Before him stretched an endless ploughed field, barren of life.

He turned around.

The wall and the doorway had vanished. Behind him the ploughed field stretched into infinity.

Cursing, Qeteb took a step forward.

He sank into the soft earth to the top of his ankle.

He took another step, and he sank yet further, weighed down by the amount of metal he carried.

From somewhere very, very far away came the baying of hounds.

Qeteb growled, and began to tear off his armour. It fell away, sinking into the earth.

He stood naked and exposed. He was DragonStar warped and warted. His flesh, humped into the strange lumps needed to fill his armour, was pale and bluish, pockmarked with corruption. His belly was soft and flabby, his legs thin and knobbly, his arms disproportionately muscled and weighty.

He had no neck or chin, and his lumpish face seemed to grow directly from his white, hairless chest.

Beautiful coppery curls fell from his head over his shoulders and down his back, merging finally with the feathers of his black and mouldy wings.

Qeteb was a sad mockery of life, and the saddest thing of all was that he did not realise it.

He grinned, and started forward across the field.

"We have here before us," announced DragonStar to the crowd, "the Demons of Hunger, Tempest, and Despair."

His voice was quiet, but beautifully modulated, and it reached every ear in the square.

"Their times," DragonStar continued, "are dawn, mid-morning and mid-afternoon."

He paused, and looked out over the crowd. "You represent the end result of their crimes, which stretch backwards through an eternity to the time of original Creation. They have ransacked the universe, and ravaged the souls of the very stars themselves."

The crowd murmured, its sound a rising swell, and DragonStar gave them a few moments in which to voice their despair.

When he resumed speaking, his voice had the tone and authority of a tolling bell.

"Here they kneel, and now is their time. What are we to do with them?"

Again there was a swell of formless sound from the thronging masses. It surged and billowed forth, engulfing both DragonStar and the Demons.

The Demons cringed. DragonStar grinned.

And the murmuring died. A decision had been reached.

From the crowd stepped three people. An emaciated man, with a distended, lumpish belly. A woman, her eyes roiling with some unknown turbulence. Another woman, dragging behind her a washing line. At the end of the washing line bounced the still form of a toddling girl-child, the line wrapped tight about her plump throat.

The Demons suddenly screamed. Not from the sight of the three people, but because each of the arrows about their wrists had suddenly flamed into life, burning into their flesh.

"Retribution," whispered DragonStar.

The man and the two women slowly climbed the steps onto the platform.

The emaciated man stood before Mot, the woman with the maddened eyes before Barzula, and before Sheol stood the woman who had the body of her daughter dangling strangled on the washing line.

"Your time has come," said DragonStar, and with one motion every person in the crowd raised their right arm and held it high, the palms of their hands turned towards the platform.

There was no sound.

The emaciated man stepped up to Mot, who was still writhing and moaning from the pain of the burning arrow.

The man stared, then reached up, took hold of the noose, and pulled it down until he could drape it about Mot's neck.

"I ate of stones," the man said in a curiously toneless voice, "until my stomach burst, and the stones ravaged through my belly until I shat stones. Now you shall know your own time."

He stepped back.

For an instant, nothing happened, then the burning arrow twisted about Mot's wrists moved. It slithered up Mot's right arm, twisted about his neck, then coiled about the rope that rose behind him.

In a movement so fast few could follow it, the arrow climbed the rope to the top of the scaffold, and, before any could draw breath in amazement, the rope contracted to an arm's length.

Mot shot into the air, suspended in the noose.

The rope tightened, and Mot's mouth opened in a silent scream, his feet kicking desperately below him.

The crowd smiled, their faces grim, their hands still held in the air.

Mot twisted frantically about on the end of the rope, the arrow still burning above him where the rope was tied to the scaffold, but the Demon did not die of strangulation.

Instead, he hungered.

He opened his mouth, and formed words, although no sound came forth.

Feed me! Feed me!

"If you wish," said DragonStar, and again the burning arrow moved.

It slithered back down the rope, around the noose, and into Mot's mouth.

It disappeared.

For a moment, nothing.

Then Mot's face contorted in an agony so great his eyes almost started from his head. His arms jerked in a mad dance at his side.

A small red, glowing spot formed in the centre of his belly, and, before any could draw breath, the arrow burst forth.

Mot's belly exploded, blood spraying through the air.