But no: there he was, standing between those two leaning stones, arms outstretched as though inviting applause.

“Penthos?” she asked again.

“It is done,” he crowed. “Am I not the most magnificent of all magicians?” He kept trying to catch her eye, and she swore he waggled his eyebrows at her. Surely he was sometimes one of the most disturbing of all magicians.

“With what result?” Dion demanded.

“Only come and see.” Penthos made a flowing gesture with his hands, the sleeves of his robe trailing after. “Witness what my power has made.” And then, because that was apparently insufficiently magnificent, “Wrought, rather.”

The four of them trailed up the hill, Dion letting the Light of Armes subside until it was only a soft glow.

Something was crouched atop the hill, something that seemed like a man. It lifted its head.

2: Fear and Loathing in Shogg’s Ford

DION MADE A SOUND. It was not quite a word, or anything fit to come from the throat of a priestess of Armes. The two warriors, Harathes and Cyrene, followed suit. Lief was the only one able to articulate their collective reaction.

“What the fucking arses is that?”

Penthos frowned, still very much in his pose as Ringmaster of the Marvelous. “What do you think it is? I have transmogrified the invertebrate arachnid into the semblance of a man.”

“What man looks like that?” Harathes demanded. “It’s hideous.”

“More so than its native form? I think no—” Penthos started grandly, but Cyrene cut him off.

“It is. Gods help us, but it is. Halfway is worse, Penthos.” Her voice shook.

Dion coughed, still fighting down the shock and revulsion. “Penthos,” she said quietly, diplomatically, “this is the extent of what you can achieve?”

It—he, she supposed, for there was enough evidence to give it a gender—squatted atop the hill, and Cyrene was right that it was the near-miss, that so-closeness that turned the stomach with its almost-familiarity. The skin was grayish in the moonlight, like a Ghantishman’s, and the body seemed close to human, hirsute about the chest and groin, long-limbed but not unnaturally so. He would be tall, when he stood, Dion guessed. There was a lithe strength in that frame, no wasted flesh but not skinny, either. His hands were long-fingered—and definitely a little too long, there. They had no nails, but that was hardly the issue.