Dion sighed. “There’s nobody else I’d turn to if I needed to yank a monster of Darkness about by its chain,” she remarked dryly.

Penthos beamed, oblivious as always to subtext.

“Listen to me, creature,” Dion said to Enth, and then a shadow passed over her face and she grimaced. “Enth, listen to me.”

The man-spider waited for her to speak.

“We go to fight the Dark Lord,” Dion told him. “All we have done—entering your forest, all the traveling, the tunnels, the Spider’s Path, and the Tooth of the Great Mother, all this has been to put us in a position where we can defeat him. We have been guided by the most erudite scholars’ interpretations of prophecy, to bring us to this point.”

Enth nodded.

“I can’t expect you to understand why the Dark Lord needs casting down. I think you’d need some Light in your soul for that. You have no such Light. Probably you have no soul.” Dion shrugged. “It isn’t your doing, but that’s how things are. Darvezian has caused the deaths of thousands, the corruption of more. He threatens the freedom and virtue of the world, as his predecessors did before him. Just take it from me that he must be destroyed.”

Enth nodded.

“When we enter his tower, you may fight and kill any creature that is not one of us, and is not a prisoner of the Dark Lord. Certainly anything that seems our enemy.”

Enth nodded a third time. Dion peered into his almost-human face, into the void of his eyes, seeking true comprehension and seeing only her own shadowed reflection.

“It will have to do,” she said at last to the others. “I fear I am not thinking clearly, but if he is to fight, he will need his initiative.”

Enth was looking up at the pinnacle of the Dark Tower now, and his long-fingered strangler’s hands were clenching and unclenching slowly.

They went in as swiftly as Cyrene had said, although the “silently” was a matter of opinion. There were six Ghants in the kitchen now, one of them engaged in the very evil business of sweeping something up. There were also two different Doomsayers, a great bull of a man wearing a filthy arming jacket, presumably suitable for wearing under huge suits of rune-inscribed black armor, and a woman whose pallid skin glowed with greenish sigils. They were eating.

“Don’t like the look of her,” Lief had decided.

“Don’t look at her then,” had been Cyrene’s advice. “Get into place, all of you.”

First through the door was Cyrene’s best arrow, properly briefed on all details of the plan by its mistress. The woman with the illuminated skin took it through the eye at quite a respectable distance, flinging her plate at the high ceiling in a theatrical gesture before toppling backward. Even as the man looked up, the rest were through the door.