Weekly Digest 49 - (#156 - #158) (Patreon)

Lori Reads An Almanac

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 against 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 them. 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 neededflow diagrams, since it was mostly internal, but there they were. The book had different sections for all four forms, and 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 light 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?"

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Customs Inspection

"What were you expecting, exactly?" Rian asked, looking amused.

Lori wasn't sure, but she had imagined that there were things she would covet. At least, she had thought so… "All right, go down the list for me, what do we have?" Lori said.

Rian's smile became genuine for a moment, though no less amused. "All right. Well, over here we have some medicines. Some refined osiel extract and osiel nuts to plant and grow more, baler roots, a few dried quefo roots as well as a little sapling we can start growing to eventually make our own... we have these winter tubers, which will still grow in the cold, and our farmers tell me they know how to keep it from dying out. We have these little saplings we can grow for spices. This is green nigrum, these little stalks here are from an vauang bulb that started sprouting on the way back so we put them in these pots to grow, and these are blue sharrods. This little jar here is some vinegar that actually has some vinegar paste in it, so as soon as we have fruits again we might be able to use that to start making more. We also have these grains here. We've got valri, glits and I was lucky enough to get some of this mais… it's not a lot, but if we plant it over the winter in the Dungeon, we should have enough to plant with in summer. At worst, we just plant it next year and eat it the year after."

The words were definitely food words, even if Lori barely recognized some of them. Her mothers had done the cooking at home, and if they couldn't be home for one reason or another she bought something to eat. "Why is so much of it food?" she said.

"Because we don’t want to starve?" Rian said, as if that was supposed to be obvious. "We also brought back the seeds from some fruits we ate while we were there, and hopefully we'll be able to grow those, we need them if we don’t want to come down with scurvy, and we'll need it for the vinegar. Don't get me wrong, I think mushroom stock is delicious, but a little variety would be nice."

Lori couldn't argue with that.

"Anyway, we've also got pirri nuts that we can try to—"

"All right, you can skip any plants, food plants and medicines," Lori interrupted. "For now, no duties on them. What else? "

Rian looked aside and gave a signal, and Riz and Umu started moving the plants and various wooden things—they looked like wood, so she called them wood—to another part of the area marked off by benches. "All right then. So these jars are for the carpenters. It's wood glue, resin, and tressflower oil. Until we start producing enough bugwax and figure out which trees to tap for what—your almanac should contain that information, your Bindership—we need to buy all that."

"Why the tressflower oil? I thought that was for cooking?"

"Not this kind. This is for treating wood against damage like decay and rot, better than just scorching it like they've been doing so far. We also have a few tressflower seeds, but I'm not sure if it germinated properly…" Rian sighed. "They might not even be viable, I got them from a bag of cooking ingredients. Anyway, this jar contains flux for the blacksmiths—"

"What's flux?"

"As I understand it, it's something they use to get the metal malleable at a lower temperature. It's probably for the anatass dragon scale, I hear anatass needs absurd amounts of heat to be worked."

Lori waved dismissively. "A waste of money. If they need heat, I can bind it for them."

"They probably didn't want to waste your time, your Bindership, and it probably has other uses for them so it's probably still useful. I think they use it for welding metal together too? We have these wire brushes, which were cheaper to buy there, and we also bought these mesh screens, since it was a pretty good deal and you can always find a use for mesh. Uh, no need to charge duties on that, it's meant for general demesne use. Hopefully by the time they wear out the smiths will be able to make more."

Lori looked at the coppery screens made of thin wires stretch taught on a wooden frame. "I can't imagine what we'd use it for," she said.

"Well, off the top of my head," Rian said, "papermaking."

She blinked and stared at him.

"What? How did you think they made paper? Magic?"

"How do youknow how paper is made?" she shot back.

"I used to be neighbors with a papermaker," Rian said with a shrug. "We talked, and I visited the workshop where he worked. I've seen it done. Can't do it myself, but I understand what's involved. It can also be used for sifting floor so there aren't little rocks and husks in it or something."

That… was a point, she supposed. "That's a point, I suppose," she said. "What else?"

"Well, those big jars are the salt we collected." Rian said. "On the way back, we spent a day filling all the water jars with salt since we knew we'd last getting home and just filled some of the used food jars with water. We can get more easily, we just need more containers… and that filter I mentioned, in case there's something floating in the water." He paused. "Also, we might have to process this salt again before we cook with it, something green's mixed in with the salt. I think that was something in the water, some kind of plant or something. You know how seawater can look green."

Lori felt her covetousness fading with every word, replaced by impatience and a slight amount of self-recrimination. Really, she should have expected this? Who would waste their beads buying absurd luxuries? It definitely made more sense that people had been doing as she had been, and buying resources they needed for what they were doing. She listened much more perfunctorily as Rian read out what else they had bought. There wasn't all that much. After all, not many people had any beads left. There was thick leather, made of sheets of leather Deadspoken together, that Rian said was meant to make soles for new boots for the men and women who regularly went out to hunt for beasts who might need better footwear than just a thin sheet of leather over some stuffing. They had pooled their beads together in anticipation for the future need. More glues, this time for the leather. More tressflower oil, of a different composition than the one for the carpenters, meant for waterproofing what fabric they had for rain cloaks when the rains came again so people could continue working…

Eventually, they got to the end of the list, and nothing jumped out at Lori as being worth havi—er, taking customs duties on.

"All right," she said, absolutely bored and just wanting to get back to reading the book she had in her hands. "You may distribute that to… whoever. Tomorrow I expect a report on Covehold. Riz, finish your report to Rian this afternoon so you can finally go back to being a glitter crawler like you want."

"Yes, Great Binder!" Riz said, actually sounding happy at the prospect.

Rian picked up a pair of packages and held it out to Lori. "The other things you asked for, your Bindership," he said. "I'll carry the glass and the box to the treasure room once you get it open, shall I?"

Lori grimaced at one more thing keeping her from just reading her day away, but accepted the paper-wrapped packages that she realized hadn't been laid out on the ground with the others. One of the packages was bigger than she expected. How many socks and underwear had Rian purchased? She had made it clear he was to use the majority of the beads she had given him for glass. "Make sure to include the glass shards and the wire," Lori reminded him. She could use that wire.

Rian lifted the glass block himself, following her as she went ahead to open up the treasure room. The block and box was placed in a discreet little corner away from the piles of metal before she closed it off again, then parted ways with Rian so she could continue reading. The packages she took upstairs, and she carefully put her new book on her table. Then she opened the first, more obvious of her packages. Inside was a new pair of boots. The leather was fresh and clean and did not smell of piss, the soles thick and made of Deadspeaking-layered leathers that seemed very tough. She'd bought her old boots in Taniar and it had an inner layer of cushioning that her new boots didn't seem to, but it would be a simple matter to take them out of her old boots and into her new ones when she started using them…

Her old boots were probably still good for a few more months, but the soles were getting worn and there were clearly cracks growing where the leather folded and wrinkled with her stride. When she'd noticed she'd tried to walk while keeping her toes straight, but she very quickly reverted back to her normal stride.

She took the boots and hollowed out a small alcove in the wall, storing the boots there and drawing out as much air and all the moisture that she could before sealing it. Hopefully the partial vacuum would keep the new boots from getting damaged while she wore out her old ones.

The other package held, as she had hoped, new socks and underwear. The larger size of the package was soon explained by how thick they were. She pulled at the socks gently, testing the elasticity of the knitting, and found herself comparing them to the rather thin strands of the socks she was currently wearing and had folded in her clothes alcove. The chest wraps were equally thick and looked rather warm, as did the loin cloths. The cloths ties were actually very thick.

Lori began folding up the new clothes, reflecting on the irony that she had bought socks and underwear with the last of her money. She had always been annoyed when her mother had given her those for her birthday, and now here she was, buying them for herself. Or at least she sent someone to buy them for her.

Once they were folded up, she debated just curling up on her bed and just reading her new almanac to find ideas for new bindings to make, but she knew it was close to lunch, she reluctantly admitted that she might miss lunch if she did that. So Lori picked up her new book and headed downstairs, sitting down at her usual table to read.

Lori was tempted to just go from flow diagram to flow diagram, but she restrained herself. Instead, she went back to the beginning of the Whispering flow diagrams and began systematically reading them. It began with what it claimed were efficient ways to gather water out of the air, and she was slightly annoyed to find some of them actually were more efficient than the method she had used. She had made a large cloud of airwisps and waterwisps that funneled water vapor in the air down into the containers they had been stored their water, staying up so that she could imbue it enough to last for the whole night.

She took comfort in knowing that her method had still been more efficient that how whatever-her-name-had-been had been doing it. Lori had always made more water than the other Whisperer.

Lori lost herself to reading for what was left of the morning as she devoured through the flow diagrams, tracing the notations with her fingers as she rea and resisting the urge to form the binding then and there. The dining hall wasn't the place to start experimenting on bindings! She needed to do it outside or at the third level…

But after she finished reading!

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All Was Right

During lunch, Lori had to all but sit down on her new almanac to keep from reading it while she ate so she didn’t accidentally drip any of her food on it. Despite her excitement and enjoyment, she had glanced at the page listings, affirming for herself what else it contained besides flow diagrams. It contained illustrations of plants and labeled whether it was edible or whether it had any use as a resource, or if it caused itching on contact and many other things.

She had a feeling she might need to—ugh—share this almanac, with Rian if no one else. The illustrations were so good she actually recognized some of the plants as those that they'd been cutting down and clearing to make space in the demesne, and some of them had actually had edible parts, like the roots, or leaves that could be used to spice their meals. Personally she thought the stews tasted well enough, but if they had more food, different kinds of food…

Well, they might need spices and flavors then.

"So, you're not playing sunk anymore?" Rian was saying to Mikon as Lori ate a bit faster than she normally would have, eager to get back to the almanac.

"Oh, we are," the weaver said. "I'm getting better at it. The games are very close now!"

"She still hasn't won," Riz, sitting between the two of them, said.

"I will! Eventually! It's just that her Bindership is really good!"

"You're still playing that?" Rian said incredulously.

Both Lori and Mikon frowned at him. "Why wouldn't we be?" Mikon said.

"You… don't find it boring?"

Lori and Mikon looked at each other, as if trying to confirm they'd heard the same thing. "Why would we be bored?" Lori said.

"It's fun," Mikon… probably agreed. What was fun about constantly losing? Did she just enjoy being crushed and shown her inadequacy? Her mothers had warned her about women like that…

"If you like it, you like it," Rian said hastily. "I don't, but that's just me."

"It's not just you," Riz said in a low voice.

Mikon reached around Riz and patted Rian on the shoulder. "Don't worry, I still like you anyway," she said cheerfully.

Rian's lips pressed together and his face didn't redden, but he was clearly embarrassed as he avoided anyone's gaze and focused on his food. On Rian's other side, Umu leaned back and gave the other weaver an annoyed look as Riz sat there looking awkwardly indecisive.

Lori shook her head and ignored this silliness as she continued eating her own lunch.

When she finished, she picked up her book and headed back to her room. She'd have the whole afternoon to read, and she was going to use it!

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"Rian," she said as she started setting up the chatrang board. She'd come down to find a lot of benches gone from dining hall again, and so had deduced everyone was eating roast outside. The board was being set up on a block of stone she'd pulled from the stockpile for this purpose, in front of the bench that she had claimed against the stone wall flanking the Dungeon's new entryway. Her stone plate lay next to her on the bench, waiting to be filled with food as dinner was prepared, the air once more filling with the smell of woodsmoke and roasting beast. She hadn't tired of the taste of it yet, and from the looks of things neither had everyone else. "I need you to find someone who can draw."

For some reason, Rian smirked. "Let me guess. To copy parts of the almanac? The illustrations, perhaps?"

"Yes," Lori said, frowning slightly at the tone. What was there to be smug and triumphant about?

"Well, I don't think we'll need it," Rian said confidently. "Have you looked at all the magic parts in the book yet? All the ones about Whispering, at least?"

"I've glanced through them, and I've been reading the ones I thought immediately relevant to our situation," Lori said. It was immediately obvious that some of the flow diagrams had two versions for their bindings: a small, relatively simple one that needed only a small amount of imbuement, and one that worked better when scaled up for economy and efficiency and incidentally required great amounts of imbuement that would either need to come from beads, several people working in shifts… or a Dungeon Binder's raw power.

"Ah, that explains it. So, you haven't been read the section that talks about unusual but useful applications of bindings?"

Lori frowned as she continued putting the pieces on the board. "I saw it but haven't perused it yet." She remembered that section, and honestly, it had seemed interesting, but the flow diagrams had seemed more immediately important. Tomorrow she intended to use the binding it depicted in one diagram to more efficiently make solidified air for their cold rooms, though she'd have to modify the rooms with better ventilation so that no one asphyxiated to death. The suggestion given in the almanac to line the room with metal to draw out the heat and keep the solidified air in another location also had some merit, and they certainly had a lot of dragon scales that weren't doing anything except perhaps rusting… "Tell me what about it you mean without being dramatic."

Rian sighed. "Sure, ruin one of the few things I can do for fun, why don't you… Fine. Do you know how to lock lightwisps to create a still image?"

"Of course," Lori said. It was one of the more delicate bindings of lightwisps, binding the lightwisps in the air such that they captured an image, though it wasn’t as simple as that. In essence, the binding locked the lightwisps in the binding to continue emanating the light passing through it at the moment the binding was made. It saw more use in theater and novels, usually used by 'cunning' characters to trick people into thinking someone was still asleep in a room or making them think an open door was still closed, never mind it wouldn't work like that because it was just a flat image hanging in the air. "And no, that binding doesn't work that way. I can't just bind lightwisps to make a copy of the page because the binding would also lock the light coming in all other directions, so the only way to read the page would be from almost exactly where my eyes were when I made the binding."

Rian nodded. "Exactly," he said. "At least, that's what the almanac said. But! Someone worked out a way to copy an image by making the copy radiate its own light so that it can been visible from any angle it can be viewed from. "

"Yes, you paint the air with lightwisps," Lori said dryly. "I don't have that kind of skill, Rian."

"Neither do most Whisperers in Covehold and the demesnes around it," Rian said. "So someone worked out a way to make copies of things by using locked lightwisps bound to things people can carry around. It's all there in the almanac. So if you use it, not only can you make copies of the illustrations in the book, you can actually make the illustration bigger than the original."

Lori gave him a skeptical look. "If you say it will be useful, then I'll investigate it after dinner," she said, finishing putting all the pieces on the board.

"Please. It'll mean you don't have to lend the book to anyone, so no need to worry about people getting their grubby hands on it."

Oh. Well, that certainly increased the priority of her reading the section he meant. "I already said I'll investigate it, didn't I? Worry about your own report. You haven't been procrastinating, have you?"

"Only in the sense I've been doing other work in the meantime. Oh, by the way, Riz finally got me up to date on what happened while I was gone."

"Good. Then inform her she that her temporary position is no longer extant and she had been demoted back to a glitter crawler."

"What, you're not even going to tell her yourself?"

"Talking to people is your job, remember?"

"Ah, right, so it was. How foolish of me to think you'd be comfortable talking to the woman after working with her all these weeks." He reached out and moved a black militia.

Lori frowned and put the piece back. "What are you doing?" she said, annoyed.

Rian blinked at her in confusion. "Er, aren't we going to play?"

"Why do you assume that? If you want, I'll be perfectly content crushing you utterly tomorrow, but I already have an opponent for tonight."

If this were a story or a play, that would have been Mikon's cue to appear. As it was, Rian gave her a skeptical look, then shrugged. "So, back to work tomorrow, I suppose?"

"The threshing will continue, and probably finish," Lori nodded. "And then preparations will be made to plant the winter crop."

"Wait, winter crop? We're planting in winter? Isn't it too cold for that?"

"Of course not," Lori said authoritatively. "The crop simply grows slowly under the snow until spring. It makes it less likely the crop will be consumed by beasts, bugs and slugs."

"Huh. You learn something new every day."

She waved a hand dismissively. "Well, you need to know these things when you're a Dungeon Binder, so I learned. That being said, I also need you to begin construction of a Dungeon farm in the third level," Lori informed him. "As we have neither the equipment nor the right technical knowledge to grow crops in trays and fluids, soil will need to be carried in to line the floor to a sufficient depth. I leave the logistics of it to you."

Rian stared at her. "A… farm. Is there even enough space? I haven't really looked down there yet…"

"There will be," Lori said. One way or another, there would be. "Once I have learn how to perform Horotracting, having all the space we need in my Dungeon will be trivial. For now, however, we will simply have to take best advantage of the space I have managed to excavate. That means planting what will give us the greatest yield for the least space."

"So, we're having a lot of boxes and racks made, filling them with soil, and planting tubers in them?"

Lori paused. "What?"

"I mean, obviously we'll be planting vigas and other things too, but tubers are very efficient when it comes to space, and you can fertilize them with waste straight from the latrine," Rian said. "Add in all the meat in cold storage and we'd get through the winter pretty well. And we'd get a new crop every six to nine weeks, which is a pretty good rate. If we planted some now, we'd have some ready to harvest by early, mid-early winter. And since it'll be in boxes, every family can have two or three in their house, or outside their house, that they can just bring out to the Dungeon come dragon time." He paused. "The ones near people's houses probably shouldn't be fertilized with fresh latrine stuff."

Lori stared at him a moment. "As I said, I leave the logistics of the matter to you. I will be busy ensuring proper growing temperature, light and maintaining a suitable irrigation reservoir." Maybe she could repurpose their old reservoir for irrigation and simply make a new one for their drinking water? Then she wouldn't have to worry so much of people pissing and dropping shit into the reservoir pit, since it would all be growing towards their crops anyway. Though she'd have to make sure all the pipes that lead from it were properly redirected, especially the ones leading to her bath…

"I don't suppose I can ask you to appoint a new lord or lady?" Rian said. "Or let me get some official assistants I can give some authority too? Because even just organizing the Dungeon farm thing will be a full time job unless I have someone doing it for me, and then who'd deal with all the other things for you? Unless you've become comfortable dealing with people in my absence—"

"I'll consider it," she interrupted him to kill that odious line of thought on the spot. "But I suppose you have a point. Before you left, you were beginning to rely on assistance from Riz, and when she was replacing you, she relied on Mikon. It seems clear to me an official full time assistant will be necessary for you from now on."

The smile on Rian's face looked disturbingly like the one Riz had when Lori had said she only needed to report the demesne's events to Rian before she would be relieved of her position.

She shoved her stone plate at him. "Now, get me dinner."

Rian rolled his eyes, but took the plate. "One dinner, coming up."

When he came back, he wasn't alone, of course. But Lori had been expecting that.

Still, it was an enjoyable dinner as Lori played chatrang with Mikon, the two of them eating as they played while Riz and Umu took turns trying to teach Rian how to dance as people sang and clapped and ate.

It was a perfectly ordinary night, and all was right in her demesne.