He opened his mouth—he had been given an instruction and could only obey it—and yet no words came out. He was aware of that great undigested knot of memory that his Mother had given him sitting like a stone in his mind. Somewhere in there was what he wanted, and yet he could not search for it. He had no idea of the shape of what he wanted.

“Speak!” Dion insisted, and something clenched nauseously within him, so that he gagged forward, jaw almost disarticulating to vomit out—just sounds, no words.

“Give him a chance,” Lief argued. “He’s thinking.”

“It,” the other female Man, Cyrene, corrected. “You keep calling it ‘him.’ ”

“It’s a him,” Lief said, then rolled his eyes. “He, he is a him.”

“I always was unsure about you,” Harathes stepped up to Cyrene’s shoulder, the two of them looming over him.

“Piss off,” Lief said. “I don’t answer to either of you.”

“Little man,” Harathes rumbled, but Lief pointedly turned his back on the pair of them. “Dion,” he said, “listen, how did the spider give directions?”

The priestess blinked at him. “Is this… are you trying to tell a joke?”

“So Mummy Spider knew where to go. So how’s Enth supposed to communicate it to us? I bet it—he doesn’t even know where we are. At least give the poor bastard some frame of reference. Can he read a map?”

“He should have some concept of maps, from all I gave him,” Penthos said thoughtfully. “The creature may have the makings of a good idea.”

“Show him a map, then,” Dion agreed.

“Hold on,” Lief objected, “did you just call me a creature?”

Penthos frowned. “I may have done. Is it important?”

“You are very pally with the monster, all of a sudden,” Cyrene pointed out.

“You can piss off too.”

“We live in unsure times,” the mage declared. “I can’t be expected to remember who’s a creature and who isn’t. Now, the map. I want to see how much the creature understands.”

“Which creature?” Lief asked sourly, but he got the map out, unfolding it for Nth’s benefit.

For a long while it was just a piece of paper with marks on, untidy and abstract. There was understanding there, though, buried in Nth’s mind—not what he had been gifted with by his Mother, but the human knowledge that Penthos had violated his brain with. For a moment he actively fought it off, clinging to ignorance with the desperation of a drowning swimmer, but then it unfolded itself within his head and he could relate the scrawl before him with the mental images that Mother had passed on: landmarks and trails, forests for hiding in, settlements to be avoided.

“Speak, monster,” Dion prompted. “Where is this path, this secret way to Darvezian?”