A day before, Dennis wouldn’t have believed that anyone could sleep in conditions like these. Now he settled himself, appreciating the soft, half-decayed texture of the bark beneath his head.
A frog chirruped beside his ear. Dennis thought he felt the touch of webbed feet crawling cautiously onto him, but after the events of the night thus far, not even that was going to keep him awake.
CHAPTER 16
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.”