Cal shivered with enjoyment of the sensation as he came from the cold street into the pleasant, warm Emporium.

The front shop was dark, the lights all dimmed, but the glow of the fire and the light of candles poured out of the workshop.

“You’re back late!” Max said, coming out from the workshop. “I was beginning to worry. Is everything okay?” He was drying his hands on a dish towel and smiling. There was a smell of cooking in the air.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Cal said, pulling off his gloves and hanging up his jacket. “Everything’s okay - better than okay, actually. I’ve got some exciting news. But hey, something smells really good.”

“I’ve cooked. Have you eaten?” Max asked. He was already taking a clean plate from a rack by the fire and moving toward a covered pot that was keeping warm by the hearth.

“Yes, but ages ago,” Cal said. “I could do with some food if there’s enough left.”

“There’s loads,” Max said. “I’ll serve you some.”

As Cal started unlacing his boots, Max ladled thick, dark stew onto the plate. There was a smaller pot by the hearth, too, and Max opened this one, releasing a puff of steam and the fragrant smell of Yallishian green rice. He served a portion of rice onto the plate alongside the stew, then placed the plate on the hearth by Cal’s chair. He cut two slices of bread from a loaf that sat on the workbench, put them on the plate as well, and then added a serving of green salad gleaming with honey dressing from a dark wooden bowl that Cal didn’t recognize.

Without asking, he poured tea into a cup and placed that by Cal’s chair, too.

Max worked so quickly and smoothly that by the time Cal had taken his boots off and set them to one side, there was a plate of dinner and a cup of sweet tea ready for him. The savory, slightly spicy smell of the stew mixed with the sharp smell of vinegar from the salad dressing and the sweet, light honey smell of the tea. The combination made his mouth water.

He was still tired, but the smell of the food was enough to make him put his weariness to one side for the moment. Cal sat down in his arm chair and picked up the plate, inhaling the beautiful smells with deep enjoyment.

“This is so great to come home to after an adventurous day,” Cal said. “Thanks so much, Max.” He took a mouthful of stew, struck at once by the salty, spicy flavor of some kind of cured meat, balanced with a rich, gamey flavor and underlaid with the fresh taste of fragrant herbs.

“Oh, wow, this is lovely,” he said. “What’s this in the stew?”

“Yes, it is good, isn’t it?” Max replied, pouring a cup of tea for himself, and sitting down opposite Cal. “I was pleased with it myself. It’s venison and cured lamb. The venison is from here in Roon, but the sausage is a spiced lamb sausage imported from Yallish. The sausage comes from the same merchant that sold me the Yallishian green rice. I went back to him to see if he had anything else interesting, as well as to get some more rice and to let him know how much we enjoyed the last batch. He was really excited, and said he’d been trying for weeks to get some of this spiced sausage, but hadn’t been able to until this morning.”

Max didn’t ask questions while Cal was eating, and Cal was glad of it. The food was excellent, and the fresh green salad was a particularly welcome treat. In the depths of winter, it was almost impossible to get fresh greens in Jutlyn. For all the magic that the population of Roon island used regularly, nobody had quite found a way of growing good lettuce at midwinter.

Now that the weather was beginning to turn, the most industrious specialist growers were able to get the first fresh salad greens onto the plates of the eager residents of Jutlyn city.

As Cal gave his attention to the food, Max picked his notebook and pen up fro where they’d been lying on the floor beside his chair. He dipped his pen and began working thoughtfully at something on the page. Cal ate his dinner with relish, polishing off the stew, the salad, the rice, and the bread in record time. He was wiping up the last scrape of sauce with the last bit of bread when he looked up and saw that Max was smiling at him over the top of his notebook.

“What?” Cal asked, his mouth full of bread and gravy.

Max shook his head. “Nothing,” he said, but his smile broadened. “It’s just good to see you enjoying the meal so much.”

“I certainly did enjoy it,” Cal said. “And it was much needed. I had a bit of food earlier this evening, but I’ve been on the go all day and a lot’s happened since then. But what about things here at the shop? How are you? Has everything been okay today? I’m sorry for leaving you to man the shop alone for so long. I hadn’t intended to be out as late as I was.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” Max said. “I’m happy to look after the shop if there’s things you need to do. It’s been pretty quiet here anyway, nothing much to report. I had a decent day, not quite as good as some other days, but still fine. But tell me about what’s happened with you. I can see there’s something big to report from your side. Go on, tell me about it.”

Cal took another drink of tea. He was still sleepy, and the big meal he’d just eaten was making him even drowsier still, but the tea gave him a lift and he smiled, taking a deep breath as he pulled his thoughts together. He didn’t want to sleep before telling Max the news, and it wasn’t healthy to go to sleep too soon after a big meal anyway.

He took a breath, and decided to tell Max the big news straight out.

“I discovered a way to dye the spider fabric,” Cal said. “A way that works really, really well.”

Max had been sitting at ease in his chair, his legs pulled up under him and his tea cradled on his knee, his notebook open on his lap. At Cal’s words, he started forward, nearly spilling his tea on his notebook.

“You did?” he asked in amazement. “That’s not what I thought you were going to say! I thought you were going to tell me something exciting about Sark’s shop next door! But I thought Maddie was working on the fabric, not you? Did Randall at the auction house help you dye the webbing or something?”

Max realized he was babbling and closed his mouth, his eyes fixed on Cal. Then a moment later he relaxed and carefully placed his notebook to one side. Cal caught a glimpse of a sheet covered in careful diagrams and lines of small, neat text as Max closed the book.

Cal grinned. Of course, he’d told Max he was going to see Randall at the auction house to ask about Sark’s shop after he’d been to see Maddie. No wonder Max was surprised to find that it was Cal who had discovered the dying technique, not her.

Stolen novel; please report.

“No, Randall didn’t help me, and it wasn’t Maddie either. I didn’t manage to see Randall - he’s on holiday, though I’ve an appointment to go see him the day after tomorrow. No, I met Jason by chance outside the auction house. We went for a drink together and the subject came up. It was actually Jason who dyed the fabric.”

“Of course!” Max exclaimed, slapping his knee with his hand and nearly spilling his tea again. “Jason is a Color Weaver! He made the sign for our shop… sorry, I ought to say your shop… but I’d never thought that he might be able to dye the spider thread. I always thought that color weavers can’t dye fabric? I thought I’d heard that somewhere, no? If they could, there wouldn’t be any demand for traditional dyers…”

He trailed off, looking questioningly at Cal.

“You can call it our shop if you like,” Cal said.

Max blinked in surprise. “What?” he said. It took him a moment to realize what Cal was referring to. “Oh, right.” Another pause. “Wait, really?”

“Sure,” Cal said. “Why not? After all, you’ve been a key part of making it what it is. I couldn’t have done it without you. To be honest, I pretty much think of it as our shop too by this point. It wouldn’t be the same without you here, and there’s no way it would have been as much fun as it has been.”

“Aww, thanks Cal,” Max said with a grin. “That means a lot.”

He paused for a moment, expectantly. “And… the story?” he prompted.

Cal laughed and stopped teasing his friend. Instead, he launched into a full retelling of the day’s adventures, explaining not only the apparent theory behind why Jason could dye the cloth when nothing else could, but also how the spider web seemed to be unlike all other materials in that it took and held magic color when no other fabric would.

He told Max about the unusual cab driver and his horrible horse-drawn cab, and about Maddie’s plan for getting the support of the Clothmakers Guild, and he told about Jason leading him through the mysterious underway tunnel hidden behind a nondescript door in the lane behind Blinkset Street. He told about his conversation with the goblin in Randall’s, and all about how Jason had fainted when doing the color weaving magic on the red cloth.

“Do you think that the different colors have a different effect on the weaver?” Max asked thoughtfully when he heard this part of the story.

“What do you mean?” Cal asked, intrigued.

“Well, I was just thinking about the process. It’s unexpected; not linear. Jason struggled a bit with the blue, then had no problem with the yellow, then had a really difficult time with the red,” Max said. “That’s odd, don’t you think?”

“I’m not sure I see what you mean,” Cal said.

“Well, look at it this way,” Max continued. “If the difficulty in the magic was just because Jason had never done it before, you’d expect the first time to be the hardest, and then for the magic to get progressively easier with each attempt. And if the difficulty came because the magic caused some fatigue, you’d expect the opposite. The blue would have been easiest, then the yellow a little harder, then the red would have been the worst. For the first use of the spell to be hard, the second to be easy, and the third to be hardest doesn’t follow either of those patterns, and that suggests that the level of difficulty isn’t about practice or about progressive fatigue. Rather, it’s something to do with the spell itself.”

“Hey, I guess you’re right!” Cal said, surprised and intrigued by this insight. “I hadn’t thought of that at all. And you’re right, normally magic does follow a linear progression. Often, it’s much the same as any other task - it’s about how much practice you’ve had, and about how fatiguing the task itself is.”

“Right,” Max said. “Look at my Metal Singing. There, it’s all about the level of detail. I can fling big pieces of metal around easily, or I can run off a batch of enchantable keys from scrap without a problem, but drawing those nails from the boards upstairs was tiring because it’s a fiddly, detailed job that requires a lot of concentration.”

“And enchanting is another example,” Cal added. “When I did the Level 4 enactment to begin the process of creating the eyeglass, it was way more tiring than doing a Level 1 spell. Equally, doing a bunch of Level 1 enchantments in a row, you’d expect to get more tired the more you did. And then there’s the different layers in different enchantment cores. They get progressively harder to use the further down you go. Everywhere in enchanting, the level of difficulty in different tasks is linear, based on spell level, layer level, or the number of enchanting tasks already done in the session.”

“Except in your case,” Max pointed out, “you used your eyeglass to find the bonus enchantments that didn’t fit the rule. They should have been harder to do, but actually they were just as easy as the layer 1 spells.”

Cal frowned. It seemed that Max was driving at something but not quite reaching the point. “That’s true, but what are you getting at?” he asked. “Do you think it means something?”

Max shrugged. “Just that where enchanting is concerned, this seems to keep happening. Rules break, trends change, unexpected stuff happens. There’s a pattern of… well, of things not following the pattern. I guess it must mean what you’ve been saying all along is true; there’s more to enchanting - and probably to magic in general - than anyone has realized before. Way more possibilities, way more potential.”

“I think that’s true,” Cal said. “I’ve always thought so. Even the work with the eyeglass shows that. The eyeglass enchanting was the first thing that I did when I got here, and without that I wouldn’t have been able to get anywhere near what I’ve done so far.”

“This spider thread,” Max continued, “I guess it’s got more properties than you expect. As a Color Weaver, Jason’s able to dye the fabric, that’s one thing. My guess is that different colors are like different Levels in your enchanting, or different amounts of detail needed in my Metal Singing. For some reason, yellow is easier than blue, and red is harder than either of them. Part of this work will be about finding out and categorizing the different difficulty levels. There’s going to be a lot of experimentation required before we can reliably mass-produce the colored fabric.”

“To be honest,” Cal said, “I’m hoping that I won’t be doing much mass production. I’m hoping that I can set up the spider farm and supply the raw material, but I’d rather let Maddie handle the details of producing the final product. I’m really happy to have found this new product, but I’m an enchanter, that’s what I want to concentrate on.”

“I get it,” Max said, “and I think that’s wise, but there’s no avoiding the fact that through this spider web, you’re opening up a whole new area of magic. The thread interacts with Color Weaving magic in unexpected ways. What else might it be able to do? What might happen if you were to try to enchant it, for example?”

Cal opened his mouth and shut it again. He’d never thought of that. His gaze traveled across the candlelit room to the dark corner where the broken clothing enchanter stand loomed out of the shadows. Yes, he could enchant hats, gloves, and even small scarves on his regular enchanting table, but if he wanted to enchant larger garments like coats or cloaks, he’d need to fix up the clothing enchanter stand.

And if the spider thread could be enchanted…

“If I could do that, I would be adding more magic to an already magical item,” Cal said quietly. “The spider thread is a magic item, a product of a monster created by enchantment – which in itself is totally new, since monsters aren’t usually created by people. The final product - colored spider fabric - is the result of the interaction between Jason’s Color Weaving and Darkworth’s spider enchanting. If I were to add enchantments to garments made from enchanted, magically colored fabric, that would be a third kind of magic layered on top of two already existing kinds. That’s the kind of magic that everyone has always dismissed as impossible, but…”

“But that,” Max added, “is exactly the kind of thing we do.”