Envy

 The book was quite clear about the amount of mess that would be created if you summoned Envy into too weak a body. 

“Em? Where do you keep the whiskey?” Charlotte called out, her voice echoing in the dusty, unfurnished room.  She kept shuddering and she had to fight to keep her thoughts from returning to what she’d just read.

“At home,” called back Emily.  There was a moment of silence and then the steady pad-pad-pad of slipper-clad feet.  Emily came into the room holding a lump of green wax and a cloth bag closed with a golden draw-string.  “What’s up?” she said, looking at Charlotte.  “You’re shuddering.  At regular intervals, no less.”

Charlotte grimaced and tried to control herself but then her thoughts would start going back to ‘…eyeballs popping like untreated blisters and fountaining forth viscous humours…’.  “The book is quite graphic,” she said.  “I could use a drink.”

“I brought some camomile tea,” said Emily.  “But then I discovered there’s no kettle here.”  She sounded like this was home already despite having arrived only half an hour earlier.  “You could try sucking on a teabag if you like?  That’s probably quite unpleasant, it might do the trick.”

Charlotte tried to consider it but the thought of it brought up ‘…tongue will elongate to the length of their arm and loll from their swollen lips like an opium-fiend falling from a couch…’.  “I don’t think I can,” she said weakly.  “This book’s warnings are meant to be taken seriously, I think.  Are you sure we want to summon Envy?”

Emily wasn’t a pretty woman; some men might call her handsome, but others were likely to compare her to a horse.  Even so, the look of affront on her face at Charlotte’s question was enough to make Charlotte wish that her features weren’t quite so strongly defined.  Her eyes seemed to bulge outward and her jaw, a square, powerful apparatus that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a gorilla, for example, pushed forwards with an audible grinding of bone.

“I am certain,” she said in the tones of someone who is holding back a lot of their opinion, “that We. Need. To. Summon. Envy.”  The emphasis she gave the words, separating them and stressing them, left no doubt in Charlotte’s mind that Envy was being summoned and would be expected to feel happy about it.  “You shouldn’t worry about the warnings, I’ve read them all too.”

Charlotte shuddered again.  “Didn’t they affect you at all?” she asked.

“Not like this.”  Emily turned away.  “I need to finish putting the symbols in place,” she said.  “Do you want that teabag or not?”

“I’ll manage without,” said Charlotte, but her hopes of sounding put upon but determined were shattered by the pad-pad-pad of Emily’s feet as she walked off.  “And where did you find a pair of slippers already?” she whispered to herself.

Charlotte made herself reread the page in the book, hoping that it would somehow help.  It did a little as some of the images were so awful that she found she was blocking out the memory of them altogether, and she was gratified to find that she’d stopped shuddering.  Then she turned the page to the actual summoning ritual that Emily would be carrying out to find out how awful that would be.  The ritual was described in a single, short paragraph and Charlotte read it three times, marvelling at how simple and easy it sounded.  There was a two-sentence invocation and then the invoker just had to slap the intended vessel for Envy with a green lotus flower.

“Em?” she called.  She stood up; there was only one chair in this abandoned house and it had a broken leg so that it wobbled disconcertingly every time she shifted her weight.  She set the book down on the chair, which rocked and creaked.

“What now?” Emily sounded distracted rather than annoyed so Charlotte followed the sound of her voice.

The house had been built a century ago and was narrow but tall, with four floors above ground and a cellar below.  There were two or three rooms on each floor; here on the ground floor there was a narrow hallway containing the stairs, and a large sitting-room for guests and a small kitchen.  The kitchen still had its cupboards and counters intact but any equipment had been stripped out and taken away.  Emily’s voice came from upstairs where the first floor had a morning-room and two smaller rooms that were just empty cuboids that could have been used for anything.  The larger room was now covered in waxy green symbols that shimmered in a light whose source Charlotte couldn’t find.  Emily was standing facing the wall opposite the window, drawing something on it that was as tall as she was.

“Where are we getting a green lotus flower from?” asked Charlotte, squinting at the drawing.  There were curves and arcs and the whole thing seemed to be afraid of straight lines, but it was somehow hard to look away from.  “There’s no such thing, you know.”

“Hah,” said Emily.  She continued drawing.

“No, really,” said Charlotte after a pause.  “The closest you can get is a blue lotus flower.”

“You can get green,” said Emily.  “You just have to grow them the right way.”

Charlotte thought about this, while her eyes tried to follow the curves of Emily’s drawing.  It was like a maze; every time she thought she could see what a line was doing it turned away and she found some other part of the design catching her attention.  She closed her eyes and was startled to find that the design still glimmered on the inside of her eyelids, now in red lines instead.

“Do I want to know how you grow them?” she asked.

“I don’t know, do you?”

Charlotte turned around before opening her eyes and was very relieved not to see the drawing in front of her any more.

“I don’t think so,” she said carefully.  “I’ve finished reading the ritual now though.”

“That’s good,” said Emily.  “You can look round now, I’ve finished.”

“I’d rather not,” said Charlotte.  “It… it’s giving me a headache.”

“Hah,” said Emily.  “Lucky we don’t have to do the ritual in here then, isn’t it?  Well, if you’re ready then, so am I.  All we need to do is go and fetch Envy’s new best friend.”

Diplomatic Consanguinity

 “Fascism First,” murmured Manguy.  He turned a page of the dossier he’d been given when he walked into Meeting Room C and started reading from the top.  He was bland and uninteresting to look at, an appearance he cultivated carefully.  He had the faintest impression of a moustache that might, if you got closer than his bodyguards would allow, be drawn on with eyeliner.  His hair, too black for it to be a natural colour was slicked back with gel and his skin, a neutral olive shade that fitted his hair-colour just a little too perfectly for them both to be real, was clear and healthy.  He wore glasses, but they were delicate, platinum framed, oval-lensed things that looked like a strong breeze would blow them away and so made you wonder if they were actually necessary.  “What a concept.  That is has come to this….”

“It began with the Sweden problem,” said Demetrion who was sat against a wall. His copy of the dossier was set on the chair next to him and one long, bony leg was crossed over the other.  “Though I thought we resolved that one rather well, personally.”

“We did,” said Margoyle.  She was wearing her usual pearl choker and a tidy, pale rose fitted suit that contrasted pleasantly with the odd shade of grey that her makeup gave to her skin.  She looked a little bit like a statue that had inconveniently come to life before the sculptor was completely finished with it.  “We have that in writing.  In triplicate, in fact.”

“Then how did we get from there to Fascism First?” asked Manguy.  The other two carefully didn’t answer, spotting a trap when it was set in front of them.  “I suppose the exact route isn’t important—“

“It might be,” said Margoyle quickly.  “I have two interns on the problem.”

“We have interns again?” Demetrion sounded interested.  

“JDR has been… persuaded—“ there was a faint sigh from everyone in the room “— that he could play croquet with other… things,” said Margoyle.

“The exact route isn’t important,” said Manguy.  There was no hint of impatience in his tone, nor any note of censure, but nonetheless there was a subtle change in the atmosphere of the room.  “What is important is whether we are happy with the destination.   Surely we can all agree on that?”

This was a firm where agreement was so famously hard to come by that voting was done in absolutely secrecy with no way of determining who had cast what vote or even when they cast it, in order to actually achieve the occasional consensus.

“The GOO,” said Margoyle cautiously, using the acronym they had decided upon for the leader of Fascism First, “appears to have located a source of help.  Page seven,” she added as Manguy looked up from the dossier.  “Though it remains unclear who could be helping him.”

“Us,” said Manguy, turning the pages backwards to find page seven.  “We are the only agency with sufficient connections and knowledge to do this.  But we are not doing it, and we have no been contacted with regard to it.  Which should have been impossible.”

“I can put two interns on it,” said Demetrion.  His attempted joke fell as flat as a deep-ocean dwelling fish and as the silence lingered he started to wish that he’d thought a little harder before speaking.

“Unlikely to help,” said Manguy after the silence had stretched to breaking point.  “What we need to know now is what the agency is that’s helping the GOO.  Without some indication of who is behind this, we’re flying blind.  And JDR will not like that at all.”

“He doesn’t like it,” said a new voice.  Jeronica sat down on a chair next to Margoyle, who delicately edged away, one hand clutching her pearls.  Manguy pretended not to notice, but watched carefully out of the corner of his eye.  “But at the moment he is trying to ensure that he cannot be blamed for it.”

Manguy relaxed.  Jeronica was the person he considered his biggest rival and threat, but if she was reporting on JDR like this then this was probably one of their truce-zones.  He made a mental note to check where she’d been for the fifteen minutes prior to her arrival though.

“Naturally,” she continued, “he will determine that he cannot be blamed.”

She didn’t need to say the rest; as soon as JDR was satisfied there was no solid path that led to him he’d be looking for a scapegoat.

“Scaramantha,” said Margoyle as though coughing.  Absolutely nobody said anything for a few seconds.  Then Manguy carefully closed the dossier without ever finding page seven.

“Jeronica,” he said, and Demetrion noticeably tensed.  Manguy made a mental note of that; clearly Demetrion was more junior than he’d been led to believe.  “I think that you currently have Diplomatic Consanguinity in your remit?”

Jeronica nodded.  Manguy was well aware of that, just as she was acutely aware of all the areas that he was responsible for.  Bringing it up was just a formality, indicating obliquely that there was something here that might be held to fall into this category.

“If Non-local Genocides were to become unaffiliated,” said Demetrion looking at his fingernails and absolutely nowhere else, “then I could consider bringing them under Alpaca Issues and Isolation.”

“In that case,” said Margoyle, her voice distant as though she wasn’t aware she was speaking, “it would seem likely that Fruit Production and Distribution would need a new home as well.  In Orangeries, perhaps?”

Jeronica stood up without saying anything and left.

Manguy set the dossier down on the chair next to him.  That was that then; Scaramantha would be blamed for the emersion of Fascism First, Jeronica would reassign Scaramantha’s major tasks and then left… that left the problem of figuring out how to get a handle on the GOO and then using it to take control.  He sighed softly, knowing that Margoyle would understand and Demetrion would puzzle over it, and followed Jeronica out of Meeting Room C.

The Everpresent Joy

 “There’s no presence at the entrance to the casino,” said Pech.  He looked as though he was thinking hard.  “Nothing magical there either; the license doesn’t allow for that kind of thing.  Maybe you picked up on something outside the casino?”

“It was definitely inside,” said Sylvie.  She hugged herself as she remember it.  “I didn’t even notice it until I stepped through the door, and then it was all I could notice.”

“That can’t be right,” said Pech.  He sounded worried now and Rafael could see the man shaking his head very slightly from side to side.  “That would be a clear violation of the licence.  No-one would have installed anything there without checking with me first.”

“How could they… install? it without you noticing?” asked Rafael.  He was starting to feel some sympathy for a man who was clearly exhausted and overworked.  “I mean, unless you’re a nullie you can’t miss it when you come in.”

“It wasn’t there when I arrived,” said Pech simply.  “If what you’re saying is true, then it can’t have been there when I arrived or I would have noticed it.”

“If?” Rafael’s hackles, sensitive to the slightest perceived insult, rose again.

“Why don’t we go look at it,” said Sylvie, aware of what her partner was like and stepping in quickly to defuse the situation.  “If nothing else, maybe you’ll know what it is when you see it.”

“I’m not in the habit of lying,” murmured Rafael to Sylvie as Pech led the way downstairs and towards the casino entrance.  He’d clearly forgotten that Pech’s hearing was very good, or at least that his thaumic shadow was broad enough to catch small sounds, as the short mage’s shoulders noticeably tensed.

“You sort of are,” said Sylvie in her normal voice, hoping that would serve as a reminder.  “Think about you where you parked earlier.”

“That’s not a lie!  That’s… creative licence!”

Sylvie’s giggle was drowned out by Pech’s gasp.  He was just beyond the reception desk where the t-junction to the cloakrooms and the entrance was, and he sounded like he’d been punched in the solar plexus. Both Sylvie and Rafael sped up and reached him a couple of seconds later, just in time for Rafael to catch him as his knees buckled.

“You can feel it from here?” asked Rafael.  Pech just nodded, and Sylvie, looking around them, rubbed an arm.

“Me too,” she said. “Though it’s not that bad here.  It’s stronger now though, it stopped half-way down the corridor before.”

“Three-quarters of the way,” corrected Rafael.  Sylvie glared at him and he shrugged.  “Not in the habit of lying,” he said, grinning.

“What is it?” she asked Pech, looking at his face so that she could ignore Rafael.

“An eidolon,” said Pech.  He struggled to his feet, leaning heavily on Rafael.  “It shouldn’t be here.”

“A phantasm?”  Sylvie looked at the corridor as though it were in her way.  “It doesn’t seem like a phantasm to me.”

“No,” said Pech.  He heaved a huge sigh that made his whole body shudder.  “No, the other usage.  The idealisation of a concept.”

All three of them looked at the corridor now, but the corridor, apart from being badly lit and seeming like the worst choice to take to move around the casino, looked just like a corridor.  No ghosts emerged from the walls, and no bright lights or eerie sounds happened.

“How can you be so sure?” asked Rafael.  He’d heard about eidolons and avatars, but this was the first time he’d ever been told he was in the presence of one.  He looked about again, wishing that there was something to identify other than a faint feeling that something wasn’t quite right.

“Training,” said Pech.  “You probably wouldn’t have had it since you’ve not studied probability-changers.  It’s like… it’s like how if you study biology enough you learn a lot about mice or plants or moulds or what-have-you, but if you know a lot about mice you probably don’t know very much about moulds.  Your training’s all been in a different area.”  He was standing on his own feet again now but he was very pale and he looked like he was sweating.

“Fair,” said Sylvie.  “I’m guessing you wouldn’t know too much about South American Death Deities then.”

“Nothing,” said Pech.  “Although I suppose now I know that there’s something to be learned about them.”

“Right, fine,” said Rafael sounding a little testy.  “When you’re done swapping school stories, what’s the eidolon doing here then?  It looks like you weren’t expecting it.”

“What’s it an idealisation of?” asked Sylvie.  She was rubbing her arm again.

“It’s not permitted here,” said Pech. “Very illegal.  This would be a lot of trouble if we were open at the moment.”

“What’s it the idealisation of?”

Pech grimaced. “Joy,” he said.  “It’s almost certainly why no-one’s winning.”

Rafael looked at Sylvie, who was looking like she had hives.  Then at Pech again.

“How does that work?” he said.  “Surely everybody would be joyful if they won?  Is it stopping them from winning so they can’t be joyful?”

“No,” said Pech.  “More complex than that.  The Everpresent Joy is an aspect of the Goddess of Fortune, and she can choose to go whichever way she wants.  Someone’s put this Eidolon here to stop people winning; it’s drawing all the good luck out of the casino and into itself.  It will keep growing until it has it all, but these are games of chance; they create their own luck, so to speak.”

“I’m definitely not following you,” said Rafael.  “Just turn all the games off, right?”

Sylvie was scratching her arms now and moving backwards.  “No,” she said.  “Like he said, it’s complex.  But basically, since there’s a casino here, there’s a source of power for that thing.  And we can’t just turn it off unless you’ve got some way to make the casino just disappear into thin air.”

Rafael grinned.

“Without explosives,” she added.

Feng shui police

 Bill and Ben, gentlemen thieves, were standing together outside an Edwardian townhouse. Bill lifted a cast-iron door-knocker shaped like a gargoyle’s head with a protruding tongue and let it fall against its iron plate with a loud clack.

“Noisy and unpleasant,” said Ben thoughtfully.  “Strange that this took off as a way to knock on a door, don’t you think?”  Bill lifted the knocker and let it fall again.

“I guess it’s easier than using your knuckles,” he said.  “More comfortable, maybe?”

“A doorbell has to be better though.”

Bill considered this, tilting his head slightly to one side like a dog waiting for a treat.  “Depends,” he said at last.  “I mean, some of those doorbells that play tunes, for instance….”

“Effing horrible,” said Ben, and the door swung open to reveal a short woman in a beige dress adorned with a large flower-print pattern.  “Not you, of course, ma’am.”

“Feng Shui police,” said Bill with a broad smile.  He offered her a little leather wallet containing some official looking laminated cards and photo-id.

“I didn’t call the police,” said the woman holding the wallet in one hand and looking confused.  She looked at Ben and frowned.  “What’s so horrible then?” she asked.  Bill gently removed the wallet, which she still hadn’t looked at, from her hand and slipped into an inside pocket.

“Well,” said Ben in the tone of someone who has a long list of things to go through and is glad to have been asked about it.  Bill poked him in the side before he could go any further.

“We were discussing another case, milady,” he said, “and since that’s police business we can’t very well tell you about it.  You didn’t overhear any of it did you?  Only if you did we’ll have to arrest you.”

“No!  I— I don’t know why you’re here.  I didn’t call the police!”

“No, your madamship,” said Bill who was getting curious to see if she would react to any of the titles he was bestowing on her.  “This is a prophylactic visit.  We’re here before you need to call us, you see.”

“No?”

“There’s been a disturbance in the force,” said Ben, grinning.  The woman in the doorway looked at him again, still frowning.  He was wearing a suit, but when she squinted it looked like it might be a very faint leopardskin print on it, despite its ordinary-seeming grey colour.  “We’ve been called out, though by not you as you’ve so helpfully told us.  Twice.  Because there is a feng shui problem building up, located inside this building, and we need to defuse… heh, even diffuse… it before it gets to be a serious problem and you have to call you out to deal with it.”

“I don’t understand,” said the woman.  She looked back at Bill, hoping that he would make more sense.  He smiled at her again and she started to feel like an orchid caught in a spotlight, and wilted a touch.

“Feng shui,” said Bill.  “You know, the flow of chi around a property.  Good fortune and prosperity when you get it right, and bad luck and dragons of foreshadowed doom when you get it wrong.  Firecrackers in February if everything’s good or fireballs in your fireplace if it’s not.  That kind of thing.”

“…help?” said the woman.  She crossed her arms across her chest and then uncrossed them, looking dejected, when Ben tutted at her.

“Crossed arms,” he said, shaking his head gently as though reprimanding an eager but misguided child.  “That’s never a good sign in a house with bad feng shui.”

“What?”

“Can we come in, please?” asked Bill.  His smile seemed to notch up another level and became dazzling.

“No,” said the woman.  “I’m not the owner, I’m the housekeeper.  I… you’ll need to wait for Miss Trevelyan to return.”

“No time,” said Ben.  He started patting the pockets of his suit and as the light rippled across it the woman in the doorway started to feel a little dizzy.  “Ah, here we go!”  He produced something the size and shape of a smartphone from a pocket that didn’t seem to have been big enough for it and waved it at her.  “This is a feng-shui meter.  It will tell us how high the negative energy levels here are.”

“Don’t forget to calibrate it first,” said Bill.

“Oops,” said Ben.  He tapped the screen and it lit up, and he swiped at something on it.  The woman in the doorway craned her neck to try and see it more clearly but every time she moved Ben turned away, waving the device around in the air as though trying to get a signal.  “Aha,” he said after a moment, and suddenly shoved the device under her nose.  She recoiled, startled, and then looked at the screen.  All she could see was a large, bright-green, number: 132.

“Is that bad?” she said, feeling nervous.

“Very,” said Ben, nodding like a priest at confession.  “The scale only goes up to 150.”

“Oh!”

“When will Miss Trevelyan be back?” asked Bill. He sounded concerned.

“Um, Tuesday, I think,” said the woman.  “She doesn’t always tell me when she’s planning on returning, but she definitely said it would be mid-week.”

“I don’t think we can wait till Tuesday, your madamliness,” said Bill.  Still no reaction from the woman.  “Perhaps you can let us in if you escort us?  If you’re with us everywhere while we sort this out, then it’s not like we alone in the building.”

“I don’t think that’s the point,” said the woman, but she was sounding uncertain.  Bill pressed home what looked like an advantage.

“Are there things in the house that would be of interest to the police then?” he said.  “I mean, we’d rather not leave feng shui levels this high unattended, but we can go and get a warrant if there’s something that you’re trying to hide.”

“Won’t take more than a couple of hours,” said Ben.  “Levels this high ought to be a public emergency if only more people knew about them.”

“And us,” said Bill.  “We’re the forgotten side of the police force you know.”

“No?” said the woman.  She took a step backwards.

“That’s the problem, you see.”

“There’s nothing illegal in this house!”  The woman rallied, taking a step forward again and remembering what Bill had been insinuating.

“Then there shouldn’t be a problem with you showing us round and us showing you what the problem is then, should there?” asked Bill.

The woman looked at Ben for guidance and then wished she hadn’t.  He was tapping at the device and it was flashing and beeping now.

“That sounds bad?” she said, hesitantly.

“Very,” agreed Ben.

“You have to stay with me at all times,” said the woman at last.  “No getting out my sight.  And I need a written report from you saying that you were here and why you were here.”

“Of course,” said Bill, his smile beaming at her and making her feel even more dizzy.  “No trouble at all.  Would you like me to write it out now, before we come in?”

“No,” said the woman.  “No, let’s just get this over with.”

Land of confusion

 “Fortune’s Observer?” said Perdito slowly.  “Like, your job is to look after the money here too?”

“No,” said Pech.  He sighed.  “I was hoping they’d send someone who knew a little more about our industry, actually.  It’s sort of complicated if you don’t know anything about the magic of chance.”  His voice raised just a touch hopefully at the end, but Rafael and Sylvie both shook their heads.  “Ah, I see.  Then… the casino is licensed, obviously, and that means that there’s a duty to make sure that nothing is messing with chance or probability in here.”

“Right,” said Sylvie, nodding.  Rafael squinted at Pech.  “No,” he said. “Nothing can change the probability of an outcome, but you can change the outcomes instead.”

“No,” said Pech carefully.  “That’s the easy explanation they give you until you start studying it.  There are things that can change probabilities, and they’re all pretty dangerous.  Do either of you have a certification in Chimerics?”

Sylvie and Rafael exchanged glances and Rafael whispered, moving his lips as little as possible, “Is this for real?”

“I’m afraid so,” said Pech as though Rafael had spoken out loud.  “Oh dear.  Have either of you heard of the Sendyon’s Scorpion?  No?  Well, this is a creature that can change probabilities.  They’re not common in this country as they like heat and aridity, but people keep importing them to try and cheat in casinos and at poker tables and they’re a vile pest to exterminate when they get loose.  Mostly because they change the chance of you catching them when they know you’re hunting for them.  What should be a certainty becomes a fraught situation where the scorpion has all the advantages you should have and you have the disadvantages it should have.”

“Ok,” said Rafael.  Sylvie nodded thoughtfully.  “I’ve heard of that,” she said.  “There was one captured in Oldham last week, I think.”

Pech smiled, showing his coffee stained teeth again.  “Yes,” he said.  There was an unspoken ‘well done’ behind his words that Sylvie and Rafael picked up on anyway.  Pech yawned.

“Anyway,” he said, covering his mouth with his hand too late.  “Fortune’s Observer is a legally mandated role that the casino must fill, and it must ensure that there’s nothing affecting probability or chance within a 50m radius of the external walls of the casino itself.  That’s my main job.”

“Which you’re not doing if no-one’s winning, right?”

Sylvie punched Rafael’s shoulder; it wasn’t a hard punch but it wasn’t playful either.

“There are better ways to phrase it than that,” she said. “Just because you didn’t like the security guards doesn’t mean you have to take it out on the rest of us.”

“It’s fine,” said Pech, holding up a hand.  Rafael noticed that his fingers were webbed.

“The guard was a jerk,” said Rafael.  “Not the one who spoke to us.” Sylvie’s hackles subsided and she looked curious.  “The other one, the silent one. He was up to something.”

“It’s fine,” said Pech again, sounding slightly puzzled.

“Maybe,” said Sylvie, ignoring him.  “But do we even have a crime here yet?  There’s nothing to actually accuse him of, you know.”

“Up to what?” asked Pech, realising that he wasn’t getting any attention.

“Wish I knew,” said Rafael.  “He makes my palms itch though, so he’s definitely up to something.”

“Can you question him?”

Now Sylvie looked surprised.  “I guess?” she said.  “I mean, it would help to have a reason but… I suppose we could just ‘talk to everyone’.  Why?”

“We’ve got a room,” said Pech.  “There’s an observation room that looks into it.  The security team use it when we need to talk to someone we’ve caught cheating.  I can watch you talk to him and see if he’s connected with the problems we’re having.  I mean, I’ve been looking for answers all day now and not found any so I’m going to take any help I can get.”

Rafael shrugged and looked over at Sylvie.  “If it’ll help,” he said.  “I mean, I really don’t know why we’re here or what we can go.  It seems like we don’t even really know much about this place either.  It’s just a land of confusion.”

“Can we do this now?” asked Pech.  He yawned again.  “Only it really has been a very long day for me so far.”

“Sure,” said Sylvie.  “Let’s go look at this room and then we’ll find the guard.  Oh, by the way, what’s the thing you have in entrance?”

“Thing?”  Pech opened the door to his office and ushered them out.

“Yeah, the five kilothaum presence.”