The title of the book was Principles of Light-Bearing, and Sharide was engrossed in it by the second page. It described how light was the underpinning of the world. She had dreamed of being a weaver, and a fisher, and a soldier, and many different wives, but the life of a seeker of knowledge had never come to her yet. When next she slept, she decided, she would try to find a life wherein she had read this book, and other books, and understood them.

Yengec lingered over his spiced yams and rice, reading Hjel’s journal. Paramentals, not cauldron-borne like homunculi but spontaneously generated from the city itself. Paramentals—every polisomancer whispered of them. They haunted cities. Not quite ghosts, but spirits just the same.