"Not likely to get an apology for the wait," she mutters.

The door opens again and they are shown in and up a flight of stairs and into a sitting room. "You are unfit to hear Her Darkness's voice but her son can interpret," she says, "if they don't know how to use their hands in Noctimar."

"They do."

"You can leave him outside the -"

"He was expensive. So was the silk."

Hiss. She steps out of the room.

This is probably exactly how the pharaoh comes off to foreigners. Though at least he's not fourth level, that'd just be embarrassing.

Eventually the Princess - she's got a crown - shows up. "Belmarniss of Noctimar. Where in Noctimar?" she signs.

"Zalun." Belmarniss speaks aloud.

"I've never been."

"I can imagine why."

"Oh, no, at the time I made a visit to Noctimar it was under other management, but there was a plague there at the time."

"Before I was born."

"Yes, you look very young. What are you doing in Osirion?"

"Adventuring. Didn't like being limited to a schoolgirl's understanding of magic."

"Are there many adventures?"

"Sure. Desert ruins."

"I mislike the idea of all the surfacers knowing how to find us."

"It wasn't that hard. Sothis is a few hours' hike west from the seaside aperture to the north."

"I'll collapse some tunnels, if it's that simple."

"Suit yourself. You could come to them if you wanted."

"I'll tell her you were here," she signs.

"I'm sure," says Belmarniss.

"You're not going to say 'tell who'?"

"I'm a strange wizard with a slave I'm not stashing next to the coatrack and I wouldn't know the Princess to look at her, you're a cousin or something. I don't care, I'm not an assassin, I'm not grievously offended that I didn't get to hear your melodious voice even though you're not in charge, and you probably really will tell her all about it, or you'll send your own loyalists up to sell the surfacers things and bite their gold pieces suspiciously and bring home enough rice to feed an army and stage a coup, or whatever, I don't care, my job is establishing the availability of trade."

"I like you."

"Thanks."

"Is it nice? Surfacer food?"

"What, do they not give the body double cousins whole meals of it even on special occasions?"

"I'm actually a junior cleric."

"Surfacer food is fucking delicious but I won't insult you with any of the travel stuff I packed. Tell the Princess and in a year pomegranates'll be cheap."

Khemet would love this. Well, no, because he'd be a boy and therefore a slave, but Khemet would love this if he were allowed. It's all so ridiculously twisty. 

Belmarniss is - really fascinating, when she's like this.

"I will," signs the junior cleric, laughing silently. "Are you looking to buy anything besides the silk to sell?"

"If I find a real bargain. But I have to know the market at all, you can't dump a cartload of carbonado or bort on me, I don't know what would be a ripoff from you and I don't know what I'd get for it upstairs. Also I'd have to be really confident it was yours."

"It's a really nice cartload of bort."

"Another time perhaps."

"Thank you for coming."

"Is the interpreter her son, or your son, or some unrelated person?"

"There's more than one. You would have gotten her real son."

"Fun. Thank you for speaking to me." Belmarniss gets up, plops her hands on Hagan's shoulders and turns him around so he precedes her out of the room, and backs out of it herself.

And they can get out of there. "Are they all...like that?"

"What, pretending to be other people? Trying to fence stolen goods? Probing for weaknesses?"

"All of the above. So much - lying for no reason."

"There are reasons! Decoy royalty are a thing upstairs too, I've heard of it in surfacer stories although I couldn't tell you who actually does it."

"Probably countries that put low-level casters in charge."

"Oh, no, she could easily be way scarier than that. I was being polite. Ultimately manners are about making people more comfortable, and nothing makes somebody comfortable like knowing you're friendly enough to point out their mistakes unexploited and foolish enough to only identify the decoy mistakes."

"- huh."

"She could also not be very scary. Basically we have no information we didn't have before about that. Also I worry I'm making it sound like there was only one way to play that but it's not a choreographed dance, it's just a whole different set of background assumptions. She could have said Her Darkness was a powerful cleric and I could have said I appreciated that they weren't insisting on the spell resistance thing, and that would've been fine. She could have said that and I could have said, oh, what would Sovi have said, Sovi would have said 'then I bet she knows all about dealing with people more powerful than herself to get shiny things, and lucky me, I have shiny things'."

"- well, I don't think I could do it but luckily I can't do it for unrelated reasons. It's very impressive when you do."

"It's kind of fun but I do like being able to ever stop."

"I guess I can see how people here'd feel like they'd have to own someone to let down their guard around them."

"Not necessarily but it sure helps. I think most people who aren't specifically targets have a few close relationships where they figure 'if this person wants me dead I guess that's how I die'. I think I got there with Sovi. I mostly trusted my mom - I didn't know if she'd cave to pressure but I knew it wouldn't be about an offhand remark over dinner.

Oh, uh, I'm not sure if you caught this but it's also possible that in fact was the princess, if she was really curious and higher level than implied. The things I'm pretty sure are correlated with reality are that if it was a body double then it was a junior cleric - though possibly also a relative - and that the person we were talking to but not necessarily the princess if it wasn't her has been to Noctimar but not Zalun."

"I definitely did not catch that and am still unclear on how you knew it."

"Well, what do we know for nearly certain? A princess exists somewhere. I couldn't identify her if I met her, so swapping her out is easy if that's a thing she ever does, which she probably does. I'm cocky but signaling non-hostility, as opposed to being suspiciously obsequious or angry. So a weak princess probably swaps, because you don't want a predictable attitude of any kind to get you an audience with somebody who'll go down to a magic missile; but a strong princess might think it was interesting enough to put on her own crown and meet me. But she gains nothing from me knowing for sure. So if she wasn't the princess she didn't drop the sign anyway, and if she was she didn't drop the pretense anyway."

"Is not wanting people to hear you talk a common thing, or was that just her?"

"Shazeun power distance thing. We don't do it in Noctimar, so I'd be speculating."

Eyeroll. "Royalty everywhere converge on ways to suck."

"It's less inconvenient than the kneeling thing, if you ask me."