“What is our road, anyway?” Cyrene interrupted. “What’s this spider’s path business?”

“Well, we can take the opportunity to quiz the creature now we’re here, as well,” Dion decided. She tugged at the bridge of her nose, feeling a headache coming on. The sheer exuberant amorality of the place was already getting to her. “Cyrene, do you know this place at all?”

“I know some people to talk to, who’ll tell me most of the truth,” the other woman confirmed. “The Light isn’t entirely forgotten here.”

Dion had planned to hole up in their room while her less sanctified companions did the legwork, but Cyrene’s words gave her other ideas. “Truly? Even in this place?”

The bow-woman nodded cautiously.

“Then I will accompany you to them.” Because I could dearly use some indication that the Light is not simply to pass out of the world, unheeded and unmourned. I have been too long in dark places.

“Then I go too,” Harathes told her. “This place is a pit. You’ll be marked by every thing of Darkness on the streets.”

“If you must. Penthos, you have magical means of gathering information, I know. Do what you can.”

“It shall be as you command,” the mage said grandly.

“What about me? I’ll go talk to some less enlightened sources, shall I?”

Dion gave Lief a level stare. “You stay with the creature here in the room. One of us must.”

The little man looked outraged—no, that was just for show, Dion saw. He was just bitter that he wouldn’t get to go whoring and stealing while her back was turned, no doubt. She was immediately nagged by uncertainty. Surely Lief was a good man to have out gathering information—and wasn’t that what she needed? Didn’t that serve their quest? One more compromise, ends and means?

No. Consider it a punishment for his thieving ways. “You stay with the monster,” she told him severely, already knowing that she was the basest hypocrite, and that she was punishing him when in truth she should be punishing herself. For a moment she felt as though she were going to lose it, all her composure, all at once, just burst into tears before them and confess that, no, she was not sure at all, and that this entire venture was seeming more and more a lost dream.

But she had to be strong. They looked to her for their moral guidance. She must be firm, because there was no other anchor in the world for them, if not she.

Lief looked less than delighted to be anchored to the creature, Enth, but she had made her decision, and now she had to stick with it. That was how leadership worked.