The noise of the frogs didn't awaken Dennis, but their sudden silence did. He snapped alert and heard the grumble of voices below him.
It was still night, but his eyes were fully adapted to the moon glimmer. He peered out cautiously.
Four figures were struggling through the undergrowth, carrying a long box. Cursing with the effort, they lowered the box to the ground directly under the tree where Dennis sheltered.
"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."
Dennis stepped forward. His fear pulled him, because if he ran he would have to turn his back on these... men.
One of the lizardfolk was tall, taller than Dennis even if the youth stood straight instead of hunching over against his fear and pain and nakedness. That one rolled a human skull in his left hand, while his right palm rested on the brass hilt of a cutlass. His tongue forked between pointed teeth as he grinned.
Dennis put his hand out to the knotted end of the spit. The bark wasn't as deeply ridged as that of the vines down which he'd just climbed. It felt as though he were stroking the scaled back of a lizard...
The human chuckled. "Go on, boy," he said. "Turn it."
"Don't let me singe, boy," said the grinning corpse. "It'll be the worse for you if you let me singe."
Dennis twisted at the pole. It was hard work: the knot didn't give much leverage, and the corpse was a heavy weight to turn against the crude bearing surfaces of the forked sticks.
"That's right, boy," said one of the lizardmen. "Turn and turn until he thaws. And don't let the fire go out."
Laughing together in their varied voices, the four scarred outcasts walked back into the jungle the way they had come. The human had a limp.
Dennis watched their backs, feeling relief at their going—until Serdic repeated, "Don't let me singe, boy!"
Dennis began to turn the spit. The corpse's ankles were lashed to the pole nearest him; the cruel, glittering eyes stared past the mold-green feet as if they were a frame. Dennis turned his face toward the jungle and gave the spit another tug.
The warmth of the brushwood fire thawed the ice-block that was Dennis' chest. He began to shudder.
None of this could be happening... but the fire hissed a muted lullaby, and its dull heat dried Dennis' skin and reminded him of how tired he was. Watching the silent motion of shadows on the jungle growth, he could forget his circumstances, his fear—
Fat popped as it dripped onto the flames.
"You've burned me, boy!" snarled a voice as vicious and deadly as the expression on Serdic's face when Dennis jerked his eyes and attention back to his duties.
"I'm sorry!" Dennis wheezed in terror as he turned the pole furiously. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry!"
The wizard's wrists were tied to the middle of the pole. The hands should have flopped loosely as the spit turned, but they were held in the rigidity of death. Tiny mushrooms had sprouted from the knuckles of the right hand, but they were shriveling in the fire's heat.
Dennis tried to meet the corpse's eyes as he struggled with the pole, but there was too much venom in Serdic's glare for him to manage that for long.
At first Dennis ducked his head away to gather more brush for the fire. The vine-roots and saplings burned hot, but they collapsed to black ash without usable coals. Fresh wood flashed up quickly in a nimbus of blue flame from the gas driven out to burn a fingers-breadth above the stems.
"Careful, boy..." the corpse whispered in a voice that mimicked the hiss of escaping gas.
A few yards into the jungle was a plant whose leaves were broad as washtubs and streaked both yellow and green. Lesser vegetation cast quivering shadows on that backdrop. Dennis began to watch a playlet in which he and Chester walked the halls of Emath Palace, greeting his parents and talking with servants and village-folk come to the palace on business. He felt warm and safe for the first time in what seemed a lifetime, and—
"Boy! You've burned me again!" blazed the corpse's thunder-crackle voice.
Dennis' mouth dropped open and his eyes flared so wide that for a moment he couldn't take in what he saw. He'd stopped turning the pole when the Wizard Serdic was face-down. The corpse's toes were black and steaming as if they were about to burst into flames. When Dennis spun the protesting pole another half turn, smoke from the shriveled digits coiled away in an awful-smelling spiral.
"Boy—"
"I won't do it again!" Dennis cried with his eyes closed. "I won't—"
"Boy," repeated Serdic in a tone of chilled steel that drove the length of the youth's spine and pithed him, leaving him no volition but the corpse's dark will. "If you burn me again, I will come off this stake; and it will be the worse for you."
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Dennis whispered between lips salty with the taste of frightened tears. The bark had torn the palms of his hands with the effort of turning the pole. He reveled in the pain, because he could pretend that it was the only punishment he would receive for his lapse. "It won't happen again."
"...worse for you..." whispered the wizard, his awful face turned toward the fire once more as Dennis rotated the spit as swiftly as if he were winching a bucket out of the well.
The jungle was no longer the haunt of darkness and hidden violence it had been when Dennis first stumbled into its trees and clutching thorns. No one could live in a world in which there was no peace or safety... and for Dennis, peace was now just beyond the firelight, in the shadows that told him of home and family.
The fire muttered reassuring phrases to the back of his drowsy mind...