"I don't know how to find the people, but if the money is an issue, could they just charge more to check the scripts? Or is it, like, they're already charging the most that would be fair to charge, and that's still not enough to cover the costs?"

"No, I think that can be done. A partial refund in the case of a rejection, perhaps; that would discourage turning it into licit bribery by requiring nine variations rejected before considering anything seriously, which I suspect would be the naive result. Getting the men and getting them together, to establish a shared understanding of what is permissible and then train any future additions, however, is still a cost which is harder to defray, and one which must be paid upfront. ...We might be able to prevail on the Queen's consort to allow us to import some of his censors; I've heard it said he attends the theater religiously, every week when not on campaign."

"A very insightful idea," he says, making a note of it.

Quietly, “Who do we mean by queen’s consort?”

"Emperor Cyprian of the Galtans, Her Majesty Aspexia's husband," whispers an aide to him, because Her Highness likes this one and didn't wave her off when she moved to answer him.

“Thank you.”

Enric still isn’t sure what it means to call someone’s husband a consort. Maybe just a noble word or maybe it’s something scandalous. But if Cyprian is helping with theatre… still not sure what to think, but seems helpful.

"The man who ended the chaos in Galt, and the finest general and statesman of our age," says Xavier, "though of course a ruler can only truly be judged by the grandchildren of his subjects."

Wow, by this metric Gaspodar fucking sucked.

"How much would it actually cost to pay them to agree what's allowed and train more people? More like sixty gold or more like six thousand?"

“Not sure on the number, but would it save money to find whoever was doing censorship before? They’d need to know the new laws, but already know the right way to read, and how to stop plays causing riots.”

"I would expect hundreds or thousands of crowns a year for each city, not tens of thousands, with costs that could be offset by taxing script submissions and theaters?" He looks at Laia, who might know this at all. "This is not my field of expertise." 

"I'm afraid I have no idea how much money the censors made; talking to them at all was generally the producer's job."

“If we bring in the old censors, one thing they won’t know is how to tell which plays are good and which are evil. Maybe we can bring in more Shelynites and ask for help with that part?”

"Could we find someone from the Westcrown playhouses to ask about the cost? Maybe not in time to finish writing the law today, but enough that we can get it done tomorrow?"

"I didn't track the censor's costs, but I did know the taxes paid by the theaters and their companies. I would estimate most of them made about two thousand gold a year, before the taxes, their actor's salaries, and all their other expenses. If a twentieth part of that had to go to censors, in most years, that could fund about a hundred gold of censors per troupe, which could approach a thousand a year in large cities but would stay well below that in the towns. I'd guess a dozen new plays a year per theater, give or take a doubling, and I don't know how many were rejected for each one approved but I'd expect maybe a third as many never approved with an average of two tries each before giving up, and for the successes to take something like three tries each to get their success."

"So that says that a censor - or a team of two if we follow Delegate Porras's suggestion - would see about, let me do the sums, eight scripts from the failures and thirty-six from the successes, call that forty scripts a year per company, of which they'd approve ten and return the other thirty for revisions or flat rejection. Maybe as much as eighty, or as low as twenty. And receive about a hundred gold from the troupe for that labor. That's on the very low end of the Archduke's estimate but I think one script a week for a hundred gold a year is... possible, and if two censors or teams can cover at least three companies it looks likely to be sustainable."

A hundred gold is kind of an astonishingly large amount of money. On the other hand, Delegate Ardiaca paid more than that to get the azata to talk to her, so maybe it's just that everything you might spend money on is astonishingly expensive when you're a noble or the government.

An ordinary laborer makes five gold a year, though he'll rarely see as much as one gold in one place. A competent clerk, twenty, and likewise. A good clerk, one who does things you didn't ask for yet and does them well, forty or so. One who also needs needs specialist experience or has to be imported from Absalom because we don't have very many Shelynites and they could be selling spells and enjoying life more anywhere other than Cheliax? Yeah, you get up to a hundred pretty quickly.

"All right, that sounds feasible. Do we need to draft language now, or is there additional research to be done tonight first?"

She's not antsy about the meeting ending and Laia leaving. Nuh-uh. Not her.

City types and their coins. Enric knows what a story and a song cost, it’s being friends with someone who sings or tells tales. Or, sometimes, putting up a traveler for a few days. 

"We'll want to try to produce a quick draft so our friends can tear it to pieces when we show it to them this evening, I think," Xavier says.

“What’s happening this evening? Who is tearing what to pieces?”

Enric showed up late to the morning meeting, on account of not knowing there would be a morning meeting. Is this something they mentioned during the morning before he showed up? Or is he just in the dark?

"- My mistake. I mean that we should consult sensible people we know as our schedules permit before reassembing tomorrow, to get their opinions on whether the bill is a good one and what flaws exist in our first draft."

Oh, that's a good idea, she should try to remember to ask Alicia when she tells her about the pamphlet.

Okay that makes sense. Nothing to be irritated about.

”Thank you. Another question. Does this mean we’re meeting in the morning again? Or just the normal time. And is it legal to show the draft to people, or only if they’re delegates?”

"No more morning meetings unless something else comes up where we want to be very fast and have a proposal early in the morning floor session before someone else proposes a worse solution for the same problem. I wish I could promise that won't happen again but I'm not sure even the gods could. I think it is extremely unlikely anyone would try to prosecute you for showing the draft to people outside the building, and quite likely the Queen or President would intervene to protect you if they tried, but keeping yourself to discussing it with a handful of others at a time and not involving a whole roomful in the discussion would keep you on the safe side."