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…
CHAPTER 17
The cry that woke Dennis the third time was wordless and terrible.
He leaped to his feet. The Wizard Serdic lay face-up on the pole. The fire had fallen to ash and a shimmer everywhere but beneath the corpse’s hips—where fat had bubbled out to burn with yellow flames and a soapy odor.
“Now you’ve done it, boy,” said the corpse. It freed its wrists by twisting them against the withie which bound them to the pole, then hunched its knees forward and untied its ankles.
“I’m coming for you, boy,” said the Wizard Serdic, dead a month and wrapped in a miasma of decay and smoldering flesh. He crabbed his legs sideways and stood up, still impaled on the spit.
Dennis screamed and ran into the night.
The jungle had tricked him, enticed him from his duties and lulled him to sleep. Now it was all clawing thorns and saw-edged leaves again.
Dennis would have thrown himself willingly into a hedge of spears if it were the only way to escape from the corpse. His last view of Serdic was a memory of white terror: the wizard with his arms lifted, pulling out the pole that impaled him, hand over hand.
Trees battered the youth as he clubbed himself on their trunks and fallen branches. His forearms stung from cuts and scratches, but the pounding the rest of his body took during his wild careen through the night was a red, dull ache with no end and no location.