Small-Town Crafter 5: The Artificer's Abode (Small Town Crafter) by Tom Watts

Author:Tom Watts [Watts, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

11

Sitting on my bed in my guild dorm, I read the note for the fifth time. This was easy since it was only a sentence long. Its contents were cryptic, but there was nothing mysterious about its sender.

James and I had been exchanging letters for a long time now. His penmanship was a mirror of himself; with its sweeping curves and strong ink, it had the potential to be great. Yet it was done in such a rushed way, with so little care, that it fell short of its great possibilities.

I didn’t know what to think. James had left the note for me, and he could only have done it today while I was drinking coffee in the mess. Or maybe when I was meeting with the guild grandmaster. Either way, it meant that he was okay. As well as that, if he was leaving cryptic messages like this then there was obviously no family emergency.

I read the note again then tapped the slip of paper against my forehead as I thought about it, as if the physical action would transfer the note’s hidden meaning from the paper and into my brain.

You’ll find me in the house where silence lies.

The note was so cryptic it might have come from the lines of some play Toby had written for the Fiends. What it really meant, though, was that James hadn’t forgotten our arrangement at all. He’d obviously come up with some kind of leveling up plan for me, and this was the start of it. I supposed I needed to go find him.

My first step was to consult a map of Port Vesta. Or in a more accurate recording of events, my first step was to order another coffee in the mess hall, find a seat, and then study the map. Since it was after nine o’clock, many of the students were either still in bed or were in a lecture or a workshop. This gave me plenty of leeway in finding a seat, so I grabbed a comfortable armchair with a footrest and a little coffee table in front of it.

The map of Port Vesta was a free one that had been tucked inside the bedside drawer in my dorm. On the face of it, it appeared to be a normal map. Yet to assume that would be to forget that I was in the artificers’ guild.

With one tap of my finger, the face of the map changed, the gray and green vistas transforming, enlarging, morphing this way and that as if the page was made from dough and an invisible baker were kneading it.

At first, it showed an overall street view of Port Vesta, with all its throughfares, alleys, roads, passages. Each of them was named, with the bigger streets granted larger fonts and more prominent map space. Another finger tap faded everything else away and highlighted the many businesses of the city. Bakeries, potion shops, spell scroll emporiums. Their names buzzed like bees around a hive.

A third tap changed the map’s priority to landmarks.

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