The Silence Trials

I treat people who have had things taken out of them. Some of it was taken by the Null Reach and some of it was taken by a licensed practitioner, and in my clinic the paperwork is the only difference.

The problem the court could not solve

Silence is the ninth School and the only one defined by subtraction. The other eight shape Essence; Silence removes it. Every working in the School charges the caster something permanent, and this is not a moral flourish added by the proscribers — it is how the School functions, and it was known before the first hearing opened.

Which produced the difficulty. A court examining Silence must take evidence from casters, and a caster who testifies about a working has performed that working. Two clerks lost the record of the third session while transcribing it. A witness called to describe what she had removed from a patient could no longer describe it, having removed her memory of doing so under oath, in the room, as an exhibit.

What the ruling actually says

Very little, in the end. It does not say Silence is evil and it does not call practitioners criminals. It says the School may not be taught publicly, that no working of it may be performed on an unconsenting person, and that a Haven city may licence individual workings by name.

That last clause is the one that matters, and it is why the law looks arbitrary from outside. Null Silence is licensed almost everywhere: it suppresses casting in an area, it suppresses the caster's own casting exactly as much, and it takes nothing that does not grow back. Forgetting is licensed almost nowhere, because the memory it takes from the caster is chosen by nobody present and announced in advance to no one.

The four costs on the record

The hearings established these and none has been successfully disputed since.

• To take five minutes from someone is to lose five minutes of your own, and you do not choose which.
• To cut a bond between two people is to forget the name of someone you love for as long as the working lasts.
• To unmake an Echo is to lose every memory of the thing you unmade, including why it needed unmaking.
• To hollow out a name is to lose your own first name for a year and a day. The record notes two practitioners who did not get it back.

"The School is not proscribed because it is cruel. It is proscribed because it is the only one that can be used correctly, by a careful person, for a good reason, and still leave less in the world than it found."
— Closing summary, the Silence Trials

What I tell my patients

That the gap is real, that naming it does not refill it, and that the practitioner who did this very probably lost something of the same size. Most of them find that harder to hear than the diagnosis. I have stopped offering it as comfort and started offering it as fact.