Play Your Part

[Daq Bekkar]

Daq snapped awake, finding himself sitting again in the armchair before the window in Morax's sumptuous library. Turning his head to the left, he could see Morax's tall, lanky figure resting his arm on the mantle of a fireplace nearby.

"What happened?" Daq asked. He felt, for the most part, alright, but something was different. If it were possible, he would have described it as being cut off from himself.

"You took an axe blow to the shoulder," Morax said. "You should have listened to me about the timing."

"Am I dead?" Daq asked.

"You don't really believe in an afterlife, do you?" He heard from his other side. Morax had somehow shifted his position in the blink of an eye, so that he knelt, face close to Daq's, on the right side of his armchair.

"No," Daq replied. He leaned away from Morax, whose presence seemed uncomfortably and threateningly close. "I guess I've just lost consciousness, then?"

"Bingo!" Morax shouted. It was a strange phrase that Daq had never encountered before, but Morax was full of those. What worried him more was how far off he sounded. "The pain and shock of the strike overwhelmed your faculties and shut them down. But don't worry, buddy. It's nothing I can't handle for you. I'll have you safe and sound before you bleed out."

"Or at least let's hope I do," he added, sounding even more distant than before. "It would be so inconvenient otherwise."

The last syllable of Morax's little quip echoed against he high ceiling of the library and resounded as a faint whisper in Daq's ear. After that, there was nothing else to hear but the crackling of the fire. He was alone in the great halls.

Daq's body, meanwhile, snapped awake, and rose carefully to its feet. With the axe still embedded in its shoulder, it examined the woman before it, pupils narrowing at the center of its eerily yellow irises. She was turned away from him, lost in the study of things to come.

"Going on ahead?" Morax asked coldly. "Not without me, I hope."

[Pagusel]

Pagusel peered up the uniformly sloping arc of the spiral staircase. The architect may have been the very same as the master of the house, because they seemed to share an aesthetic for the antique, between the brittle guardsman and the steep stone stairs.

Slowly enough to suggest caution in an otherwise unplanned pursuit, Pagusel lifted her foot to the first step. She leaned forward just the little bit more this position allowed and peered up again. She could just make out what appeared to be a landing, large enough for two or three people to stand, and a doorway beyond it.

Presently, either a flicker of movement in her periphery or the whisper of an inhale to speak--she couldn't be sure which came first--drew her attention back over her shoulder. There was Daq, looking very unnatural. Pagusel slipped her other foot up onto the step.

It had quickly become a habit of hers to look at his eyes first each time she saw his face. They were yellow, so she could assume he was going to try to be difficult. Far more disturbing than the signal that Morax had returned was the way he stood there, with an axe in his bone. He should have at the very least shown some sign of difficulty, even some indication of the weight of the thing bearing down on his posture, but the axe may as well have been a phantasm of Pagusel's own eye, for how effortlessly he bore it.

Pagusel's jaw relaxed. Her expression was inscrutable as she considered the sight of him. Even an observer who was interested in the emotions and cues of another wouldn't accurately place her state as disgust, sadness, awe, or indifference; someone as socially clueless as Morax wouldn't stand a chance, or likely care. Her nostrils flared and quickly constricted as she caught on to the nauseating smell of blood. The vitality of this smell was somehow a great deal more off-putting than the bruised brainy stench of the dead boy in the back entrance or the musk of mildew on the skeleton. She took a few moments to let the words of Daq's voice disappear in echoes.

"Maybe that weapon will suit your abilities better." She choked on the end of her sentence and indicated the embedded axe with a point of her eyes before turning her gaze away for good. "I can manage both of these." With the rolling pin and the club held in her hands like lanky extensions to her arms, she began quickly up the stairs. Her gait was awkward with the weights in her hands, and her cloak created a profound drag in addition. Although he was invited along, removing herself from Daq's vicinity seemed to be her immediate concern.

[Daq Bekkar]

Morax couldn't tell how Pagusel was reacting to him, but his eyes were immediately drawn to the quick flaring and constriction of nostrils. He knew that motion, even though he didn't practice it often. She'd caught a scent, and she hadn't liked it.

Her comment about the weapon suiting him struck him as odd. He'd noted Daq's thoughts about a change in Pagusel's demeanor, but he hadn't bothered trying to make something out of them. He had, after all, been counting on Daq to handle all of the interactions with the woman.

Ordinarily, he would have tried to ride out the difficult interaction with silence and perhaps an attempt at a curt nod or an amused smile, but the situation was too sensitive. One misstep, one unexpected reaction could ruin everything for him and set him back farther than he'd been set back in a long time. Still, there was the odd chance that things could still work out, and he would see some progression in his condition--something that hadn't happened in a long while either.

Either way, the stakes were too high for him to keep his mouth shut, he believed, so with quick but careful steps and a mind for not causing a shift in the axe's position, he half-staggered, half-shuffled to catch up with Pagusel.

"The axe," he said quietly, trying to get her attention. "It cannot be removed. The bleeding will become too severe, and this body will not be able to maintain its homeostasis. Err--in your terms--it would die."

He headed up a few of the steps, carefully at first, but with mounting confidence, and decided that he couldn't be finished talking yet.

"Which is, I suppose, the operating question here," he added hastily. "I could remove the axe to assist you and perhaps recover to carry out the terms of our contract, but Daq could not. So where do your interests lie? Do you merely seek the successful fulfillment of our agreement, or do you wish to see this through with the end result of Bekkar's... um... survival?"

Without knowledge of how it might appear, Morax strained to examine the axe wound. As if for dramatic effect, he prodded it carefully, eliciting a weak trickle of fresh blood.

[Pagusel]

Several hours removed from her last opportunity to self-medicate, Pagusel was beginning to feel a new depth to her discomfort. The need for a dose of relief hung on her brow as urgently as any real sweat. This was beyond the ordinary tics that left her grasping for a pinch of homegrown herb. Now more than before, Pagusel was reminded of her priority of securing a druggist.

She needed to retreat mentally, if only for a few moments, if she was to keep from breaking down. Halfway up the staircase, she heard the shuffle of Daq's approach. She let the quiet rumble of his voice wobble past her disinterested ears. She lifted one foot and let her sandal sink very slowly onto the next stone step; the leather of her instep creaked. If she half-closed her eyes and gazed up the staircase, she could imagine the creak of a wooden stair underfoot. If she exhaled slowly through her nose to block out the scent of blood, she could imagine her own breath was the inviting breeze from a sun-warmed room above.

Pagusel let her eyes drift fully closed and tilted her head on the slim stem of her neck. She played with the fantasy for a moment: of a quiet, private room; a place to share with an uncomplicated sweetheart with an uncoordinated smile. As her shoulders relaxed, she touched her two weapons together with a gentle tap.

The application of her drugs had become a mundane science, and she was practically immune to any unpredictable emotional or mental turns. The improvised salve of memories and fantasy, however, was far more likely to swing into a bad trip. Pagusel inhaled to catch the scent of blood again, and she snapped out of her daydream before her heart could wrench wrong.

She looked down at Daq half-blankly. She knew where she was, but at least the sting of her surroundings had let up for a few seconds.

Pagusel wiggled her head in negative response to his question. "I won't see you die. Mister Bekkar," she whispered loudly. "Keep it there if you must--and keep your distance." She looked up the stairs and craned her neck to see the door behind which must be the library he'd indicated. "Keep your . . . homeostasis . . . about you, and instruct me." Pagusel took a few steps onward and spoke an afterthought over her shoulder:

"I'll let you know immediately should I change my mind."

[Daq Bekkar]

In an imitation of an expression he'd seen the man make several times, Morax furrowed Daq's brow. He could tell that Pagusel was agitated, or at the very least distracted, but he couldn't pin down either its cause or direction. An anxious partner was, from a tactical standpoint, a terrible liability. Was she worried now about Daq? Had he laid it on too thickly?

He wanted to contact the other man for advice, but there was no way he could do it now. His will and attention were the last things standing between the body's life and the body's movement toward decay. Already, he could feel its acidity fluctuating--a sign of its proteins beginning to degrade.

Panting heavily to counteract the metabolic acidosis, he followed Pagusel up the stairs slowly, keeping his distance as she had told him to and contemplating the other things she'd said. Ultimately, he decided to take them at face value and assume that she did, on some level, care for Daq.

"The library is through the turret door at the next landing. The floor plans I looked at indicated that there is a study attached to it.. in some manner. The object of our endeavors is within the study, if we can locate its entrance," he said.

The small, arched door was in view, and he nodded for Pagusel to open it. "Let's hope we find it quickly and without any more encounters with the Gräuel. For Mister Bekkar's sake, if nothing else."

[Pagusel]

The ascent was dreamlike. Perhaps in her haste to avoid the unnatural and repulsive sight of Daq, Pagusel took the remaining steps quickly. The weight of her mind seemed to drag behind her, clinging to the edges of her like the dreadlocks of fur on her cloak.

When she reached the landing, her cloak swung heavily to catch up with her thighs. The swish of air was a bodily sigh. She heeded Morax's notation of a separate room to be found. Standing before the doorway, she glanced along each of its edges to see if maybe some indication of an extension would show itself from outside the room. The walls all around were bare; there was no other obvious door.

Satisfied with her cursory assessment of the outside, Pagusel stepped forward to open the door. Her shoulders rolled back as she visibly startled--the door was slightly ajar. Her knuckles shone like marbles in a line along the dark gloss of her club and the buff wood of her rolling pin. She rolled her jaw to the right and bobbed her head decisively after she gathered her wits, and she creaked the door open.

The library was eerily still. The first thing to catch Pagusel's roving gaze was the flicker of wicks enclosed in thick glass: each wall held one or two sconces, ventilated globes the size of a troll's fist, their greenish glass varying in thickness all around and strangely distorting the clarity of the flame within. The light seemed as if battling a viscous liquid; time was held back in the oddly slow pulse of the fire.

The sconces were mounted between embedded shelves in each wall. Aside from the practically identical shelves and the lights between then, the walls betrayed no sign of an attached room. The floor of the room was bare save for an ancient wood table in the center of the carpet. Beside the table, the carpet bore an invisible square--four small, round indentations created its corners. A chair had been there, and subsequently taken away.

Upon noticing this, Pagusel glanced back over her shoulder to see if Daq's figure had arrived yet. Maybe Morax would affirm her suspicions with some of his own--that someone had moved out of here recently--that someone was aware of their approach.

[Daq Bekkar]

Daq was unsure of what to make of everything. He felt overwhelmingly sleepy--a feeling that had never come over him while Morax was in control. Normally, he always felt more alert and on edge when he was disconnected from his body and the outside world.

In an attempt to stay awake, he tried to focus his attention on the events happening beyond the glass of the window that replayed memories. There was currently an image of a tall man, leaning on a mantle over a fireplace. Daq recognized his posture as the one Morax had adopted when first speaking to him after the injury, but the man was not Morax. Unlike the pale-skinned, sinewy figure Morax revealed himself to be in the shared parts of their consciousness, this man was more classically proportioned. The image shifted, focusing on the figure's face. It had cruelly sharp features like Morax's, but it was full of seductive color and undeniably handsome.

"Nice to see you again, brother..." was the last thing that Daq could make out.

The image grew quiet and dark, until Daq could only see himself reflected in the dead glass. He twisted around in the armchair to prop one of his legs up on the arm rest. Listening to the crackling of the fire, he closed his eyes and felt more comfortable than he had in years. He couldn't quite fall asleep, but he felt that he would be able to soon.

* * *

Morax waited for a few beats after Pagusel entered the library and listened for trouble. Satisfied with the stillness, Morax followed after her in and quietly shut the door behind him. Unlike Pagusel, he did not survey the entire room. Instead, he fixed his eyes upon the table at its center. Walking over to it, he took no heed of the indentations in the carpet. In fact, he even obliterated three of the light marks as he shuffled his feet over them.

Sniffing the air, Morax could easily pick out the acrid tang of fresh perspiration and even a few sweet undertones of stale urine. With the knowledge that the necromancer was a fellow scholar, Morax had prepared himself for the likelihood that the man would be waiting for them among his books. A feeling like a neutered form of disappointment came over him, probably as a vestige of expecting how Daq would've felt in an analogous situation.

Outwardly, there was no sign of the feeling other than a one-shouldered shrug so minimal that it might have easily been mistaken for a twitch.

"Strange," Morax muttered, driven by an impulsive and unexpected desire to talk to someone now that Daq was unavailable. "I was half-expecting him to meet us here."

He drew one of his long fingers across the table's varnished surface and came up with strikingly little dust as compared to the vacant rooms on the first floor. The table had, at least, been used recently.

"Whatever," Morax said. He sucked in a wet, raspy breath and turned away to focus his attention on the walls. "Let's just find the study and move on. Based on the floor plans, I would assume it to be aligned with the left-hand side of the room."

A handful of drops dripped from the blood-soaked sleeve of Daq's coat and landed in the thick carpet with faint pattering noises.

Morax paid no heed to them, either.

[Pagusel]

Pagusel rolled her gaze over to the left wall of the room at Morax's suggestion. She stepped towards the shelves. There was no sign of a seam to indicate a hidden door. She blinked thoughtful, glassy eyes at each sconce. The orange flame inside each globe wiggled and wavered like a blob of suspended magma. Her gaze remained locked on one glass sphere as if mesmerized; the sight had the same hypnotic effect as a dancing campfire around which travelers stare in spellbound silence.

The whiff of Daq's blood caught up to his presence in the room. Pagusel glanced over her shoulder suddenly when the scent disturbed her brief trance, and then, quite suddenly again, she twisted her neck to look back at the wall. The distraction was exactly what she had needed. Only when she looked away from the left wall, and the sconce was in her periphery, did she process the startling effect: the glass-distorted flame in the corner of her eye was, bizarrely, performing its erratic wiggling dance in precise mirror-image to the flame in the sconce on the attached wall, where her straight gaze had landed by chance. Her instantaneous reasoning immediately judged that the situation was unnatural, and a moment's more thought concluded that one of the flames was actually a false replication of the other.

She shot a look at Morax that was both stern and cautious, and proceeded towards the left wall slowly. She placed her weapons on the table's corner as she walked past. A few paces before the wall, she stopped, held her palms out from her sides as if to feel the weight of the air. She held a hand out to the wall and stroked the wooden edge of a shelf with her fingertip. It was convincingly . . . present. Then she dropped onto the floor, much smaller than a moment prior.

The cockroach ran across the surface threads of the rug to close distance of a foot or so to the wall. It stopped and waved its antennae for several seconds.

Pagusel became human again, and for an instant, she was kneeling with her nose pressed directly against the wall--maybe the tip of her nose was actually in the wall. A split-second after, she had collapsed backward, onto her tailbone on the rug; she used her hands and heels to scramble back a few feet, away from the wall. She gulped hiccups of air like a suffocating goldfish.

"It--not . . . real . . ." she gasped. Her features showed a great deal of shock and distress, and her state was far and beyond more shaken than she had shown since Daq had first encountered her.

As one who had mastered traversing the rift between human and animal years before, and being in steady practice since then, Pagusel had grown accustomed to accommodating the senses, perceptions, and mental faculties of both of her living selves. Reconciling the cockroach's keen, primitive firing of nerves and the human's overwhelming waves of sentience had become a meditation, over the years, and rarely did any sort of difficulties arise. But here, where Pagusel's every human sense had determined a wall--a powerful illusion indeed--the cockroach's lack of reason had protected it from the falseness. While aware, upon rising from cockroach to human, that a wall was determined not present, Pagusel was thoroughly unsettled to find herself with her nose stuck in a wall. A powerful illusion, indeed.

Pagusel was shaking as she helped herself up to her feet. She pointed at the wall--the illusion--with her finger outstretched at arms length, as if the very act of acknowledging the wall was troubling. "There's no wall there. None at all," she said to Morax, while avoiding looking at him.

[Daq Bekkar]

Morax turned to observe Pagusel's movements upon hearing her collapse and clamber back to her feet. For the first time since meeting her, he could unequivocally determine what emotion she was feeling. Judging by her shaking, her abnormal breathing patterns, and the perturbation of her normally placid facial expression, she had been startled by something. Nevertheless, Morax found himself more confused than ever.

The woman had faced down a lumbering, moldy skeleton without a second thought. Even he, despite his relatively weak capacity for emotion, was occasionally frightened by Gräuel. What was she doing, then, being frightened by a wall? And, if she was to be believed, an illusory one, at that.

Walking with pronounced deliberation aimed at preserving the capacities of his weakening shell, Morax approached the wall. Despite knowing that it was a fake, he was unable to disremember its presence. The reconciliation of his belief and attuning to magic with the necessity to now make himself an unbeliever was too much for him. Daq, he mused, would be ideally suited for this sort of task. Almost as an afterthought, he tried to conjure him up, but all he could feel in that part of him was an almost sorrowful heaviness.

Abandoning this idea, he took out the rusty shiv he carried with his good arm and dragged it along the wall, listening for a change in noise. Everything seemed consistent, even the normal force being applied back at him.

He considered chipping pieces off of the wall and testing the detail of the illusion by running a test for chemical composition on them, but he decided he'd be carrying himself in a lifeless form by the time of the test's completion. Dejectedly, he rested his head against the wall and stared at the ground. That is when he noticed it, a tiny beetle crawling away from the purportedly fake wall. Though he'd only caught it in the corner of his eye, he thought he had seen it crawl from out of the wall, despite there being no obvious holes in the stone. This made a strange sort of sense to him, in light of what had happened with Pagusel. Perhaps she had been unable to reconcile her insect and human perceptions.

"Kaavfer," he whispered, putting the knife back into Daq's overcoat. He reached down with one of his long arms to pick it up. Holding it in front of his face to examine it, he had to resist the urge to pop it into his mouth and crunch it between his teeth. It squirmed in his grip, but he was able to identify it as a species he recognized.

He set it back down to see where it would go, but it continued to walk away from the fake wall, and Morax needed to see it go through. After some thought, he concluded on the shortest way to synthesize the preferred pheromone of the beetle's specific genus.

Snorting loudly, he hocked up a bit of bloody phlegm into his mouth. Holding it there, he let it intermingle with the residual sugars in his saliva until he could smell the almost imperceptibly faint scent of his target chemical developing.

With just a step back, he spat at the wall. From his perspective, it splattered there and slowly dripped toward the floor. To the beetle, however, it had landed on the other side, for the bug immediately reversed its course and slipped through the illusory stone without a second thought.

Morax, upon observing this, was able to follow it. In the short, dimly lit corridor beyond the 'wall,' he picked up the bug again. Looking ahead of him, he could see an old, white-haired man pouring over a tome at a cluttered desk.

Knowing that dealing with the coming obstacle could be difficult, Morax opened his mouth, tossed in the critter, and treated himself to a well-deserved snack.

[Pagusel]

Cognitive dissonance: Standing there, with her fingers on the hardwood table, staring blankly as Morax thoughtfully prepared his steps to overcome the illusory wall, Pagusel conjured memories of her own in an attempt to recall the solution to this frightful thing, cognitive dissonance.

She remembered a bumpy coach ride, with her vision and her tactile senses draped in crepe-like cloaks and the intoxicating scent of mold. The enclosed passenger chamber jostled so profoundly that she couldn't tell acceleration from deceleration, much less directional changes. When she had pried away her veil and the stiff curtain of the window, she had been surprised and slightly nauseated to find the trees outside tripping by at a slower rate than she'd expected. She had avoided the sight after that, and gruffly retired under her veil for the rest of the trip. No, that memory wouldn't do it . . .

She thought of a fever. There was a stiffness in her neck and minor brushes against her skin provoked unexpected hint of pain. The most vivid sensation in the memory, though, was the chills. Those racking chills refused to be warmed by any conventional methods, probably because she already was quite warm, at least according to the frightened, simple companion--the last way she'd seen him--and the concerned others who'd shunted her back to the temple. This wasn't quite what she was searching for, but she was certainly on to something with the ague . . .

In a bid for something deeper, perhaps a juvenile memory uncorrupted by the wisdom of adulthood, Pagusel found what would combat her cognitive dissonance: i was a fever, after all, and a mother. She'd been curled up on a bench with some minor childhood illness, fitful and suffering chills and sweats. Then the hand of her mother had come--lank fingers, shiny skin the color of oiled brown paper, and soft, puffy veins. The hand had cupped her cheek and suddenly the chills made sense: it wasn't the sensation of heat trying to enter her skin, but of heat leaving her feverish body; she had simply confused the direction of movement. She felt properly warm, then, after just the gentle touch of her mother. It had been a long time since she'd thought of her.

Pagusel saw Morax step through the wall after what looked like a little bug. His spit dripped down the wall like the inert puppet of physics it was. But, while it was a powerful illusion, Pagusel had never before--and expected she never would, unless she met with a supremely adept wizard--encountered an illusion that could strongly fool the eye from the actions of a free and willful agent. She saw him go through. Indeed, even something as dynamic as fire was beyond the powers of most illusionists, which would explain why the creator of this trick had conceded to duplicate the visual effect of the fire after a true object in its midst.

Pagusel frowned thoughtfully and looked up at the ceiling as she again pulled up that long-ago memory of her mother's temperate hand. She allowed the memory to caress her cheek as she walked towards the wall, clubs in hand. She kept her eyes wide open--she needed to be aware. As she passed through, she considered the comfortable temperature of the room, and that she needn't feel chilled or overly warm. The thought itself may have helped, or at least distracted her, for she found herself in the corridor behind the ghastly sight of Daq and his axe.

She walked up to meet him by his side. She looked pointedly at the white-haired man, and then at Morax. She didn't dare speak, but gave him a look as if to say Do you intend that he must be killed? She noticed with a wrinkle of her nose that he had already killed the buggy.

Another thought came to her mind while she was waiting for his instructions, that she really should write her mother soon.

[Daq Bekkar]

Morax shook his head in response to Pagusel, and an unpleasant dizziness welled up behind his eyes. Swallowing heavily to overcome the feeling, he indicated to the best of his ability that Pagusel should come with him and follow his lead.

“It is a small box that we seek,” he whispered, beginning to make his way to the end of the hallway and Melagone’s study just beyond. The volume of his voice barely exceeded that of the sibilant hiss of air coming from a leaking, pressurized vessel. “Ornate like the one Daq’s wife made for him and that he later gave to you, but smaller and cubic.”

Upon reaching the end of the hallway, he crept into the study. He moved with an unexpected and almost predatory silence. If his inquiries had turned up accurate information, Melagone was hopelessly focused on his studies, so much that he often neglected eat and drink while poring over his books. It was Morax’s hope that they would be able to slip in, take the item, and leave without his noticing.

Unable to shake the dizziness brought on by his earlier motions, it seemed to Morax that he had searched for a silent eternity before being interrupted by the quiet utterance of a parched throat from the desk behind him.

“Are you one of mine?” it asked.

Before turning around, Morax allowed a minor shifting of his form—not enough to disrupt the contiguity of Daq’s frame, but enough to restore some of his more otherworldly features.

His yellow eyes glinted as he responded, licking eagerly at his sharp teeth. “Yesss.”

A pair of sunken eyes, clouded with myopia, stared back at him for a moment before darting to observe his companion.

“And this one?”

Morax’s mind, ordinarily unsuited for making up lies came to a conclusion with unexpected alacrity.

“She iss… my familiar,” he responded.

Addressing Pagusel, he added: “Mahathallah, introduce yourself.”

[Pagusel]

Pagusel walked down the hall after Morax. She stepped lightly so as to hear his whispered instructions; even her hands she held out at her sides to preclude the rustling of her cloak. Still recovering from her difficulty with the illusory wall, her expression was blank, more stony than placid. She rather floated down the hall with an air of detachment. The only disruption to her mien was a tiny wrinkle that cut between her eyebrows when Morax mentioned a box from Daq's wife. She hadn't forgotten where she'd stowed that thing, wedged in a mud-caked drainpipe outside the gnome's shop.

As they took their last few steps to the study, Pagusel allowed herself to be distracted in wondering whether Morax or Daq was aware that she didn't--couldn't--have the box on her person at this point. She imagined that either of them should be aware of this by now, and she'd have to go retrieve the thing before it was possibly nabbed by Morax.

She stood just past the mouth of the study and watched Morax ooze about for a few moments in search of his intended. It wasn't until the old man spoke up that she paid him any heed at all.

She squinted thoughtfully at the way he silently smacked his lips after speaking. A mere wisp of cottony hair wafted over his brow and caused his head to bob as if burdened by weight. His question was disarming in its apparently senility. Could such a powerful man be tricked such?

In response to Morax's command, Pagusel hesitated, then executed a deep curtsy, with no verbal report. If it was playacting he wanted, then she needn't confuse things with her own script.

Melagone lifted his chin; the dry skin of his neck stretched like a tortoise's. He dotted the air with his nose. "The familiar . . . smells brainy," he commented, in as scolding a tone as his old throat could muster.

His meaning didn't settle with Pagusel for a few seconds, and then she realized he must be referring to the trace scent of brain tissue on her person from touching the slaughtered youth. Although his rheumy eyes likely wouldn't detect it, she still fought to keep a thin grimace from her features. A moment later, she realized he hadn't commented on--hadn't noticed?--the reek of Daq's blood, and another wave of disgust threatened to overthrow her bearing. She tightened her grip on her clubs so that her knuckles seared with pain, and thus tranquilized herself.

Melagone tapped his fingertips absently on the page of his book and peered around the floor of the room as he awaited a worthwhile word from his supposed servants.

[Priscilla Malatrast]

The sound of tentative, slow hoofbeats announced the arrival of a carriage in an alley just outside Melagone's compound. Mostly obscured by the deep shadows and early morning fog, it stopped, but no passengers emerged. To the untrained eye, it would appear that the carriage contained only a petulant old woman, arguing with herself. However, the more arcanely-attuned observer would note a tall, cruelly attractive man sitting across from her with one leg crossed over the other in an indulgent and suggestive manner. Regardless, both types of observer would agree on the pleasant, arousing smell that emanated from the carriage--a musky scent of old roses.

Whereas the weak lantern light only outlined Priscilla's age and ugliness by calling attention to her deep wrinkles and pitted skin, it only added to the character and allure of her companion's features.

Leaning forward on her cane in an attempt to stretch her aching back muscles, Priscilla bunched up her features into an unpleasant frown. "Well? Where is he, then?"

Zapar, with one elbow resting on the side of the rich leather seat, shifted away from her to peer out of the carriage's small window. "He will arrive," he replied. The tiniest hint of annoyance crept into his voice.

Priscilla glowered. "Don't take that tone with me," she said. "If that bitch battlemage really did report me, I am taking quite a risk in coming back to the city so soon after the incident. And what am I banking on? Some dream you had?"

Snapping away from his observation, Zapar clambered across the carriage and leaned over the much smaller woman, as if poised to abuse her. He addressed her with an aggressive and malevolent tone.

"It was not just some dream," he said loudly, sounding genuinely offended. "Unlike those of humans, the infrequent dreams of demons are filled with message and auspice. He will come, and he is counting on us to be here."

Priscilla was neither afraid nor impressed. With a dismissive wave of her hand, she motioned for Zapar to take his seat again.

"Whatever you say," she muttered. Like Zapar, she turned to observe the goings on outside through the carriage window. She could see little more than fog and darkness.

[Daq Bekkar]

Morax sucked at his teeth nervously. Frankly, he had just expected the lie to either work or not work--not to be challenged at any point. He wasn't even really sure of what to make of Melagone's reaction. He'd sounded... angry? No--more like a schoolteacher, trying to coax something out of a tacit student.

Although he'd immediately understood what the necromancer had meant by "smells brainy", he wasn't even terribly sure that he was supposed to respond. Morax stood perfectly still, despite the body's resistance to the muscular action of holding itself upright. It was on its last legs, and regardless of the outcome of the palaver with Melagone, it would be useless to him if he took much longer.

Searching desperately with his eyes, he was unable to locate the little metal box he was after. Finally, after what seemed like several awkward minutes, he settled on a course of action. He would attempt to lie again, and simply ask for the object directly.

The only hitch was that he was only passingly familiar with necromancy. He'd read several books on it, but really only the ones concerning the common ground between necromancy and demonology, which, given his history, was a pet specialty of his.

Clearing his throat, he spoke in a haggard whisper that, he thought, made him seem more ghostlike. "A.. ssssacrifize was required," he said, indicating Pagusel in the hopes of explaining her "brainy" smell. "For.. for.. an.. um.. for a.. spirit.. intersection... technique."

Spirit intersection technique. He thought that it sounded both sufficiently jargon-like and similar to something he'd read in a far eastern text on summoning ghosts for typtographic divination.

"It--he.. put up.. resistance," Morax mumbled in addition, motioning with his good arm toward the axe embedded in his shoulder. He assumed that the presence of the axe was the reason Melagone had thought he was one of his necromantic oddities in the first place. The pain would have prevented an ordinary human from walking around with a similar injury. A possessed one, on the other hand...

Catching himself before becoming lost in the interesting notion of the similarities of his actual situation with the one he was playing at, Morax added, "And, as you can see, this body is nearly finished."

Stepping forward slowly, he approached Melagone's desk. This lie would either cinch the deal or cause the situation to degenerate inexorably, so he wanted to be close in case it came to overpowering the man.

"I need an object for a ritual to assume a new one," he said carefully. "A phylactery."

Waiting for a response and poised to strike, Morax watched as Melagone's eyes drifted subconsciously to look at top left drawer of his desk. Should it come to killing the old man, Morax mused, at least they would know where to look.

[Pagusel]

Melagone peered back at Morax steadily as he leaned on the edge of the desk. The rims of his eyelids tensed ever-so-slightly and gave the old man an unexpected air of canniness.

Another faltering bob of his head had come just after Morax's improvised mention of a "spirit intersection technique." He had paused for some time, but glanced down at the books on his desk as if in afterthought. His pale fingers padded around the disheveled piles that were within his arthritic reach, and he muttered hoarsely, "No, no . . ."

His fingers shuffled beneath a few edges of parchment and eventually landed on a spine of split bamboo. With a cough and a wheeze, he dislodged the thin book. Its paper cover was faded beyond recognition, and the strip of bamboo into which its binding was sewn was streaked with brown mold and appeared brittle. "It is the Intersection Spirit Technique you want," he corrected the being with a resolute tap on the surface of the book. After this he disengaged his attention and went back to the tome he had originally been reading.

Pagusel held her ground at the mouth of the study, her hands tucked safely back beneath her cloak. She crossed her arms in front of her midsection, each elbow nestled in the palm of the opposite hand. Slowly, she lifted her right foot up the length of her left leg and crooked her knee to stand stork-style. She didn't remove her gaze from Melagone while he rummaged around. Only when he seemed to forget about their presence altogether did she glance over to Morax again.

She dropped her foot back quickly to the floor when she saw the extent of his blood loss thus far. The weight of imminence as a perception, the synapses it fired in her shaky psyche, was far too uncomfortable to ignore. Pagusel took several swift steps to the front of Melagone's desk. "I will handle the phylactery, if you please," she said briskly.

The old man's head jerked up and his surprised gaze landed on Pagusel's looming nearness. "A phyl-- . . ." He trailed off as he gazed about in trying to remember the circumstances. "Well then . . . " He moved his hands with aggravating slowness to the drawer of his desk and shifted it open. He looked back up at Morax and blinked. He appeared simultaneously hurt and stern, somehow pitiable. "You must learn the technique and be careful in your experimentation," he chided. His emphasized words were almost inarticulate wheezes.

He stared at Morax with his drawer hanging open as baldly as nakedness. Slowly, his gaze drifted off Morax and back to his book. He seemed to be unaware of his intentions to get them the piece to begin with.

Pagusel craned her chin to see into the narrow drawer, and could make out a tangle of silver wire and a squat, open jar of iron filings. A glint of reflected light may have been the smooth edge of a tiny box peeking out from within the drawer, but Pagusel couldn't see exactly from where she stood, and presumably Morax would know what to take.