The Grand Library of Greenwyn City was one of the marvels of the northern world. Deep in the library’s mysterious vaults, strange tomes full of ancient lore were gathered and stored, available for study by those who could show good reason for wanting to access such valuable items. But Alex had a more humble goal, and for that, all he needed to access was the public area at the front of the building.

The assistant librarian, Mortys, was a ghost. Mortys was dead, but he didn’t let that get in his way anymore than it had to. He was a tall, spare being, with very pale skin and a distinctly translucent aspect to his face and hands.

Mortys didn’t smile when he saw Alex - he was incapable of any facial expression - but his eyes gleamed with pleasure, and perhaps the anticipation of a challenge. Mortys and Alex liked each other, in their own ways, though their relationship was more of rivalry than of true friendship.

Mortys had a voice like the distant hiss of breath through stone. “Alex. Long time. You still have those books about the construction of microscopes on loan. They’ll be overdue next week. Don’t make me hand you another fine.”

Alex put his purse down on the table with a thud and a clink of coins. He pulled off his gloves, then drummed his hands on the table in front of Mortys, eyeing the ghost librarian as he did so. “You’ll make me jealous of your memory, Mortys,” he said. “But next week is next week, so I’ll keep the books until then.”

Mortys looked hard at the purse Alex had placed on the table. “And the other fine you have outstanding, the one for the book about playing the keyharp? Are you going to pay that fine?”

“Nope,” Alex said. “Not today.”

Mortys made a noise like cold bones rattling in an unquiet grave.

Alex shook his head. “Don’t give me that. You and I both know that fine is under the minimum required to block my borrowing privileges. So no, I’ll not be paying that today.”

“And how are you getting on with the book on microscopes?”

“Great. If I keep at it, I might even be able to see my library fine. Now are you going to tease me some more or are you going to help me find the book that I’m looking for?”

“I’m at your service, of course. What would you like to borrow?”

“A book on knitting.”

Mortys the ghost was as surprised at this request as Alex had expected he would be. Alex could tell that Mortys burned with curiosity to find out what was going on. His face remained expressionless, but his body rocked backward and he held up his pale, translucent hands and flapped them in the air for a moment. But he wouldn’t stoop to actually ask, and so Alex was able to take great pleasure in not telling Mortys anything about why he wanted this book.

When they got back to the counter with the book, Alex patted his shirt pocket, then his pants pockets, and put an expression of dismay on his face. Mortys leaned forward, positively glowing with the anticipation of being able to lord it over Alex and tell him he couldn’t borrow a book without his card. Alex palmed the card as he made a show of hunting through his purse and his pockets, then pulled it out and presented it to the ghost with a grin.

Mortys would have glared if he could. Instead, he hissed at Alex and wished him good luck with his knitting.

“Good luck with being a pedant,” Alex retorted. “Hey, are you going to the globe racing tomorrow?”

“Of course,” Mortys hissed. “I’ll see you at the usual place?”

“I’ll be there,” Alex replied with a wink, and Mortys nodded to him and turned away.

The air was chill after the warm, wood-scented gloom of the library lobby.

Alex pulled up his hood and tucked his book snugly under his arm inside his cloak, then stepped back out into the rainy night and headed for home.

* * *

The Knitter’s Path: Novice to Legendary by Nine-Needle Gorian was exactly what Alex had been looking for. Mortys might be a rule-sniffing, order-licking, minutiae-grubbing pedant, but he knew about books. No matter what your tastes, Mortys was the go to undead entity for book recommendations in Greenwyn city.

The weather turned foul as Alex carried his book back to Dockland Hill. He resisted the urge to look for a cab, even when the wind whipped round from the river and flung handfuls of thick, freezing rain into his face. Funds were always scarce, and he needed the walk after his heavy scrying session earlier in the day. He hunched his head down, pulled his hood lower, and kept walking.

An hour after he left Mortys, Alex climbed the narrow, badly-lit stairs to his small room, where he pulled the drapes and used Will to conjure light into a small static lamp that he kept under the corner floorboard with the rest of his scrying kit. Static lamps weren’t as illegal as scrying, but a static lamp was a Will spell, and a person who used one was very likely someone who at least dabbled in scrying. It was best to keep suspicions like that to a minimum, and the distinctive soft light of a static lamp in his window was the kind of thing that might draw entirely the wrong kind of attention from a passing lore keeper. The drapes that covered his front window were probably the most expensive thing in his room, and they were worth every penny if they kept prying eyes away from his work.

Once he’d hung his cloak up on a nail by the door and dried his face and hair on his one towel, Alex filled his water cup from the barrel he kept by the door and drank, then he filled it a second time and took it with him to the middle of the room. He sat on the floor in the centre of the bare room and put the static lamp on the boards next to him, and his cup of water beside it. Then he put his new book on the floor in front of him and read the title on the cover out loud.

“The Knitter’s Path: Novice to Legendary,” he said, and sighed with contentment. There was nothing quite like the feeling he got just as he was about to embark on the pursuit of a new interest.

“Hmm,” he said, and despite his hunger and his long day, the sound he made was like the sound a man makes when he sits back from a long awaited meal.

He opened his new book and began to read.

Nine-Needle Gorian was verbose and longwinded in his introduction, but Alex was a both a fast and detail-orientated reader, and he didn’t want to skip anything. He ploughed resolutely through Gorian’s introduction to the craft, and was glad he had done so. Gorian emphasised the need for practice, for patience, and for a forgiving attitude. Knitting, Gorian wrote, was one of the most underrated skills a person could learn. It might not look like much at first, but given time, one who practiced the skill would reap an endless crop of rewards, not only material, practical rewards, but also personal and spiritual rewards. Knitting, Gorian wrote, allowed one to practice the focused state required for various other skills, as well as to create garments for oneself and others at a fraction of the price of buying them.

Alex read on, taking in information that he’d never known before, about wool and dyes, about the complex process of producing yarn from fleece, about the different materials that might be used to make knitting needles, and on into the basic and more complex stitches. The title, From Novice to Legendary, wasn’t an exaggeration. The book assumed zero knowledge on the part of the reader, and that was exactly what Alex was looking for. By the end of the evening, he had memorised his shopping list for tomorrow, and knew where he was going to begin.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

It was late, and Alex wasn’t absorbing any more information. Time to stop. He closed his book, drank his water, then rose and stretched, hearing his spine, shoulders, and elbows pop as he did so. He put his new book carefully away, leaning on the wall by the window next to Beginning the Keyharp by Trena Sila and Microscopy: Theory and Practice, Second Edition from Greenwyn University Publishing.

He kindled a small fire in the hearth. He took some bread from the cupboard and heated the soup he’d made last night in his small kettle. The soup base was a beef stock from a batch that he’d made the week before. The soup was thick with potatoes, leeks, and barley, and the bread was dark rye from a few days ago, going a little hard now, but soft when it was dipped in the soup. He had a handful of greens he’d picked up at the market earlier that day to complete his meal.

It was humble fare, but it was tasty, and Alex ate slowly, thinking about his plans.

Once he’d wiped the last of the soup broth up with the last bit of bread, he washed the pot out with cold water from the cask he kept by the door. He drank several more cups of water from his small clay cup. Outside, it was getting quiet. Down at the dockland inns, it would be getting noisy, but Alex’s apartment was far enough away from the river that the shouting and brawling of the sailors didn’t reach him.

His bed alcove was small, but it was dry and warm. Still mulling over his plans, he slipped under the covers and fell quickly to sleep, the image of dancing knitting needles filling his head as he dropped into dreams.

* * *

Globe racing was a favourite entertainment in Greenwyn City. Alex enjoyed it for its own sake, and it was a good chance to see people and catch up. It was also a good way to practice his favourite activities - scrying and memory work - while making enough money to keep his belly full from day to day. Mortys would invariably be there, as would Derk, who worked as a kitchen porter in the Sticky Arms in Fairfield, and Yasha of Lyriath, an ex-mercenary from the Salt Sea Coast who now turned her hand to smithing and mending of weapons instead of swinging them.

Alex found his friends in time for the second race. They had all lost on the first race already, except Yasha, who had a nose for betting and had managed to win by putting her money on the second place finisher.

The stands weren’t that busy. Today’s race was only for real enthusiasts, as the competitors were from the less well-known globe trainer houses. That meant the minimum bet was lower and the rewards for winning were equivalently less impressive. That suited Alex well. The less was there was to win, the less there was to lose, and crucially, the less risk of drawing attention when you did win.

A long time ago, he’d worked out a ratio of wins to losses that he could sustain, making enough over time to stay on the right side of profit, while never winning enough that the lore keepers might get suspicious. At bigger races, betting and winning larger sums, the risk of getting caught would be much higher. The financial rewards would be equally high, but Alex wasn’t in it to get rich. He just wanted to keep turning over enough money to be able to eat, read, and spend time practicing scrying and memory work without getting caught.

Until now. Now, he had an ambition. It was a heady experience, and a new one. He would have to be careful not to get over excited.

That morning, he’d risen early and spent four hours channelling a tight flow of Will as he dealt spread after spread of fortune cards, narrowing down the possibilities until that he knew exactly which globe would make first, second, and third place for each of the day’s races. As he reached his conclusion for each position in each race, he committed it to memory. By the end of his session, he had built an elaborate mnemonic mind map of every result in every race for the three hours he intended to stay.

After that effort, he’d had to lie down again, but he did so with satisfaction. The effort had been worth it. It always was.

Now, as he strolled up the nearly empty stands, waving to a glowering Derk, a smiling Yasha, and an unresponsive Mortys, Alex had a complete map of the afternoon ahead. It was this kind of thing that made scrying not only illegal in the eyes of the lore keepers, but also despised by most people in Greenwyn. Alex knew the moral arguments against scrying, of course. He also knew that the satisfaction of doing the magic was something he would never be willing to give up.

The interesting thing about looking into the future and knowing with complete certainty what would happen was that it was almost always immoral in some way or other. It may not appear so in the moment, but there is no possibility, no occurrence that happens that does not have some negative impact on someone, somewhere.

In normal day-to-day life, moral beings make judgement calls about their actions, usually based - more or less consciously - on the trade-off between the benefit to one individual or set of individuals versus the negative impact on another. This is a normal, unavoidable part of living. But a person who can predict beyond doubt the outcome of events over which they have no control suddenly has a great deal of power to change what impact those events have on others.

Globe racing was a case in point. To have the power of foreknowledge and to use it to the benefit of a friend might seem innocuous at first glance, but looking closer at the question, Alex couldn’t escape the fact that pushing a friend toward better bets removed agency from the person involved, interfered in their fate (with potential consequences that he couldn’t predict) and gave them an unfair advantage over others, all of which were immoral things to do. To have foreknowledge that a friend would lose badly and not to intervene was also, of course, immoral.

Alex had reached a compromise with himself a long time ago. He stuck to it as best he could, even though a part of him always knew that what he did was wrong in many subtle ways.

He used his scrying to cheat at the races, so that he could earn a steady living from betting. In the process, he couldn’t avoid knowing what was going to happen for his friends, and so he tried to strike a balance between how much change he would bring about himself, and how much he would minimise the impact of his foreknowledge on the lives of the others.

He didn’t always succeed in striking that balance. The place where he generally made the most impact was when his friends seemed about to bet hard and lose badly. Here, he made the call that it was worse to know and let his friends damage themselves anyway than it was to interfere with his friends’ destiny.

And so, Alex’s foreknowledge of the outcome of the races allowed him to know if his friends would win or lose, and to know for himself when to bet and how much. Over months of regular weekly visits, he’d win enough to turn a profit and lose enough to keep the attention of the lore keepers elsewhere.

When his friends were going to win, he’d bet with them, seeming to be swayed by their choices. When they were going to lose, he’d sometimes do the same, and sometimes he’d override them, making convincing arguments for placing bets on a different globe instead. In this way, he made money more often than he lost it, and most of the time, his friends did too. And in this way, he managed to keep his uneasy conscience at bay enough to continue using his forbidden magic.

It set him apart from his friends, putting a barrier between himself and them that he would never be able to overcome. He enjoyed their company, and they enjoyed his, but scrying was the most important thing in his life, and none of his friends knew anything about it. Oh, they benefited from it in many small ways when they went to the globe racing track with Alex, but none of them ever knew that they were not truly gambling. None of them ever knew that they were, in fact, benefitting from Alex’s deep practice at the hidden, forbidden magic of scrying with the power of Will. If they had, Alex didn’t doubt that they’d have disowned him immediately. Except, perhaps, for Yasha.

“Taking up knitting, I hear?” Derk said cheerfully to Alex as they he took his seat with his friends in the stands, in time for the second race. Yasha grinned at them both. Mortys looked straight at the empty race track, pretending not to hear.

“That’s right,” Alex said pleasantly. “I’m really interested in it. Did you know that it can bring great spiritual benefits, as well as giving you the chance to produce your own garments at a fraction of the price?”

“You and your hobbies,” Yasha chuckled. “Last week it was microscopes, the week before that it was geology, and the week before that… I can’t remember.”

“Keyharp playing,” said Mortys. “He still owes the library fine for keeping the book overdue for a day before renewing the loan. I tried to tell him.”

“I thought you weren’t listening,” Alex retorted. He rolled his eyes and nodded his head toward Mortys. “He just doesn’t get the appeal of having wide ranging interests.”

Mortys turned quickly and was about to say something, but Derk hushed him. “The next race is going to start! I’m on House Granafyr’s red twister globe!”

Alex leaned forward with the others, hoping that Derk hadn’t put too much on the red twister. It wasn’t due to come first until the fifth race.

“What globe did you bet on, Alex?” Yasha asked.

“I only just arrived, I’ve not put a bet on yet,” Alex said. “You?”

“Red twister too,” Yasha grinned. “It’s a sure thing!”

Alex tried to smile. Below them on the track, someone blew a whistle and the five trainers yanked open their black metal boxes and released their racing globes to streak like balls of lightning across the quarter mile strip toward the finish line.