“If you would,” Dion confirmed, and then winced and staggered, because the magus had taken hold of the native power around them and just yanked on it, gathering swathes of it into his hands, tearing it from the earth. She was used to the exercise of his power—coarse, unsubtle, but staggeringly strong—but this was Penthos giving his all. Some small part of her was awed that all that almost brutal might was actually on her side. A rather larger part of her simply marked up one more reason to fear his betrayal. Magi had never seen eye to eye with the church of Armes. Oh certainly, the world was full of men and women of ambition, but magi sought to place themselves on a level beyond human—a level, therefore, that approached that of the divine Armes himself. Neither Armes nor powerful magi much liked the competition. History was full of men like Penthos who had been brought down by the justice of Armes before they could become something like Darvezian.

And yet the Dark Lords keep rising up. We always miss a few. Perhaps Penthos will be next to take that mantle and cast his lot entirely in with the Dark.

She turned away as the magic began snapping and sizzling about the magus’s hands. Seconds later it must have begun its work on the spider, because she heard a thin shrieking from it, a hissing and a rattling of its chitinous body, all too reminiscent of those hectic minutes within the forest.

She wondered if spiders actually felt pain, or anything that a human might conceive as pain, or any finer feeling. It seemed unlikely. What, then, would they get from this ritual? Some puppet or echo of Penthos with the spider’s vital knowledge seemed the best they could hope for.

The others had their weapons to hand, all facing away from the searing flashes of greenish light and gouts of flame that accompanied almost all of Penthos’s major works. When Dion considered the world, her chief question was, Is this of Light or Dark? Penthos’s main interest was usually, Is this flammable?

She wished she’d asked how long this was going to take. For all she knew it could be days. Men like Penthos tended to lack a human frame of reference for things like time.

Clutching the disc of Armes to her for comfort, she lowered herself to her knees and prepared herself for a long vigil.

The night was well advanced when Cyrene of the keen eyes called out an alarm. As Penthos had warned, works like this attracted attention, and one would hardly need to be magically sensitive to spot the visible display of power that the magus was lighting up the hilltop with.

“What have we got?” Harathes demanded.

“I think it’s Ghantishmen. A warband, raiders maybe.” Still out of arrows, Cyrene readied her sword. “Dion. Light, please.”