:All governments inevitably make mistakes, and I'm pleased you agree with me about this one. Also that you share my goal. I'd be happy to offer my assistance, though I'll want to know more about how your administration already functions before I'm qualified to give more than the most basic advice; there's a great deal of knowledge I'd need and don't have - any of the language, to start with:

:Yes, of course: Vanyel smiles at him, warmly but very tiredly. :You'll need some briefings. Probably with the other Heralds for now - I'm afraid that my energy may be about to run out. We - can maybe start by getting you some maps and books? I think we have a few texts in Hardornen. Are there other languages from this region that you can read?: 

:A very little Rethwellani, and I very much appreciate it: He'll try to rise, then, since Vanyel is in worse shape than he is. :A very interesting conversation, Herald-Mage Vanyel Ashkevron. One I am very grateful to you for:

:You're welcome: Vanyel ducks his head. :Oh, and please don't feel you need to start on this right away. You're recovering as well - you should feel free to take all the time you need: 

:Advice that certain Herald-Mages could stand to follow: Yfandes teases him, privately. 

Healer Andrel is hovering by the door, and quickly jumps in to help Janos stand and assist him back to his room. 

:I assure you, Herald-Mage, reading is not work:

And then he's going to return to his room, get comfortably settled, thank Andrel graciously, hopefully arrange for some maps or Hardornen books to be sent up, and think about what he's learned about Valdemar.

Janos has come up with a picture of what Valdemar looks like, and it isn't a good one.

The leadership is capable and benevolent - not just normally benevolent, but supernaturally so. Their mages are skilled, if not quite at the level of the Empire's. Their nobles are under control. They have perfectly competent Healers. They have a magical power to prevent civil wars without spending half their income on it, not to mention one to select new members of their leadership group from anywhere in the country, letting them directly appoint competent administrators without the need of a civil-service examination. They started with full information on the Imperial model of government, and the ability to copy any elements they wanted or start anew as they wished.

All of this ought to make the country not just a utopia, but the richest state on Velgarth.

And it isn't. Maybe he's wrong about this, that is a possibility, and it would be the simplest. But the sheets on the bed - the decorations in the halls - the building's construction - the lack of statistics - Vanyel's humility about his own knowledge - Herald's whites - all these suggest that Valdemar is much, much poorer than the Empire.

One hundred years after they fled civilization for a wilderness, that's plausible. Two hundred years. Three hundred years? Perhaps, if you stretch it. Eight hundred years after leaving the Eastern Empire, Janos shouldn't need to build a Western Empire of his own, he should have Gated straight into it!

There are possible explanations. Maybe Imperial prosperity requires a larger population-base than Valdemar can build peacefully, maybe they're (somehow! Vanyel can't be that good!) lying to him about how well their system works. But the explanation that seems most likely, right now, is that who- or what- ever controls Valdemar - the Companion-herd, the spell that Chooses Heralds, the god that cast it - has decided to sacrifice Valdemar's prosperity for some inhuman goal that he cannot comprehend, let alone agree with.

Right now, he wishes he'd learned more about gods before leaving. The teachers of the Hall of Learning had talked so little about them... none of the founders had said much that he'd read, other than restating their fundamental amorality...

But whatever's gone wrong with Valdemar, gods are at the heart of it, and he needs to know more so he can fix it.

He hopes he's wrong. But he thinks people are starving out there, and he has no intention of letting that happen.

He's mostly left alone for the rest of the morning, save for the Healers' regular assessments. 

Around midday, Melody, the Mindhealer from the night before, arrives along with his lunch tray. (They're giving him real food, this time - vegetable stew, greens, a bit of baked fish with cream sauce, bread and butter on the side.) 

:Herald Tantras gave me some books for you: she says. :Selection in Hardornen in the Heralds' library is limited, unfortunately. Vanyel thinks we can dig up some better texts through the Temple of Astera but it'll take a few days: She plops what looks like a history treatise and a book of historical ballads on the bedside table next to his meal. :...Also, I meant to check back with you about the blocks and any aftermath from that: 

He's pleased with the food! Well, actually, he mostly doesn't notice what it is, but to the extent he notices, he's pleased with the food.

:Thank you:, he says, :and thank them both, from me:.

:The blocks were... very uncomfortable:. He'd never actually realized how much of a weakness it was, the extent to which he leaned on his endorsed-compulsions. :I have not noticed any particular aftermath effects.: well, he actually feels a good deal smoother, more comfortable, as if there's now only three swords hanging by a thread above his head instead of five, :but I would like to know if there is any way to defend against them; I don't believe I've encountered the specific technique before:.

Which is horrifying, since while he's technically heard of Mindhealing before, he had not realized that you could use it to do that; he can think of ways to fake it with compulsions, but not easy ones, and his shields would defend against that unless the mage was very good indeed.

:...Most people can't shield out Mindhealing at all. It must be possible, but I wouldn't know how to teach you how, and I don't know who else could either. - I can give you my word that I won't do it again, though. I wasn't anticipating the effects being nearly as incapacitating as they were - normally a block that localized would have correspondingly local and contained effects, and that seemed not to be the case at all. Also, to be honest with you, involving myself at all was already pushing the bounds of Mindhealing ethics. I need to figure out a long-term policy and it's very possible the policy I decide on wouldn't have had me doing that: 

... There's a lot in her speech worth unpacking. She hasn't figured out a long-term policy, meaning... meaning Mindhealing is rare in Valdemar, too. Still, if shielding it out is practically impossible... his brain is immediately filled with ways to use Melody for - assassinations, kidnappings, commando raids...

More important urgent issue: He cannot, in fact, ask her not to give her word she won't do it again, even though it would long-term serve the majority of his endorsed purposes if she dug out Compulsion #6 in another day or two, since he would need to be much more confident than he is that he has a better grasp of the Emperor's him-related needs than the Emperor does in order to have that removed.

:Understood, and I appreciate the guarantee. I think the compulsion was a good deal more general than most, and hence the block on it was, too; that will be the case if you end up treating other Easterners:. Which she probably won't. :I can't provide advice on what such a code would look like, I'm afraid; Mindhealing is extremely rare in the Empire:. Or he'd have known what to do about it better.

Nod. :In that case, I'm likely to be returning to the front in the next couple of days. There aren't enough of us to justify me staying around here when I'm very badly needed there: 

Oh good.

:Understood:

He pauses.

:I do appreciate what you did, though. It may have saved my life:

Nod. :I - can't say I'm glad to hear that, but I am glad we fixed it. And I'm even gladder than I was that you made it out of there: 

:I'm certainly glad I made it here, but I'm afraid you'll get an unreasonably bad picture of the Empire from just this situation. The court's worse than the country is:

...Nod. :I confess I'm curious about what you'd claim are the upsides, but I can't stay. I expect Herald Vanyel will have plenty of questions for you about it later. Is there anything else you need right now?: 

Well, for instance, the Empire has common enough and reliable enough censuses that you can tell how competent a job the government is doing other than by whether there are literal famines taking place. :Nothing very important, though a map would be convenient, to help me follow the details of this history: He taps it as he speaks.

:I think that one has a map included, but it's not recent - I'll see if one of the Healers can chase down a proper map for you: 

And she heads out. 

He is left mostly alone for the next few candlemarks, though at one point another of the Healing-trainees darts in and gives him a map. 

Excellent. Then he's going to start reading the Hardornen history, paying careful attention to mentions of its western and southwestern neighbors, to see what he can learn about the countries. He's particularly curious about their military, of course - about the general military strategies in the west-of-the-Crown cluster - but anything he can learn about how the countries function, he plans to, even if it's just side mentions of little details.

Once he gets his hands on the map, he finds that interesting, too, running his finger along the rivers and borders it shows. It's msising small rivers, he's sure, but other than that it doesn't look too implausible. He'll want a look at the terrain itself - the map never really matches the terrain, he's ridden through invisible marshes and not-worth-mentioning rivers before - before he commands troops, but he'll want to speak the language before then, too, so there's no great hurry.

And at times when he's left alone and he's pretty sure there's no one watching, he'll send out his Farsight, carefully scanning the area first around his room, then around Haven, then in the countryside around that, just to see just what Valdemar looks like at ground level.

Hardorn seems to get on well with Valdemar. It's more recently founded, actually; the Kingdom per se is only around 600 years old, before that it was a collection of smaller city-states. The successor to the first King to consolidate power there did try to invade some Valdemaran territory, and utterly failed, thanks to Valdemar possessing much better logistics - and, though they didn't have more mages at the time and may even have had fewer, their mages were far better trained and able to work as a unit. 

(It's noted that Valdemar didn't invade them back, despite several potential opportunities; in fact, the author of the book claims that Valdemar has a firm policy of never invading a sovereign country's territory, which has been taken more or less strictly by different rulers but has never been fully broken.) 

There've been no full-scale wars between the two nations since, only a few cases where rebelling Hardornen nobles near the Valdemaran border tried to nibble some extra territory, and the Heralds sent an envoy to politely request the King's assistance in dissuading this, not that they seemed to especially need help. (Hardorn, apparently, has a much higher rate of rebellions and civil wars than Valdemar claims, though more than half of their successions are peaceful.) 

There have been a handful of major natural disasters in the last four hundred years - heavy rains leading to severe flooding, an earthquake, a drought that stretched on for nearly four years. Valdemar offered aid each time, even though it's not obvious that the terms of their alliance demanded it. 

Hardorn does not get on well with Karse. Neither kingdom has an especially well-patrolled border, and even during peacetime, the area tends to be home to quite a high population of roaming bandits. Karse has on two occasions invaded Hardorn, and both times managed to nab some territory, not that it can possibly be worth much to them; the land is rough and hilly, unproductive for farming, and each war usually involves a lot of blood-magic being thrown around, causing significant damage.

The book is about fifty years old and obviously doesn't cover the current war, but during previous wars between Valdemar and Karse, Hardorn has usually suffered almost as badly as the combatants; the local weather-patterns mean that any significant combat magic on the eastern half of the Valdemar-Karse border tends to result in storms that blow straight across into Hardorn. The last such war three hundred years ago resulted in a severe famine, despite the fact that it only lasted a year before the then-King of Karse died (supposedly of natural causes, or at least this is what his son claimed) and the new King had a couple of Sunpriests executed for treason and then opened peace talks. 

The book doesn't focus on military history per se, but he can read between the lines. Gates are used very rarely - to move troops in advance of a battle, but not generally during a battle itself, and minimally for supply logistics. Valdemar and Karse don't seem to have enough mages to keep up with the inevitably required weather-working, and they have a lower ratio of Adepts than the Empire does; mages on the stronger end of Master can Gate, but not as far or for as long, and they don't seem to know any concert-work techniques for Gating, let alone permanent Gate artifice. The number of mages relative to un-Gifted troops is also lower. As a result, war is much more often fought along a single front, on the current border, and targeted strikes directly on a major city or capital are almost unheard of. 

Valdemar... did not, over the course of the war, move its troops onto enemy territory for tactical or strategic purposes? Janos can understand 'not attacking other countries', he can recognize the benefits of a clear policy of not making your neighbors afraid, but that's got to be some kind of historian's error. No country that still exists could be that stupid. He's also somewhat curious what Valdemar got out of the aid - a long-term ally, perhaps, but unstable kings have short memories. Possibly sending foreign aid whenever a neighbor has problems is just one of the failure modes of overly-altruistic countries, which - as Vanyel described the Heralds - Valdemar may be. That wouldn't explain their poverty, but it might help mitigate the absurdity of it.

And he is somewhat curious what Hardorn is doing in the present war. Karse is never described in the books as being much larger or much stronger than either of its neighbors alone, and it would either need some major advantage - some uniquely brilliant general or particularly lucky generation of mages? - or to have made a major strategic error, to start wars with both of its northern neighbors at once... and Hardorn couldn't help but take a Karsite invasion of Valdemar as an attack on it, too, not if it would cause famines in the country.

(And he has some trouble believing in no Karse-Hardornen wars over the past three hundred years, but maybe the combination of the Valdemaran limited-alliance and the rough terrain might make that worth it? Not likely, but hardly implausible).

And from the sounds of this, Valdemar and Karse both have *very* undeveloped magic. Surprising; both Savil and Vanyel seemed wholly capable. Maybe that's just that they wanted specialists to look at him, but he might be worried that the two of them are an unusually lucky roll of the dice for Valdemar, when it comes to mage-talent and intelligence coinciding. That would be its own kind of problem.

Haven and the surrounding countryside, to Farsight, pretty much just confirm the hypothesis that Valdemar is much, much poorer than the Empire. 

The major Trade Roads leaving the city - four of them, in the cardinal directions - are paved, though with what looks like a less sophisticated and long-lasting mage-technique than would be used in the Empire. Most of the smaller roads are cobbles or gravel or just hard-packed dirt. There are no canals. No aqueducts. No forms of magically-propelled land transport. Just carts, and people riding horses or mules or on foot. 

The city of Haven itself would be hellish to attempt to take by force. There are three layers of city walls, presumably built at successive times as the city expanded; all of them are quite well maintained, and staffed by blue-uniformed Guards who seem attentive and diligent. The gates through each successive wall don't line up at all, and as soon as the roads enter Haven proper, they go from straight to tortuously winding. The river does run through the city, but is guarded at both the entry and exit points.

The wealthier areas of Haven are...fine. The noble manors are big and well maintained, though less elaborately built than anything in the Capital of the Empire. The few wealthy-looking people he glimpses are dressed more decoratively than the Heralds, which hints that the plain white uniform may be a deliberate choice rather than just a lack of material resources. 

The poor areas of Haven, which are mostly in the western half outside the second-layer wall, are a disaster. Rickety wooden tenements that cannot possibly be up to any building code ever invented anywhere. Narrow dirt streets, sometimes with side ditches for sewage, sometimes without. What looks like the tanners' district is on the west side of the river, and glimpses of the area immediately downstream definitely make it look like raw sewage is being dumped into the water. The Guard-presence is visibly less, and he's glimpsed a few Heralds - quite visible, wearing white and riding white horses - but none in that area. 

There are children in those streets, many of them barefoot despite the snow, all of them underdressed for the cold, all of them clearly underfed.