—who understood any sort of civilization knew that those who worked magic were to be respected.
The next turning point after Adepts came very swiftly. An Adept could train others to do parts of spellwork and then combine their subworks into a Great Work. This was first used to enrich an eroded floodplain, while the baron’s men built levees to make use of the renewed soil. This historic Great Work used just under sixty journeyman-level Mages and a single Adept.
One of the journeyman Mages was a very young man named Urtho.
At this time, the “texture” of Velgarth’s magic was very rough. It took a brute force approach to cause something to happen, and Great Works nearly always resulted in serious injury for two-thirds of the magic users involved, because excess energy would manifest as light and heat. Very often, spellwork simply wasn’t worth the chance of losing a percentage of your Mage teams to blindness and burns. Magework was reserved solely for things that laborers, soldiers, and engineers could not replicate. And, not incidentally, wherever there was magic, something was going to explode. This was partly because no one had the slightest concept of static electricity, and magework would sometimes create a huge potential charge that would ignite materials and gasses nearby. That never helps. Other times, enchantment-prone materials would accidentally get charged up and detonate. This led to a brief and ill-advised fad of naked spellcasting, which ended not long after the first spate of full-body, smoking head and groin hair burns. Obviously comparing notes literally couldn’t hurt.
A bold tradition arose, by Urtho’s doing, that got Mages together in “salons” to share their information freely about spells and energies, regardless of their political leanings or ranks. It was against common law, even considered traitorous by some, but the fear of and respect for Mages were such that these salons were not once raided. Urtho was, to put it mildly, likable. Whereas so many colleagues were gruff or pained by old wounds or insufferably self-important, Urtho had kind eyes and a kind heart, to match his ability to maneuver socially. A knack for bribery didn’t hurt, either.
Urtho’s salons became a “movable feast” that would travel village to city, Mage school to secret cabal, and every year they became more lavish and the food much better. Mages were always wealthy. The salons advanced magical theory to a level that might have taken a century more, had they not flourished. Inevitably, these gatherings collapsed due to schism and war, but the world gained much knowledge (and fewer explosions) from them.