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“Collect your fifty best warriors.”
    The old men balked. They had done their part. They had no taste
for adventures.
    The thing they had created whispered a chant in which there were
no waste words. Three old men died screaming, devoured by worms
that ate them from within.
    “Gather your fifty best warriors.”
    The survivors did as they were told.
    When the warriors came they hoisted the wicker man onto the back
of the crippled monster. No woodland pony or ox would allow the
amalgam to mount it. He then led the band down to the wreck of the
town at the Barrowland. “Kill them all,” he
whispered.
    As the massacre began the wicker man moved past, his ruined face
fixed southward. His eyes smoldered with a poisonous, insane
hatred.
     
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XIII
    Timmy came flying into camp moments after the racket started. He
was so scared he could hardly talk. “We got to get out of
here,” he choked out, in one-word gasps. “That monster
is back. Something is riding it. Some savages are killing them in
the village.”
    Old Man Fish nodded once and dumped water on the fire.
“Before it remembers us. Just like we rehearsed
it.”
    “Oh, come on,” Tully snarled. “Timmy’s
probably seeing things. . . . ”
    The tree cut loose with the granddaddy of all blue bolts. It
filled the forest with its glow and banged like heavenly
lightning.
    “Holy shit,” Tully whispered. He took off like a
stampeded bear.
    The others were not too far behind.
    Smeds was thoughtful as he trotted along, his arms filled with
gear. Fish’s precautions had paid off. Maybe. Like the old
boy said, they weren’t out nothing getting away for a
while.
    From behind came a flare in a rosy peach shade answered by
another blast of blue. Something yowled like the lost soul of a
great cat.
    Tully claimed Fish thought too much. But here was Fish turning
out to do more and more of the leading while Tully eased into
Smeds’s old place as shirker and complainer. Timmy
wasn’t changing, though. He was still the handy runt with the
thousand stories.
    Fish and Timmy were putting more into this than Tully. Smeds
didn’t think he could cut them. Especially not if the payoff
was as big as Tully expected. No need to be bloody greedy then.
    Smeds squatted beside his log, placed his stuff in the nest of
branches left to hold it. Tully was on the river already, splashing
away. “Sshh!” Fish said. Everybody froze, except Tully
out there, splashing away.
    Old Man Fish listened.
    All Smeds heard was a lot of silence. Nor was there any
lightning anymore.
    Fish relaxed. “Nothing moving. We got time to
strip.”
    Smeds took the old man’s word but he didn’t waste
any time getting naked and shoving off.
    Lying on his chest on a log in the middle of a river in the
middle of the night, Smeds felt the first nibbles of panic. He
could not see the island for which they were headed, though Fish
said there was no way they could miss it from where they had left
the bank. The current would carry them right to it.
    That was no reassurance. He could not swim. If he missed the
island he would drift maybe all the way to the sea.
    A sudden barrage of blue flares illuminated the river. He was
surprised to see that Fish and Timmy were nearby. And for all his
furious splashing Tully was only a hundred feet ahead.
    He felt an urge to say something, anything, just to draw courage
from the act of communication. But he had nothing to say. And
silence was imperative. No point asking for trouble.
    During the coming hour he relived every moment of fear
he’d ever known, every instance of misfortune and disaster.
He was very ragged when he spied the darker loom of the island dead
ahead.
    It wasn’t much of an island. It was maybe thirty feet wide
and two hundred yards long, a nail paring of a mudbank that had
accumulated weeds and scrub brush. None of the brush was taller
than a man. Smeds thought it a pretty pathetic hideout.
    At the moment it looked like paradise.
    A minute later