SARAH

Alex made entry into the room. Three badgers focused their attention on him and charged. Sarah cast a tier two chained lightning through Alex and into the badgers. All three badgers stumbled and fell as the stun effect of the spell took hold. Sarah started trying to cast the tier three chained lightning spell at the badger farthest from Alex. Alex stepped forward to finish off the closest one. Grandmother warned them all that casting any magic but the spell you were currently trying to learn would increase the number of attempts you would have to make. Sarah was hoping that by sticking with just the tier two version of the same spell, the lengthening effect would be limited.

So far her theory was proving to be more fiction than fact. She was keeping a mental count of her failed attempts and that count was getting rather large. The third badger was starting to shake off the effects of the stun just as Alex finished off the second one. Sarah was afraid the chained lightning might jump to Alex because he was so close to the badger. Instead of casting she shot the last badger with a non imbued arrow, killing it.

They both held for a moment searching for any additional motion in the room. Alex touched the nearest badger causing prize coins, hides and claws to appear. Alex and Sarah scooped their shares up.

“Have you noticed the prizes are larger with just the two of us?” Sarah asked.

“Yeah,” Alex replied. “The materials are about the same if you consider it is only being divided by two and not by six. The prize coins though are higher than the smaller split accounts for. It is like Control is giving a bonus for being in more danger.”

“Something like take more risk and get more reward?” Sarah questioned. “Since failure is death I don’t think the increased payoff is worth it. I wonder if this is another of Control’s little tests. Control is testing us to see if greed will overcome common sense.”

“Probably,” Alex said. Deciding that the room was clear he slid his sword back into its scabbard. He started digging through the debris in the room. Sarah made her own sweep picking up any loose sheets of vellum, notebooks or crafting tools that she found. The room was dressed like an office with multiple rows of desks. It was a large single room with no side rooms that might be closets or private offices. There were loose sheets of vellum mixed in everywhere, but Sarah only found one or two complete notebooks. She picked it all up and slipped it into the gathering bag that was tied to her left side.

Alex came up with a nearly complete chair frame built out of steel. There were only three legs, but the wooden seat was still attached to the frame. The seat was constructed out a square plank of wood with a hollow carved into it to make it more comfortable to sit on. There was no back rest, just a bare bar too high to really offer any support.

“I haven’t seen a seat like this before,” Alex observed, looking over his find. “I wonder if there is a back rest in a similar style.” Sarah looked at his half chair and thought.

“I think I’ve seen something like that before,” Sarah responded. “A narrow plank of wood with a rounded hollow for your back, it mounts on that cross bar and hangs below.” Sarah thought about it some more and said, “I might have seen it on the Speedwell.”

Sarah’s description sparked a memory in Alex, only his wasn’t a distant memory it was much more recent. He started going through the piles of debris again.

Sarah was finished with her own search. She thought she was watching Alex when she recognized that her gaze was caught on an object near her feet. The item didn’t look like debris. It didn’t have the same dirty worn look. Sarah leaned over to pick it up. She turned it over, studying it. On the side was one of the same little cubbies that accepted spools of thread on a loom. Sarah could see the center pole the spool would slide on. Sure now that it was a tool of some type, even though she didn’t recognize it, she put it into her pack.

Thinking about what it could be, she studied the spot she found it in. It was laying half on a pile of debris that might once have been a desk. It was staged like the tool fell off the desk when it collapsed. If Sarah remembered correctly she found a stack of vellum in the remains of that desk. The stack was so tightly packed that she thought it might be a notebook before she picked it up. She wondered if that was related.

Sarah knew the debris pile was never a desk. She knew the tool didn’t fall off of it. Everything in this room was constructed by Control in exactly the condition it was in now. Control placed everything in this room in exactly the positions they were in when Sarah and Alex made entry. Still, Control liked to tell stories. It pushed events to turn everyday life into an endless adventure story. It also told small stories in the mosaics on the bottom of a pool, in the images on the upholstery of a sofa and in the arrangement of the debris in a room.

Alex came up with a short wooden board that looked worn in the middle. He thought it looked too short on the first pass through the pile. Now he remembered that Grandmother picked up every piece of wood that wasn’t rotten and didn’t have a broken edge. He walked over to his broken chair and held the board up in front of the cross bar.

“How does that look?” Alex asked.

“Yes,” Sarah responded, “that is what I remember.” By this time she was actually pretty certain the chair she remembered seeing was on the Speedwell, so she was glad her comments helped Alex. Alex studied the bar and the back of the wooden plank. He flipped the chair and studied how the seat was attached. When he was finished with his inspection, he turned back to the room debris and started searching the piles again.

Sarah considered the spool that should be in the machine. Maybe it rolled away when the tool hit the floor. Spools were small and easy to miss. The only tool that Sarah was aware of that was smaller were pins. She started searching the piles of debris that were on that side of the desk. When she found the spool there was thread on it.

Sarah searched her memory but she was certain she never found a spool with thread already on it in the wild. Even more shocking was that the thread was white. It was possible to not dye thread when you spun it. What you ended up with was threads in different shades of tan and off white, depending on what source of fiber you started with.

Ellen will be interested in this, Sarah thought to herself, as she recalled her recent conversations with her about chemistry. Todd found his own small object in a pile of debris. He was comparing it to something under the seat of his partial chair. When he finished, he plunked the small part into his backpack and started searching the piles again.

Sarah's thoughts wandered, as she fiddled with the spool of thread with one hand. She was thinking of the fountain that stood at the exit from Home Square to the green. It was covered in geometric tiles representing each of the magic symbols. A circle represented one, an oval was two, a triangle for three, a square was four, a pentagram was five and a hexagon was six. The zero tile was represented as an octagon. Besides the shapes the fountain tiles were also colored, yellow; one, green, two, blue, three, violet, four, red, five, orange, six. Thread could be dyed those colors by adding a source for the color and the corresponding number symbol in the spell. A crafters personal magic color could serve as the source for the color.

In the fountain the octagonal tiles were white. Did that mean that zero would dye an item white if a crafter gave a white source? Sarah wondered. She was thinking a lot about the zero symbol since her discussion with Ellen about how to represent it on a ribbon. Light was not the only spell that was cast with zero. There was a whole tree of cloaking spells; don't notice me, blur, camouflage, conceal. Sarah realized with a start that those weren’t separate spells, rather they were increasing tiers of the same spell. Don’t notice me was a tier zero spell while conceal was tier five. It would appear they were missing a few of the tier versions. She needed to ask Grandmother about it.

“Are you ready for the next room?” Alex asked. Sarah looked up to find Alex waiting in the doorway. There was no sign of his chair, the board or any of the small parts he was searching for. Getting that lost in thought was dangerous in the wild. Sarah shook her head to clear her thoughts, focusing on the here and now. She dropped the spool into her backpack and assured Alex she was ready.

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Her foot slipped on a last sheet of vellum when she took a rushed step to rejoin Alex. The sheet was laying flat against the floor and disappeared into the floor tiles. It was only after Sarah picked it up that she realized it wasn’t vellum but something thicker. She refused to think about it here. She would examine it closer when she was back in the safety of the square. She slipped the sheet into the collection bag with the rest of the loose vellum sheets.

It took about four hours to fill Alex’s cart. He was pleased with the haul. They only found one piece of complete furniture. It was a small round table made out of iron. Alex called it a unique piece. The legs were decorated with twisted rods of iron that were so beautifully done it looked like vines. A flower image was inscribed on the flat top. The scribing was deep enough to give the image texture, but not deep enough to make the surface noticeably uneven.

Alex threw six badgers onto the top of the cart. The crafter in Sarah rebelled at the thought of leaving so many animal carcasses behind. When she said something to Alex about not wasting the animals so close to the square, Alex replied, “We don’t want to flood the market.”

Sarah thought about Alex’s words as they walked back. If they carried all the meat back it would feed the square for a week. At the same time, if they kept it up day after day, it might drive hunters out of work. Even though this square was their home in the structure, they did not stay here very much. If the square’s hunters gave up the craft, where would the square get their food when the party left again? Six badgers were one for each member of the party. Although no one ate a badger in a day, it also wasn’t so much of an oversupply that it would drive anyone out of work.

When they reached the square, Alex thanked Sarah for going with him. Sarah and Ellen were crossing the courtyard that morning on their way to the inn when they ran into Alex just coming out of his shop. Ellen told Alex they were interested in notebooks or loose sheets of vellum. Alex told them he was just on his way over to the training yard to see if any of the trainees wanted to go on a scavenging run with him. If they wanted to go with him instead, they could keep all the vellum they found. After a quick discussion they decided that Sarah would go with him while Ellen would go on to the inn to look for Grandmother.

Sarah thanked Alex in return for letting her keep all the crafting tools. The tools were not part of the original arrangement. She assured him that either she or Ellen would go out with him in the morning.

Sarah climbed the two flights of stairs up to her apartment at a half run. She was anxious to learn what Grandmother thought of her and Ellen's work. She opened the door to find Ellen at the new workbench. The entire surface was covered in loose sheets of vellum. There seemed to be writing on all of them. Even more impressive was the stack of finished books on the corner of the top.

“There you are,” Ellen said, sitting the stylus in her hand down and turning to face her sister. “I thought you would never get here. We need to go down and rent a shop.”

“Now?” Sarah asked, surprised. She swung her bow and quiver off her shoulder and leaned them against the closest wall. She followed that with her pack and collection bags. “Are we ready? I found some interesting things today I want to show you.”

“I don’t think I will ever feel ready, that isn’t important. What is important is that we move forward. I have a feeling Grandmother will respect us if we’ve made the commitment of renting a shop,” Ellen explained. “The shop next to Alex’s is still available, let's go claim it.”

Ellen marched past Sarah and out into the hall, leaving Sarah a little shocked. She dropped the last of her loose items and followed her sister down to the courtyard. She didn’t catch up with Ellen until they reached the shop front.

“What do you think?” Ellen asked. Sarah looked over the shop. It was the next set of doors down from Alex. The doors were all equally spaced along the edge of the courtyard, but the spaces beyond varied. Since the windows to an empty shop were always opaque, there was really no way to know what you were getting until you paid the rent. There were some hints. The front windows of Alex’s shop were transparent. Most of the space between this door and his shop door was his. Sarah thought the large frontage on the courtyard was great for displaying his larger merchandise.

The shop on the other side was also rented, it was the square’s butcher. It too seemed to have most of the space between the doors. That didn’t leave much window space for this shop. Sarah thought that might work out well. Their spell books didn’t need a lot of space to display. A large amount of empty space might work against them. Making customers not come inside when they thought there was nothing for sale.

“I like it,” Sarah responded.

“If we touch the door together we would both be able to pay a month's rent. We will both go into the shop on the first door open. That should make us joint owners,” Ellen explained. Sarah knew all that. She could see that Ellen’s urgency was a cover for her nerves. She was now using this planning to control her anxiety.

Sarah reached out and took her sister’s hand. She pulled Ellen’s hand up and pushed it up onto the glass of the door. At the last second Ellen opened her hand and spread her fingers, allowing Sarah’s fingers to reach through between them and also touch the glass.

A pile of shadow coins appeared. It was ten silver. Sarah was surprised the rent on a shop was so low. The way people talked about it, she expected more. Sarah pulled the coins from her inventory and paid a month's worth. Ellen did the same. Sarah dropped her hand releasing Ellen’s. Ellen reached for the door. Sarah noted there was a slight tremor in her fingers. The door swung open at Ellen’s touch. Sarah followed her sister into the space beyond.

Sarah considered their shop as the door closed behind them. It was a little like Grandmother’s shop in Londontown. The frontage on the courtyard was narrow, which Sarah already reasoned out, but it reached far back. It was wider in the back. Grandmother’s shop was shaped like a T, but this shop was more of an L, with the back section extending in the direction of Alex’s shop. The back room of his shop must be small, Sarah thought to herself. What was interesting was how the wall between the front room and the back room was laid out.

In the shops Sarah visited before, the back wall ran parallel with the courtyard wall. In this shop it was rotated ninety degrees. The separating wall made the toe of the L into the back room. A small restroom opened up off the backroom close to the bend in the L. That left the showroom as a long thin room. The shop counter was right at the front. It too was positioned ninety degrees to the front glass. It abutted the glass wall itself. Built-in shelving was on the wall behind the counter for displaying goods. The shelving was only on the front half of the wall. The back half was bare.

Sarah could see Ellen’s nervousness as her sister looked at all that space they needed to fill with things to sell.

“I like it,” Sarah said. She was standing behind the counter at the front. “With the counter here we can greet each customer as they enter and explain how the shop works. I think we are going to do that a lot in the early days since no one has seen a shop like ours before.”

Ellen turned and looked at the counter and the door. Her nerves settled as she considered Sarah’s words. Sarah was right. They would need to explain their product.

Sarah wandered toward the back of the space. She thought Ellen would be calmer if the front room space was smaller. “Grandmother said she removed the back room wall in the interface. Can we just move it?” she asked Ellen. Sarah was too young when their father was killed to remember much about his shop. Ellen was older and was an active part of the business. Ellen’s crafting skill and business acumen was what kept them fed and housed until they joined up with Grandmother.

“Yes,” Ellen responded, “with some limitations.”

“Can we move it here?” Sarah asked, she was only about halfway back the top of the L from the courtyard wall. It would make the showroom truly tiny. Moving the wall here would put about half the built-in shelving into the back room. “Can the second half of that shelving be put on the new wall, or on the opposite wall? Actually, can we move the shelving from behind the counter altogether? Put it on the far wall and the new back wall? That way we could use it to house the books we want the customers to browse.”

“I was thinking about buying shelving from Alex,” Ellen commented.

“We can do that too, when we run out of space. He got this little iron table today that reminded me of the tables in the gallery. I think we should buy that from him instead. Maybe we could get several of them as he gets the respawns. We can set them up in the center of the space with a couple crafting tools on them and an open book,” Sarah said excitedly and her thoughts flowed. Ellen liked that idea. She thought a display like that might draw her into a shop. They could set the first table close to the window.

“Grandmother said we should put a list up of all the wizard spells we have so that people could choose from it what they want to add to their book. We could put that up on the blank wall behind the counter,” Ellen said aloud. “I suppose we need a list of warrior spells too. We could also put up your world map there.”

“Oh!” Sarah said suddenly as inspiration struck her. “We can sell map sections! Like the real map. Remember how Companion taught Alex how to copy a section of his map to and from a vellum? We can pull the map sections for each of the settlements from our own maps and put them in a book. Then we can copy them onto vellum sheets. As part of the price we can teach people how to load the square up onto the personal map. It may not give them a route to the settlement but it would show them what direction to go.”

“That is a good idea,” Ellen responded. “The route really isn’t that important. With the way the structure changes all the time they become obsolete way too fast. Settlements always stay in the same place.” Sarah was happy to hear some of the stress leave Ellen’s voice. “How do you know a copied version of a map square will still load into a personal map?” Ellen asked.

“I don’t. We will have to experiment. Think of how proud Grandmother will be with us if it works?” Sarah responded. “That reminds me I found some things with Alex I think you should see. It might call for some experimentation before you finish your book on spinning. And you need to tell me what Grandmother said.”

“So much to do,” Ellen muttered, but she sounded almost happy about it. “Let's make the changes to the shop, they won’t take effect until we leave. I can walk you through how to use the interface at the same time.”