The creature was hairless and naked, with a colored crest that ran across the top of its head and dawn its spine. It was bright in the sunlight, obscenely marked with a skin that was scaled and multicolored.

A marag. Smaller than the giants in the jungle, but a marag nevertheless. Like all of its kind it was motionless at rest, as though carved from stone. Then it turned its head to one side, a series of small jerking motions, until they could see its round and expressionless eye, the massive out-thrust jaw. They stood, as motionless as murgu themselves, gripping their spears tightly, unseen, for the creature had not turned far enough to notice their silent forms among the trees.

Amahast waited until its gaze went back to the ocean before he moved. Gliding forward without a sound, raising his spear. He had reached the edge of the trees before the beast heard him or sensed his approach. It snapped its head about, stared directly into his face.

The hunter plunged the stone head of his spear into one lidless eye, through the eye and deep into the brain behind.

It shuddered once, a spasm that shook its entire body, then fell heavily. Dead before it hit the ground. Amahast had the spear pulled free even before that, had spun about and raked his gaze across the slope and the beach beyond. There were no more of the creatures nearby.

Kerrick joined his father, standing beside him in silence as they looked down upon the corpse.

It was a crude and disgusting parody of human form. Red blood was still seeping from the socket of the destroyed eye, while the other stared blankly up at them, its pupil a black, vertical slit. There was no nose; just flapped openings where a nose should have been. Its massive jaw had dropped open in the agony of sudden death to reveal white rows of sharp and pointed teeth.

“What is it?” Kerrick asked, almost choking on the words.

“I don’t know. A marag of some kind. A small one, I have never seen its like before.”

“It stood, it walked, like it was human, Tanu. A marag, father, but it has hands like ours.”

“Not like ours. Count. One, two, three fingers and a thumb. No, it has only two fingers—and two thumbs.”

Amahast’s lips were drawn back from his teeth as he stared down at the thing. Its legs were short and bowed, the feet flat, the toes claw-tipped. It had a stumpy tail. Now it lay curled in death, one arm beneath its body. Amahast dug at it with his toe, turned it over. More mystery, for clutched in its hand he could now see what appeared to be a length of knobbed black wood.

“Father—the beach!” Kerrick called out.

They sought shelter under the trees and watched from concealment as the creatures emerged from the sea just below the spot where they stood.