Cal led Loruk and Laria out through the back door. He planned to take them through the lane that led out from the back court, then round the corner to access the street door to the upstairs apartment. He did this mainly because there was a press of people in the front shop now, browsing the goods and chatting with Max, and Cal didn’t want to have to push through them all with the orc and the hunter at his side. As Cal locked the back door and pocketed the key, Loruk headed for the lane, but Laria stopped abruptly and stood still, looking up into the air as if thinking.

She frowned.

“You all right, Laria?” Cal said as he came up beside her.

She shivered. “Yes…” she said slowly, then faltered. “I thought I felt something strange, that’s all. Is there…? No, never mind. Let’s not talk about it just now.”

“Very well,” Cal said, feeling curious but not wishing to intrude on her privacy. If she didn’t want to discuss something, he wouldn’t press her. She nodded and gave Cal an apologetic but grateful smile, then jogged on a few steps to catch up with Loruk.

Cal hung back for a moment. He glanced up at the windows of Sark’s shop, but there was no sign of any face at the upper window. Not this time, at least.

Cal and his friends walked round the block and came to the street door. Cal unlocked the door and led his two friends in, climbing the stairs ahead of them and ushering them into the upstairs room above the Emporium. The small room was still rather bare and drab, with little furniture except the stove, the locked chest, the desk and chair, and Cal’s bedroll. Purple spider webbing, freshly made, was thick along the lower edge of the far wall.

Laria spoke up. “So, Cal, Loruk tells me that you’ve discovered a way of making fabric from the spider webbing?”

“Oh, he tells you that, does he?” Cal said, narrowing his eyes at the old orc. “What a pity. His memory must be failing him, otherwise he’d have remembered that it was a secret!”

Loruk laughed. “My memory is just fine, Cal,” he said, “but my judgment of people’s worth and trustworthiness is perhaps better than yours. I tell you, I knew Laria in the old days; she’s trustworthy. I’d trust her with my life, and my secrets.”

“And my secrets, too, I suppose,” Cal grumbled, but he smiled as he said it. He was only pretending to be angry. To tell the truth, he’d often wanted to tell Laria the secret of the webbing, and it was only his promise to Maddie Turner that had kept him from doing so before now. He was glad that Loruk had removed that problem by letting the secret out himself.

“It’s true,” Cal said. “I just stumbled on the fact by accident, but it turns out that when it’s dried, the webbing has the potential to make a new kind of fabric, very light and strong. I’ve teamed up with a woman who knows about fabric making, and she’s taken a sample to work with and test out the potential. She’s pretty excited about the possibilities. In fact, I’ve had a message from her today asking me to go see her. I’ll do that after we’re finished here.”

Laria seemed interested, and would have asked more, but Loruk spoke first. “Tell us what the problem is with the spiders, Cal,” he said. “Your note didn’t say much, but I guess there’s some issue you need help with? I don’t have a huge amount of time.”

“Oh, fair enough,” Cal said, and immediately launched into an explanation of the problem. Quickly, he explained about Alyn’s bakery, and the strange fact that the spiders seemed to be implanting bundles of webbing into his rising loaves of bread.

Loruk threw his head back and laughed. “So that’s it!” he said.

“Yes,” Cal said, “but I don’t know why you find it so funny. It could get me into a lot of trouble, and it’s going to cause Alyn trouble too, if it keeps happening.”

“I’m sorry, Cal,” Loruk said, still grinning. “I didn’t mean to take it lightly. It’s just that it’s not going to be a difficult issue to solve.”

“I’m glad to hear that!” Cal said, surprised. “But what is going on? Why do the spiders do this? Their behavior seems very strange to me, but how do I stop it?”

“You don’t!” Loruk said. “You don’t want to stop it, whatever else happens. You want to allow the behavior, but you need to provide a safer and more attractive environment than the bakery for them to do it.”

“But what are they doing?” Cal asked. “What’s the meaning of it?”

“They’re laying their eggs, Cal!” Loruk said. “They’re laying eggs to produce new spiders, protected in clumps of webbing. That means they must be doing well, feeling safe and secure in the environment. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t reproduce. You want to encourage this, because getting your animals to reproduce is an important part of farming, and that’s a principle that applies to monsters, too. This is good news for your ambitions, and it shouldn’t be too difficult to alter their behavior so that it stops inconveniencing Alyn.”

Cal listened with interest, and Laria did too, as Loruk explained that during their egg-laying cycle, spiders looked for warm, protected places to lay their eggs. In the wild, they would often make use of hollow trees, or narrow fissures in cave walls, or sometimes the thick, warm mud of the swamps in the monsterlands.

“They must think they’ve found an ideal spot, inside the loaves of bread,” Loruk said, “but in fact it’s no good, since the eggs will never survive the cooking process. What you need to do is fairly simple. You want to keep the egg-laying to this room here, and to do that you want to make it simpler and easier for the spiders to lay here than anywhere else. So, keep this room warm, and provide a set of convenient places for the spiders to lay their eggs. If you do that, and Alyn blocks up the ingress in his bakery, the spiders will leave him alone.”

“What happens when the new spiders are born?” Laria asked.

“Nothing in particular,” Loruk said. “Though you’ll need to make sure there’s plenty of food left out for them, Cal,” he added. “Have you been feeding them daily?”

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“No, actually,” Cal said. “I haven’t.”

Loruk frowned. “No wonder they’ve gone further afield, then,” he said. “If you want to keep the spiders under control, you need to give them no reason to widen their range. Provide cheese for them daily - twice a day, ideally. That way they’ll not roam, particularly not if you give them somewhere warm and safe to lay their eggs as well.”

It didn’t take too long to come up with a plan. Cal got some old blankets from a chest downstairs then he, Loruk, and Laria cut the blankets up and balled them up into separate nests where the spiders could choose to lay their eggs. They tied the bundles up with string, covered them with another blanket, and laid them along the wall near the fresh webbing.

When they were done, they stood back and Loruk said, “That ought to do it, Cal. Feed the spiders, keep the room warm, and leave the egg-laying area alone for now - no harvesting of the web or the cores for a week or two until the egg-laying is finished. Then you should be able to get back to work.”

“I don’t need to confine the spiders or anything?”

“There shouldn’t be any need. Even if there was, I don’t think you could. But this should be fine. Spiders are simple and linear creatures, they’ll take the easier route given a choice. Unless you bother them during their egg-laying, or forget to feed them for a few days, they’re unlikely to stray far.”

“Thanks, Loruk,” Cal said.

“Oh, happy to help,” Loruk said. “Anytime! And now, I’m afraid I have to be going. I’m glad I was able to help out, but I’m meeting someone about buying a new apartment to add to my small rental empire, so I have to hurry off. Nice to see you again, Laria. Look me up once you’re back from your next monster run, we’ll go for a drink or something.”

With that - and rather abruptly, or so it seemed to Cal - Loruk bustled off.

“He was in a hurry,” Laria said.

Cal nodded. “There was something else I wanted to ask him about, actually,” he said. “I wanted to ask him about property. He knows the buying and selling market. I’d forgotten until he mentioned it himself.”

“Oh yeah?” Laria asked. “Are you thinking of expanding?”

“I suppose I have been,” Cal said, “though a few things have happened that have changed my focus. It’s like this, Laria. There’s an old shop next door to here, and if this spider-farming venture takes off I’m going to need to dedicate the space up here to the spiders. Also - though he says he doesn’t mind - I’m not so comfortable with Max having to sleep on the floor in the workshop. I’d like to get a bit more room to work with, and the space next door makes the most sense.”

“So what’s the problem?” Laria asked. “Apart from the cost, of course. If it’s empty, then surely it’s going to come up for sale soon?”

“That’s just it,” Cal said. “According to Alyn, it’s been empty for years.”

“Years? That’s weird!”

“Isn’t it? Well, Max and I went and had a closer look, looking through the back window and that kind of thing. Then I touched the back door, and it just opened of its own accord.”

“Woah,” Laria said. “That’s creepy. Did you go inside?”

“We did,” Cal said. “And we met the occupier.”

“So it’s not abandoned after all?”

“It’s occupied by a ghost, Laria.”

“I knew I felt…” Laria began, then shut her mouth and looked at Cal, her face showing plainly that she wished she’d not begun to say whatever she was just about to say.

“You felt something in the courtyard out back, before we came up here?” Cal asked. “You felt the presence of the ghost?”

Laria nodded reluctantly. “You know a few of my secrets, Cal,” she said in a low voice. “You know that I was involved in some dodgy enterprises after I left the guild, and you know that I left the guild in disgrace, for experimenting with magic that was forbidden.”

“You’ve shared a few things, yes,” Cal said, “but I don’t judge you for them. You know that I’m not exactly the most orthodox of magical practitioners myself, and I don’t hold strange magic against anyone else. Come along, tell me, what did you feel? You can trust me, not to tell anyone else your secret, nor to reject you as a friend because of it.”

A sudden unexpected reaction came over Laria - she sobbed convulsively, and then choked back more tears as Cal instinctively stepped forward and put his arms around her. To his surprise, she didn’t pull away, but accepted his hug, putting her arms around him and hugging him tight as she cried bitterly for a few moments, sobbing into his shoulder.

After a few heaving breaths, she pulled herself together again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

She pulled a huge blue handkerchief from her belt, wiped her eyes, then blew her nose noisily. “Sorry,” she said for a third time.

“Hey, come on, you don’t need to apologize,” Cal said. “There’s nothing wrong with getting upset. But what’s the cause? Did I say something wrong?”

“No, no,” she said, smiling. “Nothing wrong. Just… oh, Cal, no one has ever said that to me before. No one’s ever said they would accept my secret magic as it is. I’ve kept it to myself for so long - no one knows. No one except… except Mortex.”

“Well, you can tell me,” Cal assured her again. “I want to know.” Even as he spoke, a suspicion grew in him that he could guess what the secret was. The mention of Mortex, the enduring mystery around Mortex’s exact nature, and the feeling Laria had mentioned around the ghost of Sark; all these could lead only to one conclusion.

“I’m able to do death magic, Cal,” she said. “I have the powers of a necromancer.”

“I’m still your friend,” Cal said immediately, smiling. “But why are you so ashamed of it? It’s dark magic, and people don’t like it, but it’s not illegal, is it?”

“It is for an elf of the high kindred,” she said. “And it was forbidden at the guild level I trained at. It’s what got me thrown out of the Pedantus Guild, and it’s kept me from going back to live with the other elves. I’m an exile, Cal, exiled from my people and exiled from my ambition to become a guild member. All that’s left to me is this career of hunting monsters. Oh, I’m quite good at it, and I’ll do well at it, but I have to keep my magic secret even from my companions in the hunting team.”

“Except Mortex,” Cal prompted.

When she only nodded, Cal asked, “Mortex is a result of your magic, isn’t he?”

She nodded again. “He was a fellow guildsman,” she said. “I was… I was in love with him, but he died in a stupid accident, and I used my magic to try to bring him back to life. Mortex was the result. But Mortex is his own person, nothing like the man I was trying to bring back. Ghosts are… funny that way. They don’t come back the way you expect them. Most of the time, if it’s done right, a spirit can be raised again, but they’re never going to have the same character or traits as the person they were in life.”

“But Mortex is bound to you?”

“We look out for each other,” Laria said with a shrug. “I think we could separate if we wanted to, but we’re fond of each other. I feel a sense of responsibility toward him, you know? He doesn’t really understand what he is or what he was. He doesn’t remember his life before his death and resurrection, but he’d be lost without me, and in my way, I’ve come to rely on him too. He’s the only one who knows that I’m secretly a necromancer.”

Cal nodded thoughtfully. “I’m glad you’ve told me,” he said. “It explains a few things. That must have been really hard for you. How long has it been?”

“What, since the guild? Oh, years,” she said. “And yes, it has been hard, but I do my best, and I’m getting there.”

She sighed, then looked him in the eye. “I’m glad I’ve told you, too,” she said, then grinned suddenly. “And now,” she went on, “you understand why there’s no one better to help you with your ghost problem!”