But at that moment Lothern was back, leaping into their midst with his great heroic strides and declaring, “My friends, alack, the Darkness is still nigh, but hidden from me! I swear my eyes are sharper than any man’s, but no trace of it can I find!” He looked so terribly earnest and desperate to please, or at least to please Cyrene, to whom his eyes kept drifting.

Dion raised a hand, as if in benediction, and then she sat down, turning away from him to hide her expression.

“Alack,” said Lothern bewilderedly. “I have failed in my service…?”

“Aha,” Dion got out. “Oh Armes help me.” Her voice trembled, and to Penthos’s delight she was plainly on the very edge of giving in to hysterical laughter. “Lothern, pray just… take us to Ening’s Garth, right now, forget the evil, no more stops, and that will be enough… service from you.” And although her voice wavered perilously on the brink, she was able to finish her sentence without laughing in the man’s well-meaning face.

The sight of Dion letting go of her holy authority enough to actually smile—and for once at a joke that Penthos himself was able to understand—brought a moment’s much-needed levity to the magician. A moment later, he caught sight of Enth again, standing dumb and oblivious in the midst of all this confusion that he was, all unwittingly, the cause of. Something about that blankly hostile face soured his enjoyment of the moment. The creature was plainly aware that something was going on, but would never be able to comprehend what it was. There was a hole in Enth where humor was supposed to sit, and Penthos wondered glumly whether that was due to the thing’s essential dour nature, or whether it reflected some similar failure of his own.

From that point on they began to make respectable progress toward Ening’s Garth, although Lothern kept feeling frettishly for his talisman. Penthos was able to observe a peculiar dance between him, Harathes, and Cyrene, as the big warrior constantly tried to walk between the other two, or at least uncomfortably close to them, while Cyrene was constantly moving off, frequently with Lothern tagging after her. In the end, the cumulative delay caused by all that maneuvering was, Penthos reckoned, a greater drag on their time than any spurious evil-detection.