Armand’s First Letter. Amelia’s First Letter. Cathy’s First Letter.

14 May 1025, Bois-de-Bas

Dear Amelia,

It is a comfort to know that you and your coterie have taken steps to ensure that no citizen of Yorke takes a magically transported brick to the head. I do not know how likely such a tragic event is when using your Iturian Relay, but it is one I have often pondered in connection with my message arrows, which travel by perfect line of sight at great speed. These arrows were of great use to us during Le Maréchal’s war, as out people in Bois-de-Bas could communicate in secret with the hidden base on L’Isle du Grand-Blaireau and also with M. Suprenant in Mont-Havre.

I stopped sending arrows to M. Suprenant almost immediately after the war ended: the target in Mont-Havre was atop Suprenant et Fils, which is not a tall building, and new buildings are erected in Mont-Havre every year. I did not wish to be responsible for damaging someone’s window, or worse, for injuring someone severely, for the sake of saving a day or two.

As for the link to the base on L’Isle du Grand-Blaireau, the island was abandoned until Jack and Cathy began work on the Two Sloops Inn. We used the old message arrows early on to signal Jack to send the inn’s caravan down to Bois-de-Bas to pick up passengers; but the inn is now prosperous enough to afford a caravan driver, and to have the caravan go back and forth at intervals throughout the day.

Still, I mention my arrows for a particular reason. You say that two of Tillotson’s bricks that meant to be transported to Toulouse have have gone astray, and that makes me wonder. In the purest version of the Iturian Relay, so far as I understand it, a wizard can use the relay to send an object across the room from one node to another without reference to any sort of formed object. Our goal has been to provide formed nodes that convert effort into magical power, and so eliminate the need for the wizard, that is, so that relay will work for anyone.

But I beg you to consider this: in your relay you have two nodes, at opposite ends of a table. The wizard intends to send the ball from the first to the second. The two nodes are formed to power the relay so that the wizard need not do so. But what, pray tell, remains to connect the two nodes but the wizard’s intent? What comprises the relay itself, but the wizard’s intent? 

How easy is it to maintain that intent across long distances? Or between two rooms or plots of land, only one of which the wizard has seen for himself?

I predict that Dr. Tillotson, out in the fields of Nexinghamshire, will find it quite easy to use the relay, powered by formed nodes, across whatever distance he likes, provided that he has seen both ends and can picture them clearly; that his efforts will fail otherwise; and that although Octie might be able to operate the relay in Tillotson’s presence he will be quite unable to do so in the good doctor’s absence.

In short, perhaps the bricks disappeared because Dr. Tillotson had only the vaguest notion of where they were to go.

But perhaps forming can provide the solution. My message arrows work by affinity: the arrow head and the target are formed from the same block of wood, and the arrow consequently seeks to rejoin the block from which it was made. Perhaps if the nodes were similarly formed, the affinity could serve to guide the transported subject from one to the other. The wizard’s intent would be, “Establish this relay between this node and its sibling node, wherever the sibling might be, and keep it working,” rather than “Establish this really between this node and that unrelated node in Toulouse.”

I am no expert in wizardry, of course…but from all you and Jérôme had told me, intent plays a vital role in Provençese wizardry, whereas in Cumbrian wizardry the wizard sees himself only as a source of magical power that he can feed into externally constructed spells that then work “of themselves”. But if Cumbrian wizardry is built upon the same natural magic as Provençese wizardry, that cannot be right; the Cumbrian wizard’s intent must be a driving force. By forming a strong connection between the nodes, we might, one might say, crystallize that intent into the nodes themselves. 

I submit this notion to you and Jérôme; as a master former as well as a wizard trained in one of the streams, he is well placed to tell me whether it is plausible or not, and even to try it out.

Meanwhile, speaking of plots of land, I have been out in my sky chair doing some surveying. The wagon works was at the edge of town when it was first; it is now surrounded by the homes of many of our men and their families. But the land beyond that ring of homes is still unoccupied, and I have acquired a large plot of it—with its own hot springs!—as the site of a new guild hall for the Armorican Former’s Guild, and, as I hope, for the a new institute of higher learning. 

These ideas are in the early stages as yet. I have no professors, and no students, for anything but the study of forming; and we have not yet amended the laws of the Armorican Former’s Guild to admit of teaching the craft to non-members. (And if Jérôme, as a master of this guild, could come to Bois-de-Bas for a guild-meeting, I should be very grateful. Do mention it to him, if you would, though I will of course send him a separate note.)

But if I have none of these things, I have the land, and the vision. The rest will come with time.

Your (possibly hubristic) cousin,

Armand

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