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gardens, and across the gardens he could see the lights of the other homes of the Mage elite. Soft globes of pastel colors lit their gardens—you could tell where one garden took over from the next by the color of the lamps. Only a few lights were burning in the homes themselves, and those were probably night-lights, not an indication that anyone was wakeful or working. In the distance he could see the Council House, facing the Delfier Gate that opened onto the forest road.
     The Council House stood symbolic guard over the gate and access into the City. Or was it more than merely symbolic?
     There were a few farming villages in that direction—the City claimed extensive lands outside itself. Certainly soldiers were sent out there, and tax collectors, the latter to feed the City's prosperity, and the former— perhaps to ensure the City's prosperity?
     But Kellen had never been there, and emigration between village and City was strongly discouraged, or so he'd been told, though never why.
     He could understand why the Council wouldn't want too many people trying to move into the City; conditions were crowded enough without adding more people. But why keep citizens from leaving if they wanted to?
     It was a puzzle for which he had no answer. Unless it was simply that City-dwellers had few, if any, skills that would be of use in a rural or agrarian society. Perhaps the idea was merely to save them from inevitable failure...
     Still, shouldn't people be allowed to learn this for themselves?
     If would-be City-folk-turned-rustics came trailing back with their tails between their legs after failing some bucolic experiment to the ridicule of their former neighbors, surely that would be more effective than any reprimand from the Council.
     The Council House itself was ablaze with light, for Mages worked there all night, every night, weaving spells for the good of the City. It was the only place in the City that never slept. Of course, all those lights so nearby meant that the stars were hard to see from the gardens of those living nearby.
     Someday Kellen would spend his nights there too, if his father's plans for his future went according to Lycaelon's oft-expressed wishes.
     A night owl by nature, that hadn't seemed so bad in the past, for he would be well out of Lycaelon's purview most of the time once he went to night duties—but for some reason now, the thought seemed stifling. As stifling as the High Magick itself had seemed of late, for it required a finicking obsession with detail that, applied to anything else, would be considered unhealthy. Kellen had come to realize of late that High Magick was boring, that—once certain tools of memory and power manipulation were mastered—it was entirely composed of written spells that were descriptions of the change in reality that the Mage would like to produce. Very exact descriptions, very minute descriptions, down to the smallest detail, written in a kind of mystical shorthand and forced into the face of reality-as-it-was by magickal power.
     Frankly, if the simple spells were enough to induce yawns, the advanced spells that he'd managed to glimpse looked to Kellen a very great deal like abstruse mathematical problems expressed in words and symbols of the sort that drove schoolboys mad—"If A leaves his house on the corner of Bodhran Street and approaches Taman Square at the same time B—"
     Learning how to read, write, and thoroughly comprehend this sigil-language and apply it to the world in the form of memorized spells was what the Mage-in-training first learned. Only then was he allowed to do anything with his knowledge.
     It was bloodless and terribly boring, when it came right down to it. There was so much preparation and memorization and detail required to do even the simplest thing that by the time you actually accomplished what you'd set out to do, you were probably so bored with the process that the accomplishment came as an anticlimax. And in any case,