“Ah, well, but,” Dion led with, “Dorthric says that, while the power of the Light can make the blind see and the deaf hear, no amount of repetition will bring the willfully ignorant to true knowledge.”

Ba-dum cha! thought Lief, and with that his arms were free, and nobody was looking at him.

“Litho of the Northern Wastes was quite specific—” Abnasio began, but Dion jumped on him, verbally at least.

“Litho is a corrupted secondary source—!”

“My own tutelary deacon swore by Litho—!”

“Well, my tutelary deacon at least knew about the veracity of ancient Boralian texts!”

“Your deacon’s a corrupted secondary source!” Abnasio spat.

“How dare you denigrate the good name of Aloysius the Pure!” Dion demanded, which was apparently a name to conjure by if you were a churchgoing type, and therefore made for good ammunition.

Abnasio seemed caught on some sort of philosophical fork at that point, stuck between trying to attack Dion and yet at the same time not get down to mud-wrestling with the sacred memory of whoever Aloysius the Pure had been. Lief, who was inching toward Enth right then, wondered what cunning piece of sophistry he would dredge up in his time of need.

“Take the heretics!” he shouted.

“Oh thank you!” Lief hissed to himself, because abruptly the monks were bundling forward toward Dion and the rest, and he could close the remaining distance to Enth. He could hear Dion shouting out, “Kill none of them! Beat them down only! They are all servants of the Light, however—” And then her voice cut off for a second, and Lief spared a panicked glance in case she had been brought down already. However, she had her mace out, and apparently “beat them down only” was by no means inconsistent with breaking bones with a blunt object, and Dion was throwing herself into it with a will.

Lief had his hands on the manacles now, and he had retrieved that other set of picks that the monks hadn’t found. Yes, he had given up on them before, but he felt that a fully ambulatory fighting Enth would be a far more useful fellow fugitive than a crippled Enth. Swiftly, hunched about the manacles, he got to work, letting his hands inform him while his eyes raked the melee.

The monks were burly and well exercised, but not fighters by nature, nor armed. Their first wave had been battered into the ground by Cyrene and Harathes’s staff work, Lief saw, but now it was down to fists, elbows, and feet. Cyrene had always been a good close-in fighter and, be they ever so chaste, monks still had genitals just like other men. Harathes himself was mostly relying on sheer brute strength and armored gloves.