Daszel crushed the last nut-sized concentration of magic between his fingers. Removing the alarms had been arduous and unrelated to his safety, for the mage who owned the place would have been worse off for acknowledging the intruder. The client wanted secrecy though, and Daszel the Stymph's clients got what they wanted down to the detail.
The main thing this one wanted was among the treasures deep below the earth in the mage's sanctum mirabiliorum, some of them plainly valuable and others coveted only by the knowledgeable. Daszel touched none of them save for the requested item, a glass figure the size of a rich man's stomach which represented a dragon and had inside it an unnatural gem which gave the thing a pleasing radiance. There it was.
He sent a charm of comprehension to caress the dragon; he was ever wary of traps and curious too about the importance of this innocuous gewgaw despite his policy of not bothering his clients with questions. The item must have some secret to it, and so it did. The gem within was a dragon's heart, something few realized could be so small. The work of converting the figurine into the core of a new body was well underway; a dragon reduced to its heart was a play reduced to its script and awaiting the right actor.
What use someone (whether mage or client) might make of a dragon was likely to worry the moral, but since Daszel contented himself with ethics, he absconded with the dragon and brought it to the client, whose gratitude came in a substantial form.
"Although," the man said, "It seems a bit different from when he displayed it before. The color is a little fuller, but duller too."
"It's closer to reviving, that's all."
"It's what?"
The resulting conversation left the client quivering like a tax farmer who saw his books in a judge's hands. "Oh, that's, not quite what I . . . Are you prepared to take on another job? Immediately? It's to put something somewhere. Without being noticed."
"I'm Daszel," Daszel answered.
Finis
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