"What have you got in these areas?" she asked.

With a sigh, our guides directed the Djinn driving the carpet in an easterly direction, toward the faint fingers of light heralding false dawn.

Location, location, location, as Catchmeier, the real-estate Deveel, kept reciting to us, as if repetition made it truer than anything else he said. Just before the sun came up, we landed in front of a tent I wouldn't have looked twice at if I'd been on my own. To my surprise, it lay across a busy passageway from the Golden Crescent Inn, one of my favorite eateries, a reliable spot for private conferences, and workplace of some of my closest friends in the Bazaar who didn't work for me. The rental property lay just exactly at the angle one's glance would fall on as one came around the corner of yet another throughway, one that even at this early hour was full of carts and foot traffic. It had looked promising, even to my increasingly bleary eyes.

"It's got all the comforts of home," Catchmeier said, holding aside the flap of the tent. I peered inside. The decor in the transdimensional building concealed by the magikal portal hadn't been updated in years, maybe not since the spell was laid, but I couldn't see anything basically wrong with it. I got a glance of tired walls painted in faded designer beige, worn wooden floors, and battered lintels between rooms. '"Skylights in the two main rooms. Outhouse out the back. Regular trash pickup. Safe neighborhood—hardly any murders in the last ten years. Well, the last two anyhow. Last two months," he admitted at last. "What do you think?"

Bunny and I looked at one another. "We'll take it," she'd said. The Deveels and the Djinn driver looked relieved.

"Just come with me," Catchmeier had said. "We'll have the paperwork drawn up for you in no time. No trouble."