Alses knew that feeling, all right; the sharp needle-stab of anger, simmering and bubbling below the surface, crimson spires raying out from a boiling core. The words, poison-sweet, were merely the icing on the cake; she paid barely any attention to the sounds that came from Nilen's uncaring lips. It hurt, a bit; what had she ever done to the city's foremost architect?
Aside from give her a lot of business in the construction and expansion of Elysium Hall, of course. As far as Alses could remember, she'd always been polite in her dealings with the Akka. A wince crossed her face, her words to Mercadier coming back to haunt her: 'Tarred with the same brush.' Joy.
“Saya Johelm,” Alses replied, her voice clear and bell-like, its echo brisk and sharp in the stark chamber, inclining her head in a half-bow out of respect for the scrupulously fair man who sat, supremely comfortable, waiting for her. At least he seemed to have reserved judgement on her, entirely unlike Nilen, a woman who wanted someone to burn, and didn't seem to much care who it was. “I wish we were meeting under more pleasant circumstances.”
She let his words wash over her like a tide, swallowing hard on the sickness that threatened to overwhelm her defences as his dry, precise diction continued. Her hands were clammy; it was only by supreme effort that she stopped herself from blotting them dry on her robes and twisting the fine silk into rumpled knots.
The tea – although very fine, and with a scent redolent of all the best bits of autumn – didn't particularly help matters, either, a tugging distraction at her auristics and a whisper of stubborn desire in her brain.
'Focus, Alse, focus,' she admonished herself internally, trying to centre herself and find some form of equipoise with which to face the oncoming storm. She needed to be organized, methodical, brilliantly quick in her rhetoric. Alses was skilled at speaking, it was true, all the more so when she had a purpose behind her silver tongue, but there still needed to be at least a soupcon of substance behind what she said.
Especially when it came to Johelm.
“The ban on public magic?” she echoed, buying herself a tick or two more. A few deep breaths, slow and careful, filling her nostrils with the rich scent of cinnamon, underscored by the tannin tang of the tea. It was perhaps too much to hope for that the head of the Seiza would be at less than top form for this, regardless of the time, but it was still interesting to know he'd been at this all night.
“It is a blunt instrument, in my estimation, sir, a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel, and it hurts the mages of this city. No other group in Lhavit is so closely watched and regulated – not without reason, of course, that I freely admit. Many mages have considerable destructive potential at their fingertips, and regulation is a necessary thing if we're to avoid Lhavit becoming a smoking crater sooner or later. But we have the loyal Shinya's eyes on us as it is, the Towers have their own rules and regulations, and all our mages have to be known to the Wizard's Registry and keep those records up to date. To my knowledge – and I am always happy to learn more and be corrected - we don't require nearly as much from any other group of people.”
Alses smiled, a weak and watery thing. “I would say that there is a fine line between protection and persecution, Saya, between the need to safeguard the citizens and the need for their liberty. In my opinion, the ban crosses that line.” She paused for effect, a natural break in the cadences of her speech, weaving a spell of words about the barren chamber. “I know there are those who would argue – and I'm sure they would do so cogently – that mages have an unrivalled capacity and propensity for destruction and that this ban on public magic and an increasing weight of regulation is the only way to 'keep us under control.'”
Alses couldn't help the momentary contemptuous little curl of her lip; the phrase had always irked her on the most fundamental of levels, as though by dint of their understanding of djed people became somehow sub-sentient, more like an animal that needed to be caged and corralled and collared, than a thinking, living, breathing person.
“I don't agree. I disagree with the law itself and the premise on which it's founded on several points, in truth. I know why the law was put in place, at least partly – people were afraid, and fear is so very powerful; I understand.” A sigh, a gentle shake of her head. “But you can't deal with something like magic by locking it away; you drive it underground, instead, out of sight and out of mind, where its nastier aspects – and I won't pretend magic doesn't have those in abundance – can flourish unwatched, unregarded, unregulated: we invite disaster.”
“And again, no other group is under such suspicion, or such watchful scrutiny. People talk of reimancers and their flames, or morphers and their claws, or summoners and their creatures, of all the havoc they can wreak, but, sir, I give you in competition - as an example - the philterers. Do not misunderstand me; Tian J'net is a splendid woman and a good friend, but I know what she could do, were she of a mind.” Alses looked calmly into Johelm's mild gray eyes, the butterflies in her stomach stilled and quieted; she had launched herself from the cliff and it was still too soon to tell whether she would fall or fly.
“A firestorm that could turn the Diamond to ashes in a vial the size of my hand. A poison that could kill us all with a few drops slipped into the cisterns beneath the city. And as for madness, well...Sweet Whispers has its crown, and that I can't deny, but I hear bad things about quicksilver and those who spend too long with it.”
“You could argue that it's all for our own safety, and the safety of others, and to an extent I know that to be right. Unfortunately, that is also a justification behind the abolition of the right to privacy, the rescindment of the principle 'innocent until proven guilty', and the introduction of mandatory execution for every crime from littering to high treason.” A pause.
“Besides, there's a world of difference between a master reimancer with a simple keep-warm fireball in one hand to hold off the winter's chill, and a blizzarded-to-the-eyeballs young buck throwing lightning bolts into the fountain in Springwater Square – one, I hope you agree, is perfectly innocuous whilst the other is not. We already have laws that would apply in the latter case, Saya; Behaviour Likely to Cause a Breach of the Peace comes to mind, and the Shinya have always been good at that sort of thing. They are all mages of a specialised sort, after all.”
Alses shifted slightly, subtly moving a little more of her robes under her, using their bulk as padding against the uncomfortable chair. Privately, she was quite glad to have worn them; a part of her had agonized over whether she should have dressed as Councillor Radiant or merely gone in her own, rather more modest clothes. Now, Alses silently blessed herself for the extra material and the padding it brought.
“There is also the issue of its practicality, Johelm. If we are to keep to the letter of the law, you may as well put handcuffs on my wrists now and have done with it.” She held out milk-white wrists invitingly, slender and innocuous, making the point. “I break it every time I step out of the confines of Elysium Hall; I can no more turn off my auristics than I can stop breathing or force my heart to cease its beating; I am incapable of complying with the law, as is every other master aurist in the city.” A sigh and a smile, and the non-verbal query; when the law had been made, surely the Dusk Tower had had words, at the very least?
“I would also contend it is a kick in the teeth to every mage who's ever answered the city's call in its time of need. When the earthquake shattered the hothouses on the Sharai, we were at the vanguard of the response. Dawn Tower reimancers to quench the flames, Twilight Tower morphers to shift the rubble and evacuate the critically injured, Dusk Tower aurists to find the flickering embers of life under the tons of wreckage. For example.” Another pause, to drive the message home.
“And again, when the Zith come raiding, the mages stand up with the Shinya to fight for their homes and the Diamond. Reimancers to scatter their flocks with air and lightning, and the morphers to take the fight into the skies and drive them back. I won't pretend that the Shinya couldn't cope without us, but many more lives would be lost otherwise, of that at least, I am sure.”
“Magic is woven into the history and fabric of Lhavit,” Alses continued, her voice low and soothing. “Mages laid down their lives to flatten the peaks the city is built on, so that there would be a safe place for people to shelter from Kalea, and mages have continued to give their lives down the centuries to protect this place because it is their home and their sanctuary, a place where we're not shunned or killed for our skills. Magic isn't, perhaps, as important as it once was to Lhavit, but I think the service of the present and sacrifice of the past shouldn't be forgotten. If our reward is to be forced to hide our skills and our talents in our own homes, then Lhavit is no longer quite the place I fell in love with when I arrived.”
.