After a quick breakfast from Alyn’s and a couple of cups of strong coffee, Cal was ready for the day. He began by doing a bit of enchanting. There was a lot he wanted to do today, but he had to prioritize. Once he started sending telepathograms and thinking about spider silk harvesting, he knew that events might start to run away from him, so he wanted to get the last bits of enchanting done before he set about his other tasks.

There wasn’t a great deal left to do, and he worked quickly, knocking out another strength enchantment and a warming enchantment - both pendants - and setting them on the shelves in the front of the shop, ready for sale.

The rain hadn’t eased at all. Max had washed up the dishes and cleaned the shop while Cal had been working. Now, Cal was about to get ready to leave, but Max was standing looking out the window at the rain.

“Why don’t I go instead?” Max said. “I’m feeling restless, I could do with a walk. Tell me what you want to say in the messages and I’ll send the telepathograms instead. I’ll pick up some more food supplies while I’m at it if you like.”

“Sure,” Cal said, smiling. “That would be fine. I was wondering if I should ask you to pick up some cores from Biddle and Kronk as well, but I think we’d be better waiting another day for the hunters to return. They’ll doubtless have picked up some other cores as well as the Level 4, and we need to be careful of our funds. We’re doing better, but we’re not quite at the stage of being able to splash out on wholesale whenever we want. What you could do,” he added as an afterthought, “would be to pick up some fine soil and some seeds. There’s a shop that specializes in that kind of thing over on Drellis Lane, not far from the telepath exchange.”

Max grinned. “Sure,” he said. “I’m looking forward to seeing how your enchanted plant pots work. Any particular kind of plants you want?”

“Something with colorful flowers, and preferably sweet scented as well.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Cal wrote down the messages he wanted to send to Mephisterion and Loruk. He invited Loruk to visit them at the shop, and said that he had something he wanted to ask for advice on. Loruk had sounded keen to visit when they’d spoken before, and Cal was confident he’d come along. If not, it would be no problem to go meet him somewhere else in the city to talk things over. To Mephisterion, he simply said that he would like some advice about a problem that had come to his attention, potentially related to a new member of Mephisterion’s staff.

Max got ready to leave, and Cal lent Max his heavy jacket as well. Max didn’t have a very good coat. His cloak was fine for the cold - it was warm and thick, and kept the heat in - but in this rain it would soon get soaked through.

Once Max had headed off, Cal got out his bestiary again and had another look through it. He was looking for spiders. There were spiders and other arachnid-type creatures found in the monsterlands, but on leafing through the bestiary Cal found that most of them were not elementally-aligned monsters. As such, they had blank cores, and were generally overlooked by hunters. This meant that they were mostly overlooked by the bestiary as well.

He looked through the arachnid-type elemental monsters, but there were none that matched the ones he had upstairs. At the end of the book, there was a large set of appendices covering the classes of monsters that were found with blank rather than elemental cores. Most of these were similar kinds to the elemental classes - similar shapes and behaviors, and similar habitats - but since they didn’t have elemental cores the bestiary lumped them together into the appendices of the book, paying special attention only to the ones that might be confused with elemental aligned monsters.

The appendix lists were mainly concerned with hunters not catching blank core monsters by mistake. In the main part of the book, the entries were accompanied by beautiful illustrations, but the appendices mostly dispensed with this, just giving a black and white sketch here and there of some identifying feature of a lookalike monster, so that hunters wouldn’t waste their time in collecting blank cores.

Cal sighed. Half an hour’s fruitless search had wearied him, and he stood up and stretched, then went into the workshop to put the bestiary away and get out his journal and quills. When he got back to the front shop, he found there was a customer standing there.

“Ah, good morning,” Cal said, and the man jumped slightly. He was a small, thin, nervous fellow, many years older than Cal by the looks of him. He was a human, with a bit of straggling gray beard and the ink-stained hands, peering eyes, and slightly bowed shoulders of a scholar.

“Oh, hello, hello,” the man said. “I’m looking for something… ah, I heard that your shop caters to those who might not be so welcome in the more upmarket shops.”

Cal smiled. He hadn’t really thought of it that way, but he supposed it was true. “I want to make the benefits of enchanting available to ordinary people, yes,” he said. “What kind of thing are you looking for? I’m afraid I’ve not got a great deal of stock in at the moment - some supply disruption after the recent storms, you understand.”

“Oh, quite, quite,” the man replied nervously. “Yes, I understand.”

He hopped from one foot to the other in front of the counter, casting quick, nervous glances at Cal out of the corners of his gleaming, watery eyes.

“What kind of thing do you need?” Cal asked after a moment, seeing that the man was struggling to get his nerves in order.

“Confidence,” the man blurted suddenly. “I need confidence. Charisma. Strength of character.”

“You’re trying to make an impression on someone?” Max asked gently.

“Yes, yes, that’s exactly right. An impression, yes.”

“May I ask who?”

“My uh… my employee. I have a new employee who has recently joined the library where I work, and he is rather negligent of his duties. He has an influential contact in the higher echelons of society, and he believes that he can get away with not doing any work. He displays his insolence in many small ways, and seems to wish to challenge my authority. I wish I could be stronger with him, put him in his place, but he’s rather larger than I am, and is able to be er… rather physically intimidating. I’m a scholarly man, and I have no desire to engage in a power struggle with this fellow, and yet I must do something to impress my authority upon him if I’m to have a quiet life.”

“I see what you mean,” Cal said. “Well, I don’t have anything that will actively boost your confidence and charisma with your employee, but I wonder if this might help.”

He took one of the strength boosting pendants from the shelf and offered it to the old man. “This will give you a physical strength boost if you wear it around your neck,” he explained. “In my experience, people like your employee are more likely to be impressed by physical strength than by personal charisma and charm. If he’s pushing your boundaries, you might perhaps let him see you doing some heavy physical work around the library. Then he would see that you’re not the weak person he thinks you are. If he sees you’re able to match him at some physical task, that might well change his opinion of you. He might grow to respect you a little more, and your life would become easier. What do you think?”

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“Goodness,” the old man said in a breathless voice, staring at the gleaming light reflecting off the smooth, glassy glaze of the pendant. “I’d never thought of that. Yes, I think that might work. Books are heavy, and we have a great stack of boxes that need to be moved up to the archive. Actually, that’s the main problem I’ve been having this week. You see, I’ve been trying to get the young rascal to do that task, because I’m not up to it, but he seems to think he’s above such work. You really think this pendant will work?”

“It won’t give you superhuman strength,” Cal said. “But it’ll certainly give you a significant boost, and once your employee sees he’s misjudged you, I certainly think he might change his behavior and show you some more respect. Why don’t you try the pendant on and we’ll see if there’s anything in the shop that you can test it with?”

“May I?” the man said.

“Of course!” Cal grinned. “Just put it around your neck and we’ll see what we can do.”

The change in the old librarian was remarkable. As soon as he put the pendant around his neck he straightened up, his back and shoulders opening up and his head rising. Even his eyes got a bit brighter.

“Why, I feel better already!” he said “Why is that?”

“The muscles in your body may be stiff and tired from spending many hours in study,” Cal said. “The muscles need strength to hold you up. This pendant grants you some of that strength, so it’s likely you’d feel physically better straight away. Good! Let’s see if there’s anything heavy around here you could try and lift.”

Cal hadn’t anticipated this, but he quickly cast about the workshop and saw the heavy soup cauldron where Max had left it, and a couple of buckets of water laid out next to it. Cal tipped the buckets into the cauldron.

“Come through here, sir,” he called to the librarian, and the old fellow marched through, beaming happily.

“This is your workshop, I see,” the librarian said.

“Yes, this is where I work,” Cal said. “See this soup pot? I’ve filled it with water to make it heavier. Is this the kind of thing you would normally expect to be able to lift?”

“No, not at all,” the librarian said, regarding the heavy iron pot. Cal noticed that the man’s nervous mannerisms seemed to have faded. He still shifted from foot to foot - that was likely a very old habit - but his eyes twitched less and he wasn’t repeating his words or fumbling his phrases anymore.

He stepped up to the soup cauldron and grasped it by the handle, then lifted. “Hah!” he cried as the heavy pot came up smoothly at his touch.

“Another test,” he said, and squatted, getting his arms around the pot. He set his feet, breathed in, then stood smoothly with the heavy, water-filled pot grasped to his chest. His eyes twinkled as he looked at Cal over the top of the pot. He held it up for a moment, then squatted and put it down again.

“What do you think?” Cal asked.

“I’d never have been able to lift that before,” the librarian said. “And it’s probably a little heavier than a standard box of books. Yes, this is great. If nothing else, I can just move the boxes to the archive myself without the assistance of that lout. Now, I can just get the job done, and I don’t have to worry about chivvying him on to do it for me.”

The librarian paid over 60 crowns for the charm, and went off very happy. Cal smiled. He was pleased not only to have solved the librarian’s problem, but to have done so in a way that the client hadn’t thought of himself. The librarian had come in wanting something to give him the charisma and confidence he thought he needed to force his employee to obey his instructions. He’d left with the ability to do the difficult task himself, and Cal would be surprised if that didn’t lead to him gaining his emplyee’s respect in the process.

It wasn’t long before another customer arrived. It would have been hard to find a man more different from the librarian. This new customer was a huge, imposing human with a short-clipped black beard and a mop of shaggy black hair on his head. He wore a loose suit of sailor’s trousers and jerkin, with a light jacket, and despite the rain outside he seemed dry and comfortable.

Cal smiled at him, noticing the anchor tattoo on the back of his left hand and the distinctive swagger of a man used to walking the unsteady deck of a ship.

“Ahoy there, landlubber!” the man growled. This might have been taken as an aggressive greeting, but Cal could tell from the way the man smiled that there was nothing bad meant.

“Good afternoon,” Cal replied politely.

“Arr,” the man said thoughtfully. “I’ve a need of a present to give to my wife, young man,” he said. “It’s her birthday tomorrow and I’ve been away, not able to get a gift, you see.”

“I understand,” Cal said. “What kind of thing were you thinking?”

“Something that’ll keep her sweet on me, lad, that’s what I’m thinking. She’s one of them catkin, you know what I mean by catkin?”

“Yes, I know. The native people of Yallish.”

“Aye,” the sailor replied thoughtfully. “Sharp claws, you understand.”

Cal nodded. That’s unusual, he thought. Another catkin in Jutlyn city? Laria’s lens maker was a catkin too.

Aloud, he said, “my understanding is that catkin people feel the cold, is that right? I have these here…” he moved from behind the counter and showed the sailor the enchanted mugs. “This is a mug from a local potter’s shop, just down the street from here. They’re beautiful mugs and would make a nice gift anyway, but I’ve enchanted this mug so that any drink left in it will stay warm no matter how long it’s left.”

“Ooh, that’s clever!” the sailor said. “She’s always leaving her tea to go cold in her workshop, then cursing about it when she remembers it again. Aye, this’ll do nicely! Can you wrap it?”

Cal went to the counter and wrapped the mug in fine paper. As he was doing so, the sailor bent over to get his leather purse of coins out of his sock. “Oooh, ouch,” the sailor groaned as he straightened back up.

“You alright?” Cal asked.

“Aye, aye, just my back, lad. I work below decks on a cargo ship, see? Lot of lifting and carrying, makes for a stiff back and shoulders. You ain’t got anything for that I suppose?”

“Actually,” Cal said, thinking about the effect his strength pendant had just had on the old librarian, “I might just do.”

The sailor left shortly afterward, proud owner of both a warming mug for his wife, and a new strength pendant which had instantly relieved the worst of his back pain. Cal took out the ledger and noted the sales down in the book.

“Good,” he said, running his eyes along the columns of figures from recent sales. He clinked gold coins into the strongbox and went to get himself a fresh cup of tea.

By the time another few hours had passed, Cal had sold the other mug to a kind, matronly woman who ran a boarding house near the docks and wanted to tell Cal all about it. He’d also sold another strength pendant, this time to a fellow who worked moving stock from place to place in the city by cart. He sold the last warmth pendant to a young guardsman who came in specifically looking for one on the recommendation of someone who’d bought one before. There were a few other customers who came in looking for warmth pendants, and Cal had to send them away with his apologies and a promise that there should be more in stock soon.

It was afternoon by the time Max got back. He came in flushed and smiling from his walk, and shook the rain from his hair and jacket as he entered.

“Watch out behind,” said a voice, and Max turned back to the door. He’d been about to shut it, but now he saw that there was a gremlin in the uniform of the telepath exchange holding out two envelopes.

“Thanks,” Max said, taking the telepathograms and closing the door firmly against the wind and rain.

“Quick replies?” Cal asked.

Max looked over both of the envelopes. “Yes,” he said, approaching the counter and handing them to Cal. “Quick replies, and both addressed to you.”