"Once a ghoul, always a ghoul!" she hissed, choosing the worst possible epithet for the follower of the Merciful, renowned warriors of the undead.

"Turned us down?"

"Worse. He told me he'll do it himself. Himself! And just how exactly does he plan to sniff out the conspirators without us? The stupid vampire!"

"What?! Where does he get off thinking he can do this without us! He obviously failed to understand something. Let me talk to him, Talia. I'll explain things. Clearly and simply."

"He understood perfectly," the Alae wrinkled her brow.

"I'm not just going to leave it at that. Where is he now? I want to talk to him myself."

"There's no point..."

"I don't get it." Irson was starting to lose patience. "You were just talking about him like an old devoted friend you could count on, and now this!"

"Oh, Irson," Talia rubbed her face in distress. "He is old and he is devoted... but not quite a friend, more like a comrade-in-arms. We've been through a lot together and see many things in the exact same light. But he's... got his quirks. Just think, ten years ago it was unthinkable for him that anyone would dare criticize Veindor and his circle. And the notion that a non-human might lay claim to a spot alongside the Merciful's noble servants? Laughable! Then I happened into his life. On the one hand, he feels very strongly that everything he and I have started can be super beneficial to Veindor and company... But on the other, to him I'm still an uneducated, bigmouthed schemer with a tail. A sloppy mop-top oddball, the daughter of Enhiarg's foremost harlot. All in all, a completely unworthy being – even discussing the tenets of the Merciful's sacred teachings with me is blasphemy. And now you show up – a poisonous innkeeper with a Lindorg diploma... Barking up the same tree. You can see why he's a bit rattled."

Bit by bit, Talia returned to her sardonic tone of voice. But her explaining didn't mollify Irson one bit.

"That's stupid."

"Well, I guess if you wanted to you could stick a sign that says 'certifiable idiot' on anyone's forehead. You and I probably don't have any shortage of stupid notions in our heads either," Talia countered, slapping her head.

"So, what do you suggest? Let him do as he pleases and run our own investigation parallel to his?"

"No, I think we should try and prove to him that we're not the vile beasts he's made us out to be in his wild imagination. Then everything'll work out."

"And I think your pal could use some straightening out! Even a bit of extreme correction would do. I'm not a confrontational Tanae by nature, but that's the kind of crap that gets my venom flowing! I don't feel like I have anything to prove. Least of all to some..." Irson scuffed his foot in annoyance.

"I prefer to think of it as 'indulging others' weaknesses,'" Talia yawned ostentatiously. "Let's not sink to his level. No one's asking you to do the dance of a hundred rings[1] for him. I for one... am going to try to bring him back to his senses. Then you can talk to him in a harsher tone. We might just be able to get through to him then." She twitched her shoulders. "Yeah, that's what I would do. But it's your adventure, not mine. You decide."

"All right... How do you plan on 'bringing him to his senses'?"

"Hey, Irson, you don't by any chance have any aches or pains right now?" Talia asked out of the blue.

No..." Irson was taken aback.

"Too bad. Come on, don't look at me like that. I'm telling you: our ace in the hole in the fight against xenophobia, common prejudice and religious dogmatism, which some associates of mine have, is my spirit. All my fussing with all these Veindor-pleasing things has made a pretty strong impression on it."

"What kind of impression?"

"Bolstering my affinity for the Merciful. No matter how much Veindor's priests may brush me off, we serve the same cause. Our ideals are very much alike, and that means our spirits are, too. If I changed into a human body, I could easily fool a follower of the Merciful, passing myself off as a senior lay sister at one of his temples. They sense that I'm one of them."

"And they no longer sense an Alae?"

"That's just it – no. But I could drown the 'stench' of my true feline nature by making the 'follower of the Merciful' part of me smell stronger. And how do you make a mint leaf smell more?"

"Rub it between your fingers?"

"Exactly. The same is true in our case: we've got to poke at it, that is, do something pleasing to Veindor. Kill a necromancer, deliver a baby, preach a sermon on the merits of death, cure a cold, something of that nature. And it's in the bag. That aroma positively hypnotizes Inon... Hmm, no, that's not the right word – it has a sobering effect on him. He begins to see me as I am, and not as the vile Alasais' spawn those hypocrites from the Elidanite gentry make me out to be."

"But doesn't your spirit's reaction depend on your purpose in all this?"

"Oh, it does! But isn't our other purpose connected to the same serving of Veindor's ideals?" Talia smiled slyly. "Like it or not, we're helping one of his priests remove the curtain from his eyes and serve his merciful master more effectively. Without us, liare only knows how long he'd run around in circles with this investigation. And not a mouse's claw would come of it."

"What about the good old Alaean brain-curling method – that wouldn't work?"

"Nope. Inon has such incredible spiritual armor, I couldn't break through it in a million years," Talia flashed eyes of great distress.

"And so you must resort to all manner of perverse manipulation, poor thing," Irson teased her.

"Yup. The hair on my tail is blushing now!" The an Kamian grinned like the Cheshire cat and suddenly threw up her hands. "Oh, indulgent Tialianna! We're in luck!"

Spotting something in the water, she jogged sprightly to the nearest suspension bridge. Irson struggled to resist the temptation to grab her by the tail and exact an explanation from her before she sprung the next surprise on him. Following some pale warm spot with her eyes, transported by the canal's slow-moving waters, the Alae hopped from terrace to terrace. Irson caught up with her at the wide ramp connecting one of the houses' backyard to the canal.

"This has to be Tiana's doing. What luck!" she laughed, squatting by the water and dangling her fingers in the water impatiently. "Is this what it's like to be in on the same investigative crew with a Tanae?"

Irson blinked and finally saw the object of her captivation: a corpse floating in the canal. A fresh Nalarite corpse, practically still warm.

"Can you help me? If he drifts off to the right, he'll be out of my reach," Talia asked, extending the gaff to Irson.

Pressing his chest to the low guardrail, the Tanae hooked the deceased and pulled him closer. He wasn't able to pull the Nalarite up onto the small bridge – something was preventing this from underneath. Talia splashed around in the water and grabbed the dead man by the scruff of the collar.

"More than likely something is sticking out his chest. I forgot to tell you."

"Hold this, will you," Irson handed her the gaff. "One second." He rolled his sleeves back and moved his fingers, kneading them.

"Let's just turn him over onto his back."

Irson grinned.

"Did you want to get soaked or...?"

"Yes, actually," Talia admitted.

"Then get away, an Kamian brat," Irson hissed. Ve-ery sternly.

He waved his hand and the deceased shot up into the air with a loud splash. The Nalarite's chest cavity really did contain something between a spear and an oven fork. A label hung on the dark red handle. "'Please return this fishing pole to Castle an Al Emenayit. I am not a catch,'" Talia read aloud.

"Fishing for intelligent life? Now that's too much!" Irson said with a wry face.

"But who's fishing for whom??" Talia exclaimed, extracting the two-tonged fork from the dead man with a jerk. Irson was able to lower him to the wet dock. "It's Onyel. A victim of unrequited love. His mother's a herring. He wore one Eale female out with his courting, so much so that she said she'd kill him if she saw him again. And... well, there you go."

"Very romantic. Do you plan on bringing him back?"

"Nope."

"Then what good is he to us?" Irson looked at her dolefully.

"Are you hungry?" Talia sang him in a gentle voice. Irson sputtered indignantly. "OK, OK, I'll scale down the joking. This here's a great example of how an unfitting body spoil a creature's whole life. Are you sure your brain can endure another one of my cautionary tales?"

"I'm sure. I want to know how all this works."

"OK, you asked for it. You see, His Grace the Wet-tailed Lord of Waters Nelleyn sucks at choosing souls for his subjects. I'd even go as far as say he doesn't even select them in the proper sense. If a soul has a certain set of characteristics that could be interpreted as an inclination toward affinity for the element of water – gosh, what a mouthful! – he grabs it and sticks it in the blue body of some poor Nel-Ileyn newborn."

"And?"

"More often than not it leads to dissonance. Most of these 'watery fellows' are pretty rotten types by nature. It's all connected somehow. They're akin to the Eale- – aggressive, fairly primitive desires, extremely freedom-loving, etc. Not like the cowardly Nelleyn philosophers, right?" Talia poked the corpse with her toe unceremoniously.

Irson nodded.

"Thing is, Nelleyn tried to construe their brains in such a way so as to neutralize what he considered 'negative' traits in their souls. That's instead of simply weeding out anyone deemed 'unfit' by his pacifist measure! Makes me wanna grab him by the collar and drag him to the Fiery Desert!"

"Talia, let's skip the sacrilege and emotions; my head is splitting!" Irson pleaded.

"Fine. If 'normal' Nalarites, that is, the ones whose souls match their bodies, are simply very careful by nature, then these are outright paranoid. Nelleyn tried to suppress their aggression, but as you can see it didn't happen. It simply transformed – and into something far worse. To this day Nalarite aristocrats hunt down, put to sleep and vaporize their own strictly out of fear that these friends and relatives would turn them to jelly otherwise."

"And where's Veindor in all this? He should put a stop to such experiments."

"Nelleyn is Nae, last I heard," Talia pursed her lips. "But let me get to the point. Onyel was one such 'abnormal' Nalarite. He'd realized a long time ago that something was not right. Wherever he went, phobias bubbled up all around him. And he felt his madness progressing. Then he came to Briaellar, to the an Aeliatans, to ask their help in getting rid of his fears. Naturally, they refused to help him. They said that his problem went deeper than that – as in, if they simply taught him to stop fearing their methods, it would only get worse. They delicately suggested that he pay a visit to the Silver Temple. But he didn't listen. Instead he went to some Eale dame who had overindulged on alanae leaf, and she messed with something in his skull. I don't know whether her tampering helped with the fears, but he began to burn with passion for the woman. He'd barely opened his eyes when he started singing that he loved her and would love her from now until the Great Drying[2], that without her the sea was but a mud puddle, life had no flavor, and all that jazz. And if her heart didn't respond to his appeals, then her veins flowed not with blood but with slushy water, but he, Onyel, would certainly melt her ice-cold heart... One of my friends wrote down the speech word for word. I'd almost went green with envy."

"You mean you're planning to fix what the Eale dame did, and do Veindors' priests' work for them?"

"Exactly. I haven't been cramming anatomy, physiology and soulology books until my eyes bled for the past year just for fun! Time to switch from theory to practice. So Master Inon is actually quite fortunate: he's getting to witness quite a show – and for free! Oh yes. Helping someone who's wound up in the wrong body is a huge pleasure," she purred, and Irson noted that she was more sincere than sardonic. "It's especially awesome growing the nerves. Nothing compares! Ecstasy!"

Talia got down onto a pile of dried seaweed and glanced at the deceased with such a carnivorous look that Irson wouldn't have been surprised if she dug her claws into his side hungrily and growled.

"Look at him – human to the core. Only he's painted blue, and his mug's a trifle thicker. And this is supposed to be the bane of the depths?! It would hurt if Alasais were to abuse our bipedal form like that, but at least our feline form is one shift away. But these poor bastards? They have but one body – get it wrong, and it's like you're serving a centuries' long sentence... Let's start with dessert," she said and rolled the Nalarite's head onto her lap.

Her fingers dove into Onyel's blond locks, fumbled about for a second in search of some prominent points, and suddenly froze. For a while. Her entire body went stiff; only her face remained lively, shifting from a strained expression to a scoff, from lips pursed in concentration to curling into a smile. Setting his eyes to capture any magic emanating from them, Irson didn't find a hint of sorcery. Looking at her, one might think Talia was administering an acupuncture treatment to the dead man with her claws. But that's how it was supposed to be: what she was doing with Onyel's brain, she was doing through her spirit, and no outsider was capable of sensing such delicate manipulations.

"OK. I'm done with the main restructuring. Now for a few aesthetic changes," Talia drawled at last, opening her eyes.

Her rainbow turned grey; for a moment she glowed like the sky in storm, strings of lightning flashing behind the curtain of clouds. Her cat's cheeks flushed; her fangs glistened between her blood-filled lips. Talia undid the chain binding her ears, shook her hair and with a dose of lusty passion scratched the back of her head. From afar one could easily take her and Onyel for lovers, especially when the Alae's nimble fingers took to wandering about the Nalarite's body, correcting faults only she could see. Watching her in action Irson now understood why some especially sensitive maidens had literally thrown themselves about his neck upon seeing him work, moaning, "Master Trimm! I want to be your potion!"...

As he abandoned himself to pleasant memories, Talia managed to get to Onyel's spine, his elbows, knees and pelvic joints. Then she moved on to his fingers.

"What's he, a sea predator, supposed to do with these cut-off rakes?" she grumbled, pulling, molding the deceased's hands. It was as if they were made of oily blue Nel-Ileyn clay.

Irson drew closer. Translucent buds were blossoming between the Nalarite's fingers. Talia cultivated the membranes until the Nalarite's hand began to resemble an exotic fan. She fanned herself with it a couple times and winked.

"And he shouldn't have legs, but claws, in order to catch quick little fish and skin them in quiet caverns, and to shuck clams like nuts! And he needs another kind of skin: tight, slippery, greenish, like an expanse of smooth sea water. It has to be resistant to poisonous seaweed. He'll want to tie back his true love's hair with a jellyfish's tentacle, give her a bouquet of sea anemones or a sea urchin – and he'll be able to. He won't get pricked or stung. And his hair? An absolute farce! They'll get caught on the first passing coral, or stuck between his scales. They should glide behind him, flowing around rocks, tickling the bellies of helpful rays; they should slide, wriggle, every lock like a long, thin, flowing eel. They are, after all, his sensory receptors – kind of like our whiskers, but so much better. They have one fault – they dry up from vegetation on land, the live fibers in them die. To turn into corpses of hair... gross. Then there are their eyes... And I won't even touch their neck bands," she mumbled. "And the teeth. What are those big flat shovels for?! How is he supposed to champ with those..."

This went on for a while. Irson remembered the Nalarite girl and her little friends dressed up in doll clothes. The scene didn't seem so idyllic now... He recalled Aniallu. It's a shame her problem couldn't be solved in a similar, purely physical way.

"The final touch," Talia declared and, slapping Onyel's chest with her palm, she healed his wounds in a flash.

Irson failed to notice exactly when the Nalarite's soul returned to the updated body. Talia carefully patted his cheeks and pulled his little aquatic ears. He suddenly started, grabbed his chest and spit in the canal with relish. The Alae giggled.

"Well Onyel, I think your girlfriend promised to impale you with a whale harpoon next time? And what we have got here instead? A puny dinner fork? For shame!"

"Her beauty runs dark and deep, like the deepest hollows of the sea..." the Nalarite rumbled.

"Oh! He's sprouted a voice! You won't be able to whine and moan like before, now will you?"

With a strange movement Talia shook Onyel's shoulder, who then vomited slime and what looked like chunks of seaweed and lumps of sea sponge.

"I – I'm me," he said, coughing.

"Yes. You're you. And to plant this idea in your fishy mind once and for all, I suggest laying on the bottom for a day or two. Don't move your fins. Don't make bubbles. Relax your gills. Then take a load off. Have at it."

The word "load" had a strange effect on Onyel. He grinned his wide new shark-tooth grin, drew himself up and suddenly gently slapped his savior on the neck.

"Get out of here!" Talia said bashfully, and shoved him into the canal.

The Nalarite splashed and sprayed for a moment, and then headed for the depths. He was gone in a flash.

"Nelleyn won't rub you behind the ear for this," Irson mumbled.

"He can go to the dogs. Do you know how many kittens have been drowned in his precious waters across all the worlds? He'll owe us till eternity!" the an Kamian said unapologetically. "Here comes In!"

Irson turned around. A tall, somewhat stooped man of forty, dressed all in grey, was approaching. He had a calm, stern teacher's face that looked like it came from one of those closed military schools, where everyone made the beds up perfectly, used formal language and bowed stiffly when meeting a colleague. His gray emotionless eyes looked at the Tanae and the Alae, staring with what seemed to Irson to be a measure of suspicion.

"Poor thing, he's trying to guess what kind of indecency we're about to drag him into," Talia whispered with a chortle. "I feel sorry for him every time."

"I don't," Irson grumbled.

______________________

[1] The dance of a hundred rings – is one of the most popular Tanaean dances. Performed in serpent form.

[2] The Great Drying – the end of the world in Nalarite lore.