"Their mother is a goddess," my guide says. "Gods make life very difficult."
Gods? In my dreams? Unlikely.
"And Empanda is a dangerous enemy," my guide continues.
"Whatever," I say. "Let's just get out of this jungle, shall we?"
The guide shakes its head at me. The bone structure is far too sharp and angular to hold an expression of any intensity but I get the feeling it disapproves of me.
"What were we doing again?" I ask it with just a bite of the confidently ignorant.
It grits its teeth and and forces words out. "Looking the murdered Wizard's Wife."
"What if he has another one?" I ask with total, wide-eyed innocence.
My guide blinks at me.
"I mean, maybe he's married again in the last... month? Got a new flame? Maybe it's her that knows," I say. "Maybe we should just be going back to enquire about his love life."
It goes a very interesting shade of red.
"This one thinks that one enjoys being outrageous," it says carefully.
I have no idea what it means. I tell it so. The colour drains from its face pretty damned quick.
"If we need to find the wizard's wife," I say after a reasonable silence, "then we need to go back to the frog's tower, right? The body's lying around somewhere" - my guide hisses in disgust - "if he hasn't finally done some magic or remarried. That's the closest we're going to get to someone who can tell us where to go."
My guide looks as if it has a few suggestions, none of them polite. It struggles to form a sentence but manages "this way," as it points away from the direction the scared teddy bears took.
"This one understood what that one thought the last six times that one explained its thinking," it says as it walks as quickly as the undergrowth allows, "that one did not need to tell this one again."
"What do you mean?" I ask.
"Where else does that one think the party is going? Does that one think this one can't find the way?"
Oh, it's sulking. It thinks I don't trust it to know its way around the place. It would be right. It hasn't exactly shown much competence at this guiding thing. For a start, surely we need to be cutting our way straight through all this growth, not walking around all these large stalks and changing direction all the time, How does it know we're making progress in the direction we're supposed to go if we keep having to turn back on ourselves?
We could be lost in here for weeks.