Imperial Decree 438-92-F, and everything it has been used for — including, once, waking up.
The Controlled Magical Manifestations Act — Imperial Decree 438-92-F, “Regarding the Prudent Regulation of Potentially Hazardous Thaumaturgical Phenomena.”
The Act was first enacted in 6894, after the Floating Market Disaster in Fortuna, in which a “dancing flame” enchantment reversed gravity in the Core Quarter: fourteen injuries, three drownings, and sixty-seven canal fish transmuted into miniature Lord High Governors. Its principal architect was Lady Magistrate Aveline Harrowgate. It has grown by amendment ever since — classification categories expanded from 3 to 27, liability extended to three degrees of causation removed — until it stood at 34 categories, 22 environmental contexts, 13 practitioner levels, a Bureau of Magical Oversight employing 378 Classification Specialists, and, in the words of an anonymous treatise, “exactly 7,289 explicit exceptions and exemptions to its own regulations, creating a document that spends more text explaining when its rules don't apply than establishing the rules themselves.”
“In its current form — following twenty-eight amendments, fourteen ‘emergency revisions,’ and the complete rewriting required after the infamous ‘Legislative Enchantment Incident’ of 7042 (in which the original text spontaneously developed sentience and began issuing its own contradictory regulations) — the CMMA spans twelve volumes, requires specialized legal training to interpret, and contains so many loopholes, exceptions, and internal contradictions that many experts believe it has inadvertently created more magical disasters than it has prevented.”
The Complete Restructuring of 7043 followed: the recaptured text — which required specialised containment procedures, and is rumoured to still occasionally mutter legal precedents when the moons are full — was rewritten in deliberately mundane language chosen for its low thaumaturgical resonance. That is why the current Act speaks of “energy phenomena resembling but legally distinct from what common parlance might term ‘fireballs’” and “temporarily localized exceptions to conventional gravitational constants.”
The other telling: the Crossing Courant, reporting the Act as a standing condition of life, says the text became sentient in 7042 and has been “amending itself ever since.” The reference entry says it was recaptured and rewritten. Both are printed here as found.
The Vaïmarium, the CMMA entry; the Courant's version in the papers.
From Lady Magistrate Harrowgate's sealed journal, opened on the hundredth anniversary of her death:
“The truth, which I daren't express in the official commentary, is that our goal cannot possibly be to prevent magical accidents or misuse — these are as inevitable as rainfall. Our actual purpose, which the Empress has implied but never directly stated, is to ensure that when such incidents occur, there exists a comprehensive framework for assigning blame to someone other than the Imperial government. Preferably someone without the resources to defend themselves against charges of regulatory non-compliance.”
The Vaïmarium, archival note to the CMMA entry.
The Act, as it lands on doorsteps.
“A Bankside hedge-witch was fined this Foursday under the Controlled Magical Manifestations Act for the crime of — the citation is exact — ‘practicing a threshold-ward without a Class III Domestic Sanctity License, said threshold consisting of a doorstep, said ward consisting of sweeping it.’ The fine exceeded her monthly income by a factor the Courant is not permitted to print without a correction from the Ministry of Public Confidence, which has been ‘reviewing’ that permission since Deepwinter.”
The Courant's editorial, “On the Price of a Doorstep,” concludes: “The Act we actually have fines a woman for sweeping her own step… A law that can always find someone small to blame is not a broken law. It is a very well-made one.” The Catch, printing the new fee schedule, adds that the Act “has never once been enforced against a mage of means, and is enforced on this bridge roughly four times a span, generally against a woman who has swept the same threshold every morning for forty years and could not tell you which of the sweeping was the magic.” The licence itself costs forty-two gold imperials — a sum the Toll's advice columnist notes, in her standing disclaimer, that she has in fifty-one years of sweeping never had at one time.
The Crossing Courant; The Culvëen Catch, Licence Schedule; The Culvëen Toll, Ask the Threshold.
Under a never-repealed wartime proscription, opening a door into the gap from which the Kel Reave horror came remains a capital offence — unless it is done for entertainment, at a licensed facility, in front of a paying crowd who have placed wagers on whether the players come back whole.
“The Courant notes, purely as a point of civic interest and not at all as editorializing, that this is the only law currently on the books in which the correct legal defense for opening a hole between worlds is ‘but people were enjoying themselves.’”
The Crossing Courant, on the phaseball facilities. The Act's theatrical-performance exception — Category F, “modest perceptual augmentation within explicitly acknowledged entertainment contexts” — is the same door, smaller: it is why licensed stages may manifest what doorsteps may not.
The Museum dragon, before the Bench — told by The Plinth; the Ledger-Courier's investigation names a different alderman, and the papers are left disagreeing, as printed.
Kivarro's Museum of Antiquities bought an elder dragon skeleton, warranted by contract to be genuine, “the description hereof to be, in the vendor's belief, partially correct in some particulars.” The Bench has ruled that the warranty is satisfied. The Office of the Bite assayed the specimen: genuine elder dragon, by mass, 11.4 per centum — chiefly the skull, four dorsal vertebrae, and the left forelimb; the rest, large delta monitor lizards. The Institute's published threshold for a soul-summoning into remains is not less than one-third genuine — so when the Children of the Dragon attempted their reanimation rite, the fraud ensured it could only ever have raised the pooled and puzzled soul of several enormous reptiles. The fraud, entirely by accident, saved the city. The Bench has twice adjourned sentencing: what is the tariff for a crime whose principal effect was the preservation of the community?
“The Registrar's finding, delivered on the 14th of this month and already the most-quoted sentence in Kivarran civil practice since the Marrow Deed, is that ‘a warranty which promises only partial correctness cannot be breached by partial correctness, and that the Committee, having accepted a clause which concedes in advance that most of the thing may be wrong, is not now heard to complain that most of the thing was wrong.’”
The Museum kept the skeleton on display and corrected its own placard — printed entire in Broadsheets. The Children, for their part, face considerably more serious charges under the CMMA's own provisions on attempted unlicensed mass reanimation.
The Plinth, No. 1,109; The Kivarro Ledger-Courier, Investigative Desk.
Two official documents concerning a fourteen-year-old. Her name appears in them under spellings the sources do not agree on; following her own ruling, this page uses the designation and the name she chose.
Throne Procurement, Vys Division — excerpted:
Consolidated Acquisition File — Subject SK-17, in Forc's archive entry (as kept in her archive file).
Imperial Intelligence Directorate, Office of Standing Warrants, Ærra. A reward of eleven thousand gold imperials stands for information leading directly to the person of Subject SK-17 — with the Bursar's note that it “has been collected. Several times.” The charges open with the Act itself: Charge I, Unlicensed Manifestation (CMMA, Vol. IV, §§ 9–14, and the whole of Vol. VII) — thirty-one occasions of complete motor paralysis, duration nine minutes, invariably nine. Charge IV, Unauthorised Deposit, was drafted for this subject and used only for this subject: she broke into the Kivarran Museum to return a stolen object, and filed the accession card correctly; the drafting officer's marginal note ends, “I have spent nine days of my life drafting a law against returning things.” Charge VII, Sedition, consists in its entirety of the subject laughing at a public reading of an Imperial proclamation. The chalked words on the Explorer's plinth — ASK HIM WHOSE IT WAS — have since reappeared on two hundred and six subsequent occasions, and the Directorate is charging her with all two hundred and six.
Apprehension attempts to date: 31. Apprehensions: nil. Casualties, on all sides: nil. And the Schedule's eleventh charge has stood reserved and empty for eleven years, across all thirty-one manifestations: “There is no Charge XI.” Its colophon: “Consolidated 7094. Reviewed annually. Charge XI remains vacant.”
Consolidated Schedule of Charges, Subject SK-17 (official paper, archive copy). A compiler's note appended to the Schedule stands outside the record, and is not reproduced.
From The Acta of Saint Ivy — the Sabast Cadets' folk-canonisation, recognised by no church. Hagiography, labelled as such.
“Crowned ‘Empress for the Evening’ by the acclaim of a dockside Sabast tavern equally far gone, she issued three royal decrees. Two are lost. The third — that all debts owed to a certain notorious creditor were pardoned — was, through a clerk's hungover error the following dawn, actually entered and enforced. A dozen families woke free, and the creditor's appeal failed on the grounds that the decree, while issued by no lawful sovereign, had been very properly witnessed.”
The Acta of Saint Ivy, “The Three Decrees.” Adjacent acta: she re-cut one glyph above the Academy door so “lift the eyes to the heights” read “the heights are watching you back,” and was expelled twice in one day — once for leaving by unlicensed kite.
Against twelve volumes of Act, the Empire's smallest paper holds one legal sentence. The Imperial Censorship Bureau has ruled that puzzles do not constitute publication, on the grounds that a puzzle has no meaning until it is solved, and that a thing without meaning cannot be seditious — a ruling the Toll says it thinks about constantly. And T. Quire of Errata, whose sheet asserts nothing and only corrects, states the principle his whole practice stands on:
“A cross-reference is not an assertion. That is the law and it is a good law and it is the reason this sheet exists and the Bureau's man laughed and went away…”
The Culvëen Toll (the puzzles ruling); Errata No. 566, on Correction 16. Errata's full statement of method is in Broadsheets.