Harathes actually stepped forward, sword directed at that bowed back, but Cyrene shoved him to one side and was beside Enth in the next moment, her bow falling to the bloodied bed, her hands on his shoulders. Dion tensed, waiting for the creature to batter itself against Penthos’s strictures, to get its hands about her throat, to have to be put down. But it just slumped there, as though that one strike had somehow thrown its anger into the substance of the tower, and it had nothing left.

“I’m sorry,” Cyrene was murmuring. “Enth, I’m sorry. I really am.” Dion was shocked at Cyrene wanting to comfort the thing, more so that it apparently wanted comforting.

“Why do I feel this?” the man-spider asked. “Why would anyone want to feel this… I don’t even have words for what this is.”

“Guilt, remorse, empathy,” Lief listed lazily. “You’re already more human than Harathes.”

“Stop…” The warrior gritted his teeth. “Stop taking its side.”

“But we’re all on the side of the Light, didn’t you know?” Lief smiled sweetly at him. “No matter what we do.”

“Enough.” Dion glanced about for the last member of their company, finding the magician with his back turned, looking hawkishly at the stairs.

“You’re right, Penthos,” she decided. “Recriminations later. Let’s finish this.”

“Hmm, what?” The magician glanced at her, frowning. “Apologies, I was miles away. What’s happened?” His eyes took in the dead prisoners without finding anything amiss.

They trooped back down the stairs in grim silence. If Enth was leaving a trail of bloody footprints, the black stone and red lighting contrived to conceal it. Back in the makeshift kitchen there was a moment when everyone looked over the dead Doomsayers, the dead Ghants, and probably there was some sort of reassessment going on, in some heads at least. Dion knew that inside hers there was a great dammed weight of introspection that she was holding back. She had felt soiled from the moment that they had taken up Enth as a traveling companion, but that had been simple: to travel with a thing of Darkness was a bad thing—hardly the sort of complex moral quandary that would go into a seminary exam. The sullied feelings she was penning up now were not because she had used Enth as a tool. She did not like what she had seen, through Enth’s eyes. The moral certainty of the Light’s crusading methods was an easy thing to vouch for, when you only saw it from the side that held the sword and the disc.

There were several other doors off the kitchen, and Lief examined each, making full use of the fact that they had all been put in far more recently than the building of the tower, and that none of them fit their stone frames overly well.