Cal took out the knife that Loruk had given him and used it to neatly slice open the envelope that contained the first message. It was from Mephisterion.

Cal,

I’m aware of the issue with my new gardener and his ex-employer. She has been causing some trouble. Sorry to hear you’re embroiled in this problem. This is socially awkward but should be quite easily resolved. Will visit you this evening after sundown to discuss. If tonight is inconvenient, send me a message here to rearrange.

1.

“Well, that’s good of him,” Cal said, handing the missive over so that Max could read it. “Tonight should be fine, I guess.” Max nodded as he looked the brief message over. “That’s hopeful,” he said. “Sounds like Mephisterion has an idea of how to handle it, at least. And we don’t have to go back to Doomglade Towers, either!”

The second message was from Loruk.

Cal,

Interested by your message. Will come at once.

Loruk

“An orc of few words,” Cal smiled as he read over this short message. “I wonder…”

But his words were interrupted as the door was pushed open and Loruk himself stepped in. The telepathogram was marked as sent less than half an hour ago. The orc must have sent it then come straight over.

Loruk was tall and heavily built, massive, with his hunter’s strength still present despite his age. He’d been retired for many years now, concentrating on his business as a landlord in Jutlyn, but he still strode through life with all the confidence and power of a master monster hunter.

He had long gray hair tied up in braids, one on either side of his head, and a long, impressive gray beard. His hair was not the gray of the sky outside. Rather, it was the gleaming dark gray of polished iron, and it put Cal in mind of ax heads and sword blades. The orcs were a warlike race, and now that open armed conflict was a thing of the past for political reasons, many orcs had found their calling in the challenges and honor that could be found in the hunt.

“Ah, there you are, Cal you young rascal,” Loruk boomed. His voice was deep as a mountain canyon, and hard as rock, but it was kindly and jovial still. Loruk’s eyes - unusually pale and blue in his dark green face - glittered with pleasure as he looked around the shop.

Loruk had been Cal’s landlord before Cal had bought the shop, and Cal had always enjoyed listening to Loruk’s tales of his adventuring days. Things had been less well-regulated back then. Orcs were a very long-lived species, much more so than humans, and longer even than dwarves. Loruk had seen many changes happen over the decades he’d been a hunter, and he was well able to talk all evening and into the night about all the things he’d seen.

“Loruk,” Cal said, standing up and clasping the orc’s big hand in a warm greeting. “I’m glad you’ve come. This is my friend Max, who runs the shop with me.”

“Delighted, delighted,” Loruk said, shaking Max’s hand. Max was looking up at the old warrior with wide eyes. Even though Loruk was unarmed and dressed in civilian clothing, he still looked like a fighter, and nobody with any sense would have chosen to cross him.

“I’ll make tea,” Max said in a small voice and scurried into the workshop.

“He’s a bit nervous around new people,” Cal said in a whisper, nodding his head in the direction of the workshop, “but he’ll get used to you. Come, have a seat.”

“So, you wanted to discuss spiders with me?” Loruk asked when Max brought the tea out. Cal turned the sign in the window from Open to Closed, and locked the door. He’d not got much left to sell anyway, and he wanted to give Loruk his full attention.

“That’s right,” Cal said. “Spider. I hope you don’t mind, but it’s a bit sensitive. I’d rather not discuss the details too much, but yeah, I’d like to ask you a bit about what you know of spiders - their behavior, their webmaking, their aggressiveness, that kind of thing.”

Loruk twitched an eyebrow at Cal. “But you don’t want to tell me why, eh?”

“If that’s okay,” Cal said, feeling a bit bad but remembering his promise to Maddie.

Loruk’s nostrils twitched, and he drew in a long, slow breath. At that moment, Cal thought he’d offended his old friend, and he was about to speak, but Loruk got there first.

“Can’t fool an orc, my lad,” he said. “I want to keep your secret, and I want to be discreet, but I’m afraid my nose and eyes have already uncovered the secret.”

“What d’you mean?” Cal asked. He was confused. How could Loruk’s nose and eyes have betrayed the secret?”

“I can smell ‘em, Cal,” Loruk said. “And I can see ‘em, too.”

“What?”

“Spiders,” Loruk said. “I can smell spiders in here, special ones, and up there,” he pointed his knotty green finger up at the back corner, “I can see the glow of the web. You’ve got some kind of webweaver here in the shop. But what I don’t know is why you want to keep it quiet?”

Cal looked up to see where Loruk was pointing. “I can’t see anything,” he said.

“Aye, very likely not,” the orc replied. “But my eyes are more sensitive to such things than yours. I can see a faint purple glow through the floorboards, and the shop smells of spiders. Not an unpleasant smell, mind you, but distinctive. So, you have some magic spiders here that you want my advice with?”

Max was laughing, and Cal realized that the look on his own face must be a picture. His mouth was hanging open, and he closed it with a click.

“I don’t know what to say, Loruk,” he muttered.

Loruk grinned at Max and laughed loudly. “How about starting from the beginning. Tell me about your spiders, and why you want to know about their behavior.”

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Cal sighed. He’d promised Maddie Turner not to tell anyone about the new thread, and the possibility that it might be woven into a fabric, but it seemed silly to conceal that detail from Loruk, since he already knew so much. Also, the old orc was a friend, and he was far from stupid. He’d work out any details from Cal’s questions, no doubt. It would be much easier to just tell the story.

So, Cal told Loruk about the spiders. He told how he’d discovered that they were enchanted in a new way, that they produced blank cores, and that their enchanted web could be dried to produce a durable, useful thread.

“You want to farm them?” Loruk asked.

Cal nodded.

“In your house?” Loruk asked.

Cal nodded again.

Loruk chuckled. “Of all the crazy schemes… But I’ll help you. This is just my kind of thing. I’m glad you came to me. I don’t know much about farming monsters, but spiders are the one exception. I know it can be done, because I’ve done it.”

“You have?” Cal said, amazed.

Loruk smiled. “Why don’t you show me some of this webbing?”

Cal agreed to this, and he, Max, and Loruk trooped upstairs to the room above the shop. There was a new crop of purple glowing web in one corner, and the one that had been there before had been expanded, stretching out across the floor near the center of the right-hand wall.

Loruk went over and looked at this larger web closely. Then he reached into his pouch and pulled out a small parcel wrapped in brown waxed paper. He opened this to reveal half a sandwich. He took the top off the sandwich revealing cheese, ham, tomato, and salad. Carefully, he took a bit of the cheese from the sandwich, broke it in half, and dropped one half into the web. Then he stood back, contemplatively munching the rest of his sandwich as he waited for a spider to appear.

It didn’t take long. Loruk had hardly swallowed the last mouthful of his lunch when a fat, ungainly purple spider emerged from the gap between the wall and the floorboard. It chittered officiously as it scurried across the web, caught the cheese up in its pincers, and then dashed back into the hole.

“Well I’ll be…” Loruk breathed. “If that isn’t something…” He turned to Cal. “You know what that is?”

“I was able to examine it and get some data,” he said. “It’s called an enchanted web weaver.”

“Uhm,” Loruk grunted. “Well, yeah, I guess that’s as good a name as any.”

“What do you mean?” Cal asked.

“When I asked you if you knew what it was, I wasn’t trying to make a point. I was asking because I don’t know. That’s a new kind of spider for me. I’ve seen every kind of enchanted spider there is in the monsterlands, and that there ain’t one of them. It’s new!”

“A new kind of monster,” Max said.

“Almost as strange as the fact that it’s up here in your bedroom,” Loruk said. “There’s more to this than meets the eye, that’s for sure. You said that the fellow who used to own this place had created them himself through some kind of magic? That seems like dirty work to me. I don’t like the idea of creating new monsters, but if he’s done it I don’t see why you shouldn’t benefit from the result if you can. So, you want to harvest the web?”

“If I can,” Cal said. “But I don’t want to scare them off, either, and I don’t want to damage them. I have a… a use for the blank cores, too.”

“You do, do you?” Loruk said with a grin that showed his big foretusks and his gleaming sharp bottom teeth. “Well, that’s your business. I think you’ve told me enough. But Cal, farming spiders is the easiest thing in the world, and it’ll be even easier in the city.”

“Really?” Cal asked, surprised.

“Oh, yeah,” Loruk said. “We used to do it ourselves out in the mountains. Very useful out there, spiders are.”

“How’s that?”

“They catch all the flies and biting insects that infest the lower reaches of the mountain foothills. We had a place we’d set up camp, kind of a cave with a bit of flat ground - not much, but a comfortable enough spot for a few nights. We’d encourage the spiders around there, feeding them and building them up so they would cover the area around our camp in their web and catch all the little critters that liked to bite us in the night. They even kept small rodents down too, mice and the like. And in a pinch, their eggs are good to eat.”

Max looked a bit green at the thought, and Cal remembered him saying how he didn’t like spiders at all.

“Anyway,” Loruk continued, “I say it’ll be easier in the city because there’s one key component that you need if you want to encourage spiders.”

“And that is?”

“Cheese,” Loruk replied serenely. “Cheese, cheese, and more cheese. But it’s got to be fresh. They won’t take old stuff. That’s why I always carried that knife of mine, because it kept cheese fresh. We used to take tons of the stuff out on trips with us, to keep the spiders sweet. That’s going to be easier to get in the city than out in the mountains. If you feed them cheese, they’ll never leave.”

Cal laughed. “Really? And what about harvesting the web?”

“Oh, that’s easy enough too,” Loruk said. “Watch, I’ll show you. I kept a bit of cheese over. This is how you do it.”

He’d kept a small nugget of cheese from his lunch, and now he moved over and placed it a few inches away from the outer limit of the web, then twanged the nearest strand with his finger. They waited, and sure enough a moment later a spider darted out toward the food.

This time, however, it stopped at the edge of the web, staring across the couple of inches of open floor between itself and the cheese. It darted forward, caught the cheese up and returned to the web, scurrying away under the floor again.

“Wait for it,” Loruk said. They waited. About thirty seconds later, three spiders appeared. One of them took up a position high up in the web, watching the room suspiciously and paying special attention to where the three friends stood still, watching.

Meanwhile, the other two scurried over to the outer edge of the web and busily set about extending it. They worked quickly, stretching new webbing out along the floor and then suspending it from a new strand that ran along the top of the structure to the wall. Then, their job done, they all vanished again.

“You see?” Loruk chuckled.

“They’ve built webbing out to cover the spot where you placed the cheese!” Cal said.

“You can just keep going with it like that,” Loruk said. “They find some cheese and they assume that it’s come running along the floor, I guess, so they extend the web so that they can catch another one if it comes along. You can direct their web building in whatever direction you like that way, one bit of cheese at a time.”

“What about harvesting the web?” Cal asked.

“What about it?” Loruk said with a shrug. “You just take it, it doesn’t do them any harm. So long as you leave some cheese out for them afterward, there’ll be a new bit of web in place within a day.”

“Max?” Cal said.

“On it,” Max replied. He darted downstairs and returned a moment later with a long broom handle and a package of cheese he’d bought on his trip out earlier.

“Little bits at a time,” Loruk cautioned. “That’s the only thing. If you give ‘em too much, they stop producing. Just a little taste at a time, like this.”

He showed Max how to take the small chunks that were just the right size, and when they had three, Cal took the broom handle and approached the web. With one sweep, he caught the web at the bottom corner and pulled it loose. There was a lot more resistance than he’d have expected from a normal spider web, but the thread was still fresh, and it hadn’t yet taken on the elastic strength that was the main feature of it once it was dry, so it came free easily enough.

“There you go,” Loruk said. “Put a bit of cheese down and leave the spiders be for 24 hours, and you’ll be ready to harvest again. Happy?”

“Yes, thanks a lot, Loruk,” Cal said, grinning as he held up his broom handle loaded with webbing. “Now all I have to work out is how to get this downstairs without raising too many eyebrows in the street.”

They solved that problem by having Max open the shop door and Loruk go out into the road to check there was no one coming. When it was safe, Loruk waved to Cal, and Cal dashed from the stair door to the shop, and then into the workshop with his glowing harvest. Carefully, he peeled the sticky purple mass of webbing off the end of the broom handle and laid it on the desk.

“It takes an overnight to dry,” he said, “but tomorrow, we’ll have our first batch of spider thread to give to Maddie Turner.”

“Here’s hoping she likes what she sees,” Max said.

“I have a feeling she will,” Cal replied. “Believe me, Max, this is us truly branching out.”