I supposed either was really possible.

“As most of you are probably aware,” he said, his eyes slipping over Keri La Belle as he said “most”, “Chancellor Davies is going to be holding a press conference at five P.M. tonight. We have been ‘asked’ to show the conference in class. Now, we don’t have a whole class period before the conference starts, I don’t know how long it will last, or what will be said in it. I don’t even know for certain what the subject of the conference will be.”

“I wasn’t aware, actually,” La Belle said.

“Yes, I knew that,” Hart said.

“You looked at me like you thought I did.”

“Anyway,” Hart said, “there’s not a lot that we can cover, under the circumstances… I’m not sure whether it’ll be worth trying to continue class after the conference ends, so I’d like to get…”

“Hey! Do you think it’s about the dead swan girl?” La Belle said. “Don’t you think it’s a bunch of crap that one non-human dies and it’s this whole big thing, with imperial agents and press conferences and things?”

“Don’t you think if any of the humans had been royalty from a politically sensitive area, they would have received the same attention?” Hart asked. “If not more?”

“Hell no,” La Belle said. “Humans don’t get shit… we don’t have special dorms, or special meals. Nobody organizes a protest when we go missing. If we had a group for the advancement of humans, people would say it was racist.”

“Or normal,” Ms. Carter said. “There are plenty of groups that advance humanity.”

“Yeah, but, we wouldn’t be allowed to say it right in the group’s name,” La Belle said. “If we had a human channel or a united human college fund or a… a… human league, everybody would jump on their ass and call them racist until they gave up.”

“An organization doesn’t have to say they’re for humanity,” Carter said. “It’s the default state in human-controlled society.”

“What human-controlled society? Like, Hart says it’s okay that she’s getting all this attention because she was a princess, but we humans don’t even have royalty,” she said. “We’re like all advanced past that, and stuff. Oh, unless you count the emperor and empress, but that’s not inherited… is it?”

“The imperial titles are not explicitly hereditary by law, but the emperor traditionally names his successor, and in most cases the person he’s named has been both a descendant or collateral relative of his and in a strong enough position to enforce their claim. Let’s call it semi-hereditary and move on,” Hart said. “But the empires are not the only human states in the world, and there are a number of feudal states and a few constitutional monarchies with human royal families at the head.”

“Whatever, none of them even go here,” La Belle said.

“Well, that would be a very good reason for their deaths to get less attention around campus,” Hart said. “Now, ladies… I wouldn’t mind giving up half of a class period to discussing this kind of topic if I thought it would lead anywhere interesting, but since we can’t do anything more than speculate about what the Chancellor will have to say…”

“We can do that, though,” La Belle said.

“Do what?” Hart asked.

“Speculate.”

“Not in an informed way,” Hart said. “And it seems pointless when we’re going to be find out for sure in… twenty-five minutes. So, let’s talk about Republican History until then.”

“But why do you think it took…”

Thankfully, he just started talking over her at that point. It ended up being more like twenty minutes, because he got the TV set up and attuned to the university’s news feed at a few minutes before five.

“Can we speculate now?” La Belle asked.

“It seems even more pointless to do so, which makes me think there’s less chance I’ll be able to stop you,” Hart said.

“I just want to know why they waited until now to say anything about this,” she said.

“I’m pretty sure the university’s been giving statements pretty non-stop for the last four days,” Hart said. “I imagine they didn’t hold a press conference until they had something worth holding one for.”

“Don’t you think it might just be because the royal family’s coming?” someone asked.

“Well, that would fit the definition of ‘worth holding a press conference over’,” Hart said. “Guys, seriously… I don’t know any more than you do what’s going to happen and what they’re going to say.”

“Would it be the university holding the conference if they actually have something to say about the case?” some guy sitting on the end of the second row asked. “I mean, I’d think it would be the imps announcing if they’d solved anything.”

“That could be,” Hart said. “I really don’t know.”

“That’s a bunch of crap,” La Belle said. “Like you wouldn’t ask what it’s about when they told you to show it in class.”

“Who said I didn’t?”

“And they didn’t tell you?”

“No, even though the folder the dean was carrying was stamped ‘top secret and confidential unless anyone asks’,” Hart said. “One more time: I really don’t know anything. Now, let’s all be quiet… I think this is it.”

The image in the box had just dissolved from a static image of the university… one unfortunately highlighting the fountain… overlaid with floating announcements to a fixed shot of a raised platform in front of the administration building. A large number of people, students and others, were gathered in front of it. The view was pulled too far back to make out a lot of details about the people on the stage, but it looked like a lot of guys in suits. There were a large number of campus guards and provincial officers in between the crowd and the stage.

A man stepped up towards the podium and the image zoomed in on him. He looked a bit like a lawyer, and a lot like he hadn’t slept all week. His short, dark hair was neat in an air-puffed sort of way and his suit looked well-made. He cleared his throat a couple of times before he began.

“Good evening, students, members of the press, and esteemed representatives of the Lebedev family of Mariinsky Lake,” he said, and the view swung around and zoomed in on a group of people sitting in chairs near the stage. The cordon of security around them made it impossible to see much more than a mass of fur hats and coats. “For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Mitch McSmeagol, director of public relations for the university here. In regards to the ongoing investigation into the death of Her Royal Highness, the Princess Lidiya Petrovna Lebedeva… a matter which concerns us all very deeply… we have been informed by the Imperial Bureau of Finding of this Republic, appointed by the grace of His Excellency Magisterion XIII, that the case has been brought to a close. Chancellor Bethany Davies will be reading a statement, after which we’ll be taking a number of questions.”

There was a tiny amount of scattered clapping. He stepped back from the podium and put his hand on Chancellor Davies’s back and said something to her as she stepped up to take his place. She nodded and waved him away.

“Good evening. After a thorough inquest, the Imperial Bureau of Finding has determined that the death of Princess Lidiya was due to natural causes, relating to a monster or monsters who were able to strike due to a previously unconsidered aspect of the university’s protective spells,” the chancellor read. “We stress that there is no reason to worry about the integrity of our protective spells, which are the strongest and most comprehensive in the province. There was more than one casualty of Veil Night frivolities, and in each and every case the victim was found outside the lighted areas protected by our paths. This was also true in Miss Lidiya’s case. While no doubt she felt safe being surrounded by the protective sidewalk that ringed the fountain, the fountain itself was not so protected.”

This was about the last thing I’d expected to hear, though it was all arguably true. If the fountain didn’t have its own separate protective spells woven into it, a ghoul could drop down into the middle of it and be perfectly safe. How it would have got there was the question, and the obvious hole in the story… unless they were claiming that a flying creature had gone after Leda?

Of course, they weren’t actually claiming anything had… just there had been an unspecified “monster or monsters”. That could be a ghoul, it could be a winged terror… it could be a transformed mermaid whom the safety spells didn’t even recognize as a monster and who could just as easily walk up to the fountain and step in as Leda herself had.

Were they trying to fob this story off on the family as a quicker alternative to actually solving the case? That was a better outcome than picking a scapegoat, but only marginally so… what would stop her killer from restraining her appetite after she’d literally got away with murder?

“The death of Princess Lidiya was as tragic as it was unforeseeable, but there is a lesson in it for all of us: be careful. None of us could have guessed a person would be so vulnerable in the fountain after dark…”

“I could have,” Steff whispered.

“…but that’s all a part of why we urge students not to linger out of doors after sunset. When you have to go somewhere, travel with friends and stick to the paths. There has never been a monster attack on a student within the network of sidewalks and footpaths since it was put in back in 198. We extend our deepest sympathies to the family of the victim, the ruling Lebedev family of Mariinsky Lake, and are pleased to be able to offer them our hospitality during these trying times. We hope they will join with us in looking for a way forward, a way to prevent such future tragedies before they happen. Agent Greer from the Imperial Bureau’s field office in Enwich will now discuss his team’s findings.”

I didn’t recognize the man who stepped forward. The fact that they were using someone other than Mike Gregory to deliver the “findings” screamed cover-up to me… maybe he simply wasn’t available, but from what Lee had said it seemed like he’d be unlikely to go along with a story that served political expediency over justice. Greer mumbled his way through a statement that said nothing more than what Davies had already said, which was almost nothing.

I wondered what it would do to the official story when my information reached the authorities, but then I realized that unless Lee had been unable to get a hold of Mr. Embries completely then it was unlikely that he wouldn’t have spoken up before this plan was put into motion. Even if he was only the Vice-Chancellor, he was probably among the people on the stage, and he would probably have been in on the plan.

If they knew but were doing this anyway, what did that mean? Would they rather blame things on some unknown flying creature or mysterious hopping ghouls than go after the mermaids? What exactly would stop them?

“Did you hear Davies? ‘We hope the family will join us in not suing our asses for using their daughter as ghoul chum’,” someone said, to general snickering.

“Hey, it’s not their fault she couldn’t stay on the paths,” La Belle said. “If they sue, I hope they lose… because any money the school pays will just come out of our pockets. Why should I pay for someone else’s stupidity? I pay my fair share already.”

“No argument here,” Hart said.

“If she wanted to swim, we do have a swimming pool,” La Belle said. “Though I don’t think animals should be allowed in it.”

“She wasn’t an animal,” I said, my frustration at the situation boiling over. “She was a person.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t want people-feathers and people-poop in my pool, either,” La Belle said.

“Do you even go to the pool?” one of the other girls in the front row asked her.

“I haven’t yet, but I’m paying for it with my fees,” La Belle said.

“Well, so was she,” someone else said.

“Shh,” Hart said. Mitch McSmeagol had rejoined Davies and Greer at the podium and they were getting into the question-and-answer part of it. Whoever was working the camera for the university’s news channel was having a hard time getting the view and audio pickup focused on the person asking the question. He zoomed way in past the head of the man who was speaking, getting a close up of the lip of the stage. The view jerked upwards as he pulled back, giving us a glimpse of the row of men backing the Chancellor up. They were other high-ranking university officials, probably. Vice-Chancellor Embries was indeed among them. After whizzing past him, the camera came back and focused on him, like he was the most interesting thing the cameraman could see.

The Vice-Chancellor looked entirely too pleased with himself… I meant that both in the general sense that he looked more pleased with himself than was probably altogether healthy for an individual, and in the specific sense that he looked way too happy about the idea that the institution he helped to head up was likely to be facing a lawsuit from the family of a slain student, especially since it seemed really unlikely he’d be able to claim any reward from the family in that case.

“Yes. We have already been meeting and working with the royal family, today, to come to a private solution to… any lingering… issues they may have,” Chancellor Davies was saying, as the view continued to hold on Embries. It was a little muffled, but it was easy enough to make out now that the classroom had fallen completely silent. “They are our guests in the Imperium, and we’ve extended every courtesy and cooperation to them, trying to come to terms with… with what has happened.”

“We would ask that everybody please try to respect their privacy in this time of grief,” the PR head added, quickly and smoothly cutting her off. “Thank you.”

I gathered that the “good question” she was avoiding answering had been about the possibility of a lawsuit… the mention of meeting with the family in private made me wonder just how much pull Embries could have. Enough to all but own a law firm, it seemed. Enough to broker a “private resolution” between Leda’s family and the Imperium that kept the university insulated from the worst fallout?

Pinning it on a totally random wandering monster encounter didn’t exactly make the school look blameless, but it would probably be better than the panic and outrage when it was proven that one of the school’s non-human students had done it. Back towards the coast there would probably be a panic and furor over mermaids, but here in the midst of the woods and plains of Prax there wouldn’t be any targets for people’s worst instincts except for the other residents of Harlowe and the university itself.

But what would become of Iona and Feejee, if neither were officially implicated in Leda’s death? I doubted her family would go along with any plan that didn’t involve bringing the killer or killers to justice, but I wasn’t sure that it could be called “justice” when a representative of the Imperium stood up and read a bit of creative writing and then a “private resolution” took care of the killer.

I didn’t know whether I wanted to be right about all this or not… I supposed it would be better if the panic could be avoided and the threat of mermaid attacks ended at the same time, but for all that this might be a nice, neat solution, it didn’t feel like a clean one. If I was right, then I was really glad I’d kept my name out of things.

I turned to ask Steff what she thought of it all, only to find her staring at the TV with a look that could only be called slack-jawed wonder. Like, her jaw was literally hanging over. There was even a bit of drool in the corner of it. The image in the box was still the same close-up of Mr. Embries… I would have suspected the cameraman had wandered away, but the focus stayed on him too perfectly even when he shifted slightly.

He was really kind of handsome, in a silver fox kind of way. Kind of dashing, kind of stately, with an odd sort of presence that you could feel even through the TV… he didn’t exactly seem like Steff’s type, though.

“Steff?” I said quietly.

“Shh,” she said.

“Steff, come on, what’s the big deal? You’re drooling over this guy,” I said.

“Shh!” several other people said. I looked up and saw that everyone in the room was as transfixed by the image in the TV as Steff… and apparently the cameraman… were. I stared at Embries, wondering exactly what it was about him that demanded this much attention, but I still didn’t see it. I mean, he was handsome and well-dressed, but he was also… old.

He’d been looking slightly to the side… focusing on the podium, probably, but then his gaze slowly turned and focused on the camera, like he’d just noticed it was pointing at him. As he stared out from the screen, there were a few gasps, sighs, and even a moan from around the room. A look of irritation flashed across his face, and the image in the box flickered away, then became the static image of the fountain again.

“Uh… looks.. looks like they’re having some mystical difficulties there,” Hart said, sounding like he was just waking up. “Well, I guess we have all heard the important parts. Class… um… dis… let’s pick it up on Friday, okay?”

“Dude, who was that old guy?” La Belle said. “I kind of think I want him to eat me.”

“Oh, shut up, Keri,” one of the other front row girls said.

Next: Everybody goes to dinner like nothing happens. Or else something happens. You’ll just have to find out, won’t you?

Discuss this story on the Livejournal feed.

“Wait… I thought class didn’t start for another couple of minutes,” Keri La Belle said from her seat in the front row.

“It doesn’t,” Professor Hart replied. “Today’s lesson involved a lot of set-up, though, so I got here early.”

“But why are you talking to us if class hasn’t started yet?” she asked.

“You don’t have to pay attention until then,” he said, placing a few more goblins and then adjusting their positions.

“How do I know when I have to start paying attention?”

“When class starts,” Hart said, continuing to pull out more goblins and placing them on the relief map.

“How do I know when that is, then?” La Belle asked.

“How do you normally know?”

“When you come in and start talking,” she said. “That’s why it’s not fair for you to do that before class starts. Because then how are we supposed to know when class actually begins?”

“For point of reference, assume it starts now,” he said. He stopped placing goblins on the desk… they now outnumbered the red-clad soldiers by more than two-to-one… and gestured for the guys who were crowded around his desk to take their seats.

“But what if someone’s not…”

“If they’re not paying attention, that’s their own fault,” he said. “Now…”

“But you said…”

“Class has begun, Ms. La Belle,” Hart said. “Kindly keep your mouth in the closed position until you’ve figured out what the discussion topic is and have something to contribute on it.”

“It’s war, right?”

“Yes, war,” he said. “When you look at the history of a family, a lineage, you’re talking about a series of marriages and births, mostly. The ‘begats’, to use a classical term. Individuals contribute other accomplishments to the family legacy, but with rare exceptions we don’t divide our family history up into epochs based on when Uncle Mortimer perfected his barbecue sauce. The most compact timelines list nothing more than births, marriages, and deaths.”

For once, I hoped that La Belle would interrupt the class with an irrelevant side-note… from what I could tell, her family did mark its history from the deeds of one ancestor. I would have loved to get more detail or even just confirmation from a stray remark, but Keri appeared to have spent her annoyance charges already. She remained perversely silent.

“But when you talk about the history of a larger people, what you end up talking about most is the wars,” Hart continued. “Advances in culture, art, transportation, crafting… these things are important, yes. We characterize periods by them. But what defines those periods? How do we tell when one ends and another begins? If there’s a war, it’s easy… if there isn’t, there might not be any clear consensus on when exactly something rose or fell.”

He paused to finish laying out the goblin troops. With the caped centurions squaring off against goblins rather than human rebels, it was more apparent that he was looking backwards a bit from the time period we’d been dealing with, back before Magisterion had even arrived in the westering world.

It was an interesting choice, because Hart had bristled at administration requirements to teach material that he saw as outside the stated scope of his class. The decades leading up to the foundation of the Imperial Republic were important background for Early Republican History, but that’s what he’d always treated it as: background. The idea that he’d suddenly break out visual aids to illustrate a fight that had happened long before there was any talk of republic was a little odd.

“So, getting back to the point… a rapidly growing town conquers some of its neighbors in order to feed its expansion… a city begets a city-state,” he said. “Further conquest becomes necessary to secure resources and trade routes, as well as defense. City-state begets an empire, the empire begets colonies, and in some occasions, the colonies eventually beget their own empires. Ms. Carter, is my metaphor too sexual for your tastes?”

“Uh, no, sir,” she replied. “Too martial. What about diplomacy? Most alliances are entered into voluntarily, trade routes can be secured by treaties, weaker neighbors can choose to be absorbed by a stronger one to gain the benefits of its power… colonies can be granted independence after growing into a self-governing state. It doesn’t always have to be war.”

“You have a point, Ms. Carter,” Hart said. “But the hand of war can be felt in those interactions even when it’s not seen. War is costly and disruptive to the point that it can bring about the end of an era. The avoidance of war is a powerful motivator for weaker states and an attractive incentive for strong ones. Any negotiation between distant powers is going to be tinged by the knowledge of who is likely to win if the matter comes to blows. Any consideration made by a neighbor about the benefits of voluntary annexation is going to give weight to the cost of resistance.”

“I’ll grant that this is a useful filter for viewing history,” Carter said. “But I don’t think it’s the only one. War isn’t some elemental force that shapes everything. If anything, it’s the other way around. There are pressures… social, economic, political, cultural pressures… that cause wars.”

“Sure,” Hart said. “And marriages and births don’t just happen, either. They’re a natural culmination of a lot of other, smaller events. But they’re what gets recorded in the Family Librum and, as single events go, they have a disproportionately large impact on everything that follows them. In a way, talking about them is a way of talking about all those other, smaller events.

“History is, broadly speaking, the study of what came before. But it can’t be the study of everything that happened, for three reasons: one, not everything that’s ever happened is equally significant. Something that doesn’t have much impact on what comes next is not going to be anything more than trivia, if we even know about it at all. That brings me to point two: we don’t know and will never know all of what happened. Finally, even if we did, it would take as long to recount it as it did to happen. So when we look at history, what we are looking at is a scale model of the past: it’s reduced in size to something easier to handle, some details are lost while others become more prominent.”

He held up one of the scarlet-clad soldiers, armed with a tiny spear thing.

“Like this,” he said. “This figure stands for a pikeman… several of them, in fact… who fought under General Clayborn in the first Battle of Seven Hills, during the first Dwarf and Goblin War. All of the foot soldiers who fought in the actual Battle of Seven Hills were individuals with faces and lives . Most of them had names. We know who some of them were, in general terms. We have a few letters, at least one surviving diary. These are important primary sources. They help give us a picture of the world in which the battle took place.

“If we wanted another ‘filter’ to look through besides war, we could go personal. We could say with some certainty that this might have been one Antony Kearns, whose letters to his wife are one of the most frequently-narrated pieces of historical correspondence from the pre-Republican era. We know that he was at Seven Hills, though we don’t have his account of it… which means we don’t have even the smallest idea where he was positioned. Dwarven historians gave us extremely accurate charts of the human and goblin troop positions, but they neglected to identify which of them was the one who would eventually become noted for the correspondence he left for posterity.

“Similarly, we know that Mr. Kearns lived much of his life before his military career in Dunmere Keep, and thanks to him we have some idea what a typical day for a merchant’s son living in Dunmere was like. We don’t know enough about him to write a definitive biography… the story of his life… but we have something like the story of a typical day in his life.

“But a typical day in the life of Antony Kearns of Dunmere Keep, as fascinating as it is as part of the historical record, pales in significance in comparison to this day,” Hart said, gesturing at the desktop display with the figurine still in his hand. “This day, more than two decades before the first skirmish of what we now call Magisterion’s War, when the fight was not yet Republican versus Imperial, colonial versus colonizers… Antony Kearns was born on the other side of the ocean. The son of a loyal subject of the Unnamable One, had always counted himself such a subject. He was no militiaman… he served in the scarlet capes in his father’s stead. Antony was a young man when he fought the goblins. He was nearing forty when revolution broke out. So, what changed?

“We know almost nothing about his life in between those two points, for the simple reason that he didn’t have anyone to write to about it. He fought for the Old Empire in one war and against it in the next, serving with distinction under General Clayborn in one and against him in the other. We have some ideas as to how this came to be, we can make some broad inferences as to the rest based on what we know about the merchant class and how their grievances helped lead to the revolution,” Hart said. He put the figure down, back on the battlefield with the other pikemen. “But at this point, we’re moving away from history and into the realm of storytelling… taking what we know about an era and making up something that might have happened to an individual. The personal view is one way of looking at things, but it has its limits. History is found more often in the aggregate, in big mass movements involving lots of people… and what do you call it when you’ve got a great big mass of people all marching in the same direction?”

“A parade?” La Belle guessed.

“An army,” Hart said.

“Armies have parades. Don’t they?”

“So here we go,” he said, ignoring her. “The Battle of Seven Hils. Background: two legions, under General Clayborn, were sent into the northwest in order to help put down a goblin warband that had been massing in the region. Imperial forces were completely unprepared for the scope of the threat, as they had all but exterminated the goblins in that region less than one generation ago… one human generation. Here again you see the human inexperience with goblinoids rearing its face. Human-style reproduction can’t produce an army from a devastated population in a quarter of a century. With goblins, though, there’s no such thing as ‘almost exterminated’. If they don’t care about social niceties, education, or the survival of the mother, the population can increase tenfold in ten years.

“The goblin warriors weren’t much like the armored soldiers you see here,” Hart said, gesturing at the figurines. “Their weapons would have been cruder, their armor practically non-existent. This isn’t to say they weren’t dangerous… they were born and reared for one reason only, to fight. Their lives meant nothing to them, so death meant nothing. Their elders, the survivors of the earlier massacres, were prepared to raise a whole new generation up after them, once the threat to their survival had been dealt with.

“Here is where the goblin unfamiliarity with humans came into play. The goblins had dealt with invaders before, but they had never dealt with anything on the scale of the empire before. They had never fought a foe they couldn’t outlast with a massive band like the one they’d raised. They couldn’t conceive of armies like those of the empire, they couldn’t imagine a foe with the means and the will to carry men and material from half a world away… soldiers birthed from the womb of the empire in equal numbers to those they’d spawned.”

His whole reel about goblins sounded at least borderline offensive… I really wasn’t sure that “spawn” was the right word, given that goblinoids had sex and carried their young in much the same way that mammals did, however much the messier details differed. I also thought he was probably oversimplifying the math… from what I understood about goblin reproduction, the upper limit on multiple births wasn’t firm but was restricted by practicalities. Even dispensing with the safety of the mother it didn’t seem likely that they could get twenty or so surviving children in a brood, which is what it would take to get a tenfold increase with each mother giving birth only once.

On the other hand, if he didn’t mean each woman carrying a fatally large litter to term every time, just showing no particular regard for their health and breeding as often as possible. That could probably mean triplets or quadruplets, maybe as often as once a year. That still didn’t work out to a tenfold increase in ten years… if anything, it could be much higher. I supposed that the number of times a goblin could reproduce and survive on average would also have some impact.

It was possible that I was simply overthinking what was a convenient phrase meaning “the goblins built up their population really quickly”. A tenfold increase over a decade was doubtlessly possible, but it seemed unlikely that anybody had done an exact survey of the goblins to the northwest of the colonies before the build-up or after it.

“I’ve placed miniatures on the battlefield to represent the placement of groups of men and goblins,” Hart said. “If each human figure represents, say, about five warriors, then each goblin on the board represents fifty. The human soldiers are a detachment of the Nineteenth Legion. Though this was one of the most important engagements of what we call the Dwarf and Goblin Wars, at this point the dwarves were detached observers. They only got into the fight when the goblins entered into an alliance with kobolds. Most other engagements would also have included a number of militia men… I chose this battle in particular because it involved fewer distinct armies than most important fights from this general era. But for the Battle at Seven Hills, Clayborn took what he thought would be enough of his men to be an impressive show of force into the valley where his wizards’ familiars had seen goblins massing. Birds make for decent reconnaissance agents, but they have one weakness: they’re not so good with numbers. When they reported ’many’ goblins, Clayborn and his advisers took it to mean ’this is where the remaining goblins have gathered’.”

He pointed to a mounted figure in scarlet armor, surrounded by imperial knights and riding at the forefront of the imperial forces.

“Clayborn was no coward,” he said. “He positioned himself in battle at the frontlines when it was necessary, and behind them when it was necessary. When directing a battle, he preferred to be somewhere that he could watch things unfolding and issue orders clearly and efficiently to any part of his forces, but when leading what was a relatively small force in what was meant to be an overwhelming display of military strength and bravery, he knew the importance of sticking out his own neck.”

Hart’s eyes were on his miniatures as he spoke instead of the faces of his class, and it occurred to me that there was far less discussion than normal… he usually prompted anyone who looked like they might have something to say, whether they volunteered or not. But even those like Keri La Belle, who would speak without prompting, were watching the battlefield like they expected the metal miniatures to enact the battle for them.

“Clayborn had misjudged the situation, but he was considered one of the best military minds of the empire… hence his posting to the furthest corner of it. He adjusted quickly. He had the wizards send up signals immediately to alert the rest of the army, half a day‘s march behind them. While the general marshaled his troops into more defensive formations,” Hart said, moving the figures around to reflect this, “his aide-de-camp worked with the magicians to get reinforcements and open a line of rapid retreat. They had made no provisions for a mass teleport or gate spell… their battlefield mages were prepared more for showy spells of mass destruction, fireballs and lightning strikes… but the wizards back at the encampment had everything they needed to open a planar rift, once the battle mages relayed the message to them.

“It’s a ritual that takes hours in the best of circumstances, and they finished it in one. After the rift was open, they had a link to the rest of the army. They were able to evacuate their wounded, bring in field healers, and most importantly get the rest of their soldiers onto the field. At that point the fighting wasn’t over, but only because the goblin war band had no concept of surrender. It’s the hour between the first engagement and the opening of the rift that the events we think of as the Battle of Seven Hills took place.

“If General Clayborn had lost that day, if his men had been wiped out or he’d been slain, then history would probably remember him as an arrogant fool who marched an inferior force into an impossible situation. But because he not only survived, but held out long enough to turn disaster into victory… or into what would have happened if he’d marched his whole army across the river and into the goblin encampment… he was considered the hero of the day.”

I was reminded of Hart’s earlier insistence that history couldn’t be the study of everything in perfect detail because it would take as much time to recount as it had to happen. If he spent an entire hour long class period telling us about an hour-long battle… well, he was kind of proving his point there in a bad way.

“Clayborn did have advantages. His men were armed and they were trained. The goblins of the war band weren’t tacticians. They’d dug in in a valley ringed with hills, feeling safer in the lowlands and out of sight. Clayborn and his men had the high ground from the beginning,” Hart said, shifting the goblins around to surround the hills where the imperial soldiers were. “The war band was numerous enough to encircle the bases hills, cutting off mundane escape routes, but their best hope of victory… a suicidal mass charge… was hampered by the terrain.”

He didn’t spend the rest of the hour describing the Battle of Seven Hills, thankfully, though it seemed like there were a surprising number of “pivotal moments” in an hour-long skirmish. None of it was that interesting to me… war might have been a perfectly valid “filter” for viewing history, but it wasn’t what appealed to me. Really, I thought more credit should go to the wizards than to the fighters who asked the wizards to save their asses, after having led everybody into a fight where they were outnumbered twenty to one in the first place.

“And that’s the Battle of Seven Hills, visually speaking,” Hart said, after reaching the part where the rest of the Nineteenth Legion started pouring out of a rift. “Now, to get back to my rhetorical question from before class started: what is war good for? For historians, it’s useful for marking off eras… and for getting everybody to sit up and pay attention every once in a while. We only just touched on some of its other uses, though: securing resources, securing borders, and so on. The Dwarf and Goblin Wars were about securing the colonies from the threat of goblin attacks, and securing resources that would otherwise have been in goblin-controlled lands. The causes of Magisterion’s War have been one of our recurring topics. Here we come to the fun part. Each of you needs to pick a partner. You’ll pick a battle of the pre-Republican period, from the Goblin Wars on through Magisterion’s War. You need to make a graphic representation of that battle… it can be as simple as a detailed map, or you can go all-out with terrain and miniatures, but either way you’ll be expected to present the battle to the class and to do so in an interesting and engaging way. You’ll need to show not only the events of the battle, but also how it fits in with what happened around it… its immediate causes and its effects.

“In the case of Seven Hills, it made Clayborn’s reputation all the stronger. It made him more ruthless in dealing with goblinoids, but also more cautious. He never allowed himself to be baited after that. This proved to be frustrating to his later opponents, though it also caused him to miss several important opportunities in Magisterion’s War. I won’t be going into those now, though… I’ll be doing someone’s work for them if I do.

“You’ll have a few weeks to work on this… I’ll have the exact requirements for the assignment posted on the bulletin board in the hall before class on Wednesday,” Hart concluded, glancing at the timepiece at the back of the room. “It’ll be right next to the sign-up information for the new miniature battle club.”

Next: Another few thousand words of interior monologue as Mackenzie walks to her next class… wait, this is her last class? I guess it must be time for sex, then.

Discuss this chapter on the Livejournal community.

Also, the smug sneer faltered a little bit when she saw my face… I wondered what kind of response she’d been expecting. Mild confusion apparently wasn’t it.

Sooni put her stuff down neatly on her desk and then came swishing back to talk to me, as she so often did… she looked so very pleased with herself that I felt a resurgence of dread. Maybe Maliko’s seeming disappointment had been premature.

“Hello, Sooni,” I said,

“Hello, Miss Mackenzie,” she said, beaming. “You know… the Veil Ball is tonight.”

“Uh huh,” I said.

“I understand it is a masquerade,” she said.

“Yeah…”

“I was wondering if you had a costume prepared for it.”

Oh, here we go, I thought. It was obvious that she’d decided that I had to go to the party with her and she’s come up with some ridiculous, borderline festishy outfit she expects me to wear.

“Actually… um… I’m going with Ian, and he’s working on a costume for me,” I said, bracing myself for the temper tantrum.

“Oh, I’m glad to hear that,” she said. “I put the finishing touches on mine this morning and thought I would see if you needed any help with alterations or anything for yours. Are you going as Annie?”

“Uh… actually, I thought about doing a Mecknights costume, but I wasn’t sure how to do it,” I said.

“Oh. Well, you should have asked me,” she said, but she sounded hardly even reproachful. “I would have been happy to help you.”

“Uh huh,” I said, still not at all sure where she was going with this… was she going to ask me a favor?

“I guess I’ll see you at the dance!” she said as the professor came into the room. She turned and hurried back to her desk, where the whipping of her fox tail and forth caused the girl behind her to scoot way back.

“Settle down,” the professor said in response to the legs of the chair squeaking against the tiles. “Now, will everybody who looked up the extra credit questions please pass them forward and we’ll be moving on.”

Extra credit questions? What extra credit questions? Maliko threw a glance over her shoulder at me as she handed a paper forward, and I dimly remembered having been in a momentary panic after the last class, when I’d realized I’d missed a good deal of the lecture. Maliko had tried to taunt me by telling me I’d missed hearing about a huge, grade-critical assignment… well, I’d showed her by forgetting all about it.

Two wrongs might not make a right, but under certain circumstances two absentmindednesses could.

On the other hand, though, I had missed out on some extra credit. Even if Maliko hadn’t manage to drive me into a blind panic for the past two days, I’d still managed to screw myself a bit. I paid close attention throughout the remainder of the period, even though it wasn’t particularly interesting material… we were just dealing with conditional statements, and the inverses, converses, and contrapositives thereof. It was important to have a firm grasp on those things when dealing with certain kinds of magic… and more particularly certain kinds of beings… but it didn’t have a lot of direct application for an enchanter.

Unless I was going to put a lot of limiting effects on my work, I probably wouldn’t use it that much, and the essence of applied enchantment was making things that were useful, not bound up by a lot of arbitrary conditions. The bottom line was that there just wasn’t much of a market for televisions that only worked if a thrice-married virgin laid a golden egg in a month with seven Sundays, or whatever. In olden times, being able to sort your way through those kinds of riddles had been an important skill for enchanters, because almost nobody had the kind of power and understanding you needed to make a truly permanent enchantment, so they’d done the best they could.

When class ended, I reminded myself that Ian had told me to look at the name of the history building. I knew of at least one current professor who was a Smith, in the delving program, but it was such a common name there was no reason to think he was any relation to the one who the building was named for. But if he wasn’t, why had Ian thought I’d find the name significant?

I started to get irritated with him, that he hadn’t just told me what he was getting at… but not so irritated that I forgot to look. Almost that irritated, but not quite. I stopped at the last moment before walking underneath the arch and looked up. In the moment before the person behind me slammed into my back and pushed me forward, I read the name: Ian H. Smith Hall.

Oh.

“Learn how to walk,” the girl who’d shoved into me said, blowing past me as I started forward again.

Either Ian just thought it was really super neat that a building had the same first name as he did, or there was a story there.

I kind of wondered if Hart was going to say something about Steff’s continued absence, but he didn’t… he just jumped right into the lesson.

“Last time we were talking about the goblin situation, in the wetlands north of Ravenport,” he said. “The first direct contact between the Empire and goblinoids, and it seemed to be going great: the locals went nuts over relatively cheap trinkets and common foodstuffs that they’d never seen before, and the envoys of the Unnamable One were making all kinds of impressive diplomatic breakthroughs. Of course, the whole thing was predicated on the kind of misconceptions that we outlined on Wednesday…”

“What kind of misconceptions?” Ms. La Belle asked. I heard Ms. Carter swearing not quite under her breath.

“The ones we went over last class,” Hart said.

“But what do you mean, ‘the kind of misconceptions’?”

“Misunderstandings about how goblin society is arranged, confusion about the level of political organization, a tendency to draw inferences from the very unrelated orcish society…”

“No, I remember all that… but what kind of misconceptions were they?” Ms. La Belle asked.

“Chocolate,” Hart said. “The breaking point came when, in order to secure the driest route for the emperor’s new highway, they ‘purchased’ the land being occupied by several disparate family groups from an unrelated goblin village they had established good relations with. Some people say that goblins had no concept of property before humans came. That’s probably not quite true, but they certainly didn’t have this kind of commerce, where land changes hands based on the movement of metal coins and papers. What happened from the point of view of the empire’s allies is their friends offered to evict some of their enemies from the region and pay them for it, and that seemed like a good deal. Those whose land had been ‘sold’ had no say in the deal, and probably weren’t even aware of it until the legionnaires showed up to evict them… and that was the end of any peace between humans and goblins in the region of Ravenport. Two more legions had to be sent south to defend the colony, with its valuable diamond mines… a small but significant weakening of the imperial forces in the north.”

“Wait, that doesn’t make any sense,” La Belle said. “Chocolate misconceptions?”

“Now, in the northern colonies, the settlers on what was then the western frontier had already had their own clashes with goblins, and in some cases they had even learned how to get along peacefully,” Hart said. “The dwarves of the Westering Lands had also been dealing with goblins… they weren’t fond of each other, but at the very least the dwarves were a potential source of information for relatively new arrivals. The Empire’s experience with dwarves back in the motherlands was that they were politically neutral unless threatened… the conventional wisdom was that the only way to get a military alliance with them was to hope your enemies got stupid and attacked them first. So, the official position was to avoid, avoid, avoid. If you’ve been paying attention, you might have noticed a possible option that the empire had overlooked, a bit of leverage they had that they could have used to gain favorable relations with the dwarves. Can anybody guess what that is?”

A few people raised their hands, including myself and Ms. Carter. Hart called on me.

“Diamonds,” I said. “Ravenport’s not near any dwarven kingdoms, so they probably didn’t even know about the deposits.”

“That is correct,” Hart said. “And the mines of Ravenport are some of the richest diamond mines in the Westering Lands. The dwarves in the north and the west mine iron and precious metals extensively, but they’ve always had to trade for most of their precious stones. Before humans established a transoceanic trade, this meant using treacherous trade routes through the northern ice reaches or with underground kingdoms, with frequent interference from kobolds. Selling diamonds to the dwarves… or even selling a share in the mines outright… would have been a very canny move for the empire. Would anybody care to speculate about why the Unnamable Emperor wouldn’t have explored that option?”

“He didn’t like dwarves?” La Belle said, without waiting to be called on.

“Astonishingly enough, that’s almost correct… the emperor might not have had any particular antipathy towards dwarves, but he was accustomed to signing trade agreements that were more like treaties, where smaller groups agreed to become his subjects, de facto or otherwise, in exchange for his beneficence. He did not like to deal with other races who could deal with him from a position of strength, who would not cede their own rights in exchange for the comfort and security of the Pax, who could not be assimilated into the empire. He would not deal with dwarven kings as kings, and he knew better than to expect them to deal with him as anything else. What else? Ms. Carter?”

“He was keeping with his policy of exporting all the wealth from the colonies,” she said. “Or importing it, from his point of view. But he wasn’t viewing the situation in the Westering Lands as being an actual economy so much as one big extended workhouse where citizens of the empire could toil for his benefit.”

“Ouch. Are you writing a pamphlet, Ms. Carter? I almost hate to tell you we already won that war,” Hart said. “But, yes, essentially. The output of the Ravenport mines was already accounted for in the emperor’s plans… whether he even considered the option of dealing with the dwarves and rejected it, or it never even crossed his mind, we don’t know.”

“Then why are we talking about it?” La Belle asked.

“Because, Ms. La Belle, to understand why things ended up the way they did, it can be instructive to look at how they might have gone instead,” Hart said. “There has been some interesting supposition about how differently things might have turned out if he had made that decision… the colonists had been trading with the dwarves on a limited basis from the beginning, but they wouldn’t have been able to match his offer. It’s doubtful that Magisterion could have won as many dwarves to his cause if the emperor was careful to spread the wealth around equally. The legions wouldn’t have been as hard-pressed in dealing with the goblins. The dwarves might have viewed any uprising that interfered with the diamond trade as a hostile action against themselves. It’s hard to imagine the revolution going the way it did, under those circumstances.”

The brief exploration of alternate history interested me on the usual geeky level, but the whole thing actually piqued my interest in another way… it was, as Hart had said, hard to imagine the old empire losing control of the colonies if they hadn’t so badly misjudged the situation with the races that were native to the area. The Unnamable Emperor probably could have mistreated his own people all he’d wanted if he’d sounded out the dwarves a little better, or sent people who displayed a little more intellectual curiosity about the funny green people in the south… really, there was no benefit to not doing a little homework when it came to those sorts of things.

Was it just laziness? Or xenophobia?

Goblins could certainly come off as creepy to mammalian races… though it was probably mutual… and dwarven secrecy had to be off-putting to someone who was trying to make up their own mind about how far to trust them. But were those things any kind of real excuse for someone who was trying to oversee an ocean-straddling empire made of many cultures and multiple races? Did “creepiness” really explain a bunch of career politicians and tacticians botching things so badly?

Or maybe the underlying lesson wasn’t one about racial tolerance at all… maybe it had just been the same arrogance that had made the emperor think the human colonists would just roll over for him, too.

Or maybe it was both… maybe it took that kind of arrogance to look at a continent populated with diverse peoples and think you could treat it as a blank slate, with only the people you’d placed there yourself counting for anything.

“Ms. Mackenzie, I’m losing you again, aren’t I?” Hart said. “Or have you been overcome with some kind of brilliant revelation?”

“I… I was just thinking about what you said,” I said.

“About the rum excise?”

“Um… before that,” I said. “About the dwarves and the goblins.”

“I’m all ears,” he said.

“I… um… there’s no benefit in ignoring another race that’s living somewhere you have interests,” I said.

“Yes, that was kind of the point.”

“Well, no, you were talking about all the benefits the emperor could have gained from dealing with the dwarves,” I said. “What I’m saying is that not only did he ignore those, but he did it for nothing… there was no rational benefit to ignoring them, there was no rational benefit to not taking the time to figure out the goblins, especially when the imperial legions started out on good terms with them. Their road north wasn’t going to be finished any time soon no matter what they did, so they had every opportunity to learn about the goblin culture, to sit down and ask the goblins about their culture, but they didn’t. It’s senseless… stupid and senseless.”

“Everybody write that down,” Hart said. “Humans did something stupid and senseless.”

“How man S-es are in ‘senseless’?” La Belle asked.

“Just the one, but it gets reused,” Hart said. “In all seriousness, though, you’re right, Ms. Mackenzie: it was downright boneheaded. It was one in a series of boneheaded moves that the empire made at its peak. This might seem counterintuitive, but there’s a reason the peak of any civilization is the peak, and it’s not because of the build up that comes before it… it’s the sharp decline that happens afterwards. Of course, no world power got to be where it is by being stupid… but once it gets there, it’s big enough and powerful enough that it can survive a few mistakes. This almost always results in making more mistakes. Why not? The first few weren’t so terrible. The damage from them may not even show up as damage immediately, but they start to stack up, and sooner or later the effects are going to be felt… the emperor might have been able to quash the rebellion with the help of the dwarves and with cooperation from the goblins, but the rebellion was a historical inevitability long before that point, because of his earlier missteps in dealing with the provincials… missteps that were still ongoing even as the open revolt spread. Which brings us back to the rum excise, which was an attempt to levy funds to suppress the northern rebellion by further taxes on the island holdings…”

I tried not to get too lost in the chain of thought as the class went on, but it was hard for me not to see the mistakes of the Unnamable Emperor being repeated in modern society, at both personal and institutional levels. The IRM in general and Magisterius University in particular both prided themselves on being racially inclusive, but in both cases the actual level of inclusiveness was very dependent on the other races’ willingness to assimilate in certain ways and to stay in their places in others. We were all thrown into the same holding area, even though we didn’t necessarily have any more in common than the old world orcs had with goblins.

It was stupid and senseless… and it wasn’t a huge stretch to imagine it ending as badly for the university as the policies of the emperor had ended for the old empire.

Discuss this story.

There was a resource annex attached near the entrance of the building, so I decided to gaze and see if there was anything like a lesson plan available on the ethernet. I didn’t see an autoscribe… just three old, small, and not particularly clear-looking crystal balls… but I figured that if I knew I could get the assignment details off the ethernet then I wouldn’t have to go around begging Sooni for them.

The good news was that it didn’t take me long to explore the entire weave presence of the logic program. The bad news was that was because there wasn’t much of one. The only thing for my class was a copy of the syllabus that had been dropped into the ether. To my immense irritation, it didn’t say one word about this giant project the professor had just dumped on us. That seemed really, really irresponsible of him…

But of course, I was being hypocritical. I was the irresponsible one… or at least, if I’d been paying attention, it wouldn’t matter how irresponsible he was.

Well, there was nothing to do but suck it up and ask Sooni. We were still friends, as much as we ever had been. She probably wouldn’t make it difficult on purpose.

Of course, when you were as good at something as Sooni was at being difficult, you could do it pretty effortlessly, even without trying.

It was either go to Sooni or admit to the teacher that I’d spaced off his entire class, though… and I had enough enemies among the faculty. Even Professor Hart, who didn’t appear to have anything against my heritage, had treated me like some kind of troublemaker in our last class.

Luckily, paying attention to him was no chore… he didn’t exactly command attention so much as demand it, but it got the job done, and the subject matter was engrossing. Steff’s absence was a little distracting because it was a reminder of her condition, but it wasn’t a surprise and so I wasn’t too worried.

“So far, we’ve been confining our attention to the upper half of the eastern seaboard,” the professor said to kick things off. “That is where the Imperial Republic was born. To get the full scope of the political landscape, we need to have an understanding of what was going on in the rest of the provinces. If Magisterion was the father of our Imperium, Rufus Vale, governor of Ravenport, was the alcoholic uncle. Ravenport, unlike Phalen, was a penal colony…”

He stopped and looked at La Belle, who just stared back at him for several seconds before saying, “I know what it means.”

“Okay,” he said. “It was a penal colony…”

“But it’s funny because it sounds like penis, right?” she added.

“Yes. Thank you, Ms. La Belle,” he said. “Ravenport was a penal colony. We sometimes call this a prison colony, but back in those days, ‘prison’ was just where they kept you until they figured out what to do with you. You either paid for what you’d done, you were executed, or you were transported… exiled for life to do a term of hard labor in a foreign province and then live out the rest of your life in obscurity, far from the illumination cast by the Mother City. Penal transportation…”

La Belle snerked. Hart glared.

“It gets funnier the more you say it,” she said.

“Transportation was used to a limited degree in Phalen and the other provinces, with persons convicted of minor offenses sent to work as domestic servants in the houses of the good and the great. Hardened criminals and political radicals were sent to harsher locales, where they could do such dangerous and/or back-breaking labor as mining, draining swamps, and working plantation-style farms. Ravenport was one such place. Swampy, sub-tropical, infested with giant lizards and mosquitoes and stirges, surrounded by goblins… yes, Ms. La Belle?”

“Are we going to learn about the goblins?” she asked.

“I’m going to teach about goblins,” Hart said. “Whether or not you learn about them is your own prerogative.”

“Okay, but if I do learn about them, can I use them for my stupid paper thing?”

“Your ‘stupid paper thing’ is about goblins of the plains,” Hart said. “Ravenport is, as I described, a swampy, low-lying region on the eastern seaboard.”

“But the goblins are going to basically be the same,” La Belle said. “I mean, I can just say ‘the goblins around Prax’ instead of ‘the goblins around Ravenport’ and it would be basically right, right?”

“I’ll make you a deal,” the professor said. “You go explain to the dean how Ravenport is basically the same thing as Prax and so I’ve already basically done my unit on local history, basically, and you can write your paper about anything you want.”

“So… that’s a no?” she asked.

“That is a no.”

“Then I don’t think I’m going to learn that much,” she said.

“In my idle moments, Ms. La Belle, I calculate how much of my monthly salary comes from your tuition,” he said. “Invariably, I conclude that both of us are being ripped off.”

“Not me, I have a scholarship,” she said.

“Archons and aspects of fate defend us,” he said. “Now, Rufus Vale was the governor of Ravenport and that meant he was the first, last, and only authority over the province. Unlike the situation in Phalen and the other northern territories that were settled by willing immigrants, including some educated and important people, the residents of Ravenport could not take an appeal to the Unnameable Emperor on their own. They had to go through Rufus. If it seems like the provincials’ complaints often fell on deaf ears, try to imagine how often the transportees’ petitions even made it to those ears.

“In theory, every man sent to Ravenport owed the crown a certain number of years of work, after which they were granted some limited freedoms and allowed to make a life for themselves. In practice, only the governor himself could sign the certificate of permission required for a release from the work camps. With no court of appeals to turn to, the colonists were effectively slaves, and he squeezed as much work out of each of them as he could before he cut them loose. Those who were released had to agree to pay special ‘taxes’ directly to him.

“Rufus also pinched every penny that came into the colony, enriching himself by shorting the convicts on their rations of such things as imported grain, potions, blankets, and other ‘luxuries’. This sort of thing was quietly tolerated… expected even… though few men did it with such aplomb as Governor Rufus Vale did. Where he really went above and beyond, though, was in skimming off the top of the income the colony generated. At about the same time the Unnameable Emperor was trying to siphon every last bit of gold and silver from the economies of the northern colonies with the Coin Act, Rufus was overseeing three enormously profitable diamond mines and pocketing most of the profits.

“The Unnameable One would have got around to dealing with him eventually, but he regarded the situation in the north as far graver. One noble vassal stealing millions wasn’t as dangerous as a bunch of riffraff who asserted their rights as individuals. The former was simply someone who had overreached himself… the latter were something new and dangerous. The empire could withstand many crimes, but not open defiance. Rufus was canny enough to know that when the northern provinces had been thoroughly re-subjugated, he’d be next. His crimes were far past the point where he could have offered any sort of penance, so he did the next most logical thing: he became a patriot.”

This was mostly new material to me. Prior to high school, all talk of Magisterion’s War and of the Westering Colonies before the new Imperium had been confined to the northeast. In high school, there’d been maybe a paragraph or two on each of the provinces and a mention that funding for the war effort and material support had come from Ravenport. The textbook had called it a “prison colony” and left it at that.

Professor Hart went into a lot more detail about what that aid had entailed… from quiet, deniable words of encouragement to keep the revolutionary spirit alive to eventual shipments of money, and then arms the governor confiscated from the legion garrison when it became impossible to hide his complicity in the growing uprising.

He eventually came to a messy ending, Hart told us, when he tried to get the colony’s inmates to fight in his defense as Imperial troops landed on the shores.

“He told them to remember how terribly they’d suffered under the Unnameable One’s yoke,” he said. “And some of them listened, but enough of them remembered the Emperor’s men promising them a fair deal in the new lands and then suffering under his yoke. He was executed on the scaffold where he himself had overseen many executions, and the province was presented to the Imperial Legion as a gift by transportees eager to affirm their loyalty to the Mother Isles.

“Here’s where the Imperial Command proved itself to be as stupid as Rufus. Rather than accepting and rewarding this show of loyalty by granting the bondsmen their freedom, or even just re-establishing the garrison and letting them return to their state of toil under a new Governor who could hardly have failed to be accepted as an improvement, they subjected the ‘rebels’ to decimation and then put them to work fortifying the province and building roads north. Ravenport was over a thousand miles away from the hotbed of revolutionary activity around Phalen… a thousand miles of swamp and forest and mountain… but they treated it as though it was a foothold from which they could launch campaigns.

“This was what you did with a rebellious population, in the old empire: you executed a bunch of them and then you worked them so hard that they didn’t have the energy to rebel any more. It didn’t hurt that the commanders were able to send word home that they’d scored a decisive victory and subjugated a rebel colony instead of one saying that the problem was resolved before their feet were even on the ground. The problem was that however hard they were working the enslaved colonists, Rufus had worked them harder. Where before they’d held out hope that somebody in the Empire would hear of his abuses somehow and grant them relief, now they had no hope. As a result, the 8th, the 11th, and the 27th Legions all ended up permanently stationed in Ravenport, to help maintain order, and played no further part in the struggles to the north.”

Here was where he got back to the goblins that La Belle had been so very briefly interested in. They had clashed with the garrison, and there had been raids back and forth, but no lasting conflict until three legions were settled there with no mission but to maintain control.

“A bunch of strange little creatures lurking in the woods, all sharp-toothed and green-skinned, was judged to be an obstacle to control,” Hart said. “The goblins were judged to be intelligent, and fortunately for them, the policy of the empire was to annex rather than exterminate. The legionnaires began a campaign of pacifying and civilizing the goblins. This, I remind you, while a thousand miles up the coast, their empire was at war.

“There were some missteps in this campaign. The range of races we call ‘goblinoids’ were unknown in the old lands. Imperial Command based its policy on dealing with the goblins on its experience with orcs, assuming the newly discovered creatures to simply be a new variety of orc. The orcs were known to have a sharply defined division of labor among the sexes. The men are warriors and hunters, but the women are in charge of domestic affairs. That’s not just an atrocious pun… women make all the important decisions at the family level since they remained with the camp while the men are away, and political power for each village is vested in its oldest citizens, most of whom are female.

“The goblins kept their women at home while the men fought, but that’s where the similarities to orcs ends. They were territorial and entrenched, rather than nomadic. Goblin women held little power. They certainly didn’t live to be respected elders very often. Before modern healing magic became commonly available to them, carrying a litter of little goblins to term carried a fifty percent mortality rate. The rate for the infants’ first year of life was close to eighty or ninety. The only old goblin women were old maids.”

“Why did so many of them die?” La Belle asked.

“That’s beyond the scope of our discussion,” Hart said. “But I look forward to hearing about it when you give your presentation. The point is that when the legions tried diplomacy, they went about it all wrong… they gave tribute and sought audience with the goblin women, thinking that they would then counsel their husbands towards peace. If hobgoblins were present, the envoys deferred to them as they would have to an unusually big and strong orc warrior, not realizing the low position hobgoblins occupied in goblin society.

“They assumed bonds of tribal loyalty existed that went beyond the immediate family groups. If they saw similar markings outside two villages, they thought that meant that they were affiliated… never dreaming that the goblins had a written script, and that seeing one identical squiggle in the midst of other squiggles signified no more of a relationship than I have to Ms. Carter since we both have an ‘a’ in our last names.”

“I have an ‘a’ in my last name, too,” La Belle pointed out.

“Cherish it,” Hart said. “It may be the only one you ever get.”

“Professor,” Ms. Carter said, raising her hand slightly. “I have a question.”

“Yes?”

“Didn’t they notice that the female goblins were slaves?” she asked.

I wondered where she was getting that from… Hart hadn’t mentioned it, and while Shiel had made it clear that women were an underclass in kobold society at least, the sad truth was that most races had a history of giving women the short end of the stick.

“Well, that’s a bit of a controversial point,” he said, sounding like he knew exactly what she was talking about. “It’s true that goblin women… married goblin women, and sometimes unmarried ones depending on whether their parents considered them ‘on the market’… wore chains, but this is arguably a symbolic submission. It’s been said to symbolize a connection rather than bondage.”

I remembered Oru’s weird necklace that she had worn to the dance, a heavy chain with a fake lock on it. Was that what they were talking about? If so, it seemed like I’d misjudged her… if she had that kind of a pre-existing commitment with Moeli, than he was kind of a jerk for blowing her off and it was really no wonder she was so angry with me. Not that it was my fault, exactly, but I could see how…

“Ms. Mackenzie,” Hart said.

“What?”

“Your insights are sometimes interesting,” he said. “Would you like to share whatever’s so engrossing with the rest of the class?”

“Um… it’s not really an insight,” I said. “But… so,” I stumbled on, acutely aware of how air-headed and La Belle-like I must have sounded, “if a goblin is wearing a chain around her neck, that’s a symbol of commitment?”

I might as well get confirmation before taking this particular sin of the world upon my shoulders, I figured.

“I’m not a professor of goblinoid studies,” Hart said. “But I believe in modern goblin life, that would be analogous to a promise ring or an engagement ring. However, I’ll stress that again: modern goblin life. Not Early Republican Historical goblin life. At that time, goblin women were chained by their husbands in a variety of different fashions, some of them quite elaborate. This is completely outside the scope of our material, but if you’re really interested, I’m sure you can find pictures of the various configurations online. Some of them won’t even ask you for a charged card to view them.”

“But I can’t imagine the legion’s envoys stopped to ask about the symbolism,” Ms. Carter said.

“Here we see the awful power of a preconceived notion. Having identified the goblins as being ’small orcs’, I wouldn’t imagine they stopped to inquire about much,” Hart said. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have made so many mistakes.”

“Didn‘t they find it odd that the domestic decision-makers were chained up?” Carter asked.

“According to a contemporary account, at the first meeting between a presumed goblin dignitary and a legion envoy, the envoy asked the goblin what the chains around the torso of the goblin serving them meant,” Hart explained. “When he was informed that it meant she was the goblin’s wife, he immediately started paying attention to her. His side misunderstood the mirth this produced in the assembled goblins, and thought they’d simply made a smashing diplomatic success.

“It didn’t take long for word to spread that the way to get neat presents and a funny show out of the tall pink things was to trot out your wife or your burliest houseboy, and the Imperial Legions gained a reputation as being soft-headed, harmless buffoons… it was a comedy of errors that would end very tragically for the goblins of Ravenport Province. Yes, Ms. Carter?”

“Didn’t you say that the goblins had been sparring with the imperial garrison for years?” she asked.

“I did,” he said, nodding. “They had. But the garrison soldiers were considered untrustworthy and had all been sent to less sensitive postings or discharged and returned home, taking their valuable experience in dealing with the natives with them. The goblins had never seen anything like the regalia of the Legion before, and if the humans made the mistake of thinking they were dealing with a familiar kind of creature, the goblins assumed this was some new sort of being that had come on their domain, trounced their former enemies, and then proceeded to give them gifts of clothing and herbs and alcohol while putting on hilarious entertainments. The goblins had no fear of the Legion.

And that’s where we’re going to leave off for next time.”

Discuss this story.

“Sooni, I just wanted to let you know… whatever you want need from me… whatever you want… I’m here for you,” I said. “Completely.”

“Well, yes,” she said, with an air of “Why are you telling me this?” in her voice. “Obviously. Now, I can’t be seen on television with you, so that’s why the carriage is going to pick me up first. Suzi and Kai will escort you downstairs. They will stop you if you try to get away.”

“Why would I try to get away?”

“I don’t know. Why do you do anything?” she asked. “You’ve been trying to get out of a date with me since before you agreed to it.”

“Where’s Maliko in all this?”

“In the healing center. Now, the carriage will be at Harlowe at seven, and you need to be ready to go right when it gets here,” Sooni said. “If it’s sitting around in front of the building, people will be curious about it. Are you done with classes for the day?”

“I’ve got one more,” I said.

“Kai is going to be escorting you to and from it,” Sooni said. “She’s going to be with you at all times until you get into the carriage. I want you to obey her like you’d obey me.”

“Yeah, that really won’t be a problem,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Sooni, I’m not going to try to get out of this. Really.”

“You’d better not,” she said. “Kai will hurt you if she has to.”

Kai was waiting out in the hallway. I caught a glimpse of her tucking something small and rectangular away in her bag almost as deftly as Amaranth could disappear an object. If Sooni had any clue that she hadn’t been standing at attention waiting for us, she didn’t show it.

“Kai-Kai, Miss Mackenzie is all ready to go to her next class, now,” Sooni said. Her eyes had gone big and bright… and so had her voice. “I want you to take extra-extra special good care of her while I’m away, okay? Okay! I love you so much, Kai-Kai!”

In the classroom she’d been talking as if Kai were part of her crack squad of highly trained commandos. Now… well, I couldn’t help picturing Kai strapped in the highchair, wearing a diaper and bib.

One look past Sooni at Kai, and I knew my thought was written all over my face. She kept her expression neutral, but the look in the tiny cat girl’s eyes was scary. Knowing what she had to put up with, though, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she thought of nothing but murder all day.

Sooni gave Kai a kiss on the forehead and then a painful-looking hug, and then she skipped off down the corridor, her sandals clunking loudly on the floor.

Kai watched her go around the corner, then stood staring after her. Her jaw was moving. I realized she was counting. When she’d evidently judged that Sooni was well and truly gone, she turned to me.

“Kai, I’m sorry you’re stuck…”

“I’m going to the bathroom,” she said. “You are staying right here.”

“Um, okay.”

She dashed for the restrooms, and was back in just over a minute.

“If Sooni asks, I didn’t leave you,” she said. “I’m going to sit out in the corridor and read my book during your class. If Sooni asks, I went into the classroom with you. The same applies to when you take a shower, when you’re changing your clothes, and any other time you’re naked.”

“Kai, I’m sorry for putting you through this,” I said, “and I don’t really want to be naked around you, either, but… the thing is, I don’t lie for anybody.”

She stared at me, her cat eyes unblinking. She didn’t say anything.

“It’s not just that it’s wrong,” I said, shifting uncomfortably under her lantern gaze. “I’m… I’m not any good at it, you see, and Sooni doesn’t trust me to begin with, obviously, so she’d figure it out if I tried.”

“I see,” Kai said. “What is your handedness, please?”

“What?”

“Are you right-handed or left-handed?”

“Uh, I’m right handed.”

She jabbed a pair of clawed fingers into a point on my left shoulder, and my arm went completely numb on one side, with shooting pains going up and down the other. I gasped.

“If Sooni asks, I was with you the whole time,” she said.

“Ow, shit!” I said. I tried to raise my arm, but I couldn’t. I could barely wiggle my fingers. “What the hell did you do?”

“It’ll wear off in half an hour or so,” she said. “But I know other ones that last longer and hurt more. If you get me in trouble with Sooni, I am going to set every joint in your body on fire and then paralyze your breathing. Then I’m going to take the butt of my sword and start smashing your fingers. Understand?”

The pain was growing worse. It was like the time I’d smashed my foot, but spread out over my entire arm.

“Quit sniveling. Let’s go, if you’re going,” Kai said. She gave me a shove.

“You’re lucky I don’t want to hurt you, Kai,” I said.

“You’re lucky I’m not Maliko.”

The burning pain was giving way to numbness all over by the time we got to the history building. My arm hung at my side like a dead thing. It was like a corpse arm had been grafted to my shoulder. It was a horrifying feeling, like something alien had attached itself to my body.

“You’re sure this is going to wear off?” I asked Kai outside the classroom.

“I can immobilize your jaw, too,” she said. She pulled out a slim paperback with elvish writing on the cover. “Have fun in class.”
Steff was not in the classroom when I got there, and she hadn’t shown up by the time it started. I was a little disappointed, but I wasn’t terribly surprised.

“Good afternoon, class,” Professor Hart said. “We’re going to be starting something different today… Current Events Fridays. Every Friday, we will spend a little time… maybe the whole period, maybe half of it… discussing some relevant social happening in the here and now. These sessions will be fairly free wheeling, and you will not be tested on anything that comes up during them, but you will receive a grade for participating in the discussion.”

“Why are we studying current events in a history class?” the La Belle girl asked.

“Why do we study history?” Hart countered.

“Because it’s a history class.”

“But why do we have history classes, Ms. La Belle?” he asked.

“I have it because it’s required for bardic studies,” she said.

“Please sit down, Ms. La Belle.”

“I… I am sitting down.”

“Sit down further,” he said. “You’ve earned your participation grade for the day for raising an excellent question. What do current events have to do with history? For that matter, what does history have to do with current events? On the obvious level, in two hundred years, our current events will be history… and two hundred years ago, history was current events. Taking that to a deeper level, by looking at the patterns of historical events we can make sense of ongoing conditions today… and by looking at those conditions, we can deepen our understanding of history.

“One of the hardest things for us to grasp as humans has always been the continuity of existence. We’re born, we live a handful of decades, we die. Consequently, we imagine the past as if it were a whole separate world from us, an entirely different plane of existence. There are very few humans born before the revolution who are alive today, and few of them are what you would call a people person. But it happened a scant twenty-two decades ago… three human lifetimes, if you think about it. Some things may have changed in that time, but we’re still living in the same world as Magisterion I did. It’s not as obvious here in a middle-of-nowhere province like Prax, but in Phale, you can’t go out for a cup of coffee without stumbling over a battle site or a historical marker.

“And even here, we can see the effects of the events we read about. We have in this very classroom… occasionally… a student of elven extraction. There’s an elven professor in this very department who… on rare occasions… teaches classes. Would that be possible without the Council of Leibenstein? If the Diocletian Treaty had never been signed, would it be thinkable today that an imperial university could welcome both elven and dwarven students? The opening of such institutions to our allied races, and then to all humanbloods, led to the situation we currently enjoy, where our university is host to students of many races, including those with no ancestral ties to humanity. Do you see the line connecting the dots here? The events of the past resulting in the condition of the present, which is very relevant to our current situation?”

I saw it, obviously… and from the murmurs around the room, other people did, too.

“Ms. Carter, would you care to start our discussion?” Hart said.

“Are you talking about the Harlots and the naked dark elf?” La Belle asked. Hart ignored her.

“Well, I think it goes without saying that the Imperium has always been a bit of a crucible where different cultures come together, even going back to the revolutionary period,” Carter said. “But I’m not sure how well the university succeeds in that area.”

“How so?”

“It seems to me like there are actually four separate, unblended cultures,” she said. “There’s us, the elves, the dwarves, and everybody else over in Harlowe.”

There was some nodding and murmuring of agreement at this.

“Okay,” Hart said. “And to what do you attribute this… unblendedness?”

“Well, you can’t force assimilation…”

“Not that the Imperium hasn’t ever tried,” Hart interjected .”But, go on.”

“What I’m saying is if the other races want to stay aloof, that’s their prerogative,” she said. “And that being the case, we have to expect situations where one of them does something that seems, from our perspective, to be completely inappropriate or wrong. They’ve made no attempt to understand the mores and traditions of the larger culture around them.”

“But why is it their responsibility to learn our mores and not the other way around?” another girl asked.

“I might like to learn about dark elf culture, but I don’t have to obey their laws to go to a human university in a human civilization,” Carter said.

“Mi… Ms. Mackenzie, you’re twitching every time somebody says ‘dark elf’,” Professor Hart said. “Why?”

I thought maybe my twitchiness had more to do with the fact that I couldn’t sit comfortably on the bench with my arm immobilized. Every time I shifted, it bumped into the desk or the bench, and no matter where it touched, it was like hitting my funny bone. Still, he’d asked the question… it was an opportunity to raise the issue.

“Uh… they actually don’t like that term,” I said. “As far as De… Delia Daella’s concerned, she’s an elf.”

I didn’t want to use the nickname in front of the class. I hoped that if Dee had been present, she would have understood that I wasn’t renouncing her friendship… but I didn’t want people who had no knowledge of her person or the significance of the nickname to pick it up and start throwing it around in a conversation where her actions were going to be picked apart and debated.

The idea of La Belle inadvertently naming Dee a friend in the same breath she used to call us “Harlots” made me sick.

“Has she ever looked in a mirror?” La Belle asked, as if on cue.

“Well, they have their own beliefs about the origins of different kinds of elves,” I said. “But… doesn’t calling one group just ‘elves’ and giving the other group a modifier imply that they’re, I don’t know… less? Or less pure?”

“I think it’s just a description,” Carter said. “There isn’t any judgment in it. It isn’t derogatory.”

“But isn’t ‘dark’ kind of a negative word?” I asked.

“Not necessarily,” Carter said.

“But evil things are called ‘the forces of darkness’,” I said. “Black magic. Dark magic.”

“Well, I guess you’d know about that,” Carter said.

“Leave it, Ms. Carter,” Hart said. “Just to throw out a point of interest, though: one of the older draconian words for demons means ‘light bearer’… and a lot of the oldest artwork depicts demons bearing flaming brands or being wreathed in fire. But the same sources are just as likely to turn around and call them a ‘bringer of darkness.’”

“See?” I said. “Light is an aspect of fire, which is the strongest element in demons, but because demons are evil, the association is still ‘dark’.”

“Right, but the label for dark elves comes from their skin color, not their evilness,” Carter said. “It isn’t the same thing at all.”

“But once you call them ‘dark’, they get tied in with all the other ‘dark’ things,” I said. “Like those stupid news reports going on about demon worship.”

“I thought they were saying that dark elves don’t worship demons,” a guy said.

“But the association is there,” I said, aware that the longer I sat there talking about demons, the more it felt like the eyes of the people behind me were drilling holes through my back. “And it will be no matter how often they say it… in fact, I didn’t see a lot of the coverage myself, but I really wouldn’t be surprised if some of the stations were saying that so they could play off the association without actually saying ‘they worship demons.’”

“But wasn’t the girl who got arrested a priestess?” La Belle asked.

A bunch of people answered her in the positive.

“So who does she worship, if it’s not demons?”

“Uh, there are lots of gods that aren’t demons, Carrie,” somebody said.

“Well, yeah, but they don’t live… down there,” she said, pointing downwards and stage whispering the last two words.

“The underlands are not hell,” Carter said.

“But they’re pretty close together, right?”

This was met by a chorus of jeers and groans. I decided I’d earned my participation grade for the day and put my head down, only half-listening to the rest of the discussion. I don’t know what Professor Hart had originally had in mind, but it never seemed to get anywhere truly productive. Ms. Carter seemed like she was just trying to impress everybody with how clever she was, Carrie La Belle acted like she was trying to show everybody how dumb she was, and they dominated the discussion between themselves.

Kai had said her nerve thing would wear off in half an hour, but I was only starting to get the feeling back when the bell rung for the end of the period. She was sitting in the hall, still reading her book, and she didn’t look up when I approached her. I started to say hi, but she held up her hand before I could speak. She read three more pages, marked her place, and stuck her book back into her bag, which she handed to me without a word.

I thought about saying something, but then I decided that since she was being put out by Sooni’s crazy demands, I could be nice and carry her stuff.

Something had definitely changed with her. It wasn’t just that she was in a good mood… she’d been in a good mood most of the time I’d known her, and she hadn’t been like this.

The E.R.H. classroom was an older style one, with long desks running half the length of the room and wide benches bolted to the floor. Steff guided me towards the end of one, sitting down and then pulling me onto her lap.

“Not during class,” I said, wriggling off her. I was a little bit annoyed that she didn’t seem to remember I’d put interfering with schooling on my personal black list.

“Just until it begins,” Steff protested, trying to pull me back.

I caught a whiff of something as I pulled away, something very faint, but sweetly sour and strangely familiar. My mind flashed on Puddy, who used her one-sixty-fourth dwarven ancestry to legally excuse her habit of drinking nothing but chardonnay, which she bought by the crate.

“Steff, have you been drinking?” I asked, though I knew the answer. The smell was distinct.

“You know I’m not supposed to,” Steff said. She laughed.

“I do, and so do you,” I said. “Steff, Viktor’s worried about you. I think you should listen to him.”

“I think you should let me worry about him,” Steff said. “And he should let me worry about me. I’ve got everything under control.”

“We’ll talk about this later,” I said as the professor entered from a side door at the front of the room.

I was almost positive it was wine that Steff had been drinking, and not some other drink. The smell of Puddy’s breath was lodged permanently in my brain, and Steff‘s smelled almost identical. I could not claim to be an expert on alcohol, but I’d never imagined wine to be among the “hard stuff.” I mean, the Universal Temple still used actual wine with the intoxication properties untouched for its sacraments. My otherwise abstemious grandmother enjoyed a glass of red wine every now and again. Puddy’s behavior might have been explained by her constant overindulgence or just her overall personality, but first Barley and now Steff had now acted remarkably similar under its influence.

Barley had doubtlessly moved onto other things after that first time she’d violently came onto me, but at that point, all she’d had was Puddy’s wine.

“Good evening, class,” the professor said. He was a relatively good-looking man, I thought. A little bit on the hefty side, maybe. His hair was a little bit gray but his face seemed young and strong. His eyes swept the room until he spotted Steff and me. “Today, we’re welcoming a couple refugees rescued from the slooooowly sinking ship that is the I.M.S. Einhorn. For those of you just joining us, I am Professor Aaron Hart. It is my sincere hope that you will find the material we present here a bit more challenging and the instruction less so. Miss Mackenzie, please stick around and see me after class.”

Great… was I going to have trouble with another teacher now? At least his opening remarks made it seem unlikely he’d be sympathetic to Professor Ariadne’s version of events, whatever that was.

I didn’t bother correcting him on my preferred form of address. At the start of the year, I’d tried with varying success to get my teachers to refer to me using the human standard of honorific and last name rather than first, but now that I was so widely “out” as non-human it seemed kind of pointless.

“We’ve spent the past two weeks covering the Provincial Period,” the professor continued, “from the discovery and initial settling of the Westering Lands, up to the earliest events which led to the revolution. You have been assigned no grade for the section test on Friday, but you will need to get copies of my lecture notes, and read them, both for the comprehensive exams later and so that you will understand the context in which later events occur.”

Steff had taken a piece of paper out of her backpack. She wrote on it, “It’ll be hard for you to talk when I’m choking you with my cock.” and pushed it towards me. I pushed it back.

“Today, we begin what is commonly known as the Revolutionary Period,” Hart said. “Our focus for now remains in the Phalan Province, and specifically the township of Phale, whose deep harbor made it the natural entry point to the colonies for both manufactured goods and the Imperial Legion. The date is 7th Militia 312… Astera 7th, -9 ME, by our current calendar. The ship Tradewinds has just anchored in Phale Harbor. On board are two men who will become very important for all those living in the Western Provinces: Adon Magnus, called Magisterion, and Phillip Bell, called Phillip Bell.”

Steff turned away a bit in her seat and began scribbling furiously on her paper. I assumed she was drawing rather than writing, but I didn’t try to see.

“The former was a dangerously charismatic ex-centurion being turned out to a particularly distant pasture with the sinecure post of adjunct proconsul,” Hart continued, “and the latter was the nephew of a remote cousin of the Unnamable Emperor who had just been appointed Legatus over Phalan. Bell might have held his post for a few years of relative luxury before returning to greater rewards back in the Mother Isles, had he not been carrying a pouch containing several scrolls containing imperial edicts which would prove to be wildly unpopular. Can anybody tell me what the most important one of these was?”

I raised my hand, as did several other people.

“Miss Mackenzie?”

I hadn’t actually expected to be called on. The professor’s expression was neutral, but his eyes were fixed upon me, hawk-like.

“The… uh… Coin Act?” I said, with less certainty than I should have. I knew it was the Coin Act. This was high school stuff. I hoped the entire class wasn’t going to be a re-hash.

“The Coin Act,” he echoed. “Coinage in those days was much the same as it is now: to facilitate commerce, precious metals were divided into discrete units of an agreed-upon weight. The earliest coins were generally only issued by monarchial governments who stood as guarantors of the coins’ purity, but as sophisticated magic became more common, it became both harder to prevent perfect but unauthorized copies and easier to detect adulterated metal.

“The focus of coinage laws shifted then, from trying to control who could make coins to regulating how they were produced, standardizing size, shape, and material, but allowing anybody to produce them. Back around 7th Militia 312, it did not matter whether a coin was pressed from the emperor’s dies, cast by a silversmith, or transfigured by a wizard… it was accepted as tender throughout the empire on the value of its metal.

“The Coin Act was meant to change that, at least for the distant Western Provinces. The loot from the Dwarf and Goblin Wars had impressed the Unnamable One, and he was determined that none of it should remain in the Provinces, or flow in trade outside the boundaries of the empire. The Coin Act was the first step in systematically criminalizing the possession of gold and silver in the Western Provinces. It decreed that the only lawful currency in those territories would be special coins, made from more base metals, issued only by the provincial government. Question, Ms. Carter?”

He said this last to a red-headed girl in the front row, who hadn’t even raised her hand.

“Yeah… how could they possibly enforce that kind of law?” she asked.

“With appalling viciousness,” the professor answered. “These coins were no harder to duplicate than the standard ones. In fact, due to the inherent difficulty of magically creating gold and silver, the junk coins were easier to reproduce… they could often be conjured out of thin air. With no way to prevent unauthorized duplication, the enforcement portion of the edict focused on punitive measures. For men of standing whose positions would have protected them from most mundane kinds of legal consequences had they remained in the old world, the penalties for violating the Coin Act were ruinous. For everybody else, they were fatal. The goal was to make people so afraid of being caught making unauthorized copies that they wouldn’t dare try.”

“But how did they catch anybody at it?” the Carter girl asked.

“Some people were caught in the act,” Hart said. “Others were turned in. As you might imagine, evidentiary standards were lax, even for the time. The crackdown on illicit duplication was only one aspect of enforcement, however. With the Coin Act’s passage, new edicts were issued, banning the use of devices for detecting the purity of gold and silver. This was meant to make it impossible for commerce to be done with the old coinage, but Provincial merchants adapted. They revived older, more primitive methods for testing metals, techniques they learned from their dwarven allies, involving weights and scales. Such ‘scientific’ tests could be very easily fooled by magic, but the provincials learned from the example of their government and dealt harshly with any transgressor they discovered.”

He paused and looked around the room. The rest of the class seemed to perk up, as if they anticipated something.

“A goldsmith named Edwin Golden, who was found to have used weightening charms on his gold coins, was punished by vigilantes who force-fed him a potion of fire resistance, and then a cauldron of molten gold before nailing him to the wall of his shop. He died in agony as the gold solidified in his stomach or the potion wore off before it cooled, depending upon the account. Broadsides were distributed showing a drawing of him pinned to the wall, with golden tears streaming down his face for dramatic effect.”

Okay, that hadn’t been covered in high school.

“Fucking sweet,” Steff whispered. “That is… so… hot.”

“The ultimate answer to Ms. Carter’s question, though, is that ultimately the Coin Act was unenforceable. It was never officially repealed, but the so-called Mercy Act was passed seven years later, leading to the waiver of all penalties. In theory, you could still be caught and convicted of violating the Coin Act, and even sentenced, but that sentence could not be carried out,” Hart said. “So the Unnamable Emperor could maintain the delusion of control. His dream of stripping the provincials of all their gold and silver was never realized, but the Coin Act had real and lasting consequences. Let’s hear some of them. Ms. La Belle?”

A girl with long curly hair the same shade of strawberry-blonde as Puddy’s looked down at her book for a few moments before answering, “Um… the provincials didn’t like it?”

“No, they did not,” Hart agreed. “Mr. Marks?”

“The Emperor increased the garrisons in the provinces?” he answered.

“Correct,” Hart said. “What else… Miss Mackenzie?”

“The emperor banned magic weapons from the provinces,” I said. “At least, for civilian commoners.”

“Yes!” Hart said. “Exactly. To be more precise, the nobility were allowed to keep their heirloom weapons and wear them to social functions, but they could not be carried accessibly on the open street or used for their intended function. It was the resulting outcry which led to the increased legion presence, ostensibly to guarantee the safety of the now-disarmed populace.”

Steff slipped her paper back in front of me. She’d drawn an incredibly detailed and realistic picture of me, lying on my stomach with my legs bent back around and the ankles tied to my wrists. Even though there could not have been any doubt, she’d written the word “YOU” with an arrow pointing at the picture.

I stared at it for several seconds, utterly absorbed by the detail… the look of horror on my pencil-drawn face… until I realized Hart was talking and I wasn’t listening.

I wrote a single word and circled it for emphasis: basement. My safe word. I’d never used it before. I’d never had to, but my grades were important, this class was interesting, and I couldn’t afford to be on another teacher’s shit list, especially now that the deadline for dropping classes safely was passed.

Steff withdrew the paper and crumpled it up. I cringed at the sound. I hadn’t meant for her to actually destroy the picture, just put it away for a more appropriate time.

“I want you all to think about what it must have been like to live in the Western Provinces at that time,” Hart was saying, when I started paying attention again. “Most previous imperial expansion had happened when the empire moved into lands already settled by tribes of humans. No matter how violent and bloody the initial conquest was, the ‘barbarians’ often took to the imperial way of living quite nicely, and in their thirst for the fruits of civilization they became everything that model citizens were supposed to be.

“‘Every barbarian wants to be an imperial, but no imperial wants to be a barbarian’ was the saying, and these assimilated peoples had always been afforded the same rights and privileges of any other imperial citizen. The Westering Lands, on the other hand, had no human inhabitants when they were discovered, and so were settled by colonists from the established provinces, mostly within the Mother Isles themselves.

“Imagine being a colonist from the Mother Isles–maybe even from the Mother City itself–who has voluntarily transplanted his life, his family, and his business to this new world, to help settle the land ‘for the good of the empire’, and then finding out that for your pains you’re being denied the basic human rights that even the descendants of conquered barbarians possess. Imagine how frustrating that would be.”

The phrase “human rights” jumped out at me. Of course, the old empire had been pretty monolithically human. Historically, the phrase wasn’t completely inaccurate. Still, it grated on me in a way I don’t think it would have before. Human rights… rights inherent to humans.

“Miss Mackenzie, what are you thinking?”

The question caught me off-guard. I guess my distaste must have shown on my face. I swallowed and gathered my thoughts, trying to figure out how to frame my objection in a way that would be relevant to the class.

“The… provincials… were frustrated because they were being treated like non-humans,” I said, finally.

“A bit louder, if you please.”

“The provincials were frustrated because they were being treated like non-humans,” I repeated.

“Yes. Excellent! That is a wonderful insight into the historical mindset,” Hart said. “By law, only humans could become citizens without a special act of the emperor. The rights traditionally given to citizens were thus tied up with humanity. Jumping ahead a bit, the Coin Act, the Legion Act, and the other related imperial edicts were collectively referred to as ‘The Inhuman Acts’ and the revolutionaries’ famous Statement of Intent listed ‘intentional deprivation of humanity’ among the offenses committed by the Unnamable Emperor. The Imperial Republic to come would recognize certain rights for non-humans from the beginning, but that came from necessity, not principle… it was the new government’s proven willingness to honor trade agreements with the dwarves that cemented that important alliance.”

He wasn’t sugarcoating things, but I thought he’d missed the point a bit. I didn’t feel like disrupting class on my first day to make a political point, though.

“Today, most rights we enjoy are not tied explicitly to race or even citizenship, but are understood as the universal rights of free people,” Hart said. “To understand the provincial point of view, it’s necessary to imagine a different time…”

I listened to the rest of the lecture with interest, but my mind kept coming back to the concepts of “human rights” and “universal rights.” How much had things actually changed? I was called “it” and a “thing” even by some of my fellow Harlowites, but to some people on campus, “non-human” might as well have been the same thing as non-person.

The controversial doctrine of “human blood, human soul” was often dragged up in support of equal rights for those of mixed descent, but it was founded on a chauvinistic assumption that any level of human ancestry was important.

I liked how Professor Hart managed his class, though. As he laid out the essential points he meant to cover, he kept stopping to ask the class to try to imagine how things must have felt. He encouraged the class to ask questions and share their thoughts, and by the end of the period it had gone from a lecture to an open discussion on how we would have reacted to the Inhuman Acts, with the professor mentioning actual historical parallels to students’ responses.

It was interesting, but I stayed out of it. I wasn’t human to begin with, and I could feel the unspoken hostility and unwarranted assumptions underlying many of the thoughts being voiced. Each time the word “human” was voiced, I shrank into myself a little bit more, and found myself pressing up against Steff for comfort and protection. She leaned into me, making appreciative noises under her breath.

“I think it was wrong because I don’t think humans should have to be treated like that,” Ms. La Belle said near the end of the class. It seemed like her slight resemblance to Puddy was only skin deep… Puddy reveled in her token non-humanity. “Like they’re not even human, you know?”

“You’ve certainly put yourself into the provincial mindset,” Hart said. “Anybody else?”

“I think it’s more a matter of humanity being the framework the provincials had for understanding their rights,” Carter said. “I don’t think we can assign motives to them.”

“What do you mean by that, ‘assigning motives’?” Hart asked.

“I mean, I don’t think we should assume they were bigoted,” Carter said. “They weren’t making some kind of bold new stand, they were fighting for their rights that they were already supposed to be entitled to. I mean, if somebody says like, ‘All humans get cake.’ and you’re human and don’t get any, I think you can be legitimately upset that you weren’t given what you were promised. They weren’t guilty of excluding non-humans, because non-humans were already excluded from the system. When they set up their own system, they tried to fix that.”

“To some extent, yes, but I think you touched on a key point there,” Hart said. “Being given what you’re promised. The provincials felt betrayed. It’s not that the emperor had never passed burdensome laws before. It’s not that citizens had never had their rights restricted before. What made this different… what bred the resistance that led to rebellion… was the sense of being cheated, of being ripped off. They were lured overseas with promises of ‘cake’, as you put it, only to get there and discover it was a lie.”

He glanced up at the timepiece at the back of the wall right before the bell sounded.

“We’ll pick this up Wednesday. Please read the personal accounts from chapter three, on legion quartering,” he said. He turned his gaze to me. “Miss Mackenzie… stick around.”

I nodded. Steff turned my head to face her and gave me a lingering kiss on the lips, sticking her tongue in my mouth and then biting my lower lip.

“I’ll be waiting,” she breathed as she pulled away.

Hart hadn’t told me to come up to his desk, so I stayed on the bench while people filed past me and the room emptied. When the rest of the class had left, he came up to me.

“How does your friend like to be called?” he asked.

“What?” I asked.

“What is the preferred form of address?” he asked, and I realized he was asking me about Steff. “If I hadn’t seen you coming in together, I would have asked directly, but I assumed you would know and that might save some embarrassment.”

“Oh,” I said. “Um… she says she doesn’t care, but Miss Steff is probably most appropriate.”

“Miss Steff,” he said, nodding. “Got it. Incidentally, if you know anybody else who’s still in elven history and would like to get out, let them know they can talk to me about facilitating a late transfer.”

“Um, okay,” I said.

“And, if you would tell Miss Steff to not fuck around in my class, you’ll be doing both her and me a favor,” he said.

The word “fuck” from the mouth of a teacher–a proper professor, not a fighting coach–caught me by surprise, and I didn’t know how to respond.

“That’s all,” Hart said with a curt nod. I picked up my things and left.

I didn’t know what to make of the instructor, but it had been an interesting class.