"Especially," Myoko added, "if the villagers offered a reward."

"Or suppose," Sister Impervia said, "a gang of heathen bandits stole St. Judith's jawbone from the academy chapel. Wouldn't we be honorbound to organize a party and retrieve the saint's remains?"

The Caryatid made a face. "Those aren't quests, they're errands. You'd leave such business to the town watch… if Simka had a real town watch, instead of Whisky Jess and the Paunch That Walks Like a Man. I'm not talking about junkets to the countryside, I mean real live quests."

"What qualifies as a real live quest?" Myoko asked. "Finding the Holy Grail? Slaying the Jabberwock?"

"Saw a Jabberwock once," Sir Pelinor said with another mustache-suck. "Rusty mechanical thing in the remains of an OldTech amusement park. Four hundred years ago, parents paid for their kiddies to ride its back. No wonder OldTech society collapsed-if I'd seen that monster when I was a child, I wouldn't have slept again till I was twenty."

"I don't care about your Jabberwock," the Caryatid said. "I don't care about quests at all."

"Then why," Myoko asked, "do you keep talking about them?"

"Because," the Caryatid answered, staring moodily at the cockroach guts on the table, "this afternoon I had a sort of a prophecy kind of thing."

"Uh-oh," said the other four of us in unison… even Sister Impervia, who's theologically obliged to treat prophecies as Precious Gifts From Heaven. We all knew the Caryatid had flashes of second sight; alas, her gift of prophecy only raised its head when something really ugly was about to happen.