“No,” Enth said, unexpectedly enough that everyone jumped. His round black eyes gleamed in Armes’s Light as his attention skipped from one to another. “I told them. I told them you would do this if they gave you an excuse. They could have hidden. They could have listened to me. It was their decision, to attack us. To attack you. You. Us.” His hands twitched and flexed, and abruptly his whole face convulsed, an expression forcing its way into being from the very depths of his Dark heart. “They were stupid!” he got out through clenched fangs. “Stupid and blind and limited! And I tried to tell them! I said everything I could to show how murderous and merciless and terrible you—we—you are! But they thought they knew best. They had to challenge you. They dared encroach on the world of humanity. And that means death. I know that now. It always means death.”

Which was not entirely how Dion wanted to think of things, and she knew that there were surely gaps in the creature’s logic somewhere, but just then she could not muster the mental resources to think of them.

And, besides, Harathes was coming back with, “That’s right, and don’t you forget it,” and for a moment Dion found herself regarding him as she saw Enth, as an inhuman and repulsive specimen of some alien species.

“Let’s just move on,” she said quietly.

There was a light touch on her arm: Penthos, regarding her with recognizable human concern.

“I’m fine,” she said, with more force than she felt. “Let’s just move on. We’ve got a job to do. We didn’t come here to kill spiders.”

It was Enth who led on, from that point, with Penthos conjuring good air when necessary—less and less as they neared the far side of the caves. They passed many more spiders, but they were all of them dead, their subterranean home become their tomb. We got them all, Dion considered. We wiped out the whole nest of them. It should have been a deed of song and story, a great Darkness cleansed from the world. Right then she just felt empty. Not guilty, not sorry that the monsters were gone, but not triumphant, either. She felt as though the whole trek onward to Darvezian was something that she must endure, plodding ever on and on, until it was done. And then? And then at least, whatever else, it would be done. Time enough to think then what she would do with herself.