The Unaided Hand

The article forbids a weapon whose force is not the body’s own, and the Unaided Hand takes that sentence at the moment which matters, being the moment of loosing. A windlass cranked over a quarter of an hour and held on a catch is not the body’s force when the catch goes. It is the catch’s. The rest of the system finds the point tiresome and has never answered it satisfactorily.

The Oathlands keep it and so do the Tharosi orders, and it is by a wide margin the most expensive of the three. A bow no mechanism may assist has to be matched to the person drawing it, so limbs are cut to one archer’s draw and are very nearly useless in another pair of hands. It takes years to train. It excludes a great many people who would otherwise be soldiers, and the Oathlands treat that exclusion as evidence the reading is right rather than as the price of holding it.

What the school is really defending is not the bow. It is the position that a limit surrendered once does not come back. Concede the windlass and the argument for the cam is already made, after the cam the spring, and after the spring somebody at a wharf is loading a charge and citing precedent for it. Three thousand years of the other two readings drifting steadily outward is offered as the proof, and it is not a weak case.

Its own difficulty is the silence. The article says nothing at all about the Twofold, and the strictest moon in the system retains practitioners who can take an army off a road unobserved and has never thought to read that omission narrowly. The Unaided Hand polices the bow with tremendous rigor and has no doctrine whatever about the dark.