"Good on her. The thing about Kyros's Justice is that it is very capricious if someone with power wants it to be. And I have to assume this is how he likes it, because otherwise he could change it. If a judgement is bad, the only recourse is the punishment of the judge. Knowing you've not touched a hair on the head of anyone protected by the Peace, I could nonetheless sentence you to death for violating it, and that would stand. I would be executed if Tunon learned of it, certainly. But even assuming I didn't carry out the sentence myself immediately, as is my right, you would still be legally sentenced to death, and any agent of the Court who met you would be obligated to carry it out in my stead. Violating the Law is forbidden, but executing it faithfully even in the most perverse cases of technicality is sacrosanct."

"Fortunately, making verdicts perversely lax is equally possible, or my job would be much more frustrating."

She scowls. "Absolute and capricious indeed. Not that our laws couldn't be so, but I think they were designed to - resist that, to an extent. Appeals and limits and discretion. If only because the powerful wanted technicalities to abuse and Victoria cannot issue Edicts to stop them from rebelling."

"Better, I imagine. Perhaps I will try it myself. An advisor I've been exchanging letters with thinks I soon will have the opportunity."

"...I have no idea what you're talking about and also that sounds like it will make important people very mad at you."

"Fatebinder Myothis, who has been accumulating lore for decades and contemplating it in retirement for at least one, has been exchanging letters with me. She thinks I am on the path to being an Archon. And Archon's Privilege extends to internal adjudication."

"As for whether it will make important people mad at me... Archons do feud. But Tunon disapproves. So they feud - from a distance. Recent events excepted."

"I guess I should have expected something like that." She glances around at the others. "What I said before remains true, though I'll use a new metaphor and call you the most stable looking piece of flotsam in the storm."

"A naval metaphor! You'll fit in as a Tierswoman yet."

"Bristol Ironworkers and Shipbuilders. Though I personally only helped with... A dozen or two actually when it all fell down, come to think. I'm not a seasoned sailor any more than a soldier."

"We're at least five day's walk from the sea, here, and everyone still talks like a sailor. Their whole culture goes back to the sailors who landed centuries back. It's probably Eb's fault."

"Hey, just because the School of Tides taught a lot of noble brats how to sail doesn't mean we're-"

He gives her a sarcastic look.

"-right. Joke. There's been a lot of mean ones at our expense."

...She had been about to espouse the wonders of the steam engine. Better watch that and keep some cards close to her chest, until there's some actual benefit to speaking it aloud.

Not that she'll care about this reasonable and sensible decision when she's in the heat of a Spark fugue later.

"I did read a lot of different books, while I could, but it's no substitute for actually doing, for many things. And yes, even orphans could get an education. At least in the cities. Though part of that is charity being fashionable."

"The Sages took in a surprising number of orphans and taught them, though in fairness I think most were stuck doing boring scribal work for several decades and it was rarely any of those ones who got taught the magical parts of the curriculum. That's all up in flames, naturally."

"Of course it is. Why wouldn't it be? How many people know how to read? We'd gotten up to four in five..."

"In the Tiers, I think we were up to two in five at last attempt to check, that would be, oh, eight years back. In the Northern Empire, our nearest neighbors, it's about one in fifteen. With the Vellum Citadel turned to the Burning Library - I think we'll be down to one in ten in a generation. Where it goes from there depends which Archon rules the Tiers and how they feel about education. Present company excepted, I'm not optimistic."

"Printing press. Though you need quite a lot of paper and iron to make it practical, hmm..."

"Vellum's always scarce, there's a reason I take notes on myself. Well, other than the fun psychoactives. How does a 'press' speed up writing?"

He flips over a sheet of vellum to its blank back, to devote it entirely to this concept.

"Vellum? You want paper, made from wood chips... Rows and rows of stamps in the shape of letters, arranged in a tray. Lower it into ink. Lower it into paper. Lower it into ink. Lower it into paper. Do this a thousand more times. Then arrange the stamps for the next page, and do that a thousand more times. Before you know it you have a thousand of the same book. That's the simple and easy and cheap version."

"Just wood? I imagine we've tried it, though it sounds like that would rot in a decade or two. But - like a woodcut, but split up - oh, that could work, that would be marvelous. Conveniently, we've got several scripts around, but they use the same basic glyphs - probably Sage's doing - that could be worth it. And if you can do that volume - yes, paper would make sense. Oh, this is marvelous! My favorite idea since 'not dying in a fire to Kyros'."

"Books are really good actually! ...There's lots of ways to treat and preserve paper, variously expensive. Making things cheap is the principal goal of modern engineering, though, and I'm less good at that than at building weird outlandish one-of-a-kind things. Details, I'd need to see what you have to work with around here and try things."

"The School of Ink and Quill - 'Sages' - are - well, were, mostly - about collecting and preserving knowledge, so I imagine even if this kind of thing was common there would still have been heavily-preserved vellum copies which would last for centuries even without preservation magic. But for spreading knowledge, oh yes, excellent. That was always the part of our alleged philosophy we weren't very good at."

"They were always very happy to steal everyone else's secrets. Not so happy with anyone trying to get theirs."

"Luckily the only ill use for a printing press I can think of is propaganda, and it's not like Kyros or Archons can't do that already."

"You'd be surprised," Kohl says thoughtfully, “That could entrench the hierarchy."