Shal wanted to believe the fairy tale, but the lie was too obvious, the contradictions too many. "Back!" shouted Shal, extending her staff and gesturing toward the conduit. "No wizard of good intentions would allow such corruption to continue!"

Yarash showed no sign of being either offended or flustered by Shal's words. Instead, he responded in the same cheery, lilting voice with which he had first greeted the three. "A product of simple experiments, my dear. My life's goal is to create the ultimate sea creature, an intelligent being to communicate man's messages to the myriad life forms of the ocean depths. Alas, surely you must realize that the biproducts of magic are sometimes not pretty," said the wizard, shaking his head. His chair of water surged and receded, but continued to hover in one place.

"Experiments? Biproducts of magic? Are giant frogs perchance part of your experiments, or are they some of the 'not pretty' biproducts?" Shal challenged.

"Giant frogs?" With the suddenness of a flipped switch, the wizard's voice completely lost its warmth. "You mean, you're the ones? You're the ones who murdered my beautiful creations on Thorn Island?" The wizard's eyes blazed with crazed fury, and his face became contorted in anger. The watery throne splashed back to the surface of the river, and Yarash stood right on top of the now frothing and boiling water. He swept his arms high above his head and brought them down again. His robes instantly turned dark green, and in his hands he clutched an algae-covered rope. "You killed my frogs!" he shouted, and his voice thundered and reverberated across the river.

Suddenly the water began to rise, and the wizard along with it, as if some great tidal wave were about to swell from the depths. But the water parted to reveal the fishlike head, fins, and gaping maw of a huge, kelp-covered sea animal. Yarash was standing atop the flat of the creature's massive brown-speckled head, pulling up on the slick green rope.

The monster reared high, its flagellating tail holding its body suspended above the water like a dolphin. With a sweeping gesture that reminded Shal of a circus showman, Yarash dropped the rope and waved his hands with a flourish. Again he shouted, this time in arcane words, unfamiliar even to Shal, and again his voice boomed across the water and back. A deafening hum filled the air, and all around where the wizard stood mounted on the dancing sea monster, torrents and eddies appeared in the river water, a dozen or more highly exaggerated versions of the rippling a bystander would notice as a trout came to the surface to gulp a fly. Carplike heads the size of men's bobbed and poked out of the water, their wide brown lips gaping and closing. Yarash's words continued to reverberate in the river valley, and the giant fish plunged forward across the river toward Shal, Ren, and Tarl.

"Halt!" shouted Shal, but the water near the shoreline churned and the fish heads appeared again, much closer.

This time, though, they rose straight up from the water. Mage, ranger-thief, and cleric took a frightened step backward as the fish heads' bodies came into view. The creatures were neither fish, amphibian, nor humanoid, but a sick crossing of the biological classes. Awkward, overly long fins beat the air where arms should have been, and thick, scaly torsos ended in stunted, barely separated legs. As the creatures lifted themselves from the water, their breathing became a labored sucking through the gills, but Yarash kept up his conjuring, and the misfit fish-men slogged closer. The wind changed directions, and the stench from the creatures was staggering, like the stink from the Stojanow multiplied and remultiplied.

Ren gulped for air and charged forward, lunging at the first of the grotesque beasts to emerge from the water. He stabbed deep into its gut with one of his short swords and pulled straight up through the torso. By rights, the thing should have died, but no blood poured from the body. Instead, a dark, tarry ooze seeped from the wound like dirty pus. Worse, the creature showed no sign whatsoever of pain, and before Ren could distance himself for another attack, it began flailing his head and shoulders with its fins and ramming him with its putrid, scaly body. Ren swung for all he was worth, even as he fell backward, and his sword sliced a deep gash across the fishman's pelvis.

By this time, more fish-men were closing in. Tarl charged with his shield and slammed with his hammer, but the creatures were impervious to his attacks. Not wanting to waste the Staff of Power's charges on such mundane beasts, Shal put all of her strength behind her staff and jabbed and stabbed at the hideous creatures with its sharpened point, but it didn't slow them, and now their gaping mouths were spewing a dark green fluid that seared and burned wherever it spattered against flesh. When she felt the scalding, searing acid eating through the skin of her neck and hand, Shal changed her mind about the degree of danger presented by the fish-men. She scrambled to gain enough distance from her foes to wield the staff.

Ren did his best, meanwhile, to recover his balance and continue his attack against the first of the fish-men, but others started circling. He wielded both short swords as furiously as he was able. He chopped a wedge out of the torso of one, and it bent on top of itself, but the creature still lived, still fought on. Chop and hack as he might, Ren could not stop the creatures from flailing and spewing forth their deadly poison.

"Get back!" Shal shouted to her companions, afraid that using the staff would threaten Ren or Tarl, who were nearly surrounded by the fish-men. But they could not retreat, and it was all Shal could do to keep the fish-men away from herself.

Tarl discovered he was able to push the fish-men off balance, and he was doing his best to do that in hope that either Ren or Shal would somehow be able to finish off the creatures. Push, swing. Push, swing. Again and again, Tarl slammed into their rubbery, scaly bodies with blows that would have pulverized a humanoid. Finally Tarl released his hammer with the smooth spring action Brother Anton had taught him. It caught one of the fish-men square in the eye. For the first time, fishy flesh and bone splattered and shattered. The carplike head caved in, and the fish-man flopped to the ground, twitching and jerking in the throes of death. "Aim for their heads, their eyes!" yelled Tarl. "That's where they're vulnerable!" Even as he shouted, he wheeled to face another of the ghastly beasts.

Shal and Ren heard Tarl's cry and acted immediately. Ren swung high and viciously with his swords. With the efficiency born of her impressive strength, Shal used the staff to skewer eyeballs. Fish heads rolled, and within a few moments, an unnatural calm reigned where chaos had been supreme just moments before.

From his vantage point high atop the giant sea monster, Yarash let out an anguished moan, a soul-piercing, pitiful cry, and began another incantation. At his command, more vaguely humanoid amphibians, frog-men gone awry, slogged through the water toward the three. Each creature seemed more horrible than the last, and all struggled under the burden of cruel deformities-distorted body parts, missing eyes and limbs, hideous appendages that appeared to have been added as an afterthought.

Shal commanded her own most powerful conjuring voice to speak to Yarash. "What manner of abominations do you send our way? If these tortured creatures are your creations, how dare you call yourself a wizard?"

"How dare you speak to me in such a tone, apprentice!" Yarash raised his hands skyward, and lightning crackled in the air. He spoke a sharp word of command and pointed at the three companions. With the movements of defective zombies, the river creatures closed in to attack.

"Don't do it!" shouted Shal to the wizard.