They had been hoping to take the pass to the border town of Isinglas, which for decades had stood as a bastion against what might come across the uncertain and contested territory they now occupied. Travel via Isinglas would be the long road to Darvezian, but the safer for it, through territories where the Light and the church for Armes were still strong.

Within a day from the stone circle, however, word came to them from fugitive travelers and woodsmen that the Ghantish were abroad in great numbers, stirred up from their holes and haunts, and that Isinglas was as good as under siege. There followed a hurried conference of war, with Harathes arguing that they should go to the aid of the embattled town, and Cyrene and Lief urging the importance of their mission and the importance of avoiding large battles respectively. Penthos ventured no opinion, and the creature, Enth, was not consulted.

It had slowed their progress at first. Walking had not come naturally to it, so that for the first few miles the abomination had lurched about like a drunkard, falling over, staggering, hissing in rage at its own ineptitude. Penthos had tried to aid it, but his idea of teaching the thing to walk had revolved around exerting a magical dominance and forcibly shunting forward one leg and then the other, resulting in a weird, stiff-legged stilt-walking where it was obvious the monster would topple the moment the mage left off. Lief finding every second of the business hilarious had not helped.

Then they had broken their fast, leaving the thing squatting, shackled by the invisible chains of Penthos’s magic and mercifully clad in one of the magician’s spare robes. Left to its own devices it had apparently experienced some sort of grotesque epiphany. Dion had seen it stretching its limbs in turn, staring at them as though attempting to divine their purpose from first principles. When they set off, it had found a loping, easy pace beside them, more bestial than human but undeniably fast. Dion had the disturbing impression that, if it had been free to, it could have been off and away at the sort of speed it would take a good horse to match. She could hardly say that she had begun to worry about the creature, because that worry had been present even before its transfiguration, but certainly her worries increased.

She was constantly tempted to draw forth the disc of Armes and expose the monster to her faith’s holy Light, just to reassure herself that she had power over it. Its very presence was exerting a fearful fascination over her, as would a venomous serpent coiled beside her foot. It was all too easy to envisage those hands about her throat, those razor teeth buried in her flesh…