“No, I wasn’t, I didn’t mean—Ah!” and the golden fires of truth seared a red weal across his forehead. “All right, yes! He’s not up there! Nobody’s up there!”

“Don’t tell us he’s not even here,” spat Lief disgustedly.

The Doomsayer stared at them helplessly. “Well, of course he’s here. He’s down on the bottom floor. That’s where his throne room is. You must have gone right past the door to it. Who would live at the top of a tower? Have you seen how many fucking stairs there are?”

Dion stared woodenly at him, aware that somewhere at the edge of her vision Lief was smirking uncontrollably.

“Oh, well, don’t we feel like fools now,” the thief snickered. “Terribly sorry to have bothered you. We’ll head back downstairs again, shall we? Let you get back to ploughing your furrow. Sorry about the mess. Oh, no, I forgot! You’re evil, and it’s an evil furrow! What an impasse!”

“Shut up, Lief,” snapped Dion, Cyrene, and Harathes all together, when it became evident that his gift for improvising was not going away any time soon.

“Well, seriously, though, what do we do with them, exactly?”

Dion sighed, looking at the two wretched Doomsayers. “You’re good with knots. Tie them—to the bed, to each other, whatever. Gag them.”

“Break their fingers, maybe,” Harathes suggested dourly.

Lief shook his head, and took a knife to the bedsheets, ripping them into strips and then doing a very professional job securing the two naked Doomsayers, leaving the man’s hand pinned to the bed by Cyrene’s arrow. He took his time and checked all of the knots. “Well, don’t know how long it’ll take to do what we came here for, but they’re here for the duration or until someone finds them. Let’s pop downstairs and finish this.”

Dion took a deep breath. “The Dark Lord.”

Lief shrugged. “We’ve made quite a dent in his hired help already. How many Doomsayers are there, anyway? We’ve finished off five here, and Enth got a couple before. Even if we… even if things don’t go to plan, that’s got to count for something, right?”

“Things will go to plan,” Dion stated, hearing the force of her own words ring hollow inside her head. “I will bless you all, when we’re down. What power the Light can muster in this place, I shall gift you with it. If you have any talismans or potions or other measures of last resort, now is the time to resort to them. I should… I should say something, I think.”

“Nothing long-winded,” Lief pointed out.

“But this is… we’ve worked so hard for this.”