It's a while before he's back. When he returns he has another pair of metal things. They're both a lot larger than the one for Hari Ar Sarag Marsaehu. But for what they are they're surprisingly small. They show live feeds of documents but it might not be obvious they're live feeds because they're just sitting there. The titles are Hari Imperial Law and Ehima State Law. Each one has a color-changing circle with a hole in it in one corner.

Ehima State Law is double-sided and written in small writing but it's a pretty unwieldy size even so, maybe two square feet.

"Ask me if you don't understand," says Valanda.

"Thank you.

I can't read yet."

"Oh, right, I said I'd teach you." He sighs and sits down. He opens his notebook. He writes some symbols. He points to each one and makes a sound. It's not a hard alphabet as alphabets go and he doesn't seem to be explaining a dozen ways to pronounce each letter.

She knows some of them, but she's not going to give sign of it, given how she obtained the knowledge. She pays attention. She has a good memory and very good sight-cipher-reading (which this in some sense amounts to). Is he including the tones and such?

Yep, he shows her how each vowel is written for each tone. The system might not be obvious but it's consistent and easy to remember.

She doesn't expect orthographies to be generally derivable from first principles. She continues to pay attention. Can she make her own copy of the alphabet?

He lends her his pencil for it and examines her writing to see if she's doing it right.

Letters, letters. No letter combinations doing something different? If there are she should note those.

None that he mentions.

Iri, meanwhile, watches the whole lesson.

Whenever he feels he's covered what needs to be covered, she can start attempting to make her way through the laws.

The imperial laws should be mostly familiar to her by now. Turns out there aren't very many of them. The language is very precise and detailed. Punishments for first, second and third offenses are listed. They sometimes differ by species but in general they're pretty lenient for an empire with no concept of morality and no qualms about ripping people apart to make an example of them. Fines are the first resort for most things.

Ehima has a lot more laws about a wider variety of things. Making any false statement in the course of advertising any product is punishable by a fine, for instance. There are state taxes, too. Her lack of familiarity with these laws will probably leave her confused by the legal language.

She's going to be confused by legal language a lot, that is a fairly predictable consequence of having started learning the language yesterday.

She makes use of Valanda's offer and asks as needed.

Are there in fact no sedition laws? What are punishments between 'fines' and 'execution'? Can she get any information on torture use from this? What happens if someone cannot afford a fine?

It's not illegal in itself but Ehima has some state laws that could stretch to cover sedition if judges were motivated to interpret them that way. Imperial law has no restrictions on speech but a lot of the actions someone interested in overthrowing them might want to take are otherwise illegal.

Besides fines and execution there are classes about the importance of the law and how to meet your needs without breaking it. Command magic can be used just to keep someone from being violent. Ehima sometimes exiles immigrants but not natives. No one seems to be sentenced to torture but it isn't specified how people condemned to death should be killed and it certainly doesn't say it should be humane or gentle. There is no information on how the courts determine guilt but it doesn't say they don't torture suspects. It doesn't say what happens to people who can't afford fines, either.

What kinds of laws and actions?

She blinks somewhat at "classes about the importance of the law and how to meet your needs without breaking it". (If she ends up back in her world, maybe Myra can find a way to import that.)

That seems like an omission. She asks Valanda about the fines. Also about the legal process.

"It's not always the same thing. There's judicial discretion and sometimes if your victim is alive they can have some influence. The way we know who's guilty is by using knowledge magic. Sometimes we can watch what happened."

What kind of variety of things can happen?

That is a useful thing to be able to do.

"You can be enslaved or killed. You can just pay as much as you have. You can pay some and then pay more later."

Nod.

Law reading.

Anything else likely relevant to her? Anything she expects to have a difficult time following?

Well, theft is illegal even if the property you're stealing is a person and they asked you to, for one thing.

This is not in the least surprising.

Anything particularly complicated? Are there in fact no laws about appropriate social behavior toward one's 'betters' and so on?

Also, while she is reading, what are the laws on how one may treat one's slaves?

There are in fact no laws on either of those things! Sort of. The fine for freeing someone who can't follow the law is higher if the reason they can't is because of your actions, for instance because you hit them on the head until they were too brain-damaged to understand what's against the law.

There might be more complexity hidden in other documents these ones reference, like the one defining adequate safety precautions in building design. Immigration and forest use are both kind of complicated but not likely to be relevant to Sheridan unless she decides to move away somewhere.

Charming.

If she decides to design a building, immigrate, or use a forest, she will research accordingly.

He has to leave again in the afternoon.

There's an episode on the names of different professions. This caralendar is a farmer, he grows apples. This human is a butcher, she sells meat. This essi is a professional defense mage who makes wood buildings fireproof. This caralendar fishes. This agerah is a tutor who teaches people to read.

Magic seems to make a lot of things easier. The farmer can sit down and use magic to make his apples pull themselves off the trees, for instance. But magic seems to be the biggest source of labor-saving inventions: they don't seem to have tractors or chemical fertilizers.

Valanda doesn't have time to answer more questions before bed. He doesn't bring dinner.

From all these 'this is', does she have a general derived understanding of what all the species are and what they're called?

Can she gather anything on how this works with who has what jobs (obviously they can't be doing it by strata) and how people obtain them? And how this relates to what magic they have?

This is going to become a problem, and probably indicates an underlying one. Three options seem to occur: 1) he needs less food than her, and has not realized she needs more. 2) he is eating while away and not bringing her enough for some reason he has. 3) he is also not eating enough.

Can she noting anything that would point to one of those? Does he seem hungry/show signs people do when hungry? Conversely, does he show signs of having eaten while away? (How about Iri?)

She should probably be able to name the species of people in any crowd scenes she sees, if she remembers everything she's learned. The big cats are agerah, the other furry creatures are beluli, the humanoids are caralendri, the birds are thwilit, the snakes are essi, the parasitic worms are ereli.  There doesn't seem to be any information about certain species doing certain jobs. There are some obvious inferences she could make about non-force mage essi and thwilit.

He does look a little thin but not enough so to be sure he's not eating well. He seems annoyed but it's hard to be sure if that's because he's hungry, because he's sharing space with a stranger, because he spent so much of his savings recently, because he's spent so much of his free time answering her questions...

Iri doesn't eat the same foods and might be eating while they're out.