“You must guide us now,” Dion told him, soft but firm. “This is where we must trust your lead, and I swear that if you—”

He held a long-fingered hand up, stilling her words with the shock of his presumption. “I know,” said Nth. No more than that, and certainly he did not go on to point out how close they had come to killing him, betrayal or no. Looking into their faces, though, he found the thought written there, in that language he had been painstakingly learning ever since they took him from his home.

“Well, then, we are where you indicated. From here your Spider’s Path must lead, to take us past the defenses of Cad Usgath and the great host that Darvezian is gathering. For now we travel with the scouts, but you must tell us—”

“Here.” Nth stopped abruptly, crouching. He was not looking around him, but within, his hands feeling out the hard stone of the Bone Vice. Knowledge was trickling into his head, as though a great frozen block of it were gradually melting, as though this place put out a heat only he could feel. “We are close now.” He could not have said to what.

“There’s nothing here,” the scout leader objected.

“It is supposed to be a secret way,” Lief pointed out.

“If there was some way the enemy could creep in here, we’d know it. His spies come from the side gates of Cad Usgath.”

“Unless there are spies you don’t catch,” Cyrene pointed out.

The scout leader looked unhappy at that, and equally unhappily at Nth. “This stinks,” he opined.

“Tell me about it,” grunted Harathes, but Dion shushed him.

“This is not a path of the Dark Lord,” Nth said, forehead furrowed. In his mind that undigested lump of his Mother’s memories shifted and uncurled its legs a little. “This is what my Mother found—made?—in another age, when she dwelled here. Before Darvezian, before the Dark Lord who came before him. Before she went abroad, here she dwelled, in a crack in the rock, in a cave, in a maze of caves. Here she supped on the blood of Ghants, the juices of men, of eyeless tunellers, of…” He realized that they were looking at him in that way they had, even Lief and Cyrene, and brought the litany to an end. Not long ago and that would have been all he had to say, but now he could read too much of them. Now he was moved to add wretchedly, “This is how it was, when she was here. I am just—”

“Enough,” Dion said sharply, making him flinch. “I don’t care. Just lead us.”