“So,” Cal asked as Max unloaded his shopping. “Is she nice?”

“Who?”

“The assistant from the fabric shop. Maddie’s apprentice or whoever she is?”

Max grinned. Cal was in the front shop and Max was in the back so they couldn’t actually see each other, but when Max replied, Cal could hear the grin in his voice.

“Actually,” Max said, “she is nice. She’s also Maddie Turner’s niece, and Maddie is very protective of her.”

Cal laughed. “You better watch out, then,” he said. “You watch your step, or she’ll be hitting you with her stick instead of saving you with it.”

“I’ll watch myself,” Max said. “Her name’s Ellia, and she is Maddie’s apprentice. She lives in the apartment above the shop, while Maddie lives in a larger house over in Blue Mile.”

“Huh,” Cal said, “I guess Maddie must be doing pretty well for herself. Blue Mile’s a nice area.”

“It’s not exactly Castleview, but yeah, I guess Maddie does well with her shop.”

Max came through from the workshop, drying his hands on a towel. “There’s still a bit of daylight left,” he said. “Let’s keep the shop open. Do you want to go over and see Maddie now? I’ll watch the counter.”

“Sure,” Cal said. He got up out of the chair and went to retrieve his bag of spider web. “I’ll go see her now. Second time lucky.”

This time he was luckier. Not only was Maddie in the shop, but she’d sent her niece Ellia out to the supplier near the docks, and Ellia wouldn’t be back for an hour at least. They had time.

Maddie’s eyes lit up when she saw Cal. “Come in, come in,” she urged him, as he stepped into the cluttered homely interior of her shop. It was warm - very warm, in fact, and Cal was pleased to realize that the temperature was in no small part due to the presence of one of his own warmth charms hanging above her door. She seemed more comfortable than she had when he’d seen her before.

Quickly, she moved over to the front door of the shop and locked it behind him, turning the sign to Closed and dropping the curtain over the door, plunging the shop into a deep dimness.

“Now we’ve got a bit of privacy,” Maddie said. “Come into the back shop here, Cal, and let me see the sample.”

She didn’t mess about. There was no smalltalk, no chat about Lord Hefton or Yalosh Brindlemere or even Ellia and Max. She caught hold of his sleeve and led him gently but firmly into the back room.

Cal looked around, interested to see that her shop was laid out much like his own. There was a well laid out but compact front area for the display of goods and the serving of the customers, and behind, a slightly larger room that served as a workroom and a living space. Maddie had been in her shop much longer than Cal had been in his, and her shop had taken on a great deal of her own personality.

The back room seemed to be where - like Cal - Maddie spent at least some of her time off. There was also a good amount of space used for storage, with bolts of cloth large and small standing on shelves of varying heights and sizes. Unlike in Cal’s shop, which was uncarpeted, Maddie had a large and thick rug with a complex pattern that covered most of the back half of the room. At the back of the room too, there was a fireplace, but instead of an open hearth, Maddie had a small wood burning stove, much like the one upstairs in Cal’s shop. Cal noted this enviously - though the stove wasn’t good for cooking with, it was significantly more efficient and over the course of the day, it would heat the room much better than his own huge hearth did.

A deep, well-used armchair sat on one side of the stove, and a smaller, newer chair on the other. There was room to make tea on the stove at least, and a black kettle that looked as old and experienced as Maddie herself stood on the top of the stove, bubbling cheerfully.

But it was not to this comfortable space that Maddie invited Cal. Instead, she hurried him over to the uncarpeted half of the room. Here there was a solid, well-made workbench with a scattering of tools and offcuts of fabric littered across it. A thick pad of paper lay to one side, the top sheet showing a series of intricate sketches in soft black pencil that looked like the designs for a hooded cloak.

Maddie reached up to a shelf above the workbench and tapped a dark, cylindrical object with one finger. Cal was impressed to see a bright light blossom from the object. It was a spirit lamp, like his, but bigger and of better quality. Cal saw that the light was fixed by an ingenious folding arm, hinged with springs, to the wall of the room. Maddie pulled the light out and downward, adjusting it on its sprung hinge until the bright, whitish-yellow spirit light fell full on the table below.

“Show me the contents of the bag,” Maddie said curtly, as she quickly cleared the bits and pieces of the other projects away to the far end of the table.

Cal didn’t question her. He liked her quick, no-nonsense approach to the business at hand. Lifting the bag, he emptied the contents out onto the table.

There was a lot of the stuff, Cal thought as the dry webbing thread tumbled out onto Maddie’s workbench. When he’d taken it at first from the web in the upstairs of his shop it hadn’t looked like this much, but as it had tried the individual threads had come apart from each other, and Cal was again reminded of raw, undyed sheep’s wool.

“Ahhh,” Maddie sighed in satisfaction. “This is better. This I can work with. Well done, Cal.”

She didn’t look at him. Her eyes were fixed on the material.

The webbing reflected the light from the spirit lamp strangely. The light glowed brightly everywhere else, but the clumps of massed dry webbing seemed to absorb the light, soaking the illumination up and keeping it rather than throwing it back into the room. To Cal, it almost looked as if Maddie was holding thick clumps of raw shadow.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

“Fascinating,” Maddie breathed.

She reached up to the shelf and took down a big wide-toothed wooden comb. Experimentally, she began dragging the teeth of the comb through a handful of the webbing. As before, there was no suggestion of the strands breaking, and Maddie made a small noise of surprised pleasure in her throat as she found that the strands separated quickly and easily from each other, and that as soon as they had done so, they lay flat and straight on her table, showing no inclination to curl or tangle again.

After only a minute or two, Maddie had a good stack of the separated strands lying on the table. There was a lot more to do, but from the way she had brightened up, Cal could tell she’d anticipated a much more difficult and time-consuming task.

“Will you tell me where you got this?” she asked bluntly, raising her eyes for the first time from her task and fixing Cal’s eyes with hers.

Cal hesitated. He had no real reason not to tell her, except that he didn’t know her well yet. He’d gotten used to the idea that his magic spiders were something of a liability as well as an opportunity, because if the guild found out about the spiders they would almost certainly shut the enterprise down. This was not the discovery of a new enchantment in a Level 1 core. That, though interesting and innovative, was a small thing in the eyes of the guild, so long as it didn’t cause any harm. Farming a cluster of enchanted giant spiders in his bedroom - particularly since he had only the vaguest idea how they had become enchanted - was quite another matter.

“I see you don’t want to say yet,” Maddie said. “Let me ask you a more specific question, then. Will you tell me how far away the source is?”

Cal blinked. The question was unexpected, but as soon as she asked it, Cal understood. Of course, she assumed that the material was some new import that Cal had gotten through a contact. The thought hadn’t crossed her mind that he was producing the stuff in his own bedroom.

“Actually,” Cal said, “I make it myself.”

Now it was Maddie’s turn to look startled. Cal realized some more explanation would be needed.

“Um… It’s kind of a byproduct of some new enchanting that I’ve been doing,” he improvised.

She didn’t look satisfied, but she nodded slowly. “I don’t know a lot about enchanting,” she said carefully, “but am I right in saying that it’s rather tightly regulated?”

Cal nodded. “Yes…” he said.

“Hmm. And so I can assume that this material is an unexpected byproduct of your work?”

Cal nodded again.

“And you don’t want the secret out because you fear that whatever you’re doing to produce the thread will be stopped by the guild?”

“That’s about the size of it, Maddie,” he said. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be evasive, but you’re right. The truth is, I’m exploring some new concepts in enchanting, some things that haven’t really been done before. I’m new to this, being a merchant with a shop and all that. I don’t have any background of contacts within the guild. Most enchanters already have a network of people who they know in the guild before they even get their first shop, but I’m kind of my own. I’m really excited by the potential of some of the experiments I’ve been doing. At some point, I’ll have no choice but to get some of the new things I’m doing registered with the guild, but that’s going to take time and delay my work. I want to learn as much as I can on my own before I go public with it.”

“I understand,” Maddie said, holding up a hand. “You don’t have to say more. Truth be told, I was worried that this was coming through some illegal back channel, some smuggler at the docks or something.”

“No, no, it’s nothing like that,” Cal said, feeling a little shocked at the idea. “No, I don’t ever want to be involved in that kind of thing. I might keep my work secret for a while to avoid the bureaucracy of the Pedantus Guild, but I’m not into anything illegal. I wouldn’t buy smuggled goods.”

Maddie raised an eyebrow. “No?” she asked. “I would.”

Cal was surprised by her frankness, and Maddie laughed suddenly, her old face transformed by a radiant, mischievous smile that crinkled up all the laughter lines around her eyes and gave him a glimpse of a set of remarkably straight, white teeth.

Maddie pushed the spider web to the back of the table and tapped the spirit lamp again, killing the light.

“Come over here,” she said, and Cal found himself following her without question. She led him over to the comfortable area at the back of the room. Gesturing to the smaller of the two chairs, she leaned over and opened the draught on the stove. The fire, which had been banked well, now flared up, and the chuckling kettle immediately changed its note and began to boil.

Wordlessly, Maddie poured boiling water into a fat green teapot that sat ready on a little wooden table next to the stove. She took two cups from hooks on the wall next to the hearth and sat them on the table next to the teapot, then sank with a grateful sigh into the armchair.

“I wanted to know if the thread was smuggled goods,” she said, “because smugglers are not a reliable source of supply. That’s the only reason. You’ll know yourself how critical it is to have a steady supply of the raw material you need for your craft. For me, it’s thread, cloth, dyes, leather, metal fastenings, needles for sewing, and so on. I sell imported cloth, mainly, but I also make garments and I create fabrics to order. For you, the raw materials will be different.”

She let the silence hang for a moment. Cal chose to fill it. “Cores,” he said. “Monster cores delivered by hunter teams who scout the monsterlands to collect and bring them back. That’s my raw material.”

“Monster cores?” Maddie asked with interest.

Cal nodded. “They’re like condensed nuggets of magic. Different ones have different effects depending on the monster they’re harvested from, and my skill is in drawing the effects out and putting them into objects.”

“I’ve heard of monster cores, of course,” Maddie mused, “but I didn’t understand what they were. Nuggets of pure magic. Fascinating!”

“It’s an amazing process,” Cal agreed, “but you were making a point about supply chains, and yes, I understand that. My hunters have to take ship from the docks through the north passage and then north-west to the monsterlands. When that supply dries up…”

“Exactly,” Maddie said. “Now this stuff you’ve brought me, this thread… As I said before, it could revolutionize the fabric industry. The whole thing hinges on whether or not it will take color - did you experiment with that at all?”

Cal remembered how the thread of webbing had merely sloughed off the ink it had been dipped in, the liquid beading for a moment and then dropping off.

“Only very briefly,” Cal said. “But the thread seems to be completely waterproof, and so I don’t think it’s likely that it’s going to take dye in any conventional way.”

“Hmm, well, I’ll experiment with that. It’s not uncommon for fabrics to be waterproof in their raw form. Wool, for example, needs to be processed before it’ll absorb color. Anyway, that’s my side of the business. Even if we can’t find a way to make it colored, it’s still going to be valuable as an industrial fabric. It’s so strong, light and flexible, and it’s waterproof. Even uncolored it could be used to make ropes, ship sails, and waterproof clothing. But if it can be dyed it has the potential to be huge. It’s so strong, and it seems to be very easy to work with, so it could be a massive hit with garment makers of all kinds. But if we get to that point, success or failure will depend on the availability of the raw materials. If you’re able to actually make this stuff in your shop in quantity, then we’re good. If it’s coming in on a boat from some far-flung land, then things become more difficult.”

She poured the tea and handed him a cup.

“I can make it myself,” he said. “And in time, I’ll probably be able to make it in quantity. And as far as the supply chain goes, I can guarantee that it starts and ends with me.”

“Then you and I, Cal, have the potential to develop the most exciting new business venture in years.”