“Right, follow me, then. We’re going downstairs. I don’t care what Dion says, I’m not pitching up at even this approximation of civilization and not getting a drink. How fair would that be? Problem with that woman is, she’s too damn holy for her own good. She forgets that the rest of us are just a bit more human.” Lief eyed his charge. “Some of us, anyway. You drink, monster? Answer me—look, just take it as truth that if I ask a question, you answer, right? You know what a question is?”

Nth nodded.

“And the drinking part?”

Nth nodded again. He felt very afraid of this energetic little man. Downstairs was full of humans and others that might as well be humans. There was noise, and inexplicable things were done with liquids and discs of metal and the bodies of other humans.

“Come on then.” Lief opened the door, then looked back, his face twisted awkwardly. “I’ve had better drinking buddies. There was a time when people actually wanted to share a jar with me, and I didn’t have to resort to coercing magic monster spider people by secondhand duress.” A pause, in which Nth searched wildly for some appropriate response and found none, before the little man added, “So I guess that means I’m buying the round, eh?” His mouth turned up at the corners, but in a rather forced way. He did not seem happy, even now he had got what he wanted.

The big room below was a seething maggots’ nest of humans and Ghantishmen and other things, most of them armed and almost all of them bigger than Lief, but the man shouldered and elbowed his way to where a makeshift barricade of barrels had apparently been built by a very fat woman. Nth felt such a measure eminently sensible, and would have liked to shelter behind it too, as protection from the surging tide of the crowd. Every moment he was being touched, some spongy-skinned human creature jostling him, leaning into him, or brushing against him. The feel of their pliable hides was profoundly uncomfortable, a horrible and unsought intimacy.

Lief addressed the vast woman and made some request of her, sliding over some pieces of metal—no, coins, came the unwanted knowledge. This was commerce, where the metal served as a memory for past services in some way, so that Lief’s historical actions were somehow remembered to the woman, to be rewarded with the two wooden mugs of Something Suspect that he had now been given. Nth struggled with the concept, trying to understand why it worked and whether anyone wanted the metal for itself, or just for what it represented. The thought reminded him irresistibly of his own predicament: a thing that had value to these humans without them finding in him any inherent worth. He was a cipher, a means to an end, to be spent and forgotten.