Mid-rebuke, Lief gave up. “Yes, yes it was,” he agreed. “Now—”

But the wizard had issues of his own. “You are supposed to be guarding Dion,” he snapped at Cyrene.

“Tell that turd Harathes,” she shot back.

“You’ve left her defenseless?”

She goggled at him. “In the heart of the Holy City, Penthos. And with Harathes.”

“That sounds like defenseless to me.”

To Lief’s surprise she actually smirked at that. “Yeah, you’re right. In fact, if I were you, I’d go over there right now to protect her from Harathes. If you must set fire to him, start with the groin. I reckon it’s just dry tinder waiting to ignite.”

“I’m going,” Penthos announced. He frowned at Lief. “Am I going?”

“Be calm and don’t explode anything,” Lief told him. “But why not? If nothing else it’s likely to mean Dion gets moving all the sooner.”

Penthos was plainly not sure how to take that, but he left anyway.

“Not sure why it’s us three that keep getting lumped together,” Lief said easily, “but pull up a horrible chair.”

“Firstly, it’s not ‘us three,’ it’s us two and that,” Cyrene told him. “Secondly, I am sitting somewhere else, very definitely on my own.”

“I am not a that,” Nth stated.

Cyrene’s eyes flicked between the two of them. “Did you teach it that? Have you been getting it drunk again?”

“It—he won’t drink the beer here,” Lief told her. “Although he’s not missing much on that score.”

Cyrene stared into the smoky lenses of Nth’s spectacles, and the creature stared right back at her, refusing to be cowed. Lief saw her lips twitch a couple of times, perhaps to give some order to it, but she said nothing, and at last sloped off to find her separate seat.

Shortly afterward, they arrived. There were at least a dozen of them, heavily robed figures that trooped in with the divine certainty of people who knew that they were not part of the Heathen.

The other drinkers got up and got out, as quickly as they possibly could. Lief would very happily have joined them, save that the newcomers were surrounding his table.

“Hello,” he said uncertainly.

The central figure cast back its cowl, revealing an impressively bearded face, craggy with authority, steel-eyed beneath beetling brows.

“I am Abnasio, Supreme Prelate of the Brotherhood of the Dawn,” he announced conversationally.

Lief was pointedly not looking at where Cyrene was, across the room, because this had suddenly become the sort of situation where a hidden ally might be rather useful. “It’s an honor, your Prelat’ryness,” he said cheerily. “How can we help you?”

“We have no business with you, my child,” Abnasio said gently. “We know you are a man of the Light, despite many temptations. You have done the world a great service.”