Dion toyed with the disc of Armes as though wondering how far her status would take them, if questioned. “We must have faith,” she told them faintly, doubt leaking out between the words.

Ening’s Garth, their first port of call, was not exactly a bastion of righteousness, Penthos knew. He had been given cause to visit the place before, two or three times, arriving in one of those guises that wizards traditionally adopted in such circumstances, but which he gloomily suspected fooled nobody. After all, while an aged wanderer with a staff and a hat should have been a relatively innocuous thing, the roads were so dangerous these days that any genuine old fool just pottering about on his own between cities would find his possessions in a bandit’s pack and the rest of him inside a bear before he completed the first leg of his journey. Any aged wayfarer turning up at the gates of Ening’s Garth was almost de facto a wizard, and the guards had met Penthos with the sort of exaggerated and fearful courtesy he suspected they would not have reserved for someone’s dotty grandfather out after curfew.

He had been hunting magic, of course. Ening’s Garth straddled the borders: here the Dark-minded smuggled things of value out of the lands of the Light, and the adventurous brought them back. The shadow markets of Ening’s Garth might hold anything.

Unfortunately, the same basic failure of disguise that got him through the gates also tipped off any sellers, so that Penthos had never been to Ening’s Garth without being thoroughly ripped off by various merchants of the obscure. He had no warm feelings for the place.

Getting to Ening’s Garth would be another matter, of course. There was plenty of disputed territory between there and Shogg’s Ford. The Eningsmire was treacherous, ruin-haunted terrain where the roads shifted daily and were watched over by unpleasant eyes. Darvezian had many spies, but most of them were sadly lacking in imagination. Because they searched hawkishly for travelers on the road, cross country was usually the sounder trail despite the bogs, dark woods, and a miscellany of beasts. After all, now that their party had a dead Doomsayer to their credit, the agents of the Dark Lord would surely be seeking for them on all the usual paths.