If Waver had stuck to pure dismissive scorn, Joy would have endured. She has faced many insults worse than that in her long life and swallowed them, whatever Patience had to say about her tolerance for frustration. She would have, of course, had some choice words of her own, but it could have been borne as simply another indignity among many.

It's the cigarette ash that spirals on the wind to land on the rippling surface of her broken pod that does her in.

Joy goes quite still, in a brittle, splintering way, and she extends herself along the retreating mage's eighth cranial nerves, reaches precisely into the labrinth of the ear, where the vestibular organs are placidly at work. She takes hold of the sensory connection, and in a brisk flood of inflammatory triggers, she tips his body over into the worst case of vertigo she can inflict short of ripping the whole structure out in two meaty little gobs.

When he topples over, as he will, unless he has any very clever tricks up his sleeve, Joy levers herself to her feet and picks her way across the sand.

"Disgusting and antisocial," she says, nastily.