Well, nobody gets to be a sneak thief without knowing the smell of shit, he considered. Someone’s eating well in that tower. And he waited while the Ghants made several more trips, and tried to calculate just how many bowels were moving in the Dark Lord’s domain.

So is it just Ghants, or…? Experience suggested that his nose was not sharp enough to tell the stools of Ghants from the excrement of men and, in all honesty, before now he would not have said it was a skill any adventuring hero might have need of.

When the Ghants finished their rounds—four trips, two buckets each, and no easy way to know how often they slopped out—Lief let himself creep closer to the door, still standing open.

What vile practices lie inside? he wondered. Is all that crap from prisoners, or a garrison…? It would have to be a rather meager garrison for the size of the tower, but then perhaps most of the defenders were undead or something. A freedom from being caught short seemed to be one of the few advantages of being a Deathless Servant of the Dark.

Hidden, with a vantage point through the doorway, the mystery unraveled. He was looking into a huge space, too large to see how big from his narrow slice of it. He could spot a half-dozen Ghants there, and they were engaged in the villainous activity of cooking something.

Of course, you could still cook and be evil—Cyrene’s encounter with the innkeeper proved that—but this looked to be a relatively run-of-the-mill subsistence sort of cookery. There was a fire, and a big iron pot, and the stuff they were throwing in looked more like vegetables and some rather nasty sort of meat than eye of bat and wing of frog. Human meat, Lief speculated, but he wondered if he was just finding evil because he was looking for it. Even the servants of the Dark Lord needed to eat.

He had an odd moment, then, considering just how inconvenient this place must be to live in. Nothing much grew roundabouts, and that twisted, spiny patch was more likely an attempt at a vegetable patch than a place to cultivate horrors. Even the wood the Ghants were burning must be brought in specially. No wonder there were no great hordes at the Dark Lord’s very doorstep—they would have starved to death, or frozen in the nights, or just died of extreme bad backs and crooked necks trying to sleep on the hard ground. Of a necessity, the Dark Tower’s complement must be a small one.

Then another figure crossed past the Ghants, speaking sharply to them and cuffing one. Lief drew in his breath, confronting a proper evil at last. The man was rake-lean and stooped, but he wore dark robes embroidered with glimmering symbols: no mistaking a Doomsayer.