Lief had been about to trip the line, to cry out to the denizens of the Dark that he was there—that he was prey—springing the trap of wire-strong strands that would have caught him up. They were laced everywhere between the rocks before the cave mouth, gleaming in Nth’s sight, seemingly invisible to the humans. And, seeing that line, that trap, Nth had struck. But his old pure instinct was corrupted. He had struck to push Lief back from the brink.

He felt a confusion of reactions. He was glad he had saved Lief. He was bitterly disappointed in himself.

“When your—when she left here,” Cyrene said softly, “she left something behind, then?”

It had become crowded. Now the knowledge came to him. And these lines were fresh. No doubt some of the scouts from either fortress had fallen victim to something other than the enemy.

“Simple enough,” Lief put in suddenly. “We just happen to have brought our own native.”

Nth found that all eyes were on him. “I am no native to this place,” he told them uncertainly.

“More so than any of us,” Dion stated. “Go to the—” She visibly restrained her speech. “Go to your people. Tell them we do not come to make war. Tell them to let us pass, and they shall not be harmed.”

Nth stared into her serene, terrible face. “It is an intrusion. An invasion of their territory.” He had to reach to find each word, supplementing his vocabulary with deep-buried ideas that had come from Penthos. The concepts were light-swift and obvious to him, but humans had so many words, which all together amounted to so little.

“And we are capable of driving our way in with faith and fire,” Dion said calmly. “You know this. So: you will convince them.”

Nth looked from face to face, but even those who might be his allies were obviously in favor of this plan. At the last, he turned back to the cave mouth.

He caught movement there, and could imagine the rounded bodies, the clutching legs: at least he was being sent somewhere cleaner and more wholesome than a festering human town.

He approached carefully, stepping over or hunching under each trip-line, not ready to enter the world of their speech until he was closer. Their eyes were on him, though. Perhaps they were wondering what he was.

When he was close—enough to sense the ratcheting tension from within, he reached his long fingers down to the closest threads, those that fed directly into the shadows of the cave. He touched them lightly, holding Dion’s words in his mind, trying to find a translation of them that would be true enough to the original to comply with Penthos’s strictures of obedience. His hands hovered there, like a man with his mouth open but nothing to say.

He touched; he plucked.

Noise. Just noise.