The face: the problem was the face, which now stared out at them, and would stare right back into their nightmares later, no doubt. It was not the shape, because Penthos had wrought well there—the basic clay of that visage was well molded, and might have been handsome if all the rest of it had followed something more exactingly human. The marring of that regular perfection was part of what made it so horrible. There was a mouth there, and the teeth it bared were sharp and predatory, with canines like little daggers, elongated enough that Dion could only suppose the creature’s lower jaw had slots to scabbard them. There was a nose, small and sharp. There were eyes, but the eyes… There were too many of them, to start with. Two little buttons on his brow glinted back the Light of Armes, and she thought she saw another two pinpoint orbs a little ahead of his ears. She might have taken them for spots or marks or even tattoos, had it not been for those two main orbs that dominated the creature’s blank regard.

They were huge, and they were absolutely round, and featureless—no iris, no white, just great wells of darkness goggling out from that slack visage.

It was hunched, all elbows and knees, looking at—at them, at the world? There was no way to know quite where that all-consuming attention was focused. Now a shudder passed through it, a ripple of muscles that seemed weirdly boneless. Its lips moved over those jagged teeth.

It screamed, throwing its head high and giving off a dreadful, keening wail, and that, at least, sounded almost human. A human in unimaginable torment, but whatever was behind that sound had a visceral connection to them all that spiders lacked. Except it went on and on, until Dion wondered where the breath could be coming from, to power such an unbroken sound of pain and terror and self-loathing.

“What’s wrong with it?” she demanded of Penthos, who was looking entirely unruffled.

“My dear, give it a moment to acquaint itself with its new, ah, surroundings,” the magus suggested. “The wretched monster has undergone a journey that none of you can imagine.”

“Then send the thing back and we’ll dispatch it and find some other way,” Harathes snapped.

Penthos glowered. “Is this it? The thanks I receive for such an unprecedented work of magic? Where would your vaunted quest be without me? Would you even have survived the wood of the spiders without my fire? And a hundred other tribulations upon the road—?”

“Some of which only happened because of you!” Cyrene pointed out hotly.

“I, Penthos!” The magician stabbed a finger at the heavens, and the crack of thunder that followed was too well timed to be coincidental. “I, one of the great masters of the Power Elemental, have reworked the fabric of the world to your bidding, and you presume to complain?”