Based on previous experience, Cal knew that the webbing took a little while to dry out. He hadn’t paid much attention to the first piece that he’d had harvested, since it had been very much done by accident, but he estimated that it had taken about 12 hours to change from its glowing purple magic state to the dry, elasticated thread that had excited Maddie Turner so much.

“It’s still pretty tough at this stage,” Cal said, as he, Max, and Loruk gazed at the thick crop of webbing that they had taken. “But it can be broken, and it’s sticky. I think the best thing to do at this point will be to just leave it to dry and not mess with it too much.”

“Where will we dry it out?” Max said, looking around the workshop.

He had a point. The workshop space was pretty small, and there wasn’t a great deal of room to spare. Also, the thick mat of webbing glowed brightly; a luminous, magical purple that would certainly catch the attention of anybody in the front shop who happened to glance through the doorway into the back.

“Help me move this table,” Cal said. “That’ll be the best thing to do. We’ll shift the desk over to the other side of the room, against the wall that’s out of line of sight from the front of the shop. Then we’ll spread the webbing out on the table as best we can and leave it overnight. If we find ourselves doing this more - as I hope we will - we’ll have to come up with a better solution, but for now we’re just learning the ropes, so this’ll do well enough.”

Between the three of them, Cal, Max, and Loruk shifted the heavy desk and put it against the wall that divided the workshop from the front of the emporium. This way, no curious eye would catch sight of the strange glowing mass.

“You’ll not be able to keep this quiet for long,” Loruk said, as he helped Max and Cal to spread the mat of spider web out a bit on a sheet of paper to aid the drying process. “This is a small shop, and if you end up doing this at scale you’re going to need more space. Eventually, you’ll have to get your local guild district council to approve and register it.”

“I know it,” Cal said, “but we’ll have to do what we can with what we’ve got for now.”

“Who is the local guild inspector?” Loruk asked. “Have you met him?”

“He’s a man called Jara Nexon,” Cal said. “And he seems pretty crooked, actually. I’m not too keen on him. I’d much prefer to go direct to the guild council and bypass him altogether.”

“Hmm, I don’t know the man, but going to the guild council direct can be a bit risky. If the local man is corrupt, he’s likely to want a quiet life more that anything. If you go straight to his overseers to get your new product registered, you might make an enemy of the local fellow, but if you go through him, he’s more likely to let you get on with things for the sake of not drawing too much attention. It’s a tricky balance.”

“Surely though, the district council’s authority is higher than the local inspector?” Max put in. “If Nexon just lets us carry on and doesn’t report to his superiors properly, surely we could get into trouble later on?”

Loruk shook his head. “Not if you make sure to keep a proper record of your interactions with this Jara Nexon person. If he authorizes you to carry on, it’s on him, not you. By the way, I noticed that there seems to be an unused lot on the other side of the shop from the bakery,” Loruk said. “D’you know anything about that?”

Cal shook his head. “I’ve never paid much attention to it, to be honest.”

“Hmph. Maybe you should find out. If you’re going to branch out into spider farming - and I think you should if you can - then perhaps that might be a solution to the problem of needing a bit more space.”

There being nothing more that they could do on this project at the moment, Loruk said goodbye, promising again to keep quiet about everything he’d seen here. They thanked him profusely for all his help, but he waved it away with a smile. “This has been one of the most interesting things I’ve come across in quite a while,” he said. “I’m glad you thought of me. It’s going to be really interesting to see how this all pans out. Good luck, and if you need any more help, send me a message. Let me know how you get on!”

Loruk was unusually quiet as he pulled his jacket on and headed off. In past times, Loruk would have lingered, branching out into some tale or other of the old days. Loruk was a talker, and Cal had always enjoyed hearing his tales, but it seemed that the incident of the spiders had given Loruk plenty to think about. The old orc had a quiet, thoughtful, pleased expression on his dark green face as he turned the corners of his collar up against the cold and strode off into the street.

“Well, that’s that,” Max said, locking the door behind Loruk. “The rain seems to be easing up and the clouds are clearing. If it freezes up overnight it’ll be slippery underfoot in the morning.”

Cal had sat down at the counter, and Max came over and joined him. “You alright, Cal?” Max asked, seeing his friend’s pensive face.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” Cal said, giving himself a shake. “I was just thinking about Darkworth, and that crystal.”

“The power crystal?” Max asked. “What made you think of that?”

“I guess it’s because in a way, Darkworth was doing the same thing that I’ve been doing,” Cal said. “He was pursuing new magic. The more I think about it, the more I come to feel that the presence of the spiders can’t be a coincidence. I’m not the first enchanter to consider the possibilities of blank cores, but as far as I know I’m the first one to have any success with them. Darkworth was chasing the same thing, the ability to make brand-new kinds of magic from blank cores. That explains why there was a blank core here in the shop, and it would also seem likely that Darkworth was deliberately trying to create a new kind of monster with a blank core so that he could have an easy source of them without causing any comment.”

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Max sighed and leaned on the counter. “I wonder where Darkworth is now?” he said. “Hiding away somewhere, I suppose, trying to reverse engineer the Barwell Amulet. I’d still like to find the amulet someday, and get some answers from old Darkworth.”

“Would you return the amulet to your father if you could get it back, do you think?” Cal asked. Since that first night when Max had told him the painful story about how he had discovered his father’s secret and stolen the amulet, they hadn’t talked much about Max’s past. Max seemed to want to put his difficult recent past behind him, and Cal could understand that.

Still, the fact remained that Max had a lot of emotional baggage and unfinished business connected with his family. To Cal, who had grown up without money, but with a lot of acceptance and support for his obsession with magic, it seemed the saddest thing in the world that his friend should continue to be estranged from his family.

“I don’t know if I would give my father the amulet back,” Cal said. “He told me very firmly not to return, and that was before he even knew that I’d taken the amulet.”

“Actually,” he continued as a new thought struck him, “I suppose there’s a possibility that he doesn’t even know that I took the amulet. He never used it or looked at it before, so I was able to take it, use it, and put it back freely for a long time. It was locked up in a room that wasn’t ever used.” Max gave a humorless laugh. “Wouldn’t that be weird? If for all this time I’d been using the amulet, then worrying about having lost it, and he never actually knew I’d stolen it in the first place?”

“It would be strange,” Cal agreed with a smile. “I wish we could find out where your father got it, who made it for him. It would answer so many questions.”

“Or just lead to new ones,” Max suggested. “But I think we would need a very large-scale thawing in relations before that would happen.”

Max sighed gloomily. “After all, he doesn’t even want to talk about magic or admit that he used to do it. Everyone knows, but nobody’s allowed to say. Somehow I can’t see my father and I sitting down to discuss the finer points of his magical past anytime soon.”

Cal felt sorry for his friend. It was a tough situation to be in. Max was passionate about magic, and he was good at it. His father had been a master of the art of steel singing; it was Max’s heritage. To have all that, but not to be able to even discuss it or have it acknowledged… it was no wonder Max and his father had eventually become estranged as they had.

“Thanks, Cal,” Max said suddenly, jolting Cal from his thoughts.

“Eh?” Cal said. “What for?”

Max gestured around the shop. “This,” he said, smiling. “We’ve been so busy, I’ve hardly had time to really think about it, but talking about the past just now made me realize how much has changed for me since I met you. These last years since I left the Barwell estate have been hard. I was getting into trouble, getting to know the underbelly of the city. If I’d stayed on that path… I don’t like to think where my life would have ended up. I’ve had a good education and been raised well, but I was never worldly or street-wise. It would only have been a matter of time before I got out of my depth and got hurt. I’m amazed I managed to keep things together as long as I did.”

“And now?” Cal asked.

“Now, I feel like I’ve been bumped onto a new path,” Max said. “Meeting you, getting involved in the shop, being able to really help out here; it’s been good for me, Cal. It’s even been good, I think, not to have the amulet anymore. I never really knew what I was doing with it, even though it gave me extra power. I was always thinking about it, trying to use it and trying to impress people with my skill, trying to make some money by doing things other people couldn’t. Actually, since it’s been gone I’ve realized that it was the amulet that got me into a lot of the riskier scrapes I was involved in.”

“You’re happier now, then?” Cal asked.

“Definitely,” Max said.

“I’m glad. It’s been good having you around. You have helped a lot. Jason wanted to help at first, but he’s got a lot of other things going on in his life, and I couldn’t expect him to always be here.” Cal smiled. “Jason does have a tendency to overcommit.”

He paused, looking at Max. He took a breath, paused, then spoke hesitantly. “I was wondering,” he said, voicing a thought that had been niggling at him for some time, “about the longer term.”

“What do you mean?” Max asked. “I thought you were going to teach me enchanting and I’d carry on here, building the business with you and…” He broke off, looking suddenly worried.

Cal saw the old pain of rejection in Max’s eyes and realized that his choice of words had been clumsy. “Oh, Max, I’m sorry,” he said hurriedly. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I don’t mean I want rid of you or anything, not for the world. No, I just meant… Well, look around you! I’m not able to pay you anything for your work, you’re sleeping on the floor of my workshop in the dead of winter, putting everything you’ve got into the shop as if it was yours, without owning any stake in the business. You’re even cooking most of the meals and doing the majority of the cleaning! And what are you getting for it? I mean, are you happy? What do you want from this? What can I do to improve your life the way you’ve improved mine? That’s what I mean about the longer term, Max.”

A slow smile appeared on Max’s face. “I see,” he said quietly, then sighed. “Look Cal, you say I’m sleeping on the workshop floor in the dead of winter, but see it from my point of view. It’s warm here, it’s pretty comfortable, and there’s no lack of firewood. You say you can’t pay me for my work, and that’s true for the moment, but there’s also no rent for me to pay here, and it’s safer and more secure than the room I was renting down at the docks. You say I’m doing the cooking and cleaning, and that’s true, but you’re buying all the food out of your profits from the shop, and I’m eating better and more regularly than I ever did before. You see what I mean, Cal? This is a good situation for me - a great situation, in fact. Before, I was sinking into petty crime and shady jobs, with no security and no prospects. Now, I’m looking at learning to become an enchanter, like you, and I’m rediscovering my steel singing powers without the influence of the amulet.”

Cal nodded. He took a breath to speak.

“And another thing,” Max continued, holding up a hand to stop Cal’s next comment. “You say I don’t have a stake in the business, and in a way, that’s true, but only in a very technical sense. I don’t have any money invested in the business, but if the Enchanter’s Emporium continues to be successful, it’s going to mean good things for me as well as you. I know you’re uncomfortable that you can’t pay me yet, but you will when you can, right?”

Cal nodded. “Definitely.”

“Well, then. If we carry on doing what we’re doing here, all these things will come around, and I’m up for doing whatever it takes to get us there. Just like you are.”