The Captain considered for a while. "How many of you can we count on to fight beside us if we agree to help?" he asked the nome.

     "As I said, about sixty, but we hate the shologs so much that we will fight like three times that number!"

     "Very well," said the Captain. "I will return to the ship, explain the situation and ask for volunteers. If more than half the crew volunteer, we will fight. If not, I regret that I cannot allow such a small number of men to throw their lives away."

     "Thank you! Thank you!" cried the nomes, doing a little dance of joy. "You won't regret it, I promise you. You will be rich beyond your wildest dreams, and your names will live on in glory for ever!" They threw themselves at the Captain's feet, making him cough in embarrassment and gently push them away before returning to the ship.

     The poll of the ship's crew revealed that only fifteen men were ready to fight the shologs for a share of the treasure, but that the entire crew would fight if the wizard could somehow be disposed of. The Captain was ready to call the whole thing off and cast off from the island, but Shaun took him aside to talk privately.

     "The six of us have been talking it over," he said, "and we think it might be possible to take out the wizard. If we do, you and the nomes could take the shologs easily. What do you say?"

     The Captain considered. "I don't know. The idea of you youngsters going up against someone who can shoot bolts of lightning and destroy whole villages with balls of fire isn't one I could easily live with. What makes you think you could pull it off?"

     "Trust us, Captain," said Thomas. "We've got a few tricks up our sleeves."

     "Well, I don't like it, but you're not members of my crew so I can't stop you. Good luck and be careful."

     They thanked him and went ashore again, to where the nomes' spokesman met them. Jerry explained the situation to him and the nome nodded seriously. "I'll take you to our nearest village where we'll tell you what you need to know," he said.

     The nome, Kerrinott, led them a few hundred yards along the shoreline to where a path led inland, and then they walked in single file through the palm tree forest. As they went, Thomas moved up to walk beside the nome, the path being just wide enough to allow this. Kerrinott looked up at him, guessing that the human had more questions about the shologs. It wasn't shologs that was on Thomas mind, though. "You said something earlier about ‘living on the back of this creature.'” he said. “What exactly did you mean by that?"

     Kerrinott stared at him in astonishment. "You mean you don't know?" he asked. "But surely you've noticed that this island moves, that it swims through the water."

     "Yes, of course," said Thomas, "but that doesn't mean that the island is actually alive. I mean, by the Gods, it's over four miles long! Living creatures just don't grow that big."

     "If you say so," said Kerrinott with a smile.

     Thomas scowled at the outrageous concept, but then he remembered the legless, crocodile-like creatures emerging from their holes in the ground all covered with fresh blood. He thought about their strange jutting forward teeth. He thought about the beach with its strange substitute for sand that Jerry said bore a close resemblance to dead fish skin. Then he thought about the king manta they'd seen a few days earlier, a huge plankton eater almost as large as the ship. Just how large could a filter feeder grow, he wondered. Was there any theoretical reason why they couldn't reach four miles long?

     Then he thought of something else. The deep oceans were full of huge predators, small compared to the island creature, but still capable of making short work of the almost defenceless giant. Just how could it defend itself? Of course, he suddenly realised. The crocodile snakes! They weren't parasites, they were symbiotes. They spent most of their lives burrowing around inside the island creature, probably staying just below the surface to avoid doing it any real harm, and in return for their free meals they spent a few hours each day patrolling the waters nearby, warding off any large predators that approached. He remembered how they had clustered around the ship, prodding it and nosing it to see if it was dangerous. There could be thousands of them inhabiting this creature's body, he realised, which meant there could be hundreds in the water at any one time. If they all ganged up together, they could tackle even the largest marine predators, perhaps even a sea dragon.

     He looked in awed wonder at the forest around him, an entire ecosystem living on the back of what must surely be the largest of all the world's creatures. The palm trees only grew near the beach, he saw. Further inland grew figs, bananas, snakebark trees and great spreading, multi trunked banyans, all draped thickly with vines, creepers and beards of lichen and with brightly flowering orchids and bromeliads protruding from their scaly bark. The air was alive with the sound of birdsong and the small shrubby undergrowth plants rustled with the activities of small ground animals. Just how thick is this creature's skin? he wondered. Do the tree roots penetrate all the way through into its living flesh, and if so, do they cause it any pain? Is this the only one, or are there others like it on the other side of the ocean? He asked the nomes, but they were able to tell him little. This one island creature was the only one they knew about.

     After a few minutes they arrived at the nomes' village. Nomes usually liked to live in burrows dug out of hillsides, which they decorated sumptuously and made as warm and cosy as possible, being very fond of their creature comforts. Underground dwellings were clearly impossible here, though, so they had had to make do with log cabins, made from the trunks of hundreds of trees whose felling cleared ground to turn into farmland. The nomes had had little knowledge or experience of this kind of work when they'd first arrived on the island, but they'd learned quickly and Thomas was astonished with what they'd accomplished here. He'd seen wooden buildings before, built by people whose ancestors had been perfecting the art for centuries, and what the nomes had accomplished here would have impressed even them.

     The village consisted of a rough circle of huts surrounding a clear area, inside which were large wicker pens containing goats, guinea fowl and raggis, a small species of wild pig. As they entered they were surrounded by a curious crowd of the diminutive inhabitants, mostly women, brown bearded children and humpbacked oldsters. Most of them bore the marks of the shologs' cruelty, and some were badly crippled.

     Diana gave a cry of anguish and sympathy when she saw a little boy hobbling towards her on crutches, one of his legs missing from the knee down. A little girl of about the same age was wearing an eyepatch and had an ugly scar reaching from her brow to her fuzzy haired chin, and two older nomes standing beside her, presumably her parents, both had fingers missing from their hands. Several more of them were covered by a multitude of scars, but the biggest shock came as she saw a middle aged woman hurrying out to grab a little boy of about three or four years of age, hustling him off to one of the outermost huts. The cleric only had a moments glimpse of him, but she couldn't help but notice that he was larger than the other children, and quite a bit uglier. There had been a quality about his face that was almost bestial, almost as if...

     Kerrinott saw that she'd noticed the child. "Please try to understand," he said, almost pleadingly. "There was nothing she could do."

     Diana suddenly understood, with a jolt of shock that shook her to the very core of her being, and as she looked around at the nomes again she felt an uncontrollable rage rising inside her, a feeling quite alien to her normally quiet and peace loving nature. How dare those monsters do such things! she thought. How dare they cause such misery to such harmless, innocent people! She felt her body trembling with the need to inflict violence on something, as though she could fight the shologs herself, punish them for what they'd done here, and if a sholog had suddenly appeared there and then, she would have thrown herself at it in fury, screaming curses and clawing at its face with her fingernails. She caught herself in shock, surprised and ashamed by her reaction. I'm a cleric of the Goddess of Healing, she reminded herself. My place is to help these people, to heal their hurts. I'm a healer, not a fighter.

     She looked at the hut where the mother had hidden her little half breed child, so ridden with shame that she couldn't bear to show her face in front of strangers. Someone had to fight them, though. Even if she could undo everything the shologs had done, it wouldn't stop them from just coming back and doing it all over again. She remembered a time, about three years before, when her mentor, Father Bryon, had cured a man infected by the seedlings of an archer plant. The only way to save him had been to kill the parasite and destroy all the dormant seeds remaining in his body. That's what the shologs are, she thought. They're parasites, infecting this harmless nome community.

     She knew from what she'd heard of them in the Overgreen Forest that they couldn't be reasoned with, that they loved fighting so much that they would gladly die facing impossible odds rather than negotiate. The only way to deal with them was to kill them. It was a hateful thought and went against everything she'd always believed in, but she could no longer deny that violence was sometimes the only answer.

     "Kill them," she told Shaun, tears in her eyes. "Kill them all. Every last one of them."

     Shaun knew his sister well enough to know what it cost her to say such a thing, and so he only nodded and touched her on the shoulder before moving away, so he wouldn't embarrass her by seeing her cry.

     Kerrinott led them to the largest hut in the village, a rectangular structure with a high roof, the only building in the village in which the six travelers could stand upright. Like every other building it was excellently constructed, but it had an extra something that gave it the feel of a holy place, a place of worship, even though it betrayed no outward signs of such. Kerrinott confirmed their suspicions as they took their seats inside.

     "Before the shologs came, this was our temple to Ramthara, Goddess of Growth and Nature," he told them. "They killed Wheemut, our only cleric, and ordered all religious items and artifacts thrown in the ocean, but we still meet here every holyday to pray for deliverance, even though they punish us severely for it. Now, this place serves a new purpose, as our war headquarters. I don't think She would mind too much, considering the circumstances."

     "Indeed not," agreed another nome, an elderly man whose name they later learned was Berthold. He was almost bald, but he wore a long grey beard that he kept tucked into his belt to keep it out of the way. "Indeed, one of the three aspects of Ramthara, Clawdus the Survivor, would actively encourage us to fight, since it is in struggle and hardship that we grow strong." It was a fact known to only a few outside the faith that Ramthara, Goddess of Life, had three aspects and might actually be three separate deities, although only the bravest dared to actually give voice to this heresy. The aspect worshipped by the nomes was Leben the Growing One, while the aspect most usually worshipped by humans was Vash, the Giver of Fertility.

     Berthold and Kerrinott showed them a model of the sholog's village which they kept hidden in a pit in the floor. "We use this when planning raids, to steal food and release our kinfolk," he said. "Every so often we creep in under cover of darkness or ambush one of their patrols. If we're lucky, we injure a few of them before they rout us. Every now and then, if we're really lucky, we kill one of them. They punish us terribly for it, but some of us would rather die fighting than become that lowest of all life forms, the unresisting slave."

     He pointed out some of the various huts and buildings in the model village. "Most of it is still as it was when we lived in it," he said. "The two major additions which they have added, or rather, which they have forced us to make for them, are the perimeter wall, made from palm tree trunks, with its single gate, and this hut here where they keep their still. They make a spirit from dates, and every couple of weeks, when they have enough of it, they have a wild party in which they drink it all. It's a bad time for us, so we abandon our homes and hide in the forest all night until it's over. They always find some of us, though..." His voice trailed off sadly.

     "Where does the wizard live?" asked Thomas.

     "Here," said Kerrinott, indicating one of the larger huts near the centre. "He lives and sleeps in here, coming out only to blast a few of us with his spells. There's no way of reaching it without alerting the whole lot of them. Because of our raids, they keep lookouts posted and patrol the wall ceaselessly, day and night. The only way to defeat them is with a full frontal assault by all the men on your ship."

     "But most of them won't fight until the wizard's dead," said Thomas, "so we've got to sneak in there and get him."

     "But there's no way to do that," protested Kerrinott. "It would be sheer suicide."

     "Don't worry," said Thomas with a wink. "We've got a few tricks up our sleeves. Now tell us more about this village."