Gish

A gish casts and fights in the same motion, which is not how the Arcane Congress trains anybody. The Congress licenses its mages, and it holds that a mage brought up outside its instruction is a danger first of all to himself. Amulta raises mage-warriors anyway, to its own standard and outside the Congress’s rules altogether, and the practice is old enough and formal enough to have a name.

The name was not a compliment. Gish is Peren, and in Peren it means something close to savage. It was thrown at Amulta’s mage-warriors from outside, and the Amultese kept it. It is now the official name of their training, which is a particular way of answering an insult: not by refusing the word but by writing it at the head of the syllabus.

They are not a private school. The Gish are a crown warrior-order, raised and held by Amulta itself, and there is lesser nobility in the ranks. Raerin Corvain, an officer of the Corvain family, was training as a gish; he was seeking diplomatic help for Amulta, and was found under a cairn with two months of weather on it.

Gwenivere Velmont is the one who thought of them for the curse. Amulta’s crown keeps mage-warriors raised for exactly the kind of problem the seven keeps pose, and a well-made written appeal might move them to send some. It was a suggestion made in an empty shop with the door watched, and it has gone no further.

What the training consists of and where it is done, nobody outside Amulta seems to have written down. How a man comes to be admitted is known, and it is not by choosing: children of families reckoned to carry magic are tested at about three, everyone else by six or seven, and testing positive means enrollment, because service is coming either way. How well a child tests decides the road, some toward the Gish and some toward the mages proper.