THE SEA HAG(30)

"Who's got the light?" demanded one in a breathy voice. Dennis realized with a shock that the speaker was a lizardman. It shouldn't have surprised him, out here in the jungle, but...

All four of them were hacking at the brush with long knives, glitters slipping in vicious arcs through the moonlight. "That's enough," said one.

"It's not enough," said another, and the third speaker at least was human. "He's too cold. We'll need more."

While three of them slashed down more fuel, the fourth figure knelt and took a stick of glowing punk from the gourd roped to his waist. He blew the punk to a bright yellow-orange, then touched it to a stem of gathered brush. Despite the rain of only hours before, the brush caught. The fire spread with oily, crackling intensity.

Any urge Dennis felt to join the newcomers evaporated when he got a good look at them. If they weren't robbers, they were worse. The sole human had a patch over one eye. Dangling from his left ear was a jewel too big to have been acquired honestly by anyone of his appearance.

The lizardmen were worse. What Dennis had thought was a gourd to carry the punk was in fact a human skull. One of the lizardmen wore a collar of spikes around his neck, and the backs of all three bore the scars of brutal floggings.

Two of them set up a crude spit, using forked saplings and a long pole chopped to a sharp point on one end. The other pair tipped over the box they'd all been carrying. The top fell off.

The corpse of the Wizard Serdic spilled out.

"He's too cold," said one of the lizardmen. "It's going to take a long time."

"Shut up and help me," said the one-eyed human as he began to impale the corpse on the pole.

"Too cold..." the lizardman repeated, his forked tongue adding to the words a sibilance that couldn't have come from a human mouth.

Working together despite their grumbling, the four scarred outcasts lifted the pole and the cold, stiff corpse of the wizard onto forked sticks set at either end of the fire. The brush burned with a hard flame that threw shadows like teeth across the forest. It sizzled and popped angrily.

"Don't let him burn," muttered a lizardman, giving a twist to one end of the spit where a knot gave some leverage. The pole creaked against both its forked supports as it turned, rotating Serdic's body from face-down to face-up. The dead eyes stared toward the crotch and the horrified Dennis.

One of the lizardmen tossed some more brush onto the fire. "We're going to have to leave," he said morosely.

"We can't," said the human. "Who'll mind Serdic?"

"Dennis will mind me," said the corpse of the Wizard Serdic.

Dennis jerked his head back out of sight. His bare flesh shuddered in streaks, up his thighs and down his shoulders.

The corpse hadn't really spoken. The bright-colored frogs were poisonous. They'd croaked and splashed and padded across Dennis' skin as he slept—rubbing him with venemous slime and bringing on wild hallucinations.

"Dennis," called the one-eyed human in a rasping voice. "Come down and mind the fire."

"Dennis, come down," agreed the lizardmen together.

"Dennis, come down," said the Wizard Serdic. "Or I will have to fetch you down."

Dennis had heard that hard, disdainful voice almost every day of his life. He couldn't mistake it now.

But neither could he possibly be hearing it.

Dennis stretched his head over the edge of the branch, looking down and expecting to see nothing but tangled brush and darkness. The fire glittered at him, and the five upturned faces shocked the youth as bitterly as a slap in the mouth.

"Come down, Dennis," said the corpse.

The lizardman holding the knotted end of the spit gave it a turn, rotating Serdic's face downward again. The dead voice trailed off in the sputter of the flames.

Dennis climbed down from what he'd thought was his hiding place. His chest was so cold and stiff with fear that he felt his pulse only in his ears. The vines were slick with rainwater. The fire threw shadows upward, concealing rather than illuminating hand-holds.

Halfway down, Dennis slipped. He fell the remainder of the distance, banging and scraping the inside of his right knee on a gnarled hump of vines. The pain was sharp and so fierce that it turned his stomach for the moment.

Whatever this was, it wasn't something that he was dreaming.

The lizardmen hissed in muted amusement; the one-eyed human giggled.

The corpse of the Wizard Serdic wore a smile that broadened. The spit creaked another quarter turn so that he faced the naked, shivering youth again.

"Here, boy," said a lizardman wearing nothing but a belt through which were stuck at least a dozen knives—rusty, notch-bladed weapons whose wooden handles were cracking and wired clumsily onto the tangs. "Take the spit."