The Hustle

[Daq Bekkar]

Waiting anxiously for Pagusel to make her move, Daq felt rather surprised at the clumsiness she displayed--first the drop of the cue, then the even stranger bump on the underside of the table as she rose. Clumsiness was incongruous with his understanding of the suspected drug's effects, and in the moments he had been watching her, he'd become certain she was under the influence of it.

Yet, when she spoke, trailing off with the same diffidence he'd come to associate with her, he was no longer so certain. In fact, he was far more convinced that she was sober than intoxicated. Was this some sort of double-play? It was his turn to frown.

"Well go ahead, then," he heard from behind him. "Examine her."

It was that woman's voice. All of a sudden, the disorientation he'd been feeling felt renewed. He wasn't able to think of much else but what she'd said, and how he might get her to speak again. The muscles in his brow slackened, and the frowning expression released its hold on his face, leaving only an absolute blankness that seemed to underscore his artificiality.

"Yes," he said. For a moment, he watched as Pagusel stood in front of him, with her same lazy grace and none of the restless energy he thought he'd seen earlier. "Well, um. It's just that... I don't really think..."

"You don't think she's under the influence of anything?" he heard. The voice had changed. It was still sweet and alluring, but the timbre had deepened.

"N-no," he said. The hazy, leaden feeling had begun to ebb.

"My mistake, then," the voice said again. Daq turned toward it, and looked at the woman's face. It wasn't the same as before. At the same time, he couldn't evaluate how it had changed because he couldn't grasp what it actually looked like. It was just ambiguous. He wasn't even sure if it looked like a woman's face any longer.

"A-are you..."

"I'm sorry to have disturbed you both," the person said, interrupting him. "Please, return to your drinks."

Daq watched as the guardsman spun on his heels without much argument and returned to the bar.

"You, too, Bekkar," he heard, and he soon found himself doing the same.

[Pagusel]

When Pagusel looked back down at the table, she no longer saw a starkly obvious series of shots unto victory. She was sober and far less confident. She found her thoughts wandering strangely as she attempted to focus on what her next shot was supposed to be.

The very thought of soberness was, in its way, troubling to her. As she twiddled the chalk against her cue and stalled for time, a maddening part of her mind lingered on assuaging her soberness with the salve of intimacy; it was impossible. She couldn't have the object of desire, because of his pitiless keepers. And that previous object was confined to memory, and she could be so tasteless as to dredge up for lascivious purposes.

The opponent made a noise of disdain. She glanced up to see her turned away. Pagusel couldn't see her face, but it looked as if she was wearing a shapeless sort of shawl or cloak that she wasn't wearing before. Maybe it was a trick of the figure-obscuring garment or Pagusel's own stooped point of view as she leaned on the table, but the opponent looked taller than she remembered.

She looked back at the balls and readied her aim. Just as she made her shot, a hand alighted on the edge of the table, and while it caught Pagusel's eye, she waited a moment. The second-to-last of her suit went in. Even without chemical enhancement, she was certainly no slouch. She glanced at the hand again, the geometric line of the wrist's tattoo. Slowly, she rose to let her gaze take in this person at the table, the person she intended to defeat.

In a glance, she discerned his very manner. It wasn't even the physical make-up of him so much that reminded him of her lord--king, brother, father, husband?--for the skin was almost too pale to truly be her fair lord, and the little tattoos were merely gestures of what he'd had, and the black hair was kept too neat. She instead saw how easily this man, too, would have claimed the room with the stained glass window, how his vanity and not his fear would motivate him to keep her feminine claws off his face, and how he'd incline his head, once in a great while, in acknowledgment that drugs were enjoyable. All this she saw in his long legs, his half-unbuttoned shirt, his refusal to open his eyes fully.

Pagusel stared at her opponent for a long moment, and the deep, tender hatred in her stomach was forced down by a practiced calm. She blinked, and the heat in her eyes melted into moistness that dropped onto the thin green felt and disappeared before it could interfere with her next shot. It sank, and she had only the 8-ball left.

As she stood up again, she saw her opponent had shifted several steps away from the table. She wiped the back of her hand against her eyes and saw he was looking at the ground and rubbing his hairline as if fretfully. That wasn't at all like her lord. He lifted his face, and what she saw then made her shoulders lose their posture. Her collarbone sank, and her face reflected its slackened suspension.

Why would he do this?

She could have been staring directly at Daq--the real one, the dead one--flawlessly repeated from her memory, with one enhancement: no trace of Morax. She caught the breath she had lost for a moment and pulled up on the sagging upper edge of her wrapped shirt.

The way he was standing there, staring back at her gravely, she felt she could see him: a little bit honest, a great deal defensive. She had never wanted to see her lord again, but this . . . she'd hardly known Daq but was here to mourn him just the same. If she had another chance she could be more urgent in explaining to him that he needed to extricate himself from the grasp of the possessor. Her grip slipped downward on her cue stick. She knew he couldn't truly be back, but it was the persistent power of the hope for second chances that allowed her to suspend her disbelief.

Caught in a trancelike state, Pagusel tore her gaze from Daq only long enough to lean nominally over the table and tap the cue ball in the direction of the 8-ball. It missed entirely. He'd have to come back over to continue the game.

When she looked back at him, she felt she almost had the desire to touch him with her hand, and while she didn't follow through, the desire was not upsetting to her because part of her knew he was a phantasm. She would wait for him to say something, for she didn't want to accidentally blow his ghost away with her breath.

[Daq Bekkar]

If Daq had bothered to turn around, he would have been confronted by the somewhat unsettling sight of his old form. As it was, though, he was following his heart's desire and returning to his seat at the bar to drink. He wondered how it was that he'd stood there watching people play pool for so long, when he was so very thirsty. Finishing off his beer greedily, he flagged for the bartender's attention with zealous motions that were not so easily ignored as the ones he'd employed before.

Ordering two more beers, he thought to himself about how much he'd like to test his new body's limits, to see if he could drink until he blacked out. As he chugged away at one of the drinks, he glanced down the bar to see the guardsman carrying on in the same manner. Without quite lowering the rim from his lips, he motioned with his mug in a sort of half-toast gesture. The guardsman saw him, pointed his finger amicably, and knocked back the rest of his glass of liquor. Daq mulled over the thought that the night was finally starting to pick up after its rather rocky start. Good times were being had.

Behind him, his old body looked nowhere near so jovial. Bekkar's face was contorted into what looked like an anxious frown. Despite whatever limited interaction Zapar would have had with Bekkar and the short time frame in which he could have heard stories about him from his brother, it was an incredibly accurate expression. It suggested obvious tension and annoyance, but it also exhibited a subtle undercurrent of poorly-masked despair, which was the feature that truly hit the mark.

"I hadn't thought I could fool you, Pagusel," he said with a tone that vacillated on the line between ambivalence and sincerity. The tone seemed characteristic of Bekkar, as well. In fact, if anything negative could have been said of the 'guise,' it would be that it captured Bekkar too well, that its faithfulness to the key aspects of the alchemist verged on caricature. "The.. er.. chameleon potion that I mixed up.. It was a bit flawed."

Bekkar scratched at the side of his head and leaned his cue against the edge of the table. He turned to face Pagusel and went to place his hand on hers. If he could just touch her, he might get a better foothold on her emotions, he thought. He might be able to tap into something more powerful, more consistent, more irrational.

"Listen, I.. uh.. I hope you won't hold me to this bet. I was just.. you know. It was a prank, I guess. I-I can't afford something like that.. Hah. It'd.. It'd totally wipe me out, and I just opened--well--I'm about to open this little apothecary out in Shim, and..."

He trailed off pointedly, waiting for her to react.

[Pagusel]

Pagusel, with her measured composure and her efficiently rare concessions to speech, did give off the outward appearance of having an excess of rationality. Zapar would find, however, upon getting a little closer to her psyche, that she was a lot more compulsive than she would seem. She was an addict, but a careful one.

The fact that she didn't quite flinch away from his touch was significant; she only flattened her hand a bit lower beneath his, but didn't pull away. It could have even been an invitation to apply more pressure, but as to the motivation she gave no sign. She lowered her eyes away from his, and behind the screen of long mosquito-lashes, caught a blurred glimpse of crimson for a moment.

The best emotion he'd probably be able to pick out among the relative chaos under her skin was a sadly pessimistic sense of hopefulness, a buoyancy before seasickness. There were other fleeting senses vying for her agency, like her addiction to gambling that was nearly as pressing as the loyalty to her drugs, and the crippling agony of desire for the drooling man in the corner booth. All above those, though, bobbed her attention to the old Daq, and the sweet impossibility of his standing there.

A bit of her long hair flickered into her eye when she blinked, and rather than loose her right hand from his to brush it away, she lifted her left hand around the back of her neck and swept it all into a tail over her left shoulder. The small act made her appear captive, or naive.

"I don't care about the money," she said. It was true; what she cared about was the stakes, the winning, the gambling. But she didn't lift her eyes to his, so she might as well have been concealing a lie.

He probably realized she sort of wanted to ask about the other Daq, the stranger at the bar, the stranger who'd hopped around her home naked, but she was stifling that sentiment exactly the same as one stifles the odd urge to blurt inappropriate things in daily life. It would be mortifying.

"I wanted to discuss some things with you, Mister Bekkar. Outside the realm of business." She spoke self-consciously, as if reciting lines in a play, unwilling to commit entirely to something she knew couldn't be true. As she went on, though, it became easier to pretend, or to believe.

She slipped up for a moment and glanced over at the Daq at the bar, who was starting to blend in a little better with the common people as he drank with them.

[Daq Bekkar]

Standing so close to Pagusel, with his hand on hers, Zapar could practically taste her emotions. He leaned in a bit closer, and the faintest look of distaste--just a transient wrinkle of the brow--passed over the face he'd taken. Zapar decided that, amidst the other lines of worry, the look would have been hard to detect, but he tightened his control over his new features anyway. Pagusel, he intuited, was a very good judge of appearances, despite her strangeness.

Yet, that sensation of distaste weighed upon him. Pagusel's feelings had formed a terribly bitter cocktail. There was the soft, buttery flavor of a dying thrill in the mix, as well the salty tang of addiction and even the velvety, sweet undertone of desire, but the main thing he could distill out of the morass was a cheap, saccharine version of hope. It was too staid, too reluctant for him to enjoy. It was as if she knew his illusion was false but was playing along for the hell of it.

Of course, one could quickly go from playing at something to believing in it, and he decided he would exacerbate her cognitive dissonance by making the game more enjoyable for her, even if that meant he wouldn't approximate Bekkar's mannerisms as closely. Keying in on Pagusel's desire, he soon realized that it was not directed toward the form he had assumed. It was someone else in the room, close to them, though he couldn't quite pinpoint the who or the where exactly.

Fortunately, there was something she wanted from him, even if they were only pretending. The form he'd taken had left an elephant in the room--the other Daq Bekkar, the carefully-groomed man sitting in front of them at the bar, so distinct from the time-worn, stuttering alchemist he claimed to be.

"Outside.. business?" Zapar's Bekkar said. The vocal imitation no longer sounded so pitch-perfect. Something about it was too persuasive, too suggestive. There was no trace of the halting patterns that Bekkar had often used. "You want to discuss him, don't you? The 'new' Daq Bekkar?"

He sighed pointedly, withdrew his hand from Pagusel's, and moved a few steps back. "You'd have to join me in one of the booths," he said, indicating one that, strangely, had no occupied neighbors. "I don't wish to speak of him out here in the open."

[Pagusel]

The folly of the addict was in the tipping point, the step or trip over the line of good sense into the realm of indulgence. Pagusel's drug use was under control. She was a connoisseur and not a glutton as long as she didn't find herself in that dangerous place where one sheds one's sense of responsibility--so coyly --for the sake of a moment. She hadn't found herself in that place in a long time, and the trouble with that was that she was out of practice in her self control. And what was being dangled in front of her was not the drugs she was accustomed to handling.

Pagusel was still composed externally. She merely lowered her eyelashes and inclined her chin in this Daq-phantasm's direction when he spoke. Her hand was stone still beneath his. Inside, a growing voice, a voice disappointed at the anticlimactic resolution of the 8-ball game and fueled by the frustration of that distant, unaddressed affection, put forth unformed ideas that expressed something along the lines of "do it!" Her best defense against herself was to not understand what that meant.

Still, she was captive to the fact that she chose to believe in Daq. More and more, she did; she herself had survived her own death, and why couldn't that be commonplace? Anyone watching her would find her manner a bit unnatural, like that of an amateur play actor, trying to keep her hands and feet on their cues. However, nobody was really watching, not even that smug spectator from before.

Just as Zapar moved his hand away, she rolled her shoulder back, flexed her hand. She was momentarily aware again of the effect of the atmosphere on her, aware she was wading through a mild contact high. That was a comfort. Then, he said something that surprised her, bringing up the other Daq. Pagusel's usually unchanging face registered the moment.

She took the opportunity to recapture what she, beyond better judgment, was seeking. She picked up her cloak and felt dizzy as she rose, and took the steps to close the distance he had just made. "Not him--not that," she said quietly. Her eyes were turned down because her head was swimming just a bit, and she put her free hand on Zapar-Daq's forearm as much to steady herself as to assuage the yearning her palm had been feeling in the seconds since he'd pulled away.

"About . . . you--" Pagusel nearly said his name at the end of that, but her tongue stopped her for it would have sounded too stilted. She let his arm go and walked with something like poise to the booth he had indicated. Before she sat, she looked back at him, and an arch of fiction was in her gaze. She wanted him to take his cue, more than she should have. She was letting herself get dangerously close to that place addicts shouldn't go.

[Daq Bekkar]

The way that Pagusel stumbled toward him and grabbed his arm shortly after his hand was withdrawn gave Zapar a special kind of pleasure, like a nasty puppeteer putting on a 'show' with a new doll. Having long since made his way through Malatrast's staff, he'd almost forgotten the feeling of fresh seduction, the first, tentative manipulations. They'd kept him cooped up for too long, and yet... He had to remind himself that this was not the time to indulge. His brother had sent him to recover the crafted man, and Zapar was so terribly eager to have a chance to 'please' his brother.

He licked his lips. His instincts told him that it was a decidedly un-Daq-like gesture, but he needed to feel something on them. If there was one thing he shared in common with Pagusel, it was addiction. Yet he was less studied about it, and he had rarely seen it fit to practice self control. From his perspective, the lip-licking was a necessary concession, like so many other little moment-to-moment gratifications that were immediate rather than deferred.

In the brief moment that Pagusel turned away from him to walk to the booth, Zapar couldn't help but assess her from a more.. aesthetic level. Most of her was hidden by that ugly shifter's cloak, but he'd become a connoisseur of the human form over the past decades, or however long it had been since whatever it was that had happened to trap him. He could imagine her brown skin, the economy of her slender form, her lanky limbs. Then he caught sight of the pale lines of her tattoo that receded into her cloak, and his vision of her was soured. He couldn't possibly imagine what shapes they took under her garmets.

Pagusel turned to inspect him, and the look on her face made him frown. She looked less like a puppet and more like an impatient supporting actress. Inhaling sharply, Zapar took a seat across from her and placed his hands on the table, well within her reach if she felt the urge to take them.

Hunching over like he'd seen Daq do, he craned his head up, lifted his brow out of his field of vision, and looked at Pagusel with a grave expression. He'd planned the segue hastily, and his heart wasn't in it, but he went with it anyway.

"Listen, uh, you know there's no..--err you can't exactly talk about me... without.. him, or.. it. Whatever you want to call the newcomer."

He took a moment to look down at the grain of the table. It was clear to him that he was running the risk of spoiling the ruse by steering the conversation like this, but Morax had promised him some.. family time.. in exchange for his services. Nevertheless, he was still holding out the hope that he could have his cake and eat Pagusel, too.

"The one at the bar.. He's a science experiment, of sorts. Fashioned by my brother using the item you helped him procure. But.. he's not just that," he said. As he spoke, he shifted his feet along the sticky floor to bring his legs closer to Pagusel's. "He's got my memories and, from what Morax says, he's also got a piece of my.. essence. And.. the way that the, uh, magic works, is that if he expires with that essence, then... well."

Morax had failed to brief Zapar on the nature of Daq's relationship with magic, so it seemed to him like a good idea to throw the word out casually--as a catch-all for any questions about how the essence business might work. Mortar for the cracks between his untruths.

"So.. You see.. The experiment's well-being is in our best interests," he said. Leaning in more closely, "now, what was it that you wanted to discuss about... me?"

[Pagusel]

Pagusel positioned her hands on the table in mirror image of Zapar's: also close enough to his that he could touch them if he wanted. Her brow slackened when he gave her that look across the short expanse, which so reminded her of talking to him in his smoldering lab.

At that time, he had been flickering between himself and Morax. And now--as he spoke, her sympathetic expression began to ice over--he was an entirely different kind of fraud. This one wasn't even changing before her eyes . . . the audacity. Here he was, talking about himself as Daq in the first person, and in the same breath talking about his 'brother' and the item she'd helped 'him' procure.

Pagusel experienced for several moments the nauseating, dizzy sense of relief of having taken several steps back from the edge of a steep cliff. She heard the crawl of the man's feet on the grime of the floor and her nausea compounded. She kept her eyes turned down but couldn't help that her chin turned away from her companion in disgust.

She was not going to fall into the trap of this alluring thing. When she looked back up at him, she had already tucked away the gratitude she almost felt.The cynical piece she'd grown within herself was quick to eat up any credit due others for her personal triumphs. Though it was his missteps that drew her out of her fantasy, she would not allow that to be his good deed. Instead, she stared at him with the mild anger and surprise of an actress whose opposite has forgotten his lines.

However, she didn't correct him. She didn't pointedly say "No Daq, nobody's brother was there." There were some thoughts trying to form in her head, but she couldn't make heads or tails of exactly what the relationship was between Morax, the deceased Daq, and the new Daq. And this genealogically confused phantasm had nothing useful to add. All she could piece together at the moment was that she wanted to keep Daq's "essence" away from this fraud and that she wasn't going to say what she originally intended to say to him.

She had wanted to bask in her second chance with Daq, tell him all the more urgently to shake himself of his possessor. But instead, she was going to let him forget more of his lines. She was

Pagusel lowered her eyelashes and leaned forward to support her weight on her forearms; her wrists blanched slightly with the pressure. When she lifted her eyes to him, she was full of fiction again. "I wanted to talk to you about . . ." She paused and turned her lips into her mouth to wet them. "The conversation we were having earlier, and never got to finish. You remember what I told you about magic, don't you?" She merely mouthed the practically taboo word.

"It's very important to me you remember that. And please, you must share your thoughts on it, now that you've had time with them."

[Daq Bekkar]

As soon as Pagusel turned away from him, Zapar reviewed what he'd said and found the error--Morax was not Daq's brother. Far from it. He had several options before him. He could try to reestablish the illusion, pursue a different tack, or simply walk away from the mess with Bekkar in tow. He stared at Pagusel with Daq's mournful and intelligent eyes as he parsed through his thoughts. Instinctively, he backed off from her. He could read that his advances were unwelcome and only weakening his position.

When Pagusel turned her focus back to him and leaned forward on her arms, Zapar's interest was piqued. The old expression had returned to her face, and she seemed very much like a fly that had gotten trapped in a web it had just escaped from. Yet, this conversation she'd brought up was something he didn't know about.

It occurred to him that the question was a sort of test. If he failed it, the illusion would be dispelled completely. If he passed it, perhaps he had a chance of regaining his footing. He could only guess at how Daq would've reacted based on what his brother had told him--that the man was so opposed to magic that he often failed to recognize it. But.. without knowing the content..

Zapar inhaled sharply and gave one of Daq's wan smiles as he exhaled through his nose. "Well," he said. "I've thought about it. Yes, yes I've.. I've thought about it. But... but-ah.. Yeah. It's the sort of thing that one talks about over a drink. And, uh, as you can see, I don't have anything."

He stood up preemptively and put his hands out to indicate the empty table. "Would you care for anything while I'm up?" he asked. He made sure to not glance at Bekkar as he gestured to the bar.

[Pagusel]

Pagusel's gaze on Zapar was judicious; she at once anticipated his failure and searched for a sign of his rebound. She tucked the tips of her fingers tightly under the heels of her hands, and her knuckles showed their sinew.

When he indicated the expanse of the table, she looked down at it suddenly, as if expecting to see something unexpected. Unfortunately, this one had no such alchemy to offer, and the table was still free of spirits. She was aware of her soberness like a pebble in her shoe, an itch in her ear; she was aware of his stalling as well. She would sustain a note of stubbornness, herself, and not allow him to usurp that talent of Daq's.

"If you insist," she said in response, and then added--for she wasn't interested in letting him approach that frustrating New Daq on his own--"I will have to reacquaint myself with the selection."

This was a largish pub, and as such had a selection slightly broader than the standard of one ale, and perhaps a wine. With the right seasons came a rotating selection of distilled grain liquors. Frequently Keltarian spirits would be available.

She stood up as well and started towards the bar presumptuously. As she walked, her hands crept back to feel--an attempt in futility to smooth--the wrinkly marks the rough wooden bench had left on her thighs. She made her way directly to where Daq was sitting, or rather barely hanging on to consciousness, she would imagine, at the rate he was drinking.

Pagusel's shoulder bumped against his as she jostled her way up to the counter. In the brief moment, she frowned softly and murmured, "I will return that box to you if you go right now to talk to the sluts at that table." She indicated the table with the turn of her shoulder as she sidled away from Daq. There were a few of the "sluts"--as Pagusel had phrased it, with no particular inflection beyond simple fact--at a table not far from the bar, girls who had been ogling the terribly good-looking Daq earlier; one in particular was still glancing conspicuously at him every few moments and twining her abominably curly brown hair around her fingers.

Pagusel was now standing eying the bottles of liquor on display with intense interest. A bartender tried to talk to her, but she didn't respond, she just waited for the Daq-looking thing to come. She had certainly not been anything but obvious in how she handled Daq, as the stalling phantasm was nearly sure to have seen. She was still sort of acting, though, acting as if she hadn't made any communication with the third wheel.

[Daq Bekkar]

Feeling something collide with him, Daq turned his head in Pagusel's direction and tried to focus on her, but he was too dizzy from the sudden motion of redirecting his gaze. Squeezing his eyes shut, he rubbed his right hand over his eyelids and cheeks. He relished the dull sensation of his rough fingertips pressed against his skin. The words coming from her mouth barely registered with him--he certainly couldn't figure out what box she was talking about--but he followed the line of her shoulders to see the table of women. He spilled a bit of his drink as he tried to incline his glass toward Pagusel in acknowledgement. Talking to those attractive, rather loose-looking young ladies seemed, in his present state, like a fine idea.

With a minor wobble, he got to his feet and staggered over toward them. Before taking his seat, he attempted to say something suave that, judging by the tittering of the three women, evidently came out a little more slurred than he'd intended. Whether it was his knees giving out on him or an alcohol-fueled rush of confidence, he found himself plopping down in the empty seat next to them anyway.

Zapar, who had at first simply been watching for a glimpse of Pagusel's legs as her hands ran over the backs of her thighs, immediately noticed the move she had made. She was expecting him to try getting a peek at their intended script by asking the true Bekkar. Yet, he'd never intended to be so foolishly direct about it. He smiled at her naivety. In its own way, it was arousing, like the wide-eyed, expectant look of a child.

Quickly surveying the crowd, he found a waitress with a particularly frowzy, weak-minded sort of appearance. His form shifted easily into that of a stout man with a beer gut and gray hair at his temples. As he approached her, her attention latched onto him immediately.

"Oy, Randall," she said. A fishy stench of decay wafted from her mouth as she came close to him and spoke. "Wuttya doin' here?"

Zapar wasn't particularly sure how Randall was supposed to speak, so he just relied on the timbre of the form's voice to carry his performance. "I'm on an errand," he said.

"Yea?" she said, placing her hands on her wide hips.

"Yea," he said, mimicking her. "And I need your help. You see that man sitting with those girls...?"

The waitress moved closer to him and took his hand. "I'm listening, sweet'art."

Zapar leaned in to whisper the rest of his instructions to her and plant a quick kiss on her sweaty cheek. While his hand was pressed against her stomach, he palmed her his red handkerchief.

After his brief instructions to the waitress, Zapar moved into a tight knot of people and shifted his appearance back into that of the deceased alchemist. When he joined Pagusel at the bar, he decided to avoid making an excuse for taking so long in getting there, just as she seemed not to acknowledge her short interaction with Bekkar.

Gesturing at the liquor bottles Pagusel seemed to have been studying, he asked, "Did you find anything among them that you would like? I've--uh--always thought that the Darleone Brandy tasted nice, but pick out whatever you'd like. It's my treat."

He spoke without much consideration to proper tone or mannerism. The true Bekkar would have stuttered once or twice more, and he might have put a few stipulations on which liquors he was willing to pay for and which were too expensive. Nevertheless, he was just killing time until the waitress came to return his 'lost' handkerchief.

In the booth with the three young women, Daq hardly noticed the waitress approach him, but almost as soon as she spoke to him, he fell unconscious. When he came to, his right hand felt cramped, and there was a bit of residue on the outside of his pinky.

"Whu... What just happened?" he asked. The girls around him started giggling, most likely at the bewildered expression on his face.

"Whaddya mean?" One of them asked. She ran her fingers through her blond hair, pushing it out of her face and behind her ear.

"I--uh--what did I.. How long was I out for?"

Another one responded. "Ha--You weren't out; you were scribblin' something down on the scrap of paper the waitress just picked up! Don'cha remember?"

"No.. I," he said, but before he could formulate anything else, the topic had begun to seem unimportant. He decided to return to his flirtations.

[Pagusel]

Pagusel was staring at cloudy bottle of amber liquid, marked with a foreign script, when she heard a rise in the tittering behind her that indicated drunken Daq had managed to find his mark. She squinted at the bottle, discerning individual shreds of particulate suspended within.

She became aware of what felt like a strange upset in the temporal inertia--strange for that she was sober . . . was her drinking companion really taking so long to catch up to her? She stared harder at the strange liquor.

When he came up behind her, her stomach lurched softly, as if riding too quickly over a hillock. Time caught up with his arrival, and she noticed how sore her elbows were from leaning so firmly on them. She surprised herself, sadly, with how she managed to sense that this wasn't how the Daq she briefly knew would have ordered a drink. She'd have disliked his way, she imagined.

"My tastes run counter to the Elvish sort." Such small talk was also unlike her, but this Daq wouldn't know any better. "I'll have the Striped Diamond," she said, indicating a dry fortified wine from Keltaris. "Make it a double."

Pagusel pressed her fingertips her her lips and gave her companion a sideways look as she waited there at the bar. No use allowing him to handle her drink unsupervised.

[Daq Bekkar]

Sensing a bit of petulance lingering within the diction of Pagusel's denial--that her tastes ran counter to the sort he'd suggested--Zapar decided to pull out a few stops with his order. He knew, for instance, that Daq had been a physician. As such, he might be partial to those baleful alcoholic beverages developed by doctors as digestifs. And he also knew, from his brother's cautioning, about the most volatile point of Daq's personal history--his decision to leave his home in Skelleftejäure. Surely such a man as Daq would be given to pangs of nostalgia. Therefore, he selected a drink made with the characteristic ginger and clove bitters of that region.

Careful to exhibit the sort of diffidence that would be expected of him, he ordered, "And, uh--excuse me--could I have a, um, Pink Gin with the.. the Ingefärig bitters?" He pointed briefly at the bottle and glanced down at the bar as the bartender made a face at his order. If Pagusel hadn't found anything odd about his order yet, she might pick up on the bartender's expression. It was an unusual drink for a Marnian bar, but not so unusual that it couldn't be made.

He allowed for a brief, awkward silence, and, before he could turn to Pagusel to end it himself, he was interrupted by the ugly waitress who tapped on his shoulder and handed him his red handkerchief. Taking it, he was careful to hold onto the piece of parchment tucked within, so that it remained concealed. "How--uh..?" he said.

"You dropped it on your way over," she said plainly. Zapar could hardly tell if she was a good actress or simply so uninspiringly dull that she saw no significance in the exchange. He stammered out a short thank you and shoved the handkerchief into his coat pocket as she turned and left.

When drink came in a slightly grubby highball glass, he pulled out just enough bishani to pay for it along with Pagusel's. He only included a quarter-Bishan tip instead of the half-bishan tip that might be expected of someone paying for two drinks instead of a single order.

"Shall we take our seats?" he asked Pagusel. Without waiting for her response, he began to head over. On his way, he reached into his pocket, surreptitiously fished out the parchment and scanned it. Healing magic as a crutch, simply reconciled, small cosmic scales... things beyond devils. Yes, he could work with that.

[Pagusel]

Daq's voice sounded more like his own when he ordered. Pagusel felt the fluttering sense of deja vu; it was as if she'd heard those exact words exit his mouth before, although they'd never so much as had a drink together.

She watched along the length of her nose as their drinks were prepared: hers, poured slowly into a cordial glass, over a small shred of dried beetroot--the unelegant local method of providing the layered "stripe" of color that the Keltaris crowd usually achieved with saffron--and his, put together more grudgingly, with a few shakes of bitters dripped into the glass as a hasty afterthought.

As their drinks were being finished, Pagusel found herself slightly startled that Daq was speaking to someone else . . . a waitress returning his handkerchief, nothing special. She took her drink and admired for a moment the hazy stripe of ruby red in the bottom of the glass. She saw the tip Daq left and sensed again a near-memory, this time of his parsimony. This felt less like acting; her diaphragm shivered. She was almost hopeful again.

As she gazed into her drink, careful not to spill any on her way back, an unexpected memory arose: the pool of red against the clear wine . . . the stain of blood on a pristine white handkerchief.

What had that embroidery been, on Daq's handkerchief? His monogram, perhaps, she couldn't remember. But she did recall he had used that to mop up his blood when he fell in the woods, and why soil the thing if he had a red handkerchief to use all along?

She returned to her seat, sipped at her drink to calm the twinges of the paranoia she felt brewing. Despite her attempts at self-control, she found herself glancing about for that waitress who'd returned the kerchief, then gotten lost again in the crowd. Her next sip, she held under her tongue, let the bitter-sweetness of the fortified wine dull her anxiousness. Yes, something was amiss. She didn't know what. She had to bide her time.

"Remind me--" She gave a small cough after a minor mistime in swallowing interfered with her speech. "--what exactly we were talking about?"

[Daq Bekkar]

Zapar wasn't sure what sort of gaffe he'd made, or if he'd made any at all, but something in Pagusel's affect--her nervous glances, her hasty sips at her drink--gave him pause. She was far from being completely at ease. Having had no experience with her liquor tolerance, he couldn't be sure if the alcohol would soon come to his aid in that regard. Morax had warned him that she was an addict, so his suspicions were that her tolerance would be high, despite her small stature.

When she coughed, he made a delicate move, a lurch toward her that stopped shortly after the motion started, as if he intended to help her but restrained himself for some reason or another. He suspected, given her almost skittish mannerisms, that she had issues with her personal space, and he imagined that Daq would have encountered these boundaries. He sat back and sipped slowly at his own drink before responding to her question. The bitters had an awful, grassy flavor to them, and he was forced to conceal his brewing grimace with a curt smile.

"Pagusel, you had.. you'd asked me about--ah--my thoughts on our conversation regarding... regarding magic," he said hesitantly, as if embarrassed to be reminding her. He took another sip, this time putting his hand to his mouth and clearing his throat to mask his distaste.

"You were, uh, right, you know.. I had some time to think about it, and I.. well.. I generally agree," he said. He knew this wouldn't be enough, but the trick would fail if he launched immediately into more specifics. He wanted to allow some time for her suspicions to grow before quashing them.

"I think, well.. Let's say that I don't, first, precisely.. um.. believe in magic, per se." This much he knew about Bekkar. This was part of Morax's interest in him--his bafflingly illogical disbelief. "Yet, there's.. there's no denying, right, that its effects.. That it has an effect. I've.. I've seen people get better when they are healed, so maybe..."

He took a big gulp and let the grimace show on his face. He wanted to appear like he was steeling himself to say something difficult, a hard-won consideration. "Maybe it is a product of their reconciliation.. their simple belief in it. I suppose that would make it a crutch, in a way.. a placebo. That might be how their small cosmic scales are tipped. And, I see what you mean about expanding my world view to look beyond demons. Of course, that was difficult to do while I was still inhabited by one."

Finally, he played what he thought was his trump card. Daq, quite conveniently, had written one more note. My cut... Pagusel 'used to be able to fix?' He lowered his voice quite considerably and asked her, "Pagusel, did you once practice such.. you know.. 'magic?' "

It was her turn to speak, to be evaluated, and perhaps the act of disclosing something about her past would put her off of her suspicions about him.