After the meeting was over, Torval tasked Mage-Commandrum Zaric with helping Talia get situated, as the mages of the expedition generally worked closely with the arcanists. The young woman understood the delvemaster’s train of thought. His logic was probably that it would give the two an opportunity to build a rapport while also giving Zaric a chance to point out things about the caravan that were the arcanists’ and mages’ joint responsibility. Such as maintaining the runework on the quietening enchantment on the wheels of the wagons, as the dark-skinned man was currently explaining to her.

Talia’s logic involved a lot of internal swearing and mild panic as a she grappled with a sudden intrusive thought.

Can he…feel…my magic? I can’t sense anything from him, but maybe that’s just because I have no fucking clue what I’m doing. Wouldn’t he have said something if he could? I’m probably just freaking out— Unless he’s a psion, in which case he definitely probably knows about it, and I just have to cross my fingers that—

“So, what kind of mage are you?” she blurted out, immediately blushing with embarrassment.

Smooth Tals, real smooth.

Seeing that the bald mage looked taken aback by the sudden non-sequitur, she tried to catch herself.

“I mean, I’m sorry to interrupt, I was just wondering, and then it slipped out, I didn’t mean to be rude or…anything.”

Yea this is going great. Great first impression. Even if he doesn’t know you’re a mage, then he definitely thinks you’re a babbling idiot.

The awkward silence stretched thinner and thinner, like a spider web right before it tore into a handful of clumped threads.

Then Zaric burst out laughing.

“Is that why you were so tense this whole time?” he asked.

“No! I just—well, kind of, yea,” she replied lamely.

He laughed harder, a loud, full bellied thing.

Talia was just starting to get uncomfortable when he stopped suddenly, all at once, turning to her with lidded eyes and an odd smile, looming over her.

“I’m the kind of mage that—would spit roast you and wash you down with an ale if it weren’t for this damn collar!” he growled gutturally, spittle flying from between his perfect teeth, hands scrabbling at the runed metal band.

Talia recoiled.

Holy shit.

Had he cracked? Right there in front her?

That would be just my luck.

The young woman’s hand creeped towards her sword hilt, not making any other sudden movements as the man began shaking lightly. Doubt wormed its way into Talia’s thoughts. She frowned.

Zaric burst out laughing even harder than before, leaning up against the nearest wagon and catching his breath.

“You’re evil,” Talia flatly said.

“Oohh, but you should’ve seen your face! Priceless! Just priceless! ‘Oh, please mister crazy mage sir, don’t eat me, I wouldn’t taste good, I promise’, that’s what your face was like,” he howled.

The bald man wiped tears of mirth from his face, laughing hysterically.

“It wasn’t that funny,”

“No, it definitely was,” he replied, “you have no idea how rare it is for me to get to pull one over someone who has never met a mage. Seriously, you made my day.”

This man isn’t mage-mad, he’s just garden variety crazy.

Zaric stood up, collecting himself.

“Ok, I’m good, I’m good. C’mon, if I don’t at least get you to your bunk, Torval’ll have my ass. We can chat along the way.”

He led them on a weaving dance between piles of supplies, workers, and the wagons.

“To answer your question seriously, I’m mostly an earth shaper with a minor affinity for air shaping. Which are basically the only mages, along with the occasional metal affinity mage, that the Guild bids on.”

Phew, no reading minds then, at least there’s that. Wait—

“Bids on?” she asked.

“Right, I forget sometimes what it’s like for the common folk. You probably figure that mages are all trapped above the arcano-sun, feeding it mana every hour of the day, or down below in the mines, killing beasties, am I right?”

Talia nodded uncertainly.

“Well in that case you’re mostly correct. I’d figure about ninety-five or so percent of all mages end up doing just that,” he said.

“The other five percent is split amongst the nobles and the guilds, usually the arcanists and the delvers. All told, at last count there were about seventy of us under the aegis of the Delver’s Guild. We’re just too useful for the magisters to deny the guild our use, you see. Of course, it helps that the guild pays out of the nose for them.”

That—that actually makes sense. Though I can see why the information isn’t spread around. Better for the magisters and the mage-hunters if the common people think we’re locked away and unable to harm them when we go crazy.

Zaric continued, his expression growing serious.

“Doesn’t mean everyone in the guild is happy about it, mind you. It’s where the Mage-Commandrum post comes from actually.”

“What do you mean? Isn’t commandrum just the old dwarvish word from commander?”

Zaric shook his head.

“Right, you’re an arcanist—forgot who I was talking to for a second. You’re correct. Technically. Unfortunately, you’re thinking of the wrong language. Commandrum does translate from dwarvish as commander. In some beastkin tongues however, it has a…different connotation.”

Talia, frowned. Beastkin languages weren’t her forte. She could read some of them—barely—but generally, most artefacts and trinkets were runed in dwarvish. In fact, up until half a century ago, dwarvish had been the official language of arcanistry and the language that many of the old texts she’d studied had been written in.

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

“I don’t know the details of how the crossover came to be, linguistically, but suffice to say that to beastkin, the word commandrum means something like death-witness. And that’s in the kindest of beastkin dialects, mind you. At its most literal, it means—well—slavemaster.”

Oh.

Talia spoke out loud without meaning to.

“Yea, kind of on the nose huh? Traditionally, the Mage-Commandrum is in charge of ensuring the cooperation of an expedition’s mage complement. Which is made easier by the fact that he or she usually carries the mages’ kill switch,” he explained, tapping his collar.

“That’s—”

“Necessary,” he said.

“I was going to say barbaric,” Talia replied.

“Yea well, when the people able to bend the very elements to their will lose their minds in the middle of a battle or when upwards of forty delvers are trekking through dark tunnels where silence and vigilance are paramount, it makes sense to be able to put mad mages down at a moment’s notice. Even in the city, imagine if a fire mage went insane while fueling the arcano-sun. Any damage there at all…”

Zaric leaned against one of the fully packed wagons, which had a big number four carved into the door, and turned to her, a fatal gravity in his eyes.

“Have you ever seen mage-madness take hold?” he asked.

The young woman shook her head slowly.

“I have. One moment my old master, gods rest his soul, was shaping through a cave-in, as he’d done a thousand times before, and then in the next, when he looked at me… there was something broken in his eyes, like a kind of twisted yearning. He patted me on the head and then turned back towards our caravan, the men, and women he’d delved with for years, decades. I froze. I think I knew even then, what was going to happen.”

The bald mage looked past her, at the merrily working delvers. People he might hurt someday, whether he wanted to or not. A catchy tune sprung up, the chorus spreading amongst them like a joyful plague.

“My master killed six people and maimed another five before our Mage-Commandrum managed to activate the kill switch.”

Gods…

“What happened after that?” she couldn’t help but ask.

“He died. Fell over like a puppet with its strings cut. And then life moved on,” he replied, “we mourned them— I shaped their graves myself in the next haven we came across. Delvers are hardy folk, at the end of the day. But I could never look at my old Mage-Commandrum the same after that, even though I knew that she had made the only choice available to her. Every move she made reminded me that she could end my life at any second. Every order became a threat. As soon as we got back to Karzgorad, I demanded to be transferred under a different delvemaster.”

Zaric’s gaze fell on some faraway place in the distant past.

Or maybe not so distant. He can’t be much older than twenty-five.

“The clerk didn’t even bat an eye. Gave me Torval’s name and said I should report to him the very next day. I think you’ll find that our delvemaster is an…interesting man. When I met him, he’d just lost both his Mage-Com. and his mage complement. For reasons of his own, he offered me a deal. I would take the Mage-Commandrum post, and he would hold on to the kill-switches. In a way, he helped me come to terms with my lot. I serve, I live, I love, and one day, I’ll die. In all the ways that matter, my life is no different than any other delver, and better than most mages ever get. I just hope when death comes, that I die a better death than my master did.”

Talia reflected on his words.

“That’s—a nice way of looking at it, I guess,” she said.

Zaric shrugged, pushing off of wagon number four and taking a sharp left.

“It works. I’m happy, Torval’s happy, and my apprentice and I get to decide our own fates, for the most part. So far, we haven’t run into any issues in over half a dozen successful expeditions. Though let me tell you, it certainly ruffled some feathers in Guild management to have a mage in charge of mages,” he said.

Talia quirked an eyebrow at the man.

“I can imagine it didn’t go over very well. Can’t deny I’m curious as to how he resolved the issue though,” she said.

“On that front, I’ll keep to myself. Torval’s stories are his to tell. Now, on to cheerier topics, relatively speaking. I’m not here to put the fear of magic in you, after all. At my age, the risk of mage-madness is a fraction of a percentage. So, you have nothing to worry about.”

He pretended to think for a moment and then winked at her and grinned.

“Well, aside from the decision to trek into dark tunnels to poke at mysteries better left alone when you have a relatively safe and lucrative profession that you could ply from the safety of Karzgorad. That’s definitely a cause for concern. Aren’t you arcanists supposed to be the brainy ones? If you ask me, the math doesn’t add up on that one,” Zaric joked as they dodged a pair of delvers hefting what looked like a case of smithing implements into the back of a wagon.

Heh, he has a point. If it weren’t for the threat of mage-hunters…

“Alright, let’s pick up the pace a bit. I’ll quickly show you where you’ll be sleeping for the next year, then we can go get your gear. I want to introduce you to my apprentice before we set off. She needs practice, so I plan on having the two of you work together whenever you need a mage’s touch.”

Talia made a vague sound of agreement, attempting and failing to pull her thoughts away from ideas of mage-madness. She saw herself losing her mind in the depths of the Deep Ways, with the other expedition members none the wiser. She imagined what they would look like after she blasted them into tunnel walls with waves of force. The shock on their faces as the ticking time bomb in their midst revealed itself only as it went off.

In her meeting with Arrick, her only concern had been for keeping her secret and escaping the consequences of it; for getting what she wanted. She hadn’t considered that lying to the delvemaster was, in essence, concealing a very real danger to the safety of those under his care.

Does that make me a selfish person?

She was mature enough to admit that yes, it probably did. The young woman hadn’t even considered it when she’d answered the delvemaster’s questions, despite Evincrest’s assertion that Torval was trustworthy. The pace of the conversation had been too fast for Talia to truly consider the implications of the deception, forcing her focus onto answering quickly and coherently. Which, she reflected, had probably been Delvemaster Torval’s goal. Unfortunately, his tactic had only released her instinct to keep her secrets to herself.

Was I wrong to do so? I mean I’ll probably tell him eventually but…

For the first time, she considered that the Magesterium had very legitimate reasons to strictly control mages. The true issue stemmed from the necessity of mage service. All one had to do was look up to realize it. Without mages, Karzgorad would fall to darkness like its sister cities had so long ago. And yet, even the fractured remnants of history compiled by the chroniclers showed that those persecuted by authority—even if that persecution was for good reason—were generally unwilling to serve that same authority. Hence the forced work.

Her mundane self, before she had awakened the Gift, had considered only the moral implications of slavery in all but name. In her mind, punishing individuals for something that might happen was reprehensible, a sort of presumption of guilt. She considered now that perhaps her opinion was a form of over-enlightened, ignorant prejudice.

The reality was that even without the threat of madness, mages were dangerous. Nothing highlighted that better than the fact that she had been able to…eliminate…a pack of armed thugs, untrained though they may have been, while having no real idea of what she was doing or how she was doing it.

And yet, Karzgorad needed them, nonetheless.

Talia glanced at the dark-skinned mage walking alongside her, lost in his own thoughts, imagining just how very useful and how very deadly a fully realized magic-user must be. If his master had been able to take down eleven trained delvers in the span of time it took his commandrum to find and push a button…Even taking into consideration the probable confusion and chaos of the moment, it painted a clear picture of the absolutely fatal threat mage-madness posed to even the most prepared.

That didn’t mean that Talia had changed her mind on the premise, slavery was slavery, and no matter the justification, taking away a sapient being’s autonomy was wrong. She wouldn’t be turning herself in any time soon. But the subject was clearly more nuanced than her prior image of a cluster of magisters sitting atop a hill, persecuting a small subsegment of the population in the name of the greater good.

There had to be a more elegant solution to the problem, but such concerns were best put out of mind until a later date, when she could actually do something about them. She wouldn’t be solving the issue with a stray thought, that much was certain. If she was extremely lucky, she might stumble across knowledge that…every single mage, arcanist and delver since the advent of mage-madness had been searching for and missed.

Right. Good luck with that Tals. Maybe a little much with the optimism there.

The rap of knuckles on wood brought her out of her thoughts.

“We’re here,” said Zaric, patting the number two inscribed on the door to the officer’s wagon, “home sweet home.”