Glyph Architect

The Glyph Architect holds the imperial title of that name — the spellsmith who phrases Meroveil's outward-facing magical decrees, treaty enchantments and hereditary court bindings — and is the first holder of it who is not the Crown's own. Casimir Rhode, thirty-four, is Arcane Syndicate, seconded to the Crown Council under the Lending Treaty of two crowns ago, and the Council's minute of his confirmation records the vote as five to two and the two as 'noted.' His robes are Syndicate grey cut like a uniform, because the Syndicate's geometry faculty dresses its lecturers as if for parade, and the Empire's gold piping was added by Council order in his second season. He wears the piping without comment. The Syndicate has asked, twice, whether the piping is permanent. He has replied, twice, that the treaty is.

His working is the Syndicate's geometry-school at its most literal: magic as mathematics, cast as construction. The shapes that float about him — cubes, pyramids, the occasional dodecahedron — are not decoration. They are the open terms of whatever he is currently proving, and the Council has learned to count them: three shapes in the air is a routine edict, eleven is a treaty, and on the morning there were nineteen the councillors adjourned without being asked. On the field the proof closes faster. He fixes one open form around a target, resolves it, and the target is resolved with it; the descent-working the chronicles credit to him is, in his own words, an old Syndicate theorem he has refined for six years and would prefer to hand to a senior pupil before he uses it a seventh time. The Council has heard this preference and has, on record, declined to appoint a senior pupil.

His standing is more fragile than the title suggests. The two councillors who voted against him have begun routing routine glyph-review to a junior court mage on grounds that seem procedural and are not; he has not objected, and has instead begun keeping his own carbons of every review draft in a hand-bound book whose lock is keyed to his blood. He corresponds, weekly and in cipher, with Emory Quillon of the Syndicate's rune-readers about the cadence scrolling across Quillon's obsidian slate, on the grounds that a proof which arrives before its question is either a heresy or a shortcut and he would like to know which before the Council does. He has not told the Council about the correspondence. The Council has not asked, which he has noted, in the book, as the more interesting fact.