The Hustle

[Pagusel]

The mood between Pagusel and Morax was indeed not unlike two parents before their child--in this case, unamicably divorced. If Morax (and Daq by mnemonic proxy) had judged Pagusel as someone not given to confrontation, this was probably because he had met her at a time when she had nothing to lose. Now, Pagusel had holdings, and she didn't intend to concede anything in litigation.

She followed Daq closely through the door, like a cautious warden. As she walked under the arch of Morax's arm, she glanced up along it, as if coolly appraising some architectural ornamentation. Love what you've done with the place, she might have said sarcastically, if she were a spurned ex-wife. It wasn't the house though, but Daq's original body he had remodeled.

Pagusel saw that Daq knew his way to the dining room, so she made to follow him. She lagged behind somewhat as she made careful observance of her surroundings--surroundings which Daq no doubt had an uncannily precise inventory of already. Pagusel felt certain that this was not a safe place, not like the junkyard. She relied on her ability to be slow and deliberate, so as not to become ruffled.

Her attention was moderately distracted through this vigilance as she took a seat beside Daq. Her glance only skimmed over the items on the table, determined them reasonable. She saw the movement near Daq's lap and realized he had place his linen down. An old memory of decorum chimed in her head, and she followed in suit.

The customs and politeness she had learned years ago did not completely infiltrate her table manners, because she next set upon filling her plate without waiting for any formal invitation. She took a few slices of a dense, sourish bread and spread it thickly with dandelion-seasoned lard. She also took a chunk of hard cheese with a bright red rind.

After an initial bite of her bread, she picked up the cheese again to sniff and inspect it, rubbing its slightly oily surface with her fingers. Determining it to be cheese after all, she reached over to deposit it on Daq's plate instead. "Can you eat cow's milk foods?" she asked in a low, almost conspiratorial tone.

She sought out something else to add to her plate and settled on a portion of salmon. But before eating any more, she looked at Daq again and raised her eyebrows for a response. She lifted her chin to glance around the dining room again, having realized her vigilance may had waned in sixty seconds of dining. When her gaze fell on the pineapple she had failed to notice before, a funny wrinkle dimpled her lips, as if she meant to say something else. But she looked back down at Daq's plate and said nothing.

[Daq Bekkar]

Morax glanced out at the street before turning back to the foyer and shutting the heavy door behind him. Noticing that Daq and Pagusel had already made their way to the dining room, he decided that it would be a good time to slip out to the greenhouse and leave the strange woman and her new ward to their own devices.

Inside the dining room, Daq was being far less discerning than his companion as he served his plate. Sampling broadly, he took at least one piece or serving of each of the items arrayed before him. By the time he was finished with his plate, now covered in breads and spreads, cheeses and meats, he hardly noticed Pagusel's addition until she called his attention to it.

Could he eat foods made out of cow's milk? It was a strange question. Why shouldn't he be able to? At first, none of his memories suggested anything to the contrary, but then--Approximately 75% of the world's population loses the ability to completely digest a physiological dose of lactose after infancy.

"Do you mean to imply that you are lactose intolerant?" Daq asked, blurting it out before he could acknowledge the strong possibility that the question would be unintelligible to her. The language of his little flash of insight seemed like it belonged to a different vernacular. It was, somehow, at odds with Pagusel's macramé dress, with the dining room's dim candlelight, and with the strange, prominently displayed pineapple.

He picked up the cheese and took a bite. No amount of theory could substitute for empirical evidence. He followed his intake of cheese with a piece of some dark rye bread. Chewing and swallowing confidently, he gestured expansively to indicate the dining room, or perhaps the house as a whole.

"Well," he said, a few bits of food still in his mouth. "This is quite nice. What do you think?"

[Pagusel]

As Daq filled his plate, Pagusel glanced about the room as if expecting some spook to be lurking in any dim corner. She wasn't edgy so much as she was watchful. Very slowly, her gaze still roving, she lifted a scrap of salmon to her lips with her fingers.

She chewed, and puzzled quietly over the texture. In a moment oddly similar to Daq's every recent epiphany, she found she couldn't quite recall the mouthfeel, in her experience. Certainly she'd eaten similar sorts of preserved fish in her lifetime, and yet the sensation wouldn't place itself immediately.

Pagusel acted on the urge to pursue that sensation. She piled a portion of the red flesh onto her lard-smeared bread and flaked it around with her fingertips. At first, she took a small bite. The soft fat melted around the edges of the bread and pooled richly below her tongue. The sour, almost bitter starch in the bread dissolved into the faintest sweetness. She sipped a morsel of her lower lip between her teeth to compare the texture of her own flesh to the fish.

As she swallowed, Daq asked a question she didn't understand. Her vocabulary and diction were indeed idiosyncratic and eclectic, but they followed an experiential path. Some study of physiology was in her experience, but gastric enzymes were not a part of it.

In answer to his question, she set her bread down and stared at the plate of cheeses for a moment, then selected another piece and added it to his plate. It was a gesture she hadn't made in so long, the simple act of sharing a meal, and it was like the earlier connection of palms--familiar and meaningful.

His question about what she thought of the place, it sounded rhetorical. She ate another bite of her bread and looked around the room as if for the first time. "I'm glad you're comfortable," she replied. There was a hint of wariness in her voice as she turned her chin to look at the doorway to the foyer. Nobody had come back to greet or disturb them yet.

[Daq Bekkar]

Daq smiled, picked up the cheese Pagusel had offered, and held it up to inspect it. As he did so, he caught sight of himself in the reflection of one of the silver serving bowls. The curvature of the surface distorted him in an uncanny way, shifting the angle of his extended arm to a perfect ninety degrees and magnifying his well-crafted head, with its eerily perfect smile right in the center. He looked like.. what was it..? He struggled to remember for a moment, but then he had it, a brief snippet of memory from a town square in the north. Constructed into the council building, the... Rådhus was an odd clock, with little wooden men who paraded out at the hour indicating lunchtime. What had it been called? The Gök-uhr? Several languages, all known to Morax at some point, were colliding in his head like a wave crashing into a rock and then receding in tiny rivulets through channels that had been gradually etched into the stone.

Abruptly, he bit into the cheese, opting to return to the present, to the act of eating, rather than sort out the jumbled mess of his past. He'd just picked up his knife to spread some jam on a piece of toasted white bread when Morax entered the room. One hand in his pants pocket, the other attempting to smooth back his wild shock of hair, he strode purposefully and quickly over to the side of the table opposite Pagusel and positioned himself behind Daq's chair.

Removing his hand from his pocket, he placed an article on the table, a small packet that smelled quite like Pagusel's morning herb, bundled in thin brown paper. It looked to contain several ounces of the substance. Daq started to reach for it, but Morax gently took his hand. His touch was cold but transcendently familiar and comforting.

"That's not for you, Daq," Morax said softly. "It is for your... custodian--an advance on her salary."

[Pagusel]

Morax entered and Pagusel swallowed hard. The bread, not quite properly chewed, left a sour sting at the top of her throat.

She refrained from taking another bite before Morax made his move. She was suddenly aware of how acutely she desired more food, a need just as real and vital as the urge to take drugs. It had been a long time since she'd had a culinary experience more stirring than sipping a small pot of broth or chewing her way through a bunch of rough greens. Still, she held back. Pagusel could control her urges.

Her mouth set in a grim line and she eyed Morax without shifting from her seat. Her gaze lowered to Daq, who had just gotten through puzzling over his reflection and was working on that piece of cheese she had given him. A strange thrill of vicariousness flickered in her breast as she saw him eat the food she couldn't digest.

When Morax put down the package of herb, Pagusel's eyes widened along with her nostrils. She tilted her chin upwards to avert her gaze from the parcel. It was several times more of the stuff than she could ever keep on hand with her limited means of production. She looked instead to Daq and gave a small nod of her head. "You may touch it." If anything, she may have been acting contrary on purpose.

She herself made no move to grab the parcel. She moved her hand away from her plate and tapped her short fingernails on the surface of the table. "We want the house," she said coolly. If it was her intent to make this whole encounter play out like divorce proceedings, then she was succeeding.

[Daq Bekkar]

Daq started to reach out for the parcel, but then stopped himself. What was it that Morax had called it—an advance on a salary? The implications of the phrase threatened his understanding of his recent experiences. Morax had surely wanted him to hear that little remark, perhaps had even placed the package within his reach for that very reason, but his interest still seemed genuine, at least.
He looked over at Morax, who smiled at him briefly, as if he were a child who’d just learned a simple, but not unimportant lesson. Turning his attention back to his plate, he frowned.

Morax, thanks to some coaching from his brother, had a slightly better grasp on how to read Pagusel's expression. It wasn't a skill he particularly cared to develop, but his interactions with the woman increasingly seemed as if they would have a bearing on his experiment with the alchemist.

He noticed the little flare of her nostrils, the widening of her eyes and applied the algorithm he and his brother had devised, a deconvolution of expression from background emotion. In his language, it was differential diagnosis that relied strongly on context and Occam’s razor. She was almost certainly not offended or angry, probably not surprised or frightened. Therefore, she was yearning or craving. Though she made no move for the drugs, she still desired them. He did not need to be so tenuous in his negotiations.

Taking a seat at the table next to Daq, he reached out with one of his long arms and casually placed a pale hand on top of the parcel. Mimicking Pagusel’s tapping motion with his strong, sharp fingernails, he replied to her demand, “You are, of course, welcome to live here. The offer was made to you previously, was it not?”

Though he gave her a broad, toothy grin, his eyes registered something else--a mixture of deep suspiciousness and mild displeasure. Under the table, he reached out and gave Daq’s upper thigh a reassuring pat. Following another of Zapar’s suggestions, he allowed his hand to linger for a few moments before returning it to his lap.

[Pagusel]

If Morax was making an armchair science of studying Pagusel's expressions, she was doing her part to obscure them intermittently through the act of eating. For while she was slow as she bit, licked, and chewed, she was compulsive as well. There was little rhythm to how she ate, and as she carefully picked her way around the generous portions of dairy products on the table, she was otherwise eclectic in her choices.

Morax would probably know what was making her a bit anxious: his hand on her drugs, his hand on her ward. For a woman of few possessions, she had already mentally staked a claim on both. She soothed the anxiety with a salve of dense bread, ginger marmalade, and runny egg yolks.

"Morax," she said as she finally looked straight at him across the table. She used her fingernail to scrape a fig seed from her lower lip. "I won't be troubled by whatever errors of communication you and your brother have had between yourselves. He was clear in his terms when we spoke."

Her gaze traveled to Daq, where she saw in his face the reaction after Morax took his hand off him. She disguised the stiffening of her jaw by popping a kumquat into her mouth and sucking hard as if it were a lozenge. She squeezed it in her teeth and swallowed the bit of juice. "I believe his wording was 'it shall be fulfilled.'"

Pagusel glanced to the doorway, partly in continued assessment of this place, and partly expecting Zapar to present himself upon being quoted. "The object of our mutual concern isn't suited to sleeping outdoors." Though her words were impersonal and aloof, she sounded uncharacteristically casual as she chewed on the fragrant rind. "A small townhome shall be alright. One private bedroom, a parlor. That will do. And no doors shared with other parties. I require privacy for us."

[Daq Bekkar]

Morax lost the thread of following the visual cues to Pagusel's inner moods as she recommenced with her consumption of various foodstuffs. He did, however, note that she seemed to be avoiding certain things--the serving boat with creams, the platter of cheeses, the bowl containing confiture de lait. It wasn't until Pagusel had almost finished with her counter-argument that he pieced together the common pattern.

Though it would have certainly been ideal to have Pagusel and Daq under their roof, the 'domicile' that his brother had selected would be suited for his purposes while meeting the woman's requirements. After watching her gnaw on a piece of fruit, Morax noticed as Pagusel diverted her gaze toward the doorway leading to the mansion's anteroom. Though he wouldn't have been visible from her angle, Morax still wondered if she had sensed Morraigne lurking there.

Morax clasped his hands together in front of him. The off-white color of the tablecloth brought the paleness of his skin into sharp relief. "Yes," he said. "That arrangement can still be made, though I merely thought that you would find greater comfort in living here." He nodded toward the parcel. "If only because so many enjoyable amenities would be more readily accessible."

He gestured toward the doorway. When Morraigne peeked into the room, Morax instructed him to tell Zapar to look into the matter of the 'roost' once he awakened. Returning his attention to Pagusel, he added. "Speaking of comfort, I could prepare a tincture that would aid in your digestion of dairy, if you wished it."

[Pagusel]

The sight of Morax's pale hands on the table gave small comfort: at least she could see he wasn't manhandling her ward, but she was also starkly aware of the lack of Bekkar. When she'd seen Morax before, Daq was there, at least a trace of him, even when he lurked passively beneath the surface. Now the slender angles of Morax were entirely uninterrupted, and in that way even eerier than a man possessed.

When he gestured for the doorway, she turned her head so quickly as to betray that she'd been half expecting it. Morraigne endured the stares of both Morax and Pagusel for a few moments, and after Morax had given his directive, Pagusel added her own. "Rouse him now. I have things to do," she said as plainly as if this were her servant all along.

She turned back and placed her hands flat along either side of her plate. She'd been in this position before--sitting across from Morax, separated by a table and coldly discussing business of flesh. When her gaze flickered to Daq for a moment, she was caught off guard by the slight uplift in her mood and the briefest urge to pay him some sort of compliment. It was as if she wanted to see him pleased. Pagusel didn't give in to that strange, silly urge, and instead focused on the offers Morax had put forth.

"Dairy" was a word Pagusel had only really encountered in an academic sense before. She wasn't even exactly sure of its proper syntactic place, since she also recalled it being used to describe the type of farm containing cows of gentle disposition. In this case, Morax was indicating the excess of cow's milk food and drink on the table. As she sorted the item into her mental lexicon, she momentarily dithered over whether its use as a mass noun, rather than a countable thing, was standard usage or merely the charming habit of an agricultural dialect not bothered by conjugation. Pagusel was not in the mood to be charmed, and she was about as interested in gaining the ability to digest these things as she might be in digesting flavored sawdust or kerosene.

He had also restated the offer of living in the Malatrast home, for all its readily available treats.

Morax had perhaps mistaken her for a libertine; this was common among those who were vaguely aware of her vices. At least in Pagusel's mind, however, there was a great difference between maintaining a regimented host of vices and wallowing in indulgence. Surely her morals were questionable, but they were also careful. She wouldn't correct him though, as there was no point giving too much of herself away.

"I need no digestive aids, just the privacy I have asked for. Very soon. For myself and--" Pagusel nodded in Daq's direction and again experienced an unexpected hiccup of emotion, like mortification--or rather--indignation. The feeling was so ephemeral, she couldn't even place its target, whether she felt it towards Daq or Morax.

[Daq Bekkar]

Savoring the feeling of fullness, Daq slid down a little in his seat. He'd had, of course, memories of fullness, but he was experiencing true fullness for the first time in his new body. It was like having a sip of hard liquor after years of abstinence. The discussion between Pagusel and Morax went, for the most part, either over or under his head. There were both allusions to conversations he was missing and subtexts he did not understand. In particular, he was unclear on why Pagusel was so insistent about their privacy.

He was sure that the comfort of the Malatrast mansion would be preferable to whatever offerings Zapar could find in the other parts of the city. Besides, with so many rooms in the mansion, they would likely be able to keep to themselves if they wanted.

Although both Morax and Pagusel turned to the door to look at Morraigne, Daq kept his attention fixed on the others sitting at the table. In his memories, Morraigne was a vague and almost inexplicable constant. Daq couldn't quite place how he knew Morraigne. To his knowledge, Morax had only met Morraigne shortly before the exchange of bodies had occurred, but Morraigne seemed to take up much more space in his mind than just a few days. In all of that time, Morraigne had never seemed to stand out. He was simply there, quiet and still, like a piece of furniture. The others at the table, however, were anything but constant. At the slightest provocation, their moods and motives appeared to change, like a column of mercury that expanded in just seconds once exposed to a new temperature. He watched them as they watched the door.

He took in the way that Pagusel assumed a casual expression, a neutral posture, and he saw the muscles ripple in Morax's jaw as he clenched his teeth. Something about Pagusel's actions were not in line with her bearing. Daq continued to watch them as another piece of conversation drifted by him. After Pagusel had finished speaking, Morax nodded and remarked that he wished to remind her of another point of the contract.

"Do you remember what I said about nurturing?" he said, placing an odd amount of emphasis on the final word. "Yes, I just want to make sure that in this house--this private domicile that we are to procure--you will be a humble and nurturing caretaker."

Daq had started to pick apart the latest addition to the exchange when he was distracted by a heady scent of dried roses. This time, he couldn't help but turn his attention away from Morax and Pagusel. Leaning against the doorframe was Zapar, still in his red bedclothes. He yawned and ran a hand through his disheveled hair before walking over.

The sound of his bare feet walking across the hardwood was almost familiar to Daq, but wasn't able to align the sound with memories from any of his other senses. Zapar took a seat next to his brother.

[Pagusel]

Pagusel let her dry gaze drift over Daq as Morax spoke of nurturing. She had already felt the tug of a strange attachment to him: an inclination first motivated by a sense of indignation towards Morax and Zapar, and possessiveness, but ultimately resulting in feelings of kindness towards her ward. She knew she intended to look after him and offer him enrichment, if only to improve her standing against her competitors. In that way, she would nurture him.

He had said he wanted to make sure she'd be a nurturing caretaker. "No doubt you have more tricks up your sleeve than simple verbal reminders to be sure of it," she replied. She lingered for a moment on Daq's relaxed posture, then glanced back to see Zapar enter.

The man whose form Zapar had assumed the previous night while negotiating with Pagusel incidentally had an identical twin upon whom Zapar had also learned to model himself. He generally preferred the one over the other because of the striking beauty mark, the better manicured eyebrows, and the slightly leaner frame. The twin, however, had a delightful effect on the curly-haired parlor maid, who was usually so dull between the sheets she dutifully turned down. Something about the plainer twin brought out a new and temporarily entertaining side of her. Zapar simply hadn't changed backs preferred form since the nighttime. He gave Morax a cool smile and a sideways glance to see if he noticed--and perhaps was similarly inspired by--the difference. Then he was distracted.

Without regard for subtlety, Zapar narrowed his eyes at Pagusel and looked her garment up and down. He frowned when he couldn't quite make out the line of an areola or the distinct peak of a nipple beneath the nubbly, almost transparent fabric of her dress. His fingertips idly danced along the surface of the table linen and pushed and plucked at it, the same way he wished he could assess the fabric where it bagged drably around Pagusel's obscured bustline.

A narrow vertical line appeared between Pagusel's eyebrows as she regarded the man who had threatened her with physical harm the night before. As before, she was able to handle the impropriety of his attention by reminding herself that it was entirely within the realm of normal human disgust to dismiss him.

"We're discussing the terms of your finding a home for myself and Daq, away from here." She placed another sliver of salmon between her teeth and worried it as she moved her gaze from Zapar to Morax, who was now walled in between his brother and Daq.

[Daq Bekkar]

The sight of Zapar's new form set Daq on edge. Whereas the previous forms had been mostly like his own--a little too put-together, too finely crafted--this one had been cast with imperfections. It was unmistakably human. Without making any effort to disguise the movement, he reached for the junction of his throat and chest to quell the visceral, gnawing pain brewing there. The sight of its errant hairs and handsome but slightly crooked features filled him with deep pangs of jealousy.

The basic plot of the previous night's meeting escaped him. He thought it was, perhaps, considerate of Morax to be so concerned with his well-being, but he found the terms being discussed to be, by and large, uninteresting. More interesting were the subtle interactions between Morax, Pagusel and Zapar. In particular, he was baffled by the way Morax and Pagusel seemed so unresponsive or even put off by his glances, his little smiles.

Morax had never been good at reading signals, but Daq craved the attention from Zapar that seemed like it was being wastefully lavished on Pagusel. To be so thoughtfully appraised by an obvious admirer of human beauty might, he imagined, assuage some of the insecurities he had felt the previous night, before the buzz from the liquor had set in.

Eager to have the matter handled and to be done with Pagusel for the time being, Morax chose to ignore her remark and instead tried to jog Zapar's memory with a prompt. "There was a two-bedroom townhome on Vintry Court, near the Aldgate. You had indicated that it might be suitable?"

[Pagusel]

Zapar found himself annoyed with Pagusel for making herself so boring. The plum he cradled in his palm held more tactile interest than he could probably tease out of her all morning. The garment she wore could be tantalizing if it clung a little better or if the weave were just a bit more transparent, but as it was, he found himself looking for something more interesting than her or fruit to keep his attention through the conversation.

Then he felt a juicy ripple in the air that certainly wasn't the echo of dead vegetable sex the plum was giving off. It was something like jealousy and confusion. . . that deliciously manipulable brand of naivety. Zapar glanced past the pale peaks of Morax's profile and found the source radiating that warm desperation. Pagusel pursed her lips and blinked a few times rapidly.

"No, that won't do." She spoke hastily. The end of her sentence seemed to catch in her throat. Her lips slackened softly as she paused before explaining herself. Her gaze became hazy as it searched the empty air several inches in front of her mouth for the words that hadn't been planned yet.

Pagusel wouldn't lift her eyes to meet Morax's when she spoke again, for that would make it all too clear that she had been grasping: "Aldgate is too far, I need to live closer to the scrapyard." She said the last word a little loudly. Then she took a long, shallow breath. "In case something comes up."

Her cheeks bloomed soft red. Pagusel seemed quite a bit more ripe, in fact, now that she'd had some fresh nourishment. But beyond that she gave off a wave of something far stronger than Daq's tentative yearning. It was sex and dismay and worry. Zapar caught a whiff of that cocktail and liked it.

Without a thought, Zapar lunged a hand in Pagusel's direction, the better to immerse himself in that unexpected and surprising emotion. Then a strange thing happened over the table. Pagusel was looking wide-eyed at the space above the tablecloth as Zapar's hand threatened to come too close. Her fingertips reared up like a tiny shield against his aggression. What came next was ineffective as well, in terms of brute force, but gave Zapar pause nonetheless.

A sudden, isolated breeze grazed Zapar's knuckles. Startled, he dropped the plum from his hand, which took a sharp turn backward, rolling back towards Zapar's side of the table rather than towards Pagusel. The apparently origin of the puff of air was her flexed fingertips. The tablecloth shivered beneath her hand, which she withdrew swiftly.

Zapar withdrew his hand as well, slowly, as he narrowed his eyes at her. That was interesting, whatever had just happened. He watched her cheeks flush anew as she smoothed the tablecloth. She still refused to meet eyes with Morax or Zapar.

[Daq Bekkar]

Though his brother was obviously titillated by the latest occurrence, Morax did his best to keep a mostly impassive expression. He'd heard Daq use the term before--a poker face. This knowledge of Pagusel's magical ability, her presumably unregistered magical ability, was useful, but only if his intent to use it remained obscured. If something did register on his face, he hoped it would be exasperation. He made sure to sigh loudly as he reached into his coat pocket to procure a piece of parchment.

Daq, who had been watching the exchange between Zapar and Pagusel quite intently, could not quite figure out what event had precipitated the sudden change of mood. Was it the dropped piece of fruit? Despite its somewhat unexpected trajectory, it had not knocked anything over. He turned to Morax, looking for cues, but Morax seemed otherwise occupied.

As Pagusel fiddled with the tablecloth, he unfolded the piece of parchment and flattened it against the face of a dish. The edges curled up stubbornly, so he weighed them down with pieces of the heavy silver flatware. Scooting the plate toward the center of the table, he took a piece of cheese. After biting into it, he placed the half-eaten cheese on the left-hand side of the parchment.

"There's your scrapyard," he said. Rather abruptly, he dipped his index finger into a serving boat full of raspberry compote. He pressed the jelly-covered finger down on two spots on the map. Licking off the excess jelly, he leaned back and said, "There and there are the only two plots for sale."

Daq, scrutinizing the map more closely, noticed that it had been divided into adjoining sections. Some of these had numbers written on them. The numbers near the scrapyard were appreciably smaller than the numbers elsewhere.

"The first plot," Morax continued. "Is, in my opinion, unfit for habitation. It is practically a scrap-heap in its own right. The second... I suppose it could be suitable."

Reaching for the jelly covering the first plot, Daq stretched out his arm. Morax, as he had done before with the parcel, gently guided it away.

[Pagusel]

The flush in Pagusel's cheeks quickly drained. She understood, if only vaguely, that in this jurisdiction there were consequences to manipulating physics when the result wasn't simply changing the biology of one's own body. It would take several moments for it to dawn on her that this particular space had to be under some special protection or consideration, given the unnatural sorts of things that had likely happened here. Even Morax and Daq seemed not to register what she had done, much less cared either way. It would take her some more time being human to get better at keeping track of the local regulations and what they meant in actuality.

Pagusel swallowed and stared down at the jam-smudged map. Her gaze lingered on the scrapyard then drifted toward the right. Her upper lip crinkled oddly as she thought of logarithmic axes and other principles so long-lost to her mode of thinking that they seemed from another physical world altogether. She glanced up to see Daq's gaze following the same trajectory, and she took a sharp breath and sat up straight.

"It's very well to place us wherever we'll be settled soonest," Pagusel said quickly. "Unless you mean to say your opinion is equal to decree, I don't care about it."

Perhaps she was not working quite hard enough at being diplomatic. The application of rich food had brought out a certain headiness in her. That, and the hiccup of adrenaline that came from a perceived close call with magic use.

"Spend as little or as much as you will. I register now that I have no objection to a rental if it fulfills my requirement for a private entrance." She paused for a while after that. It certainly didn't seem that anybody with Morax's motives would be willing to submit to a landlord.

Zapar, for his part, was tuning out much of what Pagusel was saying, the better to read the more interesting subtleties in her change of behavior. He distilled out a few of the more entertaining words she repeated, like "private," but otherwise devoted more of his conscious thought to how he might get Daq to appreciate the feel of his silk pajamas.

As it stood, Morax was in the way. His brother was much more of a long shot (Daq could have been easy as pie), but he made an attempt anyway. As Morax withdrew his hand from nudging Daq away from the map, Zapar made as if to echo Morax's motion, sort of a symbolic move of solidarity in controlling the construct. As he too withdrew his hand, he grazed his wrist against Morax's forearm and caught his fingers in his brother's elbow. He tugged at the crook of Morax's elbow in hopes that Morax would drop his hand down and take a moment to admire how artfully the red silk pajamas draped over his lap.