“You ready, Mark?” George asked.

“Yeah, I'm up.”

“Virginia? Are you ready?”

“Aye, Master Merrill.” She sounded nervous, but in the dim light George could see she was grinning.

“Okay, here we go…” George opened the portal, enabled the microphone, and pointed at Virginia.

“I am Oz…” a weirdly wailing voice echoed through the camp.

Like he'd done the last time, George quickly reset the portal to a different location and backed up to the exact time Virginia had made her announcement. He also fiddled with the voice changer controls.

He pointed at Virginia again.

“I am Oz…” a low voice growled.

Over and over again, George and Virginia repeated the pattern.

The words echoed insanely, shrieking, muttering, wailing, whispering. None of the individual voices was particularly loud; in aggregate, the devil's chorus was overwhelming.

The prisoners, out in the open, were awake and up before the echoes died away. They were obviously terrified of the voices, but they were apparently even more afraid of their guards—none of them made a sound.

Seconds later, the twenty or so Anoeg—camp guards, Eyanoco's sons, and the men they'd brought with them—were out of their lodges, clutching their weapons. The guards, who had never experienced the presence of the English god Oz, were as terrified as the prisoners; only the relative calm of Eyanoco's sons kept them from panic.

While the Anoeg stared frantically around trying to find the source of the insane shrieking, George relocated the focus to just outside of the palisade. He pointed at Mark; Duquesne pulled the pin of an incendiary grenade and shoved it through the hole in the speaker board. Immediately, George backed up in time and moved a few meters further along the palisade. Once again, he pointed at Mark; once again, Mark released a grenade. Within a minute, grenades had been placed, all at the same second in time, around the entire palisade.

Five seconds after the last grenade had been placed, all in the space of a single second, all of them ignited. Seconds after that, the 4000-degree heat of the grenades had set the entire palisade ablaze.

Screaming, shouting, backing away from the flaming walls, all the men in the enclosure, guards and prisoners alike, packed themselves into a dense mass in the middle of the camp.

George watched and waited. After a minute or so the charred ruins of the palisade started to collapse. He waited another minute, then pointed at Virginia.

The voices shrieked in an insane chorus from everywhere and nowhere. It was too much for the panicked crowd of men. Those who had weapons dropped them and ran; the former prisoners simply ran, all running over the smoking remains of the palisade.