Demesne 156 - Lori Reads An Almanac (Patreon)

After breakfast, Lori went to the sealed off alcoves where the cargo from the Coldhold was being kept. Rian had ordered all it be brought there rather than let people start carting away what they had asked for, supposedly because it had been mixed in with everything else and he didn't want accusations of things getting lost.

"We might as well do this at the same time," he said. "While you do your customs inspection, we can do inventory to make sure we didn't lose anything."

"How would you lose anything?" Lori said as she bound the earthwisps of the rock she'd used to block off the opening and began to move it aside.

"Well, I did inventory getting them on to the ship, then did inventory again just before we left to make sure we didn’t lose anything," Rian said. "But now that it's been moved again, I need to do inventory to make sure nothing disappeared between the boat and here. It's unlikely to have happened, but if it did, I can at least know what I need to track down, and this way, I can at least tell people we did have it. And it lets me calculate how much I need to reimburse anyone. "

Lori nodded. That all made sense. Proper record keeping was important, after all. "All right, you do that," she said as the rock was moved aside. She'd have to fix the floor here later, it was a bit uneven because of her alterations.

The inside of the alcove was dark, but she simply collected some lightwisps streaming through the opening and imbued them. sticking them on the ceiling. The once-alcove was full of parcels wrapped in cheap paper, showing water stains and ragged from iridescence damage. Rian followed in after her, then nudged a ragged block right next to the door secured by a leather cord with his foot. "Your almanac and glass," he said. It didn’t move at all when he nudge it, clearly heavy. "Getting it packed for transport outside of the demesne was expensive. Most people store things they're transporting in water, but that clearly wouldn’t work for a book. With everything else you asked me to buy, you're out of beads."

Lori grimaced. "Summarize the expenses for me in your report," she said, glancing at the block… but no, she didn't want to be distracted by a shiny new book. Instead, she looked at the packages, a several jars, and other containers. "Now, let's see what we have…"

She did not smile greedily. It was a perfectly ordinary smile, with nothing greedy about it.

"Wait, we have to check the list first," Rian said. "It'll be harder to do inventory if you start opening everything. Riz, can you find some strong people who can help carry this out, and then have them grab some benches from upstairs so we can block off a space to put it all. I doubt her Bindership will want to go over customs in this tight, cramped room while we're all getting in her way doing inventory."

Lori paused, but that did sound unpleasant. "Very well," she said. She pointed at the block with the almanac Rian had pointed out. "Bring that out first so that I can inspect it, then do your inventory so I can proceed with the customs inspection."

Rian and Riz picked up the block themselves—it turned out to be very heavy for its size—and brought it outside before the latter ran off to do find people to do all future lifting. The next alcove down was unoccupied save for some scrap leaves and loose fibers from threshing. More threshing was going on at the other end of the second level, which Rian glanced at curiously for a moment before he focused on unwrapping the block.

The paper came off, and Lori frowned. The glass block, unlike what she was expecting, wasn't perfectly clear and uniform, but was cloudy, almost opaque, and contained spots of discoloration where it looked like it had somehow burned, as well as sharp borders where it seemed like two different kinds of glass had been softened and pressed together. Resting on top of that was what looked like a thick pottery box covered with a thick, equally cloudy glaze. Covering it and acting as a lid was a flat plane of very thin glass, still cloudy, that seemed secured only with wire wrapping. Small pieces of padding—she wasn't sure what, some kind of fibrous substance—separated the wire and the glass at the edges of the box

Barely visible inside, she could just see what had to be the almanac Rian had brought, as well as what seemed like a block of some kind on top of it on which the plane of glass rested, probably to keep it from breaking under pressure. "This seems insufficient," she said.

"Well, it got here safely, so it clearly is," Rian said easily. "It was really interesting, the Whisperer who packed it made a partial vacuum inside the box and kept filing the edges until the glass held on tight. Then they just glued it on the edges and wrapped it tight so it wouldn't pop off. Very simple and elegant, I was expecting shaping molten glass and stuff. Most of the expense was the glass itself, which is understandable, but this was cheapest glass I could buy a lot of. I hope it's worth it. You yourself officially no longer have any physical money, at least until we get some trade goods sold."

Lori closed her eyes, feeling the pain and loss deep inside at the last of her beads. She was officially no longer granular. All her granular capital was gone. The little girl inside her who'd grown up with Taniar standards of fiscal responsibility wanted to a curl up in a ball and scream. "My lack of granularity is noted."

Rian nodded. "Do you want to release your frustrations by borrowing a hammer and cracking that glass open to get your almanac? I'm told that's the only way to open it, since there aren't any edges to pry. The box can be reused once you have another flat piece of glass to put on it. There's actually a deposit on that box, so technically you still have about two small think beads to your name if we ever go back and return that box."

Lori glanced at it. "We'll set that aside then. Where's my hammer?"

"Off to get it, your Bindership," Rian said. "Don't get impatient and try to break it any other way, we wouldn't want you to injure yourself. I'll get clippers for the wire too."

Lori rolled her eyes and waved him off dismissively, most definitely not at all having thought of just taking a rock and cracking it open with that.

Rian brought back a maul rather than a hammer, a large rounded block of wood with a long wooden handle. He covered the glass with the paper it had been wrapped with to prevent shards and held out the maul to Lori theatrically, as he did all things. Lori hefted it. She'd seen similar tools before when she'd been employed in carpentry workshops, and it was heavier than she had thought. Still she'd seen how it was meant to be used, and gripped it low on the haft with both hands. Then she aimed carefully and swung it down.

The almost musical crack of glass breaking was entirely too short and entirely too satisfying, but left a hollowness of wanting to hear it again.

"Did you like that?" Rian said with a smirk.

"It was enjoyable, I suppose," Lori said, handing him the maul. Rian let it rest against the alcove wall as men started coming down the stairs carrying benches and laying them out according to Riz's direction. He squatted down and took off the paper—it had torn where she had struck the maul—then carefully clipped the wire where it had been twisted shut—"We can still use this for something, right?"—folded the paper over and picked up the almanac, carefully waving it to get any glass shards out.

"Your tome of secret knowledge, your Bindership," he said. "May it be another stepping stone in your rise to power and glory and glorious power."

Lori rolled her eyes as she took the book. "Put the items you've finished checking on the inventory in front of me," she said, sitting down on a nearby bench that someone had put down against the wall next to the opening.

"Yes, your Bindership," Rian said. "All right, everyone, let's go through all this…"

Lori opened the almanac and then, upon feeling the quality of the pages, began to turn them carefully. They didn't feel as tough and durable as the paper she'd gotten used to growing up, and the edges were a little ragged, like it had been cut by a blade that hadn't been sharp enough. The cover was only a little thicker than the interior pages, and the words The Settler's Almanac was printed on the front of the slightly off-white paper. She flipped through the pages, glancing over printed words and simple line drawings of plants, animals, seeds and diagrams of tools and machines before she reached the part that she'd been looking forward to since Rian had mentioned it.

The almanac did, indeed, contain flow diagrams for not just Whispering, but also Deadspeaking, Horotracting, and even Mentalism. She hadn't thought Mentalism even needed flow diagrams, since it was mostly internal, but there they were. The book had different sections for all four forms, and she flipped over to the section on Whispering, which according to the rather austere page listings behind the cover was the thickest of the sections relating to magic. She carefully flipped to those pages, and was glad to find another page listing that detailed flow diagrams included in the section. She read through the list, taking in the rather minimal descriptions.

Lori twitched slightly at an entry that read 'Fast Dehydration’. She opened to the page in question, and took in the flow diagram of airwisps, waterwisps, firewisps, scowling as she read. Yes, it was all there… heat, air circulation, removing all the humidity in the air to draw out the moisture in the vigas stacks…She kept reading, and raised an eyebrow at reading it was good for making dried fruits, dried mushrooms and dried vegetables. There was also a note that said a large binding could be safely entered by people, though the book recommended they didn't stay long, meaning such a thing could be set up by a Binder and left to be used by other people. That… actually sounded useful. She'd have to think of building something like that.

She flicked through the pages, the uneven edges of the paper reminding her to be careful. There were other flow diagrams, all very useful, and many of which making her frustrated that she hadn't thought of it herself, and some more that impressed her at how elegant they were. There was a binding that made solidified air completely without outside input. It required several different bindings and containers strong enough to resist pressure, but once all was in place, air went in one end and solidified air for preserving food went out the other, and there was a note at the bottom of another binding it could be paired with to take advantage of the heat and firewisps being removed from the air. There was a note recommending a heatscale so that one knew what kind of air one was solidifying, as well as reminders to be careful about using solidified exhalation in an enclosed room, not letting solidified inhalation get too close to fire, and not leaving any sort of solidified air in a sealed container, lest it explode.

Really, all of them reading and planning to use this should be experienced Whisperers. Anyone who didn't know to do all of that already deserved the gruesome death coming to them for not paying attention to the properties of common air.

Out of curiosity, she also looked at the other sections. The part on Deadspeaking immediately confused her when she tried to read beyond the title, speaking of 'recessives' and 'expression' and 'spirals' and 'dead sinks' and other terms she barely remembered from her very first class on introductory magic, before she and her classmates were all separated to learn about the forms of magic they could actually learn to do. Still, the parts that were simple summaries of what the flow diagrams did were interesting. One flow diagram was for making trees produce thick resin—she assumed it was meant for trees that didn't already produce resin, or perhaps didn't produce a lot of resin—while another was for altering grain plants to produce sugar instead of flour, and several were ways to make flowers larger and produce more nectar for honey…

The flow diagrams for Horotracting were interesting. She'd always assumed that Horotracting was… well, Horotracting. Simply making rooms and spaces bigger and smaller. However, one diagram showed how to make what it called a 'Gravity Pump'. And it wasn't by inverting the direction of the flow of gravity like she thought would have been obvious, but by altering distance so falling water could be pushed up a short distance and end up higher than from where it had started, while at the same time increasing its pressure using slight adjustments to the rate in which time passed.

The diagrams were simple enough, and in some cases obvious enough, for her to understand what it meant. She could probably do something similar by binding waterwisps to force water forward, but this was meant for a Horotract, and she could see how such a seemingly obvious solution might need to be taught. After all, she had needed a lot of experimentation to develop a binding and methodology for drying the vigas stalks quickly, and she was willing to admit, in the privacy of her own mind at least, that the method in the book was far more simple and efficient, and could easily be adjusted and scaled up or down.

The fact there were three different flow diagrams for such water pumps, one reliant of altering the measures of dimensions, another on altering the passage rate of time, and a third using the obvious solution she had thought of regarding gravity implied that Horotracts found some aspects of their magic easier than others.

The section on Mentalism flow diagrams had been the most obtuse, with a lot of explanation and terminology removed. Which made sense, since a Mentalist was the one wizard you could rely on to never forget ANYTHING about how their magic worked. It was frustrating to read about though, and the more Lori read, the more it looked like a list of reminders, as if the people who never forgot anything might have actually forgotten what they could do.

It was really easy to dislike Mentalists. They never had to spend time reviewing for tests! One read was all they needed, and they barely had to pay attention!

"Enjoying your book, your Bindership?" a voice interrupted her annoyed reminiscences, and Lori blinked and looked up. Rian was smiling at her, but he was always doing that.

"What?" she demanded.

Rian pointed to the side. "We've finished the inventory, so I thought you'd want to do the customs inspection so we can release all this."

Already? Lori turned to follow his finger and saw things had been laid out on the floor and on the benches. They rested on what had probably been the paper wrappings, each separate and with space for her to walk between them all. There were also a line of familiar jars, a mix of the large storage jars and smaller jars that they used to store cooked food.

Lori frowned as she examined the things arrayed before her, closing her book with her fingers in among the pages and getting to her feet. It was… It was all… "What is all this junk?"