Reader was sitting in the mud house, reading the recipe they had received from Monk. His face was pensive and a little worried looking. He was engrossed in the details on the page before him and failed to notice Grim’s entrance.

  The little book creature paused in the doorway. He stared at Reader, expecting the human to turn and see him. When a few seconds passed without attention, Grim cleared his throat loudly.

  “Ah-hem!”

  Reader twitched and looked over. As soon as his eyes settled on Grim, the diminutive creature puffed up and fixed Reader with a positively smug expression.

  “Fuck.”

  As he uttered the swear, he truly beamed. In that moment he was not the mean-spirited little monster that Reader had formed a hard-to-explain attachment to. He was a sprightly being of joy, lifted by a single foul word.

  Reader wearily said, “That’s your second one. You got five for your work with the yak. I’ve got to be honest, I think you kind of wasted that one. Could have waited for a bigger audience.”

  Just like that Grim’s eyes returned to their usual half-lidded meanness and his expression dissolved back into a scowl. “I don’t give a hoot. I just flippin felt like it and I did it. And you know what, ark-shoal? It was flipping great and I don’t regret it.”

  Reader returned to the page before him and barely murmured, “Well, as long as you’re happy…”

  Grim scowled more deeply. “What the ship are you doing anyway? This place is really boring. And that’s coming from a guy who spent years all alone on a floating island in the sky.”

  Reader pursed his lips, annoyance flaring. “What do you want, Grim?”

  “Outta smokes.”

  “Sucks to be you.”

  The tomegeist became plaintive. Whiny was not quite the word, given the surliness that saturated every word and expression, but Reader could detect the pleading. “Aw, come on. You wanna see what I flippin act like when I’m really hanging for a puff? Medley’s a hop, skip, and a flipping jump now that the log mobile’s working.”

  Reader opened his mouth to object, then glanced back to the page. He seemed thoughtful for a moment, as though contemplating something.

  Grim brightened. “Oh. You need something from that ship-heap of a town as well. Well that’s flipping great, let’s go.”

  Reader paused. “I guess… I don’t want to waste time… but the logs do make it faster… and I really do need to look for more information in the library.”

  Grim blurted, “What kinda info?” Immediately he winced. He did not care and did not need to know. But the explanation he was about to provoke from Reader would push his interaction with tobacco further down the chronology axis.

  Reader was in a kind of trance of his own. “I have so much to do before Cutter gets back, assuming he ever comes back alive, of course. I don’t want to waste time in town, but I’m hitting a wall over here anyway. To improve the composter I have to go up a level on my band, which means I need to achieve something. Also, if I don’t want to be constantly re-weaving the uber composter then I could use a sigil that improves my weaving permanence. I’ll bet there are books in the library we could upload to your memory that would help with that a lot.”

  Grim stared. “I don’t really give a ship.”

  Reader hardly heard him. “I was reading, you know, and it looks like if we go up to iron then your function changes. I can select two subsets of knowledge for us to become expert in. We could pick things like alchemist, battle mage, conjurer, all that really cool Elder Scrolls stuff, and the knowledge would integrate more completely. That would really move us forward. We’d be so much more useful around here.”

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  “Does this seriously end with us in Medley and me smoking? Because if it does then I’m all the way on board.”

  Reader nodded. “I guess it does.”

  “Sweet. Let’s flipping go then.”

  Reader sighed and stood up from his stool. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  “Sweet.”

  They left the mud hut and crossed the farm. Reader saw Tiller, back bent as he worked on the rows of crops. The scale of the growing had increased immensely with all the new earth the composter had produced from the bodies.

  Reader frowned. “He’s going to work himself into the ground. That’s too much work for one man.”

  As they watched, Tiller gestured to Bean, and the little pipkin stabbed its tail into the ground. A moment later a corn plant leapt up in size, cobs swelling and filling.

  Grim scoffed. “You’re one to flipping talk, dip-ship. He’s got his shippy job and you’ve got yours. I don’t think you’ve slept more than four hours a night for the last flipping week or more.”

  “I’m pushing it, but look at him. It’s not the same. I’m tired and running on fumes, but I’m not exhausting myself the way he is.”

  “Eh.”

  “I really need to get on with this. The new composter will make so much more soil, we’ll finally be in the black. With cashflow we might finally be able to hire on some staff and get this thing to work better without killing Tiller in the process.”

  “He’ll just want to plough all the new cash into seeds.”

  Reader was simply determined. “We won’t let him. We’ll vote that down. He knows we need to scale if we’re going to generate thirty million gold, and he knows scaling will involve hiring people. I don’t know where we’ll find those people though. There’s plenty of folk in Medley, but I rarely see someone with a farming sigil walking by. When I do see someone like that they probably already belong to a holding.”

  Reader sighed. “I guess those are first world problems we can deal with when we actually have the cashflow to worry about it.”

  “Ex-flipping-actly. Let’s go think about this harder under clouds of sweet baccy smoke.”

  Reader paused. “You know, with all your flipping and fupping instead of full-on swearing, you seem a lot less mean. Kind of like a poorly groomed Ned Flanders in book form.”

  “Yeah, well I’m still just as mean.”

  “Yeah.”

  Grim blurted, “Shit fuck,” then rapidly clamped his hands over his mouth.

  Reader chuckled. “Did that count as one or two?”

  Grim paused, as if consulting the rules. He considered for a moment, then wiped his brow in relief. “Just one. Thank fuck. Oh. Goddammit. Oh no. Fiddlesticks. Ship head. You fupping… darn… aww…”

  Reader collapsed in laughter, unable to contain his amusement. Grim stared back, stony-eyed and scowling. “Go ahead. Yuck it up.”

  Wiping a tear and trying to regain his breath, Reader managed to squeeze out, “You can always earn more. Think of it as an incentive.”

  Grim leaned forward, clasped his hands together before him, and made a show of batting his nonexistent eyelashes. “Can we go to town now? Pweeease?”

  “Okay, okay. Let’s roll. Or hover. Or whatever the heck.”

  The log mobiles had become more dependable. The weaves were tighter and far longer lasting. Reader felt he was very close to being able to make them steerable. For now he had an ignition weave that started burning the rear of the log and converting the energy into motion, and an extinguish weave that put the fire out. And the levitation weaves, of course, that kept the logs floating above the ground when moving or stationary. They were both operated by pushing glowing runes that were visible to weavers and non-weavers alike. Soon he hoped to master steering and start applying the weaves to more complicated vehicles.

  For now, one needed to push a log around and point it in one’s chosen direction. One then sat on the log and pressed the rune. The log promptly started gliding across the white in the direction of Medley. If, after a few miles, Reader discovered he had aimed a little incorrectly, he would need to extinguish the flame, dismount, point the log again at his target, and ignite the flame again.

  This is what they did, and soon they were gliding across the vast white nothing.

  “It’s weird how nobody else has come up with a system for transporting like this. It’s not complicated, and it’s way faster than how most people travel.”

  Reader perched on the log in front of him, then turned to glance back. “Fupped if I know. Doesn’t seem like genius to me now that I’ve seen you do it.”

  “But you never thought of it, did you?”

  “Eh. Thinking isn’t my job description. Remembering is.”

  “Bet your old master never thought of anything like this.”

  Grim opened his mouth to snap a response, then stopped. “Hmm. Well, he made a floating library in the sky… but… well… ship, I guess he couldn’t really come up with improvised stuff like this.”

  Grim perked up. “Oh. Action ahead.”

  “Action?”

  The tomegeist pointed to the horizon, in the direction of Medley.

  A robed figure was stumbling across the white, and they were rapidly approaching.