Oeuf scanned the dining room before ushering Askatla ahead of himself.

The room was just as she had left it, the picture of neo-baroque ostentatiousness that her father had enforced after centuries of “modernist bastardisation” as he called it. Gone were the wall-to-wall carpets and monochromatic geometric furniture, replaced by hardwood polished to a mirror sheen and a dining set of maple with florid arched legs holding a birds eye tabletop and firmly tufted rose coloured upholstered chair on either side. Ornate brass sconces topped with faceted glass tubes cast starbursts from between windows curtained with heavy cotton duck in…