## Chapter 508 — Terms of Inquiry

Arliss was halfway through disagreeing with a ward report when the missive appeared beside her hand. The report concerned a boundary shift in a second lower practice room; the earlier room was still closed. A junior assessor had called the movement *probably settling*. Arliss had already crossed out *probably* and was deciding whether the remaining word deserved to survive when folded paper existed on the desk where there had been none. No knock had sounded. No ward had stirred. Nothing in the room acknowledged an arrival except Arliss herself.

She looked at the paper for several seconds before touching it. The message asked whether now was convenient. Arliss glanced at the unfinished report, the stack beneath it and the locked case at the side of her desk. Ian had already demonstrated that he could put objects into this room without crossing any boundary she could detect. He had also demonstrated that he could reproduce her frost without mana, remove records from Crown custody and disappear without leaving her wards anything useful to complain about.

None of that made the question less ordinary. She pulled a clean sheet towards herself and wrote:

*Yes. I am working, but nothing that cannot wait. If you intend another experiment, tell me what question you are trying to answer before you demonstrate the answer.*

She signed beneath it.

*Arliss Fen*

Arliss set the reply beside his missive. “Your turn.”

Ian appeared beside the visitor's chair using what the movie industry called a cross-fade. His outline gained weight through the room until there was nothing translucent left about him. “Hello.”

Arliss watched the transition rather than his face. Her attention went to the nearest ward line immediately afterward. Nothing. “Hello. That method of arrival is new.” She drew a fresh slate towards herself. “What are we trying to learn today?”

“I was experimenting with increasingly dramatic arrivals. Did it work?”

“Yes.” Arliss considered him. “Not frightening. Irritating, perhaps. A visible transition with no detectable cause is professionally irritating.” She made a small mark on the slate. “As theatre, it worked. As an experiment, you have accidentally made a better question. Did you merely make yourself *look* as though you arrived gradually, or was your underlying arrival actually gradual?”

“Oh, that's a good question. That might get a bit disgusting as you see my insides, if it was the underlying…”

“Then do not begin with yourself.” Arliss reached into a tray of ordinary practice objects and took out a spare brass measuring cylinder. She set it upright between them. “Something harmless. Something we can touch, obstruct and weigh without discovering the answer by looking through you.”

Ian duplicated the cylinder and made both disappear, then brought them back with the two different interpretations of a fade. The first cylinder returned as though behind a theatrical veil. Its brass seemed to gather itself from translucence, but when Arliss put a thin rod through the place it occupied, the rod met solid metal almost immediately. The visual effect continued after the object was already physically present. The second behaved differently. At the beginning of its return the rod passed through where the cylinder was becoming visible. A moment later there was resistance, then more, until the brass existed fully enough to stop it.

Arliss withdrew the rod and stared at the pair. “Those are not the same event with different presentation.” She pointed first to one, then the other. “That one was materially present while its appearance was still catching up. This one genuinely possessed an intermediate physical state.” Her attention sharpened. “Did you specify the mechanics of either, or only the effect you wanted?”

“I used a reference to something you wouldn't understand, an example, and left it to it.”

“You are assuming rather quickly what I can understand.” The objection was dry rather than offended. Arliss looked back at the cylinders. “But the important part is that you did not specify partial density, resistance or any of the mechanism we just observed. You supplied a reference and let reality construct an interpretation.” She wrote that down. “That is different from reality obeying detailed instructions. It may be interpreting references. Did you have to explain what your example meant?”

“Nope, I just said, ‘Fade in like x.’ So I guess it interpreted it and did it.”

“That is more interesting than obedience.” Arliss turned the pen between her fingers. “If you describe every step and reality performs those steps, it resembles a tool following instructions. If you provide an external reference and omit the mechanism, then it has to supply information you did not give it.” She looked at the duplicated cylinders. “We should compare reference against description. Can you think of a harmless case where the two routes might produce different physical results?”

Ian reset the two cylinders, explaining the contrast to Arliss: one would follow a reference, while the other would be recorded, removed and rebuilt from the record. He described leaving reality to solve where the information was stored, how to reconstruct the object, and how to compensate for uncertainty at the smallest scale.

The first cylinder vanished and returned through the patterned wash of light of a Star Trek teleporter effect. The second underwent something much less decorative. Its atomic structure was analysed and digitised, the original matter erased, and the information retained elsewhere before reconstruction at sub-atomic scale, with quantum uncertainty compensated for by a mechanism neither of them had defined. When both were complete, Arliss could not distinguish them with sight, touch or a cautious magical examination. “That does not solve it.”

She sounded pleased rather than disappointed. “The reference may conceal a mechanism we have not specified, and your supposedly detailed description still left reality to solve storage, reconstruction and the uncertainty problem. We need a result that changes depending on which mechanism was actually chosen.”

“Any suggestions, chief Ian researcher?”

“I am not putting that title on Crown paperwork.” Arliss considered the two cylinders. “Interrupt the process.” She pointed to the first. “If that is merely a visual wrapper around an instantaneous transfer, stopping halfway should not expose a meaningful halfway state of the cylinder itself.” Her finger moved to the second. “If the other genuinely reads, removes, stores and rebuilds the object progressively, interruption should leave something physically intermediate. No living subject. Deliberately slow. Stoppable halfway. Can you arrange that?”

Ian repeated the two processes and stopped the teleportation midway. The first stopped like a paused moving picture. Light and pattern hung motionless around an effect that offered no useful evidence of the cylinder's underlying condition. The second stopped with the brass physically incomplete. A clean cross-section stood open to the room. The wall, hollow interior and thickness of the metal could be inspected directly without any cut, heat or tool mark. Arliss moved closer without touching it. “That is physically intermediate.” Her gaze travelled across the exposed interior. “Which means we can inspect hidden structure without opening an object in the ordinary sense.”

Professional interest displaced the rest of her expression. “That has obvious evidentiary and security problems. It also gives us a useful test.”

“As I'm junior research assistant, what's the test?”

“That one may survive.” Arliss crossed to a cabinet and returned with a palm-sized metal practice box of the sort used for teaching simple containment and tamper wards. She opened it, showed the empty interior, then turned enough that Ian could not see her hand clearly while she drew a small chalk mark somewhere inside. She closed the lid and laid a simple ward across the seam. “Three observations. First, whether partial deconstruction lets us inspect the interior without opening the lid. Second, whether the ward treats material vanishing as a breach. Third, after restoration, whether both the mark and the ward survive exactly.”

She set the box down. “Do not ask reality what I drew. Remove only enough of one wall to expose the interior, slowly, and stop before reaching the mark if you encounter it.”

Ian followed her instructions. The side wall vanished from the top downward without cutting, melting or deforming. The ward stretched across the closed lid seam and did nothing. As more metal ceased to exist, the interior became visible. A hooked white chalk line appeared on the opposite inside wall. The process stopped before the disappearing boundary reached it. Arliss leaned closer. “The mark is visible and the lid has not moved.” She checked the ward. “And the ward did exactly what it was made to do: guard the seam. It did not treat the side wall disappearing as the lid being opened. That is not evidence that wards fail. It is evidence that this ward was narrower than the event.”

She straightened. “Restore the wall exactly. I want to know whether it returns as the same material or merely something equivalent.”

Ian restored the wall. It returned without seam, heat, distortion or visible difference. Arliss checked the ward before touching the box. It remained intact. When she opened the lid normally, the ward gave the expected response. The hooked chalk mark still occupied the interior wall. “Observable state preserved.” She closed the lid again. “That still does not prove material identity. An exact replacement could satisfy everything we just measured.” Arliss looked at Ian. “Can reality tell you whether the restored material is the same matter or merely equivalent matter?”

Ian explained that the original matter had been analysed and erased, its state retained, and the missing section rebuilt from newly created matter at sub-atomic scale. The same constituent particles had not returned; the reconstruction simply reproduced the relevant state closely enough that their available tests could not distinguish it. Arliss listened without interrupting. “So *exactly as it was* was satisfied at the level of condition, not material identity.” She looked at the box with renewed suspicion. “For an ordinary object that may make no practical difference. For provenance, sympathetic links, oath objects, relics, wards or anything whose history matters, it might.”

Her finger tapped the metal once. “We need something whose function depends on continuity of the original material. Can reality preserve identity explicitly rather than reconstructing?”

“What about something with active magic that's doing something?”

“Yes. Better.” Arliss selected a plain metal strip and laid it across the table. She placed two fingers above it and built a narrow active ward along the metal, maintaining the working herself rather than storing it in an object. “If the material beneath an active working is destroyed and replaced, I should feel what happens to the working. Break, collapse, reattachment, distortion, continuation. Any of those would tell us more than the box.” She withdrew her hand without releasing the ward.

“Remove and reconstruct a small section beneath the middle of the active ward. Slowly.”

Ian began removing the section for reconstruction. Arliss felt the ward lose coherence over the vanishing metal before the gap was complete. Mana pulled towards the surviving edges instead of spanning empty space. When replacement metal formed in the missing section, the working did not bridge it again by itself. Arliss watched for another moment before deliberately extending the ward across the replacement. “There.” She tested the restored line. “The new material accepts the same working, but the existing working did not treat it as an uninterrupted target. Destruction mattered.”

She looked at Ian. “Now the opposite. Preserve the original matter rather than destroying and recreating it. Remove the same section, keep it somewhere, and return that exact piece.”

Ian did as she asked, setting the original piece aside rather than destroying it. The second experiment began with the same physical gap. The ward reacted to the disappearance in much the same way, its central span losing support while the surviving ends remained stable. When the original piece returned, the working changed before Arliss touched it. Mana drew itself back across the restored section and the ward became continuous again. Arliss stared at it, then tested the line with two fingers. “I did not rebuild that.” She looked from the strip to Ian.

“The magic distinguishes between the same matter returning and indistinguishable replacement matter.” For once, she did not immediately qualify the statement. “That is a real result.”

Ian smiled at her. “You're enjoying this.”

Arliss looked down at the strip and then at the slate crowded with notes. “Yes.” There was no embarrassment in the answer. “We found a mechanism difference I did not expect, and the difference gives us another question. Material equivalence is not continuity. That is considerably more interesting than simply being impressed because you can make impossible things happen.” A small smile appeared. “So yes. I am enjoying this.”

Ian sat down. “Tea?”

Arliss looked at the cup she had abandoned before Ian arrived. Whatever temperature it had begun at was now historical information. “Yes.” She picked it up, confirmed the obvious and set it back down. “Mine is evidence of poor experimental timekeeping.” Her eyes returned to Ian. “Ordinary tea, or scientifically troublesome tea?”

“I don't think you and I should stroll hand in hand around Crownholt, so the latter is safer?”

Arliss gave him a long look. “The hand-holding would create gossip. You appearing in a royal mage corridor without entering through any door would create paperwork. I know which one frightens me more.” She cleared enough space between the cylinders and box to make room for cups. “If the tea becomes research, keep the variable small. I still intend to drink it.” Her attention sharpened again. “Two identical cups. Heat one normally. Make the other simply acquire the same final temperature without ever being heated.”

Ian raised an eyebrow. “I can.”

He supplied two identical cups, which sat among the experimental debris. One reached drinking temperature through an ordinary heating process. The other simply possessed the same final temperature without the preceding transfer. Arliss touched one, then the other. Steam, scent, weight and the immediate feel of the liquid offered her nothing useful. “*Normally* has become a more difficult word since meeting you.” She considered the pair. “One reached this state through energy transfer. The other had the state imposed without the process. We will need a better instrument than my hand if we want to ask where the energy accounting went.”

Then she took the second cup. “But first I am going to drink the experimental apparatus.”

“I was worried there would be no tea drinking.” Ian drank from the other.

“That would have been poor methodology.” Arliss drank again. The desk had surrendered any claim to order. Cylinders, practice box, metal strip, chalk, reports, notes and tea shared the surface without hierarchy. She made no attempt to repair it. “Every answer so far has produced a better question.” Her eyes moved over the accumulated evidence. “I may eventually resent you for that.”

“I can only offer my apologies for endless interest.”

“I don't accept them.” Arliss rested the cup beside the slate. “Interest becomes troublesome when it pretends to be evidence. You are at least reasonably willing to be told that your first explanation is inadequate.” She considered him over the rim of the cup. “That makes you easier to work with than several qualified mages.” A pause. “Do not let it become a source of pride. That would ruin the advantage.”

“I would never get in the way of a lady judging my adequacy.” Ian smiled. “How did you learn you could do magic?”

Arliss drank some tea before answering. The cup warmed her fingers; she loosened them and looked towards her own hand, remembering rather than demonstrating. The cold and wards they had spent the afternoon examining had once required her to learn what to notice before there was anything useful to show.

“You say that as though you have not spent the afternoon deliberately supplying material for assessment,” she said, then returned to the question. “That is less dramatic than your arrivals. I did not accidentally freeze a pond or set a relative on fire. I was taught enough to recognise mana before I could do anything useful with it. Once it became clear I could shape it rather than merely sense it, the question became what I was good at.”

A faint movement touched the corner of her mouth. “Cold came easily. Wards did not. I liked wards more.”

“Do they test who has mana, or does everyone to some degree? And it's just how you use it?”

Arliss set the cup down among the objects they had tested. Each had answered a narrow question; the cylinders and strip offered her no help with the much larger claim about every human. She took a little longer over her answer.

“Those are two different questions, and I don't know that anyone has proved the first one as neatly as you are asking it. For practical human training, the questions are simpler. Can you perceive mana reliably? Can you move or shape it deliberately? Do you have enough capacity and control for further training?”

She tapped one finger against the cup. “Whether every human possesses some tiny amount below useful measurement is a different question. I was not taught to equate *no measurable magical ability* with *absolutely no mana whatsoever*.” Her eyes narrowed slightly. “You have apparently made me more suspicious of badly defined zeros.”

“I assumed kids were tested at five and the good ones with mana became mages.” Ian smiled. “Okay, not literally that, but something more administrative.”

Beyond her elbow, the unfinished ward report still waited beneath the newer notes. Arliss glanced at the stack below it; Ian's tidy sorting system would have required rather more paper than even these offices managed.

“Crownholt would certainly approve of the paperwork.” She shook her head. “It is not that tidy. Formal assessments become important once someone is actually training, and capacity and control matter a great deal. There is no universal childhood sorting where everyone receives *mage* or *not mage* and the matter is settled.” She considered how much simplification the answer would tolerate. “People reach training by different routes. Family instruction, tutors, schools, military or Crown service, local mages noticing ability. Plenty of people with some mana never become professional mages.” Her expression became dry again. “Your model is admirably administrative. It is merely more organised than the world.”

“Do you have any instruments, magical or otherwise, to measure someone's mana capacity?”

“Yes. That part is much less mysterious than I may have made it sound.” Arliss indicated an empty place on the desk as though an instrument might already be there. “Formal assessments use receiving measures. Usually crystal or another prepared focus. The subject feeds mana into it under controlled conditions, and the measure gives useful comparisons for capacity, pressure, control and recovery.” She lifted one shoulder slightly. “They are not perfect. Strong or unusual subjects can exceed the instrument, and the test requires the subject to interact with it. It is not a little window which looks at someone and announces a number.” She looked at Ian. “Crownholt has them.”

“I'm curious if…” Ian paused, not wanting to say *real body*. “I possess any natural mana, not what reality will give me if I ask it.”

Arliss noticed the hesitation. He had been ready enough with the cylinders and the box; this question had interrupted his easy account of what he wanted to try. She left the unfinished phrase alone and made room on the desk for a different kind of test.

“You mean mana that is already yours, rather than an effect supplied because you requested one.” Her attention went briefly to his hands. “So far I have detected none when you use your impossible effects. That is not proof that you possess none.” She considered the test. “A receiving crystal would be useful, provided you do not ask reality to help you interact with it. If nothing responds naturally, that tells us something. If something does, that tells us considerably more.” Arliss stood. “I can get one.”

“If that's okay? Please.”

“Yes.” Arliss left the office without making the request ceremonial. She returned a few minutes later carrying a receiving crystal in its padded stand and a small slate for the reading. The instrument looked considerably less impressive than the experiments already scattered across her desk. She set it down between them and checked the crystal before turning it towards Ian. “Do nothing with reality. No correction, no assistance, no imitation. Just put your hand on the receiving surface and try to give it mana in whatever way feels natural.”

Arliss sat opposite him, pen ready. “If nothing happens, leave it at nothing.”

Ian put his hand on the receiving surface and tried to give it mana. He gave himself none through the external mechanism; privately, however, he linked the crystal's test to his biological body in his own physical world, curious whether his Earth possessed mana naturally or whether it was unique to this world. Nothing happened. The receiving crystal remained clear. No light gathered within it, no pressure mark shifted, and none of the prepared comparison lines responded. Arliss waited rather than declaring the result immediately, then took the crystal herself and fed the smallest controlled thread of mana into it. Pale light answered at once.

She stopped, returned it to Ian's side of the desk and studied him. “Well. The instrument works.” Her pen moved across the slate. “For whatever you just attempted, I can detect no mana contribution from you at all. That is stronger evidence than my failing to sense you.” She underlined the observation once. “It does **not** prove that you contain no mana. It establishes that this test found no measurable contribution.”

Arliss looked up. “Before I settle the note, what exactly were you asking the crystal to measure?”

“It was measuring me.”

Arliss went still for a moment. “That sentence is doing more work than you are admitting.” Her eyes moved from Ian to the crystal and back again. “It tells me who, but not how you approached the test. Were you trying to draw on something you could feel, or simply willing a response?” She set the pen down. “Which?”

Ian gave her a look that made his dislike of this line of questioning plain.

Arliss read it correctly. “Fine.” She picked up the pen again and amended the note on her slate.

**Measured subject: Ian. Method not described. No detectable mana response.**

“That is enough for the result we actually have.” Her tone was matter-of-fact rather than apologetic. “I can record that the crystal found nothing without pretending I know why.” She turned the slate slightly and looked back at the instrument. “No response under this test. The subject is simply you?”

“Me.”

Arliss studied him for a moment, then altered the note again.

**Ian: no detectable natural mana under receiving-crystal test.**

“Then that is the result.” She tapped the final line once with the end of her pen. “Not *you cannot use magic*. I have already watched you do things that make that sentence useless. But we have found no measurable mana reserve of your own for it to draw from.” Her attention returned to the crystal. “That makes you a rather inconvenient control subject.”

“I've been called worse.” Ian smiled at her.

“I expect you have.” Arliss's answer was dry enough to leave open whether she intended sympathy. She set the crystal slightly farther back from the edge of the desk. “For research purposes, *inconvenient* is almost complimentary. Predictable subjects are easier. They are also less useful when the question is whether the model is wrong.” Her gaze settled on him again. “Do you want to know whether there is no reserve, or whether you simply cannot get it to respond to this instrument?”

Ian shrugged. “I don't know. There's no sensation when I do things. I assume you do when you use mana?”

“Yes.” Arliss lifted one hand, though she did not cast. “Not one sensation, exactly. I can feel my reserve, the act of drawing from it, and the shape of mana while I am working. Strain feels different again. With another mage this close, I can usually feel that *something* is being worked even if I cannot identify it.” She regarded him over the desk. “That is one reason your effects are so objectionable. You do something impossible three feet away and, magically speaking, the room feels as though you did nothing.”

Her gaze dropped briefly to the receiving crystal. “If you have never felt a reserve, a channel, depletion or recovery, that fits the measurement rather well.”

“Is there a unit of mana? Like the amount required to create an ice cube of a certain size or something standardised?”

“Not a universal one like that.” Arliss considered the crystal between them. “We measure comparatively: capacity, pressure, recovery, how long someone can sustain a known working, where an instrument reaches an established assessment threshold. Hence marks such as C and B on a receiving crystal rather than *seventeen mana*.” She turned her cup slowly between her hands. “The problem with your ice cube is that two mages may spend different amounts making the same cube. Control, technique, conditions and the way they construct the working all matter. Measuring the result does not necessarily tell you what it cost.”

Her eyes narrowed slightly as the thought developed. “Although if you want a unit badly enough, we could define one for the experiment rather than pretending the world already has one.” She glanced at the frost-working notes. “A fixed quantity of water, fixed starting temperature, fixed final state, using one repeatable working of mine. Measure what leaves my reserve.” Then she looked back at Ian. “That would give us an Arliss-sized unit of inconvenience, if nothing else.”

“I could then ask reality to quantify your current and max capacity?”

Arliss's expression sharpened immediately. “Yes. But only after we define what the number means.” She drew a small box around the proposed ice-working on her slate. “If we establish a repeatable reference cost first, then ask reality to express my reserve in multiples of that cost, we have a quantity I can at least relate to something I have actually done.” Her pen paused. “And I would want the receiving crystal result kept separate until afterward. If reality tells us the answer first, I do not want myself unconsciously interpreting every ordinary test in its direction.”

A faint smile appeared. “So: calibrate the ice working, measure me conventionally, record both, then ask reality for current reserve and full capacity in the unit we defined.” She turned the slate towards him. “That sounds dangerously close to proper research.”

“I've an excellent teacher.”

Arliss gave him a level look, though the corner of her mouth betrayed her. “That is not admissible evidence.” She drew another line beneath the proposed calibration. “But I will allow it in the notes as an unverified claim.” Her attention returned to the problem almost at once. “We should start small. Enough ice that I can repeat the working several times without the calibration itself changing my reserve appreciably.” She tapped the slate once. “Choose the amount.”

“A dram,” Ian said, hoping his memory of the measures was correct. He was not sure whether a volume measurement would be better.

“A dram is a weight measure, yes.” Arliss considered it. “And for this, I would prefer weight.” She drew another line beneath the proposed standard. “Volume gives us another thing to control. Water changes slightly with temperature, vessels differ, and judging a surface exactly is irritating. One dram of water is one dram of water.” Her pen moved again. “Then we specify its starting condition as closely as we reasonably can, and define the end state. Completely frozen, not merely cold enough to contain some ice.”

She looked up from the slate. “One dram of water, from the same starting temperature, frozen completely by the same working. That can be our reference.”

Ian nodded. “Shall I enquire?”

“Not yet.” Arliss tapped the sequence she had written on the slate. “If we ask reality before I actually perform the reference working, then we have allowed it to define the unit as well as answer the question. I want at least one part of this measurement to belong entirely to ordinary magic.” She indicated the receiving crystal next. “I freeze the measured water. We establish what that costs me. Then we take the conventional reading without knowing what reality thinks the answer should be.”

Only then did she tap the final line. “After that, yes. Enquire.”

“Okay.”

Arliss measured out one dram of water, checked the receiving crystal against herself, and recorded the starting position before touching two fingers to the small cup. Frost formed first around the rim, then travelled inward. The water clouded, tightened and became solid without cracking the vessel. Arliss stopped as soon as the last liquid centre vanished. She returned her hand to the receiving crystal. The change was small, but visible. Arliss checked it twice before writing anything down. “Good. Small enough not to disturb the larger measurement, large enough for the instrument to distinguish.”

She marked the difference on the slate. “One reference unit: the mana I expended taking one dram of this water from its recorded starting condition to completely frozen, using that working.” Then she measured her remaining reserve conventionally and covered the result with another slate before Ian could read it. “Recorded.” Arliss sat back. “Now you may enquire.”

“11,750–11,780 out of 11,800.”

Arliss did not answer immediately. She pulled away the slate covering her conventional result, compared the two records, then looked back at the receiving crystal. “That agrees with the ordinary measurement as closely as I could reasonably expect it to.” Her pen moved quickly. “Maximum eleven thousand eight hundred of our reference units. Current reserve between eleven thousand seven hundred and fifty and eleven thousand seven hundred and eighty. So I am missing somewhere between twenty and fifty units.” She glanced at the frozen dram of water.

“And *that* cost one.” The satisfaction in her expression was distinctly professional. “We have accidentally invented a usable mana scale.” Her pen stopped. “Did reality give you a range because the value is changing while I recover, or because it cannot determine the number more precisely?”

“It just provided a range. Lots of variables, and I asked it to do Proper Maths.”

Arliss's eyes narrowed at the phrase, but she let the unfamiliar wording pass. “So the uncertainty is part of the answer, not merely poor resolution.” She amended the slate accordingly, preserving both ends of the range rather than choosing the midpoint. “Good. Then I do not want eleven thousand seven hundred and sixty-five written down anywhere as though averaging uncertainty makes it disappear.” Her pen paused beside the maximum. “The useful next test is obvious. We measure again when my reserve is meaningfully lower and see whether reality's number and the receiving measure continue to agree.”

“Should we go somewhere—yes, teleporting”—Ian looked at her—“and freeze stuff?”

Arliss gave him the look the qualification deserved. “I was going to object to the transport. I see you have prepared for that.” She considered the slate, then the collection of increasingly inadequate objects on her desk. “For this measurement, yes. Somewhere unoccupied, with water, soil and living vegetation we are permitted to damage. No roads, buildings, crops or people close enough that a failed assumption becomes somebody else's problem.” Her attention returned to Ian. “And somewhere I can leave again without depending on you.”

“Of course. Shall we?” Ian waited for her agreement.

Arliss looked once around her office, gathered the slate and tucked it beneath her arm, then picked up the receiving crystal in its padded stand. “Yes.” She gave Ian directions to a Crown-used open practice ground beyond the busier parts of Crownholt: far enough from buildings for large workings, with a pond, rough grass and several unmanaged trees along one edge. More importantly, she knew the road back. With her agreement and destination settled, Ian took them there. A moment later, the office was gone. They stood beneath open sky instead, the ground uneven underfoot and the pond lying still beyond the grass. Arliss took several seconds to establish exactly where reality had put them, finding the road marker she expected before her shoulders eased.

“Good.” Her attention moved across pond, grass and trees with immediate professional purpose. “Now we can spend enough mana to make the second measurement worth taking.”

“I'm looking forward to seeing this bit.” Ian smiled.

“That is because you are not the one paying for it.” Arliss walked towards the nearest of the unmanaged trees and stopped several paces short. She looked up through its crown, then down at the ground around the roots, taking longer over the choice than spectacle required. When she cast, the cold did not arrive as a burst. It entered the tree. White spread through the bark in branching lines, followed by a deeper change beneath it. Frost climbed the trunk, divided into the limbs and ran outward through smaller branches until the whole crown stood rigid beneath a skin of ice. Leaves whitened and locked in place. Moisture crystallised along the bark. The air around the tree hazed briefly as heat left it fast enough to become visible.

Arliss kept one hand raised, expression narrowed in concentration, and drove the working through until the tree was frozen throughout rather than merely coated. Then she stopped. The silence afterward was peculiar. No leaves moved despite the breeze. A thin crack sounded somewhere high in the crown. Arliss lowered her hand and breathed once, deeper than before but nowhere near exhaustion. “That should be large enough to stop arguing with rounding error.” Before asking Ian for his reading, she set the receiving crystal on level ground and fed mana into it with considerably more care than the tree had required. The response climbed, steadied, and stopped well below the earlier position. She checked it again, recorded the result on the back of the slate and turned it over. Then she looked towards Ian. “Measure me now?”

“That cost 720.”

Arliss looked from Ian to the frozen tree, then down at the slate. “Seven hundred and twenty.” She wrote it beside the earlier calibration and drew a line beneath both figures.

**One dram of water: 1**\
**Whole tree: 720**

“That is about six percent of my full reserve for one working.” Her attention returned to the tree, newly appraising rather than admiring. “Large enough that I would notice repeated use. Small enough that doing it once should not leave me tired.” She tapped the receiving crystal. “Now we compare that with the ordinary measurement.”

Ian watched with interest as Arliss turned the slate back to the conventional result she had recorded before hearing his number. “Close.” Her pen moved. “The conventional measure puts me a little above eleven thousand now. Within its precision, that agrees with spending roughly seven hundred and twenty from where I started.” She looked at the frozen tree, then back to the figures.

“And recovery has already begun, which means if we want cleaner comparisons from larger workings, we need to measure immediately afterward.” The satisfaction returned. “Annoyingly, your impossible answer is behaving like data.”

“Go again, then?”

Arliss looked along the edge of the practice ground and selected another tree of roughly comparable size. “Yes. Same working, as nearly as I can reproduce it. Then we find out whether seven hundred and twenty was a property of the spell, that tree, or merely our first convenient number.” She waited only long enough to settle her breathing before casting again. Cold entered the second tree in the same controlled progression: trunk, major limbs, smaller branches, then the finer structure of the crown. Frost followed the working rather than leading it, whitening bark and leaves as the deeper freeze completed.

Arliss lowered her hand as soon as she judged the working finished. “Now.”

“708.”

Arliss looked from the second tree to the first. “Twelve units lower.” She wrote both results together.

**First tree: 720**\
**Second tree: 708**

“That is close enough to call the working reproducible, but not close enough to pretend the trees are identical.” Her pen moved again, adding the difference. “About one and two-thirds percent.” Arliss looked distinctly pleased. “So now we have something better than a number. We have variation.”

“Different tree?”

“Almost certainly part of it.” Arliss looked between the two frozen crowns. “Different mass. Different water content. Different internal damage, growth, bark thickness, whatever else the working had to overcome. Twelve units is small enough that any of those could explain it.” She added another note beneath the figures. “If we want to separate *tree variation* from *casting variation*, we need something more uniform next.” Her gaze shifted towards the pond. “Water would be cleaner.”

“Or I can perfectly restore the tree?”

Arliss turned back to the first tree. “That would be better, provided *perfectly* means its exact pre-freeze state rather than an indistinguishable replacement.” She tapped the earlier note about material continuity. “Same matter, same water distribution, same temperature, same damage, same everything we can reasonably mean by the tree before I touched it. Then I cast the same working again.” Her expression sharpened. “If the cost changes significantly, the variation belongs much more plausibly to me or the casting rather than the target.”

She looked at Ian. “Can you restore it on those terms?”

“Yes.” Ian restored the tree on those terms. “Over to you.”

Arliss inspected the restored tree before beginning, checking bark, leaves and the ground around the roots rather than simply trusting the appearance. Then she repeated the working. Cold entered along the same route as before. The trunk whitened, the deeper freeze followed, and the branching frost climbed into the crown until the restored tree stood rigid once more. Arliss stopped immediately and turned towards Ian. “Now.”

“720.”

Arliss looked down at the slate, then back to the first tree. “The same.” She wrote the result beneath the earlier figures.

**First tree: 720**\
**Second tree: 708**\
**First tree, restored exactly: 720**

“That is much cleaner.” Her pen underlined the repeated value once. “Whatever twelve-unit difference we saw belongs to the target far more plausibly than to ordinary variation in my casting. Same tree, same initial state, same working, same cost.” Arliss looked towards the second frozen tree. “If you restore that one exactly as well, we can see whether its seven hundred and eight repeats.”

Ian restored the second tree to its exact pre-freeze state. Arliss repeated the working with the same care as before, cold travelling through trunk and crown until the tree stood frozen again. Ian gave the reading: “708.” Arliss wrote it beneath the others.

**First tree: 720**\
**Second tree: 708**\
**First tree, exact restoration: 720**\
**Second tree, exact restoration: 708**

“That is considerably better.” She drew a line beneath all four readings. “Within this experiment, the cost is behaving as a property of the target and the working, not as random variation from one cast to the next.” Her gaze moved between the two trees. “And twelve units is apparently enough to measure a difference between two living trees that look, to an ordinary observer, much the same.”

Ian smiled. Arliss caught it and, after a moment, allowed a small smile of her own. “Yes. This one deserves that.” She added two words beneath the results.

**Repeatable. Target-dependent.**

Then she looked towards the pond. “Now I want to know whether cost scales with the amount of material, or whether magic does something more troublesome than arithmetic.”

“When I first came to Crownholt, I didn't think this would be the outcome.”

Arliss looked at the two frozen trees, then at the slate crowded with numbers that had not existed an hour earlier. “Neither did I.” Her expression settled into something quieter. “I thought you were going to become another impossible thing Crownholt would try to classify badly.” She glanced at him. “I did not expect to end up outside the city inventing measurements with you.”

“But never concerned what I might do? Consciously, not my normal precision issue.”

“Yes.” Arliss answered without softening it. “The first time you sat in my office, you had already demonstrated that you could reach places you should not be able to reach, remove records from Crown custody and make magic happen without any mechanism I could detect. I knew almost nothing about your judgement except what you chose to show me.” She glanced towards the frozen trees. “I was less concerned that you would suddenly decide to destroy Crownholt than that you might decide something enormous was *justified* and act before anyone else had finished disagreeing with you.”

Her eyes returned to him. “I am less concerned now.” A brief pause. “That is not the same as unconcerned.”

“It's a start. I'm still not sure how I feel about you and Thomas, but if it was that bad we wouldn't be here.”

Arliss's smile disappeared, though not defensively. “I would be careful with that conclusion.” She looked down at the slate for a moment before continuing. “You being willing to work with me now tells me something about what you think of me now. It does not make what I did to Thomas smaller.” Her thumb rested against the slate's edge. “I was useful to an arrangement that hurt him. Sometimes I argued against the immediate harm. Sometimes I made the arrangement more tolerable. Sometimes that mattered.”

She looked back at Ian. “And sometimes making it tolerable helped it continue.” A pause passed between the frozen trees. “You do not have to decide what that makes me today.”

“No, and this isn't a test. The test is not telling Voss anything that might put my friends at any risk.”

Arliss's expression sharpened slightly at *friends*, but she did not pursue the word. “That I understand.” She looked down at the slate in her hands. “I have not kept Voss uninformed because I enjoy possessing a secret. I have kept him uninformed because giving Crownholt another extraordinary capability to investigate would create consequences I cannot control.” Her gaze returned to Ian. “If that remains the choice before me, I will keep choosing silence. If I believe someone is actually in danger, I will make that judgement again rather than promise you blindness in advance.”

A small pause. “But curiosity is not danger.”

“No.” Ian smiled at her. “I think I need to go. I've enjoyed this. We could maybe do something again sometime?”

“Yes.” Arliss answered before the question could become awkward enough to require rescuing. “I would like that.” She looked once towards the frozen trees and the slate full of numbers. “Preferably with fewer assumptions, better instruments, and something less alive than the local vegetation.” The dry edge returned to her voice. “But yes. Come back.”

“And you need to think of somewhere we can eat that at worst has gossip and not any implications for my friends.” Ian smiled. “Are you going to your office yourself or shall I send you?”

“I'll think of somewhere ordinary enough that the worst consequence is somebody deciding I have questionable taste in company.” Arliss tucked the slate securely beneath her arm and gathered the crystal in its stand. “And I am going back myself. I specifically required a way home that did not depend on you. Abandoning that condition the moment teleportation became convenient would be very poor research practice.” The corner of her mouth moved. “Besides, I have several thousand units of mana recovering and a walk back to Crownholt. I may as well collect another observation.”

Ian waved and disappeared.

Arliss watched the empty space for a moment, then started back towards Crownholt. By the time she reached her office, the walk had done what she wanted from it. Her breathing had settled completely, the faint sense of expenditure behind her magic had receded, and the afternoon's numbers had stopped feeling novel enough to distort judgement. She opened the door. A rectangular piece of fudge sat in the middle of her desk. Chocolate had been piped carefully across the top.

**Thank you x**

Arliss stopped. The wards had, naturally, noticed nothing. She put the slate down beside the fudge and studied the message with considerably less confidence than she had shown while assigning numbers to frozen trees. “The seven hundred and twenty was easier.” After a moment, the corner of her mouth moved. She did not add the fudge to the experimental record. She ate it. The fudge lasted longer than the chocolate had. Partly because Arliss ate it more slowly, and partly because the afternoon had left her with enough new information that even sweetness required room among the other things competing for attention. She sat at her desk with the experimental slate beside the ordinary ward reports and refused, for several minutes, to pretend those belonged to the same category of work.

Eventually she pulled a fresh sheet towards herself. The first notes were deliberately dull.

**Visual transition may conceal instantaneous physical arrival.**

**Genuine progressive arrival can produce physically intermediate states.**

**Reconstruction from new matter does not preserve an active working across the replaced section. Return of original matter permits the existing working to re-establish without recasting.**

She paused over that one and made the language less ambitious. *Permits* was observation. *Recognises identity* was interpretation. The distinction mattered. The mana work took longer. She copied the definition precisely: one reference unit was the expenditure required for her particular working to take one dram of the measured water from its recorded starting condition to completely frozen. Not a universal unit. Not yet even an Arliss unit outside those conditions. A reference established for one afternoon because they had needed something better than *a little* and *a great deal*.

Then came the numbers.

**Maximum reserve: 11,800 reference units.**

**Observed current range before large expenditure: 11,750–11,780.**

**Tree one: 720.**

**Tree two: 708.**

**Tree one after exact restoration: 720.**

**Tree two after exact restoration: 708.**

She looked at the repeated pairs for a while. That result pleased her more than eleven thousand eight hundred had. The large number was impressive only because it described her. The repeated numbers described something beyond her. Same target, same state, same working, same cost. Different target, measurably different cost. There were questions inside the twelve-unit difference that could occupy several perfectly respectable afternoons. Water content. Total living mass. Structure. Species. Temperature. Damage. Whether the working paid for distance through material or only the change imposed. Whether freezing a branch separately cost the same fraction as freezing it while it remained part of the tree. Whether a dead tree behaved differently from a living one.

Arliss caught herself beginning a second page and stopped. Ian had left less than an hour ago. There were limits even to good research. She added one final line instead.

**Reality-provided measurements agreed with conventional receiving measure within useful precision. Mechanism of measurement unresolved.**

That was as far as she was willing to go. The sheet did not enter the outgoing tray. Neither did the earlier slate containing Ian's name. Arliss unlocked the case beside her desk and placed both inside with the notes she had already chosen not to give Voss. She hesitated before closing it, not because she had changed her mind, but because Ian's words at the practice ground returned with inconvenient clarity.

*The test is not telling Voss anything that might put my friends at any risk.*

Friends. No names. No places. No explanation of what risk meant. Arliss had deliberately not asked. Once, she might have called that professionally unacceptable. Unknown associates attached to an unknown reality-altering man would have been exactly the sort of uncertainty an institution argued should be reduced. She had learned that reducing uncertainty could itself create danger. That did not mean ignorance was virtuous. It meant information had consequences before it had answers. She locked the case. The final mark on the fudge remained unresolved as well. The words had been plain enough. *Thank you.* The small **x** after them might have been punctuation, shorthand, a private convention, or another reference Ian assumed reality would make intelligible.

Arliss declined to construct a theory from one mark. That felt like progress. A knock came before she could return to the report she had abandoned that morning. One of the junior assessors stood outside carrying the same boundary file, now with another slate clipped beneath it. “We repeated the original load.” Arliss held out her hand. The result was not dramatic. It rarely was. The boundary displacement had returned under the earlier conditions, smaller on the second run but unmistakably present. Under the modified load used for the final morning test, it had disappeared again.

The junior assessor had written *probably load-specific settling*. Arliss stared at the phrase. The young mage saw where her eyes had stopped.

“I know,” the assessor said.

“Good.”

“I nearly crossed it out myself.”

Arliss read the measurements twice, following the entries from the original load to the modified one and back. The assessor remained beside the desk, watching the movement of her pen.

“Better. Take the room out of ordinary rotation.”

The assessor blinked. “Completely?”

“Until we can explain why the original load reproduces the fault and the later load does not.”

The assessor glanced down at the two sets of figures. Her hand rested on the file's edge, but she left it where Arliss could finish reading. The recommendation beneath them was still her own.

“It may be harmless,” she said.

“Yes.” Arliss let her wait, then looked up. “That is not the same as establishing harmlessness.”

“No.”

Arliss turned the file towards herself and wrote across the recommendation section: **UNRESOLVED — ORIGINAL CONDITION REPRODUCES DISPLACEMENT**. Below it she added an instruction for another controlled examination the following morning.

“Good,” she said, returning the report.

No one had been injured. No wall had failed. No heroic mage would ever hear about the room that remained unused because two tests had disagreed.

Arliss found that increasingly satisfying. The remaining work of the day was ordinary enough to make the afternoon's trees seem improbable. She returned the receiving crystal to its storage case, noting only that it had been checked and remained serviceable. She reviewed two routine ward renewals, rejected an alarm revision because the proposed overlap would make maintenance worse, and approved a containment repair whose author had described what remained uncertain instead of hiding the uncertainty beneath confidence. By late afternoon, Crownholt had changed in ways no visitor would notice.

Another practice room was unavailable. One repair would happen differently. One junior assessor had learned to distrust *probably* by half a degree more than she had that morning. Voss still knew nothing about Ian's mana experiment. The kingdom had not collapsed from the omission. Arliss sat back after the final report and found the empty fudge wrapper beside her slate. She had enjoyed the afternoon. That fact did not require reinterpretation merely because Ian was dangerous. Nor did enjoying him acquit her of anything that had happened to Thomas. She had spent enough years watching institutions turn one useful truth into permission to ignore another.

Both could remain true. Ian trusted her more than he had on his first visit. Not completely. Good. She trusted him more too. Also not completely. Better. Her gaze moved towards the window. Somewhere beyond Crownholt's roofs lay the practice ground, two damaged trees, a pond they had not reached and several questions now waiting with irritating patience. Then she remembered the other assignment he had given her. Somewhere to eat. Arliss considered the obvious respectable places and dismissed them one by one. Too close to Crown offices. Too many senior mages. Too many people who would notice an unfamiliar man because noticing unfamiliar men was part of their employment.

There was a smaller eating-house farther into the ordinary working streets, used by clerks, tradespeople, junior mages and anyone who wanted hot food without turning lunch into an occasion. An A-rank Crown mage arriving there with a man nobody recognised would produce gossip. Nothing more, unless Ian made it more. Arliss found herself smiling. That seemed to satisfy the specification. She wrote no note to him. There was no need. If he wanted another afternoon, he had already demonstrated that distance, doors and ordinary message delivery presented very little difficulty.

Arliss put away the last report, checked that the locked case was actually locked and left the office at a reasonable hour for once. Behind her, the wards remained quiet. For the first time that day, nothing required testing.