"Which just causes me to wonder exactly what sort of masochist does."

"I really don't know. You can see what it's like in small doses if you just experiment with her range, most people do that when they're kids."

"What'd you do that for?" Path asks her.

"Felt like it," she says sunnily.

"Path only bites me if I tell him to steer me away from something I don't want to do," Amariah says, as Path flies to her shoulder again and tucks himself under some of her hair.

"Evidently your relationship and ours are very different," says Sherlock.

"Evidently," snorts Amariah. "People work out all kinds of setups. Most of them don't involve unprompted biting."

"I don't think we've had time to work out anything much," says Sherlock.

"I wonder if you'd get much mileage out of reading local fiction and so on. First-person stuff especially, the others don't usually focus a lot of narration on the daemons. Or you could just make something up."

Amariah laughs. "You don't even want to read Alethia's Sherlock Holmes books? Because we have those."

"Tempting," they say in unison.

Amariah laughs. "He has a mongoose," she adds. "Stephirashal. In the original books. The dozens of subsequent adaptations play with it, of course, though the name's usually the same and it's usually male."

"What of the rest? Is Watson's a small annoying dog? I bet Watson's is a small annoying dog."

"Large terrifying dog. Antiomei," says Amariah. "Doyle was imperfectly consistent about what exactly she was - it was always some sort of wolfish dog, malamute or husky or something, once he outright stated she was a wolfdog. They did own a dog, a regular one," she adds. "Who was considerably smaller and called Gladstone."

"Yes, that sounds about right."

One of the advantages to a perfect memory is that she can summon up facts she's only come into casual contact with. "Irene Adler has a Eurasian magpie and Moriarty an unspecified variety of tarantula."

Sherlock laughs.

"Well, I imagine you can conjure the books if you want them. They're told from Watson's perspective so I don't know how much insight they contain about the interaction between your namesake and his mongoose."

"I think we will," says Sherlock.

Subtrahend gives Path an inquiring look.

"I'm curious about you," Path tells her.

"What do you want me to do about it?" she inquires.