"Thanks. Somebody has in fact already grabbed the posthumous work of Bach but just the sheet music. Demons have done recordings. How are you?"

"I'm doing great. Myriol had a couple of things she wanted me to take a look at recently and I dealt with both of them. Nothing earth-shattering, but it's nice to be useful."

His accent is a little hard to place; the underlying Thulic flavour comes through strongest when he says the name of his Grand Duchess.

"Oh yeah? What'd you do?"

"Gently convinced some people that the laws they keep trying to break exist for good reasons and they should stop being assholes about it - one of them yearns to introduce Arctic foxes to our delicate ecology for aesthetic reasons, the other one just thinks taxes are a really great idea that should apply to other people."

"You can convince people to voluntarily pay taxes?"

"Eh, he just needed a little patience."

"If you have any medium-sized predators they could maybe be angeled into looking foxy but I do not know how they'd do after that. What did that person need?"

"That person needed a comprehensible, nonconfrontationally delivered explanation of why the thing they wanted to do would be an enormous disaster."

"Are these typical of thane errands?"

"They're typical-ish of my thane errands, because they're the sort of thing I'm good at."

"What is the best thane errand you have been on, and what do you want for lunch?"

"Ooh, best is a tough one - I'd like some sort of humanly impossible demonic cuisine, of course - a few of the most personally satisfying ones are also stories it is not mine to tell, but as long as I don't name any names or specify any ill conduct I can safely tell you that I once convinced someone with diplomatic immunity to stop abusing it in a highly antisocial fashion, and out of all the thane errands I've done in my year and a half as a thane of Thule I think that's the one I truly believe no one else could have managed."

"Oh, but now I'm all curious. Whoops. Allergies, aversions -"

"I am thankfully not allergic to any foods that I know of, although my list of medical allergies is long and baffling. I have no strong aversions."

"Sauce-flaked fish and mosaicized spicy vegetables and impossible fruity chocolate emulsion it is. The emulsion breaks almost right away, I'll make it when we're done with the entrée." Fish! Veg!

"I am in favour of these humanly impossible foods!"

He tries the humanly impossible foods.

"Very much in favour!"

"I'm so glad. Demons do good food."

"Clearly so. Another reason to hope I'm destined for Hell."

"Angels can make similar stuff and fairies can copy some of the tricks."

"Despite how much fun it would be to be a fairy and how useful it would be to be a demon, I suspect that, leaving aside all concerns but the power itself, the one that would suit me best is angel."

"My guess is that's actually how it works, suitedness to the power. Why do you think angel?"

"Oh, being a demon would drive me nuts, I'd make something and then I'd want to fix a few details and the next thing you know you can find me at the end of a long trail of increasingly elaborate houses. And fairies are - well, not my style. I'm a meddler. I fix things."

Giggle. "Angel it is. They can do some things we can't - they can do vacuum, for one thing -"

"Oh, excellent. I do like synergy."

"My suspicion is based on who showed up when Elvis was summoning some random ex-human demons. Entrepreneur, sculptor, stuff like that."