Penthos, personally, would rather have taken the road and answered force with force when the opportunity presented itself. There were magicians among the Doomsayers who would be quite the challenge, and he would be able to show off his power and finesse to Dion. He had even suggested as much, but she had talked at some length about collateral damage and innocent lives, and so apparently he had got it wrong again. His comment about there being no innocents having any business traveling between Shogg’s Ford and Ening’s Garth also failed to go down well, and he had made matters worse by trying to pass it off as a joke after rather too much of a strained pause.

All in all, Penthos was feeling at a low ebb, exacerbated by the fact that his usual recourse—to set things on fire—seemed likely to make things worse. He trudged along at the back of their party as they headed over the rugged gorse and briar-ridden terrain, feeling sorry for himself. Is there any creature in the world more woebegotten than I?

He spared a glance for his creation, the man-spider Enth. Probably it was in even worse straits. No doubt it would complain, if its nature was sophisticated enough to allow it to do so. For a moment, Penthos toyed with the idea of making the monster attack his fellows so that he could rescue them. But no. Doubtless any rescue, however magnificent, would be obscured by their casting blame on him for not managing his monster, and besides, his rescues tended to be a source of collateral damage in and of themselves.

Life was hard. Life was complicated. That was what these people did not understand. Everyone assumed that genius-level wizards such as he were all for complex schemes and plots of surpassing intricacy, but Penthos longed only for simplicity. Simplicity and Dion, anyway.

Cyrene had been scouting ahead, an arrow to her bow. Penthos had considered volunteering for the duty, perhaps with an eye to manufacturing some sort of ambush or emergency that would allow him to show his worth. However, he was uncomfortably aware that, without constantly drawing on his magic, his sense of direction was notoriously poor. The one time he had tried to lead the fellowship across country, long before the Wood of the Spiders, he had managed to guide them into the same nest of troll-men three times, to the exasperation of all concerned, not least the troll-men, who had grown increasingly jaded about being set on fire and having their limbs hacked off.