"The trouble, of course, is that if you decrease the demand for mages in general there will not be more redmage capacity to distribute, after a while."

"Yeah. If sharing the springs is possible we could have Elves who would consent to being a redmage make child forks of themselves. The existing system for redmages in particular raises - consent concerns - by the standards of my society, it'd be much better if it were voluntary."

"It's a religious matter, the restricted access - as well as an economic one, but the religion might bow to the economy if you are sufficiently otherworldly at it. The consent concerns are unavoidable, the springs just won't mage anyone past a certain age. For whatever it's worth the children tend to want to go."

"They might soon have more appealing alternatives."

"Yes, that might be the sort of thing that would cause relevant theologians to have philosophical insights," says Liatsi.

"The gods themselves are not very likely to clarify?"

"I would not anticipate it at all."

"All right. Thank you very much for your time. We're ready to go on setup as soon as the logistical details are all worked out. Do you personally care to become a summoner before we have everything arranged?"

"It seems like it might serve some purpose to do so in a public ceremonial fashion."

Nod. "I thought we would leave it entirely up to you how much about how summoning works you want to reveal to your populace. If they try it on their own they are likelier to mess up, so we want to encourage people to summon only at the supervised locations; one way to do that is not widely sharing enough information that anyone could guess how to do it. We could instead publish textbooks describing exactly how to do it right, but you really do have to get it right. On my home world it is actually disabled except in certain locations but the Valar are very conservative and the benefits to daeva much smaller at home than they will be here."

"It will be easier to make changes in the one direction than the other. Perhaps when you've trained local personnel their error rate and how much training it takes them to achieve it will be instructive."

Nod. "In that case I recommend that you do a public summoning at one of the established locations - we can have one here, if you like - and that we at least allow it to be implied that it only works in those. We can make the circles not visible to the human eye. You can and probably should select a daeva in advance." 

"Not here, I think - well, not in the palace, perhaps you meant in the city. How should I select a daeva?"

"It would probably be easiest for me to recommend someone."

"That seems reasonable, although I'm curious how you choose them."

"For something this important I would probably ask someone I know very well who wouldn't be tempted to misbehave. In general I really like talking to people and have long lists of daeva who I think would be suited to particular tasks, but they're not as a class very - serious - there's not much at stake for them -"

"I see. Do you have someone in mind?"

"There's someone I would ask first."

"May I know who?"

"The name wouldn't mean anything to you, but sure, he's a demon named Cam who introduced summoning to his world as a human and would probably be happy to play a ceremonial role in its unveiling in this one."

"That sounds appropriate, yes."

"Let me know about anything you might need in choreographing it."

"I'll consult with some people about scripting the event."

"Thank you very much for enabling us to pull this off."

"The pleasure is all mine."