Far more of that makes sense to Diwaniya than probably should. If she'd only said that there were a few limited exceptions to those rules, she could be talking about the laws of his own world.

"No, there isn't much difference," he muses. "You might think there would be, but I've seen healing craft go wrong. There's a terrible disease called Burrowing Mold--awful death, long and slow and excruciating. It didn't exist until some well-meaning Shaper was experimenting with a cure for dermatitis and let some magically-augmented spores escape his laboratory. Now it kills dozens of people a year, and that's one of the rarer ailments to come from irresponsible research."

Under most circumstances, it would be flatly forbidden even to acknowledge to an outsider that the Shapers were at fault for the diseases, but fat lot of good that law has ever done him. It clearly doesn't matter here.

"So no, I'm sure you don't think your husband's flaming sword is a problem, just as I'm sure you don't think whatever healing you can do is a problem, but if there's no way to hold either of you accountable for the damage you could do in theory, I'm not surprised that your people want no part of it. Everyone always thinks things are under control, until they aren't."