Blade was getting ready to burrow down into his bed of branches when he suddenly realized that there was no longer total darkness out on the lake. Lights had suddenly appeared, faint, distant, and wavering, but unmistakable. Blade counted nine of them, stretched out in a long line across the lake. They shone a pale yellow-orange, and slowly but steadily they were coming closer. Their approach was too steady, too purposeful, for anything natural.

The line spread out wider and wider, until it seemed to stretch halfway across the lake horizon. Blade realized that if the line kept on all the way to the shore, he would end up almost in the middle of it. Slowly and cautiously, he rose to a crouching position, and moved away from his piled branches. He would have liked to scatter them so that they gave no sign of his presence, but there was no time for that. The lights were coming on faster now. Blade could hear a distant but fast-swelling chant as they did so.

He slipped up the slope from the beach, taking care to avoid softer patches of ground where he might leave footprints. Fifty yards up the slope, he came to a particularly thick patch of the bushes, some of them eight feet high. The close-grown rough branches were hard to push apart and painful to slip through. But when he had done so, he could crouch almost invisible to anyone on the beach.

The chant coming out of the darkness was definitely getting louder now. With relief Blade recognized human voices-at least forty or fifty of them, all chanting together to a beat set by two deep-toned drums. He had encountered a fair number of nonhuman or semihuman beings in his Dimension X travels, but he always preferred to at least start by dealing with human beings. Not that human beings were necessarily that much more predictable than nonhumans, or less likely to shoot first and ask questions afterward. It was more a question of what contributed most to his own peace of mind.