Chapter one: A Most Unusual Demon
Here we go. We have magical gifts, pretty uniforms, tons of angst, unresolved sexual tension, Random Capitalisation of Words, violent murder, and an over-powered yet tragically flawed protagonist. It's the Demesneverse, all right.
Chapter one
The floor she was lying on was pale stone, almost a dirty white, made from many uneven bricks that had been pieced together without masonry like the pieces of an endless puzzle. Each brick had a rune engraved on it. To her blurry gaze, they seemed to flicker and dance.
Witch Stone. Her destiny and birthright, her servant and only friend. She chuckled, almost hysterically, and drew her hand over the uneven floor, dazedly caressing it. Her fingers left lines of blood behind them.
With a long, drawn-out whimper of effort, she forced herself to her feet. Every muscle ached, her lungs were heavy with dust, and there was a deep, hot ache in her chest that she thought might be a cracked rib.
Never mind. Never mind. She began to stagger onwards, down through the corridor. As she walked, she gasped words of power beneath her breath, and the Witch Stone walls heeded - bulging out where she passed and receding back to their original form when she moved on, like she as a magnet pulling iron fillings towards her. It comforted her. She had a little bit of power, even here, even now.
She was Dara of Sablecrest Manor in Shadowed Citadel Demesne, caste of Mystics, and she was going to her well-deserved doom. She had figured it out in the end - learned just what menace was towering over her city, what ancient curse was finally going to be fulfilled - but it had been too late, too late. If she had been smarter... if she had been quicker...
No sense worrying about that now.
Faces danced before her eyes, accompanied by the echoes of names. Kroll. Mansuur. Kim. Rinabaar. Jalon.
Jalon.
She didn't think that she could survive what was to come, but she hoped that she might strike a final blow against the evil, make her death mean something. It didn't seem too much to ask.
It probably was, though.
There was a door at the end of the corridor. Dara didn't stop to open it - instead, she snarled a command and made the Witch Stone of its frame stretch and distend. With a crack, the door was ripped off its hinges, and Dara stepped into the sanctum.
It was a nightmare. Fallen, bloody bodies lay around an dais, where a stone cauldron boiled, filled with blood and more arcane things. The walls were engraved with scenes of carnage that made the real one before her look innocent.
As she watched, a figure rose out of the cauldron, emerging from its unclean depths, its form dripping and running with that heretical elixir. With a slow, graceful motion, it stepped over the edge. Its form was male, naked and beautiful.
It smiled when it saw her, a smile that had once made her heart race.
"Dara..." the demon whispered.
Two days earlier
The carriage was large and black and opulent - a little too much so to be in keeping with the current fashion. Bronzen filigree trailed its sides, and on the roof a small but genuine Witch Stone gargoyle was frozen in an eternal snarl. The horses were gargoyles too, big, clumsy things whose every step struck sparks against the street, Witch Stone against Witch Stone. There was no driver. The owner of the carriage didn't need one.
The carriage stopped outside of a tall office building, and its owner stepped out. She was short - not conspicuously so, just shorter enough than average that she had gotten used to the idea of other people always being somewhere above her. Her hair, when it fell out of the white-fur-lined hood, was long and dark, and her face was round and would, to an outside observer, be pale. No one who had ever seen her thought of her as pale, though. No one who had ever seen her was aware that anyone could be anything but pale.
Dara of Sablecrest Manor, caste of Mystics, hurried into the building, the fur-lined cloak billowing around her. She felt a thrill in the pit of her stomach, a spark that wasn't quite happiness but was, at least, a pleasure in being alive. She only felt alive, only felt real, when there was a mystery to solve - and this one was a good one.
Up above, beyond the reach of the street lights and watch fires, the sky was pitch black, devoid of sun, moon and stars. It had been that way for four hundred years.
There were a couple of Soldiers in the stairway, dressed in the blue and purple greatcoats that served as uniforms for the military caste of Shadowed Citadel Demesne. Both of them looked grim, grasping the hilts of their sheathed sabers. Soldiers never liked it when things didn't make sense - they wanted something concrete in front of them that they could chop to pieces and be done with it. It was an understandable, if sometimes unfortunate, attitude among the people who formed the first line of defense against the Wastelands, but it was also why they needed people like Dara. The Wastelands didn't always oblige you by making immediate sense - and for that matter, human beings could sometimes do things that made you wish you could believe that they were possessed.
"Mystic Dara." One of the Soldiers bowed. "We were told to expect you. The crime scene is..."
"... fifth floor, the door to the right, about halfway down the office," Dara said. "Yes, thank you, I saw the broken window. Just get out of my way and let me do my job, would you? Rinabaar will tell me all I need to know."
She swept by them, up the stairs. She felt secretly disappointed that neither of them asked how she knew that it was Major Rinabaar who was in charge of the crime scene (she had spotted a footprint in the mud outside the door that was big, heavy and came from a distinctive brand of fine military boots, an observation that she felt quite pleased with. Not that it was a big leap, she ahd to admit; the case was, technically, his). As far as interacting with other people went, patiently explaining her deductions to the average fool was about as close as she usually came.
There were more Soldiers, but they let her through without comment - most of the Shadowed Citadel military knew by now that Dara, caste of Mystics, was notoriously waspish and should be addressed only when you had something important to say.
The office was a long, hall-like room, warmed by a fireplace at each end and filled with desks. There was nothing very special about it - as a cursory glance in her reference books had told Dara before leaving her house, the Nobles who worked here were responsible for maintaining the food supply to the neghbourhoods along the shores of Cold Lake. It seemed strange that anything had happened here that was worth taking a life over.
Still, someone had. As she walked down the length of the office, she could see the body on the floor. A short, fat man, though dressed in silken clothes that flattered his figure as well as was possible. His head, with its carefully maintained locks of black hair, lay bent at an impossible angle. His eyes stared at the ceiling in something that resembled horror.
There were Soldiers all around, searching through the office meticulously though - to Dara's eye - clumsily. One of them came to meet her when he noticed her approach.
"Mystic Dara," he said formally and snapped off a strict salute. "Thank you for joining us so promptly."
Major Rinabaar was a very large man - Dara thought he might be nearly two meters tall, and broad across the shoulders like a bull. It made him look impressive, but Dara knew - not from being told, but from the kind of extrapolation that led to her being called in at situations such as this - that he was actually embarrassed about his bulk, thinking that it made him appear brutish. He made every effort to offset such an impression. His gold-buttoned officer's uniform was of impeccable fit, and so clean and neat that it looked like it had never been worn before. His hair, black as oil, was just long enough to curl and set into a fashionable style, and every hair in his full, short beard was trimmed to perfection. He smelled, faintly, if a discreet, flowery cologne.
Dara had to admit that she always felt a bit flustered around Rinabaar. Partly it was because she find him hard to read - a disconcerting feeling for someone who was used to finding almost everyone an open book, but Rinabaar was so formal and militaristic that he didn't give off most clues that she normally relied on. Mostly, though, the reason was a lot more embarrassingly simple - he was very handsome, and Dara was no better at dealing with men as men than she was at dealing with people as people.
"What do we know about the victim?" she said. Keeping things formal was what always worked best for her, when she couldn't bully her way through.
"Marias of Stonegarden Park, caste of Nobles," Rinabaar answered promptly. "Age thirty-eight, no current partner, a number of acknowledged children by different mothers. Working as one of Noble Talmat's clerks, and apparently without further ambitions. As lifestyles go, a dedicated Hedonist."
"Sounds harmless enough," Dara said, though she couldn't hide a slight look of disgust. She could map out all the possible psychological reasons for and implications of the Hedonistic lifestyle, but she could not, personally, understand the Hedonist any more than she could understand their polar opposites, the Ascetics. If she was anything, she was a Sophist - to her, life was about elevating the mind, not about indulging or depriving the flesh.
"We will, of course, question everyone who knew him," Rinabaar said. "But we woke up Noble Talmat and interviewed him already, and he denies that Marias had any enemies to speak of. And, of course..."
"... it's the same kind of killing as the first two," Dara said. "Any connection at all with the other two victims?"
"None," Rinabaar said. "They all grew up in different places, lived in different places, worked in different places, associated with different social circles. It seems completely random. The only rational theory is that this is the work of a demon."
"Is it?" Dara said. She drew her hands over one of the outer walls. Several bricks of Witch Stone were crumbled and broken - the building was ancient, and Witch Stone was fragile, though it annoyed her that no one had bothered to repair it. There were never enough witches for all the Witch Stone houses, but surely an official governmental building...
"I believe so," Rinabaar said. If he took umbrage, he hid it well. "Especially since the office was securely locked, with no signs of forced entry, just like the cathedral and the private office in Gargoyles' Dance Abbey. This time, there are more people who would have had the key, I admit, but then there is that..."
He gestured to the shattered window.
"All the shattered glass is on the outside," he said. "Like before. Someone entered without breaking any doors or windows, and then forced their way out. Clearly, a demon teleported in, killed Marias, and then left violently."
Dara shook her head.
"No, that doesn't make sense," she said. "If it teleported in, why not teleport back out? Conversely, if it broke its way out, why not break its way in?"
Rinabaar shrugged, bulging muscles moving beneath the splendidly tailored uniform. Dara felt a flutter in her stomach and had to work to keep her trail of thought. It was impossible not to be affected by the sheer weight of physical power that was embodied in Rinabaar.
"Demons are prone to theatrics," he said. "It might enjoy the idea of appearing out of nowhere, taking a life, and then disappearing amidst an orgy of destruction."
"It's not impossible..." Dara admitted grudgingly. It wasn't, either - in fact, it was the possibility that suited the facts best. It was just that that didn't mean that it suited them well - it was a clumsy theory, cobbled together from assumptions to fit a situation that made no particular sense, and Dara distrusted such theories. The correct theory, once you had it, was usually surprisingly simple. The more you had to postulate to make a theory work, the worse the chances of it being right were.
She shook her head.
"There are precious few demons that could teleport into a Demesne," she said. "A fairly powerful one could materialise, I'll grant you, and maybe keep itself together for long enough to snap someone's neck. But after that, it would fall to pieces - just dissolve back into the Nowhere. Demons have trouble enough walking into a Demesne, and that lets them be solid to start with. A demon teleporting has to assemble its body in reality, and if it did it inside a Demesne it would be fatally poisoned right from the start."
"We are not a very stable Demesne, though," Rinabaar pointed out. "A Demesne works because the focused spirit and will to live by large numbers of people in one place hurts and repels demons. Our spirit and will to live is a little... below that of other Demesnes."
"Well, other Demesnes don't have eternal night and winter to bring them down," Dara said, feeling oddly defensive of her motherland. "Anyway, look at the facts. Most demons don't teleport inside the Citadel's walls. They climb over, when and where they can, and then lurk arond the streets causing trouble until they can't stand to remain anymore, and then they teleport out. It looks to me like that much is true here too, just like everywhere else."
"There is such a thing as especially powerful demons, though," Rinabaar said. "Once you have eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
"Rubbish," Dara said. "If you eliminate the impossible and find yourself left with the improbable, then it's a hundred to one that somewhere along the way you missed something. The improbable almost never happens. That's what 'improbable' means."
Irritable, she taped the damaged wall with her finger, growling a few words beneath her breath. With a scraping noise, the Witch Stone bricks began to bend and flex, tiny fragments rubbing against each other to assume a more symmetrical shape. Dara spoke more words, and entire bricks clattered across the surface of the wall, assuming new positions. After a moment, she stepped back to look at the new design.
"Still not perfect," she said. "But it looks less obviously crumbling and broken now."
She paused, looking thoughtfully at the wall. Half of Shadowed Citadel Demesne was built from Witch Stone, and these days most of it was in disrepair. Instead of doing much about it, people seemed to have decided that it was romantic to live in a city of decaying splendour. In fact, some of the holes and cracks you saw in walls and floors weren't natural - they had been intentionally created to fit the fashionable aesthetic. Dara, never one for romance, just saw a lot of flaws in otherwise solid constructions.
There was a thought there, and she made a mental note to chase it down later. There was no hurrying inspiration, even when it was important.
She glanced back at Rinabaar. He looked at her with his usual expression of efficient neutrality.
"Did that make you uncomfortable?" she said.
"No, Mystic," he said.
"It does, for some people," Dara said. "Conjuration, and Conjurers, is one thing. It's hard to disapprove of the people who keep feeding you, clothing you and giving you pretty things. Witchcraft, though... people don't always appreciate the reminder that there are people who could turn the walls of your house against you."
"I'm sure," Rinabaar said. The look on his face was unreadable. She half-wished that he would ask her what she was prattling on about, even though truth be told, she couldn't rightly say herself. There was something... just something...
She shook her head.
"I'll have a look around," she said. "See if I can find anything new. But if it is like the other places, there will be almost suspiciously little. Your demon doesn't leave footprints either, does it?"
"I admit that it is, indeed, a very unusual demon..." Rinabaar said.
Dara snorted and got to work, all the while wondering what it was that was nagging at her in the back of her head.
Chapter one
The floor she was lying on was pale stone, almost a dirty white, made from many uneven bricks that had been pieced together without masonry like the pieces of an endless puzzle. Each brick had a rune engraved on it. To her blurry gaze, they seemed to flicker and dance.
Witch Stone. Her destiny and birthright, her servant and only friend. She chuckled, almost hysterically, and drew her hand over the uneven floor, dazedly caressing it. Her fingers left lines of blood behind them.
With a long, drawn-out whimper of effort, she forced herself to her feet. Every muscle ached, her lungs were heavy with dust, and there was a deep, hot ache in her chest that she thought might be a cracked rib.
Never mind. Never mind. She began to stagger onwards, down through the corridor. As she walked, she gasped words of power beneath her breath, and the Witch Stone walls heeded - bulging out where she passed and receding back to their original form when she moved on, like she as a magnet pulling iron fillings towards her. It comforted her. She had a little bit of power, even here, even now.
She was Dara of Sablecrest Manor in Shadowed Citadel Demesne, caste of Mystics, and she was going to her well-deserved doom. She had figured it out in the end - learned just what menace was towering over her city, what ancient curse was finally going to be fulfilled - but it had been too late, too late. If she had been smarter... if she had been quicker...
No sense worrying about that now.
Faces danced before her eyes, accompanied by the echoes of names. Kroll. Mansuur. Kim. Rinabaar. Jalon.
Jalon.
She didn't think that she could survive what was to come, but she hoped that she might strike a final blow against the evil, make her death mean something. It didn't seem too much to ask.
It probably was, though.
There was a door at the end of the corridor. Dara didn't stop to open it - instead, she snarled a command and made the Witch Stone of its frame stretch and distend. With a crack, the door was ripped off its hinges, and Dara stepped into the sanctum.
It was a nightmare. Fallen, bloody bodies lay around an dais, where a stone cauldron boiled, filled with blood and more arcane things. The walls were engraved with scenes of carnage that made the real one before her look innocent.
As she watched, a figure rose out of the cauldron, emerging from its unclean depths, its form dripping and running with that heretical elixir. With a slow, graceful motion, it stepped over the edge. Its form was male, naked and beautiful.
It smiled when it saw her, a smile that had once made her heart race.
"Dara..." the demon whispered.
Two days earlier
The carriage was large and black and opulent - a little too much so to be in keeping with the current fashion. Bronzen filigree trailed its sides, and on the roof a small but genuine Witch Stone gargoyle was frozen in an eternal snarl. The horses were gargoyles too, big, clumsy things whose every step struck sparks against the street, Witch Stone against Witch Stone. There was no driver. The owner of the carriage didn't need one.
The carriage stopped outside of a tall office building, and its owner stepped out. She was short - not conspicuously so, just shorter enough than average that she had gotten used to the idea of other people always being somewhere above her. Her hair, when it fell out of the white-fur-lined hood, was long and dark, and her face was round and would, to an outside observer, be pale. No one who had ever seen her thought of her as pale, though. No one who had ever seen her was aware that anyone could be anything but pale.
Dara of Sablecrest Manor, caste of Mystics, hurried into the building, the fur-lined cloak billowing around her. She felt a thrill in the pit of her stomach, a spark that wasn't quite happiness but was, at least, a pleasure in being alive. She only felt alive, only felt real, when there was a mystery to solve - and this one was a good one.
Up above, beyond the reach of the street lights and watch fires, the sky was pitch black, devoid of sun, moon and stars. It had been that way for four hundred years.
There were a couple of Soldiers in the stairway, dressed in the blue and purple greatcoats that served as uniforms for the military caste of Shadowed Citadel Demesne. Both of them looked grim, grasping the hilts of their sheathed sabers. Soldiers never liked it when things didn't make sense - they wanted something concrete in front of them that they could chop to pieces and be done with it. It was an understandable, if sometimes unfortunate, attitude among the people who formed the first line of defense against the Wastelands, but it was also why they needed people like Dara. The Wastelands didn't always oblige you by making immediate sense - and for that matter, human beings could sometimes do things that made you wish you could believe that they were possessed.
"Mystic Dara." One of the Soldiers bowed. "We were told to expect you. The crime scene is..."
"... fifth floor, the door to the right, about halfway down the office," Dara said. "Yes, thank you, I saw the broken window. Just get out of my way and let me do my job, would you? Rinabaar will tell me all I need to know."
She swept by them, up the stairs. She felt secretly disappointed that neither of them asked how she knew that it was Major Rinabaar who was in charge of the crime scene (she had spotted a footprint in the mud outside the door that was big, heavy and came from a distinctive brand of fine military boots, an observation that she felt quite pleased with. Not that it was a big leap, she ahd to admit; the case was, technically, his). As far as interacting with other people went, patiently explaining her deductions to the average fool was about as close as she usually came.
There were more Soldiers, but they let her through without comment - most of the Shadowed Citadel military knew by now that Dara, caste of Mystics, was notoriously waspish and should be addressed only when you had something important to say.
The office was a long, hall-like room, warmed by a fireplace at each end and filled with desks. There was nothing very special about it - as a cursory glance in her reference books had told Dara before leaving her house, the Nobles who worked here were responsible for maintaining the food supply to the neghbourhoods along the shores of Cold Lake. It seemed strange that anything had happened here that was worth taking a life over.
Still, someone had. As she walked down the length of the office, she could see the body on the floor. A short, fat man, though dressed in silken clothes that flattered his figure as well as was possible. His head, with its carefully maintained locks of black hair, lay bent at an impossible angle. His eyes stared at the ceiling in something that resembled horror.
There were Soldiers all around, searching through the office meticulously though - to Dara's eye - clumsily. One of them came to meet her when he noticed her approach.
"Mystic Dara," he said formally and snapped off a strict salute. "Thank you for joining us so promptly."
Major Rinabaar was a very large man - Dara thought he might be nearly two meters tall, and broad across the shoulders like a bull. It made him look impressive, but Dara knew - not from being told, but from the kind of extrapolation that led to her being called in at situations such as this - that he was actually embarrassed about his bulk, thinking that it made him appear brutish. He made every effort to offset such an impression. His gold-buttoned officer's uniform was of impeccable fit, and so clean and neat that it looked like it had never been worn before. His hair, black as oil, was just long enough to curl and set into a fashionable style, and every hair in his full, short beard was trimmed to perfection. He smelled, faintly, if a discreet, flowery cologne.
Dara had to admit that she always felt a bit flustered around Rinabaar. Partly it was because she find him hard to read - a disconcerting feeling for someone who was used to finding almost everyone an open book, but Rinabaar was so formal and militaristic that he didn't give off most clues that she normally relied on. Mostly, though, the reason was a lot more embarrassingly simple - he was very handsome, and Dara was no better at dealing with men as men than she was at dealing with people as people.
"What do we know about the victim?" she said. Keeping things formal was what always worked best for her, when she couldn't bully her way through.
"Marias of Stonegarden Park, caste of Nobles," Rinabaar answered promptly. "Age thirty-eight, no current partner, a number of acknowledged children by different mothers. Working as one of Noble Talmat's clerks, and apparently without further ambitions. As lifestyles go, a dedicated Hedonist."
"Sounds harmless enough," Dara said, though she couldn't hide a slight look of disgust. She could map out all the possible psychological reasons for and implications of the Hedonistic lifestyle, but she could not, personally, understand the Hedonist any more than she could understand their polar opposites, the Ascetics. If she was anything, she was a Sophist - to her, life was about elevating the mind, not about indulging or depriving the flesh.
"We will, of course, question everyone who knew him," Rinabaar said. "But we woke up Noble Talmat and interviewed him already, and he denies that Marias had any enemies to speak of. And, of course..."
"... it's the same kind of killing as the first two," Dara said. "Any connection at all with the other two victims?"
"None," Rinabaar said. "They all grew up in different places, lived in different places, worked in different places, associated with different social circles. It seems completely random. The only rational theory is that this is the work of a demon."
"Is it?" Dara said. She drew her hands over one of the outer walls. Several bricks of Witch Stone were crumbled and broken - the building was ancient, and Witch Stone was fragile, though it annoyed her that no one had bothered to repair it. There were never enough witches for all the Witch Stone houses, but surely an official governmental building...
"I believe so," Rinabaar said. If he took umbrage, he hid it well. "Especially since the office was securely locked, with no signs of forced entry, just like the cathedral and the private office in Gargoyles' Dance Abbey. This time, there are more people who would have had the key, I admit, but then there is that..."
He gestured to the shattered window.
"All the shattered glass is on the outside," he said. "Like before. Someone entered without breaking any doors or windows, and then forced their way out. Clearly, a demon teleported in, killed Marias, and then left violently."
Dara shook her head.
"No, that doesn't make sense," she said. "If it teleported in, why not teleport back out? Conversely, if it broke its way out, why not break its way in?"
Rinabaar shrugged, bulging muscles moving beneath the splendidly tailored uniform. Dara felt a flutter in her stomach and had to work to keep her trail of thought. It was impossible not to be affected by the sheer weight of physical power that was embodied in Rinabaar.
"Demons are prone to theatrics," he said. "It might enjoy the idea of appearing out of nowhere, taking a life, and then disappearing amidst an orgy of destruction."
"It's not impossible..." Dara admitted grudgingly. It wasn't, either - in fact, it was the possibility that suited the facts best. It was just that that didn't mean that it suited them well - it was a clumsy theory, cobbled together from assumptions to fit a situation that made no particular sense, and Dara distrusted such theories. The correct theory, once you had it, was usually surprisingly simple. The more you had to postulate to make a theory work, the worse the chances of it being right were.
She shook her head.
"There are precious few demons that could teleport into a Demesne," she said. "A fairly powerful one could materialise, I'll grant you, and maybe keep itself together for long enough to snap someone's neck. But after that, it would fall to pieces - just dissolve back into the Nowhere. Demons have trouble enough walking into a Demesne, and that lets them be solid to start with. A demon teleporting has to assemble its body in reality, and if it did it inside a Demesne it would be fatally poisoned right from the start."
"We are not a very stable Demesne, though," Rinabaar pointed out. "A Demesne works because the focused spirit and will to live by large numbers of people in one place hurts and repels demons. Our spirit and will to live is a little... below that of other Demesnes."
"Well, other Demesnes don't have eternal night and winter to bring them down," Dara said, feeling oddly defensive of her motherland. "Anyway, look at the facts. Most demons don't teleport inside the Citadel's walls. They climb over, when and where they can, and then lurk arond the streets causing trouble until they can't stand to remain anymore, and then they teleport out. It looks to me like that much is true here too, just like everywhere else."
"There is such a thing as especially powerful demons, though," Rinabaar said. "Once you have eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
"Rubbish," Dara said. "If you eliminate the impossible and find yourself left with the improbable, then it's a hundred to one that somewhere along the way you missed something. The improbable almost never happens. That's what 'improbable' means."
Irritable, she taped the damaged wall with her finger, growling a few words beneath her breath. With a scraping noise, the Witch Stone bricks began to bend and flex, tiny fragments rubbing against each other to assume a more symmetrical shape. Dara spoke more words, and entire bricks clattered across the surface of the wall, assuming new positions. After a moment, she stepped back to look at the new design.
"Still not perfect," she said. "But it looks less obviously crumbling and broken now."
She paused, looking thoughtfully at the wall. Half of Shadowed Citadel Demesne was built from Witch Stone, and these days most of it was in disrepair. Instead of doing much about it, people seemed to have decided that it was romantic to live in a city of decaying splendour. In fact, some of the holes and cracks you saw in walls and floors weren't natural - they had been intentionally created to fit the fashionable aesthetic. Dara, never one for romance, just saw a lot of flaws in otherwise solid constructions.
There was a thought there, and she made a mental note to chase it down later. There was no hurrying inspiration, even when it was important.
She glanced back at Rinabaar. He looked at her with his usual expression of efficient neutrality.
"Did that make you uncomfortable?" she said.
"No, Mystic," he said.
"It does, for some people," Dara said. "Conjuration, and Conjurers, is one thing. It's hard to disapprove of the people who keep feeding you, clothing you and giving you pretty things. Witchcraft, though... people don't always appreciate the reminder that there are people who could turn the walls of your house against you."
"I'm sure," Rinabaar said. The look on his face was unreadable. She half-wished that he would ask her what she was prattling on about, even though truth be told, she couldn't rightly say herself. There was something... just something...
She shook her head.
"I'll have a look around," she said. "See if I can find anything new. But if it is like the other places, there will be almost suspiciously little. Your demon doesn't leave footprints either, does it?"
"I admit that it is, indeed, a very unusual demon..." Rinabaar said.
Dara snorted and got to work, all the while wondering what it was that was nagging at her in the back of her head.