"I want people to feel like they can always walk in and interrupt me, but a door that's ajar is very annoying and gets in the way and doesn't come across quite as welcoming. I had to remove half the wall to do this instead but it looks so much nicer."

"Serves the purpose," nods Kib. "Glass might have done it too."

"I think your result is better, I don't know how troublesome removing the wall was."

"We actually had to call a Vala! The palace was built before we knew enough about architecture to do elaborate stone buildings and so is mostly held up by magic."

Kib looks dubiously at a wall.

"More obvious in the main atrium. Come on, I'll show you."

"I don't actually know anything about architecture, but maybe you can point out a physical impossibility."

He leads him into the throne room. It is spectacular. "Marble that thin would not hold up for a dome like that," he says, 'and also those aren't load-bearing arches. We'd just invented building with stone, we were making some pretty silly mistakes."

"And the Valar have so little to do with their immense power around here that they prop up your palaces."

"This world doesn't have anything wrong with it. If they can I'm sure they'll now devote themselves to yours."

"Or as your father points out some other world which may have even worse problems."

"Yep. I don't know what we'll do. We don't have immense power yet and we're not very numerous."

"Pity you can't servantmake, it can free up a lot of time after the initial investment."

"Free up time spent on what kind of tasks?"

"Anything repetitive, in particular - that's what automata are for. Or that an animal can physically do without having to actually be able to think complex thoughts. Shines for messages - they move ridiculously fast when sent at top speed, if you had a code set up with the Valar you could've sent them a series of colored shines and they'd know what was going on to the limits of the code. Golems are more complicated to make than automata but they can react to their environments, slightly different use cases. Puppets for any mechanical work that you can think about more easily than you can otherwise give impetus - I can turn most things with moving parts, wheels or whatever, into puppets, and move them along with an amount of attention scaled by how complex the force I need those moving parts to generate is."

"And everyone in your world has the aptitude?"

"Yeah, but most people aren't servantmakers, it's a specialty. Lots of people own stuff servantmakers make, though."

"Well, if the Valar aren't moved by the urgency of ending death maybe they'll like the idea of us having all these nice labor-saving devices."

"I can make you something if you like! Anything pop into your head when I rattled off the list?"

"Copying books."

"Golem can do that. I need... probably at least three square feet writeable surface area, on a body that can turn pages and hold a pen. Depending on how hard it is for me to get up to speed in foreign metalworking tools and facilities maybe a month for a prototype, future ones would be faster."

"That would be world-changing. Even if the Valar can send you right back I am going to plead with you to stay here and finish it. Should we be going to the forge instead of to learn horses?"

"You won't have to work that hard to convince me to stay, I can clearly make a bigger splash here than I can there between 'alerting Valar to problems' and 'being the only servantmaker in town'. Even if I have to learn to cut my own hair. And the primary horses application is for me to go to the Valar, right, and Tyelcormo's going instead?"

"I mean, being able to travel fast is useful anyway, but yeah, it doesn't seem necessary."