The magician nodded, long-faced. “It tastes foxed even to me. To our monster it would probably be like drinking vitriol.”

“Can you not call him that?”

“He’s my monster,” the wizard said petulantly. “I’ll call him what I like.”

“I’m not a monster.”

The two humans stared at Enth in silence.

“You’re what I call you—” started Penthos, but Lief broke in.

“Shut up.”

“How dare you—!” but something in the little man’s expression, incredibly, was enough to make the magician subside.

“Besides, you know all the stories,” the thief added unkindly, “who do they like less, the monsters or those that make them? Better for you if he’s not such a monster, eh?”

Penthos opened his mouth, then shut it, and to Lief’s surprise a mournful expression came over his face. “You’re right, of course,” he bemoaned. “I was only trying to help. I was only trying to make this quest nonsense work. And it’s made things worse, somehow. It’s made her unhappy. Why does everything I do end up like that?”

Lief’s eyebrows had gone past his hairline, and he tried to exchange an alarmed look with Enth, who had no equivalent look to pass back to him. “Er, right… ,” he ventured. “We all know you’re trying…” But no, enough was enough. “Look, I am not playing shoulder-to-cry-on for a man who can make whole villages explode. Just drink.”

“It’s horrible,” Penthos said, close to tears.

“It gets better.” Enth had not touched his but plainly he was drawing on memories of beers past. Looking at him, Lief wondered if there was something more human about him now, crept into that awkward posture and behind those nightmare eyes.

Later on, and they had at last found a way to amuse themselves and take out their frustrations on Armesion at the same time. They were renaming the Heathen’s Quarter’s sole inn.

“The Abomination’s Rest,” put in Penthos, giggling a little.

“The Pit of Iniquity,” Lief decided.

“Vice’s Last Stand.”

“That’s a good one.” The thief considered. “The Tavern of Lost Souls? No wait, how about Archbishop Prurient’s Home for Hopeless Moral Rejects?”

Penthos almost fell off his chair.

“Come on, Enth, you can do one,” Lief encouraged.

Abruptly the monster stood, and for a moment Lief thought he was going to declaim some joke name across the entire room, but then he was pointing. Cyrene had just walked in with a face like thunder. It was all rather déjà vu.

“Is she ready? Can we leave?” Penthos demanded.

“I can’t imagine how you found us,” Lief added sardonically.

“Mostly from the inn sign,” she snapped.

He frowned. “There isn’t a sign.”

“There is now, and it’s changing every half-minute into something even less tasteful.”

Penthos spread his hands at Lief’s interrogative glance. “What? That was the game, wasn’t it?”