The lock was proving challenging, far more so than he had thought. The gleam of it seemed to dazzle his hands as much as his eyes. Right here, in the Holy City, in the Brotherhood’s sanctum. I think I might not be good enough. A bitter thought, because he had always been a good third-story man, that rare thief who would take on a temple or a wizard’s tower or a cursed tomb.

“Enth,” he said softly. “Listen to me. I don’t think I can get these off you.”

A ragged exhalation from the man-spider.

“I know, and I’m sorry, but let’s get you out of here first. I reckon Dion could probably just touch these and they’d spring off.” And Lief was thinking unhappy thoughts now, about whether Dion would in fact care to, or whether a chained and agonized spider might be entirely within her ability to live with, now someone else had done the hard part. But what choice do I have? “I’m going to get the robe off Sleepy Joe here and onto you, and you’re going to have to walk out of here. Can you—can you actually stand up and walk? Please tell me you can walk.”

He saw Enth’s muscles bunch—all of them rippling like a carpet of gray rats’ backs—and then he thrust himself up, stiff-legged, until he was standing before Lief with the manacles before him, away from his chest. His face spasmed and twitched, and Lief couldn’t understand why he was not screaming.

Unless he had been screaming before, perhaps, and Abnasio had come in and made him regret it.

Lief got onto the sapped cultist and fought the robe off the man’s unresisting body, always a more awkward job than you’d think. After that, there was the difficulty of getting it onto a man who had his hands linked together. Lief solved that one with some industrious knife work, slitting the sleeves and chest and then just slipping the whole garment over Enth’s head, until the hands held locked before the man-spider appeared something close to an attitude of prayer or supplication.

“Going to have to do,” Lief decided, and turned round to come face to face with Abnasio and at least a dozen hefty monks.

“Balls,” was his critique of that particular development. A more dashing or courageous hero might have gone for the high priest with the knife he was holding, and thereafter much regretted it, but Lief was not that man. Instead, he let the small blade clatter to the ground.