“It’s always like that,” a voice beside Nathan said.

“I figured,” he responded absently, staring at the Hall-board. “I mean, why wouldn’t it be?”

“Oh.” The woman on his right sounded disappointed, likely on account of her mild disappointment and general lack of social graces. “Well, I guess it’s pointlessly jarring and rude, in some peoples’ eyes?”

“It’s not like they’re people,” he replied with the same absent tone. “I guess you could say it’s rude of the archmages who programmed the judgment golems to not have made them have better social graces. Actually, I would expect that for higher level examinations, it might not even be golems anyway?”

“How did you know they were golems?”

The voice came from someone new, someone who hadn’t walked up to him before speaking from his left. This could have been because that person had walked very silently, but Nathan had a reason to believe that was not the case. For that matter, Nathan was very confident that the person wasn’t standing there, no matter how much it seemed like he was to ordinary sight, which he assumed correctly to mean that the person was not to be fucked with.

“Well, honored one,” he said with slow, careful sincerity, “it’s written in the examination guide?”

The person pretending to be standing to his left paused at that, blinking and looking surprised. “I don’t know which I’m more surprised about,” he said with an unbecoming amount of frankness, “your having read the examination guide or them having included that fact. What were they thinking? People will try to subvert the examination!”

“I suppose they would, your wizardry.”

“Ah. Ah, yes. And they are incinerated by the defense systems, or they are worthy of passing. How do they prevent—oh, that’s—hm. I see.” The image winked out, then reappeared a moment later. “You. What is your name?”

“Nathan, your wizardry,” Nathan said politely.

“I grant you the title of Herald of the Hall, which is utterly meaningless in every way save this: that you now possess a title, and therefore it is not legal for the titled to drink the magic of your bones without your permission. Oh, and I believe you should now have access to some otherwise-restricted history books, though most of them are nonsense; and… to… entry through the main gate into all Temples rather than using the side gate? And don’t let them tell you it’s only the Abhorrent.”

“Thank you, your wizardry,” the new Herald of the Hall said, just as politely.

“Oh, and you may legally kill anyone obstructing your business whenever you labor for the Hall directly, or when you are engaged upon the work of the Quill in any regard. If you do that more than three times in a year, you cause me paperwork. Do not cause me paperwork.”

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“I understand, your wizardry,” Nathan said without missing a beat, though the archmage had disappeared the moment he had finished reciting the effects of the new title Nathan had been granted.

“What the literal, actual, incandescent fuck?”

“It’s not what it seems like,” he reassured the woman in the chair to his right, who had apparently overheard both sides of the conversation. “They apparently let anyone through the main gate of the Temples nowadays, I’m told. Though I wouldn’t know; I’m not from here.”

“That isn’t what I’m talking about, and you know it.” Her voice made the narrowing of her eyes clear, though it wasn’t particularly germane. “You can legally kill anyone?”

“Only when I’m acting as an agent on behalf of the Hall or taking quests in service to the Quill. See any of those up on the board?”

The woman’s indrawn breath was almost succeeded by another outburst, but she mastered herself just in time. Shifting her gaze to the Hall-board, she considered the hundreds of job postings carefully, skimming over them and looking for patterns in the text.

“How,” she muttered, “do you even know all of this stuff? You’re not from here, you say. Why do you know that none of the public quests are on behalf of the Hall, and everything’s in service to the Flex?”

“I spent decades being chronically over-stimulated and therefore I get bored enough to mentally drift towards any source of amusement at the drop of a pin,” he admitted, fishing a book out of the inside pocket of his coat. “After about five seconds of nothing sufficiently interesting or new happening, I tend to pull out a book or fidget with something irreplaceable. So I always keep a book around.”

“You have—you read the bylaws of the Hall for entertainment?”

“Beats getting blindsided,” he said with a broad, smirking grin. “By the way, you missed a few quests in your look-through. See that one, and the ones to its right?” She nodded as her gaze followed his pointing finger, and he shrugged. “The ones on behalf of the Hall are all acting as an agent of the State. Killing people, breaking their stuff, collecting money from recalcitrant militants who think that the government doesn’t have a legitimate claim to tax collection.”

“And the ones in service to the Quill?”

“I don’t see any on the board,” Nathan mused, “but I can guess as to what they’d be. I mean, when you’re an archmage? When there’s only seven archmages in the entire world? Whether it’s getting a pastry, acquiring rare reagents, or drawing runic circles on seven particular points at exactly the desired altitude no matter what anyone else who might be using the land or living on it thinks, the archmages are effectively an extraterritorial nation across the world.

“Take a job directly for them, and of course you can kill anyone in your way. They’re getting in the way of a micronation whose words you wish were only backed by nuclear weapons.”

“So…”

“Want to take that nest demolition job in the Outer Sunrise neighborhood? It’s—”

“Fuck yes.”

“—only three stone, two after taxes and fees and the materials, but we can split it evenly.”

“I already said yes,” she reminded him, standing up in a jingle of chainmail. “My name’s Wek. You do the paperwork, I’ll get my maul.”