She nods. "I'll let her know. What is their dwindling like?"

"They lose their memories," says the first one.

Another nod. "She's mentioned them - it seems like they might be the next easiest to help after the whitemages."

"Why's that?" wonders the second guard.

"She already knows how to work with memories. She'll need to see what exactly their dwindling does, but one of the mental defense techniques she already knows might be enough for them."

"How's that come up where you're from?"

"Her kind of mages don't get along with each other very well."

"And can take memories?"

"Some of them, yes sir. I don't think Xaari Deskyl knows that technique, though."

"Mm-hm."

DZ shrugs.

"When's she gonna be done doing that thing so we can show her in to the appointments?"

"Now is fine, sir." She goes to get her.

The first appointment is a whitemage, wrapped up in a lot of layers of linen to make it marginally less hazardous to get near the sick fellow who has paid for her services.

Deskyl leans against the wall and closes her eyes, and gestures after a moment for the whitemage to go ahead.

The whitemage nudges enough linen off her hand to touch the sick man's hand, and he coughs a few times and then stops.

Deskyl hisses softly when the healing starts.

And then the whitemage is done and puts her linen back over her hand and a servant ushers the cured man out.

    "She says she should be able to block the dwindling, at least for whitemages and probably for everyone. It's going to be tiring for her, though."

"It'd be worth a fair amount of money," says Tse Witwex, who's been looking on. "Unfortunately, it'll be hard in most cases to verify that you've managed it. Easiest by far to check greenmages and to a lesser extent redmages than the others."

    "Yes Ma'am. She's willing to do it anyway, at least when she's already here."

"We can adjust how we time appointments, if there are regular times it would be convenient for you to come."

"I'm sure there will be, Ma'am, but we don't know what they are yet. Perhaps we can come back in a week or two; we'll know more then and Deskyl will be ready to heal the whitemages again."

"Very well. The next appointment is a redmage - not a new client, but a visit from a preexisting one. Those are usually private; do you need to be in the room?"

   "It would be helpful for her to meet the redmage first, Ma'am, so she knows who to watch, but she can do it from a distance after that."