Shouting a dark curse, Halloran whirled on the killer, driving Helmstooth with the power of his pluma and his rage. The drider’s eyes widened in terror, and it raised its weapon, only to have the blade shatter like glass when it met Hal’s blow. The gleaming scythe that was Helmstooth continued its driving force, slicing through the skull and the neck and half the chest of the creature.
But he had no time to tend to his friend nor grieve for him. He saw the white shape of a drider, a pale freak among the black creatures, and deep in his gullet, he recognized her. Then her creatures swarmed toward him, and he stood before his wife and the priest and the blind featherworker, raising his sword, the only barrier between the helpless trio and certain, horrifying death.
Halloran fought the fight of his life. He charged the driders, feeling the pluma cuffs at his wrists driving his blade forward with a power he had never imagined. He sprang to
his right, leaped to his left, darted forward and back again as the driders closed in. Helmstooth struck an arm from a drow torso and a leg from an arachnoid body. The blade carved deep into a dark elf trunk and shattered another sword of black steel.
A quick drider scuttled sideways past Halloran, while two more lunged in frontal attacks. Helmstooth found the heart of one as Hal’s entire being cried out from the threat of the flank attack-not for him, but for the suddenly silent Erixitl behind him.
Flexing every muscle in his body, he tore the blade from the first victim, slicing the head from the second drider in front of him without slowing the momentum of his spin. His momentum carried him through a sideways tumble, and as he rolled, he cut two of the drider’s left feet out from under it.
The creature hissed its frustration, slipping backward and raising its sword. With a snarl of pure rage, Halloran sprang at the drider, driving it backward with two hammering blows. The second knocked the creature’s sword from its hand, and without hesitation, Hal swept Helmstooth through a vicious arc, severing the upper portion of the drider from its monstrous, eight-legged body Both halves twitched grotesquely as the drow hands seized the body, as if to pull itself together once more. It died while Halloran turned back to the threats before him.
Now more of the creatures rushed forward, and he realized his vengeance had cost him a second of time he could not afford. He deflected the first blow, losing his balance and stumbling. The second he avoided by twisting away as he fell. But then he was on the ground, and the driders were swarming around him, some of them straight past him!
“Erixitl!” He thought of her name but did not realize that he called it out loud-He saw a black sword raised over him, and then he saw only darkness.
Her first plan had been to obliterate the man with a blast of magic, so that she could linger over the death of the woman beyond. But then Darien had remembered: too often in the past she had wasted powerful magic at Halloran and his woman, only to have the spells thwarted by the woman’s magical protection.
Instead, Darien had crept carefully down the steep steps of the pyramid, letting her driders fight the battle for her. She had only one goal: the sweet flower of light that beckoned her with irresistible temptation-She saw the woman now, curled on the ground in the agonizing prelude to childbirth. She sneered at Erixitl, caught as she was in such a moment of weakness, a weakness that would prove fatal.
The white drider crept around the periphery of the fight watching her creatures attack and die at the hands of Halloran. In a cold, aloof sense, she admired the human for the savagery of his battle. Indeed, she found the sight of his sweat- and blood-streaked form exciting in a way she had not known since the Night of Wailing.
Yet she had known that his fight would be futile, and she watched him fall with a vague sense of pity, as if a good horse had been wasted.
Now Darien advanced toward the woman on the ground. She saw two old men beside her and heard her cry out in pain. But Erixitl’s dark brown eyes met Darien’s and surprised the drider with their anger and their power of will.
Erixitl groaned and threw back her head as convulsive pressure pushed against her womb. She saw the horrid, leering face of the white drider, and she knew that Halloran had fallen. She feared that she would lose her mind.
Lotil suddenly stood up beside her. The blind pluma-worker held in his hands a soft, rich blanket, a blanket of lush colors and deep, seductive shades.
Darien paused for a moment, feeling oddly confused Around her, the others of her kind hesitated as well.
Lotil spun the blanket gently in his hands, and the colors whirled in a most alluring fashion, forming a swirling vortex that seemed to pull the white drider forward with compelling, deeply persuasive force.
The man shuffled away from his daughter, moving carefully so that he did not trip. The blanket he raised before him, spinning it faster and faster. He stopped walking, though he kept twirling the blanket as he reached the still form of Jhatli.
“Father-no!” Erixitl whispered.
But Lotil dropped the blanket. It settled like a shroud over the lifeless form, and then the blind man stepped to the side. His hands spun only the air before him; the pluma cloth lay on the ground. Yet somehow the colors lingered in the air, a spinning column that pulled the driders together, compelled them to follow.
Lotil moved on, the center of a whirlwind of pluma that grew into a column taller than his head, rotating faster and faster. He drew away from the pyramid, crossing the flat clearing and his daughter watched him go. The light of his magic illuminated the entire clearing, and she saw the driders, the eight or ten that still lived, following her father in a dense pack. The white one, Darien, led the way.
The swirling colors around Lotil swelled up like a tornado, towering high into the sky. The area of the mist expanded, reaching out to clasp all of the driders in its brilliant embrace. The group moved slowly, steadily toward the precipice at the clearing’s edge.
“No, please,” Erixitl whispered, collapsing in the brief respite of the passing contraction. “Father…”
But her voice was weak, and Lotil undoubtedly would not have heeded her even if he could have heard.
Darien couldn’t take her eyes off the seductive, powerful luminescence before her. The power of the spell of pluma enthralled her, captivated her and her companions as surely as could any physical snare.
They followed the man as he shuffled across the meadow. Sometimes he paused to twirl and bow, as if he performed some kind of ritual dance. Then quickly he started moving again, and the driders followed.
Somewhere within Darien’s being, a nervous twinge of alarm began to pull at hen The objects of hishna, the talons and venom and snakeskin that she carried in her pouch, lugged against her side, their weight an oddly increasing burden. That dark power surged in her mind, trying to tear her eyes from the potent and hypnotic image before her.
But always that compelling brilliance lurked before her. She struggled to push forward as the other driders crowded past, but the weight of hishna held her back.
She did not see the cliff as it fell away behind Lotil. indeed, none of the driders did. They all knew that it was there, but that knowledge lay in some distant, logical part of their minds, a part that was no longer functional. Instead, they knew only the maddening desire to seize this brilliance, to take it to themselves and consume it.
Then the driders lunged together, and Lotil stepped backward. The creatures grasped at him, their fingers snaring his robe, their legs propelling them after him.
Man and monsters tumbled over the side of the cliff, a whirling vortex of pluma that plunged in eerie silence toward the jagged rocks far below. The crash of their bodies against the stone was a sickening, final sound.
At the last moment, the dark powers within Darien held her back. She felt a compelling urge to leap; in fact, she stumbled forward and lost her footing at the lip of the precipice. But she slid a few feet and then grasped some curling roots of brush that grew along the face of the bluff.
Gasping for breath, she
scrambled for footholds. She found purchase for enough of her legs to support her, then collapsed, suddenly exhausted. Shivering in a sudden chill she wondered at the nearness of her escape. The rest of the driders, together with the blind human, had perished on the rocks far below.
She clutched the cliffside, unseen by those above. For a time, she needed to rest. Her anger and hatred seethed
anew, directed at these humans who had so nearly defeated her. But she still lived, and her strength slowly returned. Soon she would return.
The final ten regiments of Hoxitl’s army doomed the defense of Actas, the second village on Cordell’s defensive line. The ores rushed forward in force with untamed fury, sweeping around both sides of the village.
Grimes led charge after charge of the slowly shrinking company of horsemen, but he may as well have tried to hold back the ocean tide. Finally the riders fell back to regroup, realizing the futility of further attacks.
Bather than expend his army in Actas in a hopeless holding action or allow it to be annihilated, as had happened to the defenders of Nayap, Cordell ordered his trumpeters to sound the withdrawal.
The defenders broke away from the savage onslaught, struggling to hold their formation as they fell back toward Helmsport. The cavalry operated as four small companies, driving back the foremost spearheads of the pursuit.
Sharp volleys of harquebus and deadly showers of arrows dissuaded the attackers from vigorous pursuit. Didn’t they have their foes in full withdrawal, in any event? Now that the battle was won, why press? No fighter, whether human, dwarf, or ore, wants to be the last to die in a victorious campaign.
The slow, pale light of dawn began to wash across the field, revealing that many a brave warrior lay behind on the once-grassy savannah that was now a sea of mud. Dwarves of the desert, the Little People of the jungle, warriors of Payit and Tulom-Itzi, mercenaries of the Sword Coast-all mingled their blood in the earth, no longer caring of the differences that had separated them or the alliance that had brought them together.
But many more of these fighters, the defenders of that alliance, remained alive. These were the ones who reached Helmsport’s high, earthen ramparts. They fell back in good
order, and were met at the walls by Cordell or Daggrande. These officers quickly directed the retreating companies into useful positions on the fortress ramparts.
As the last ranks of Hoxitl’s regiments reached the battle, there was no fight to be found, for all the defenders had gone. Thus they swept on in victorious glee, a surging wave of chaos roaring toward the breakwater of the solid fortress.
That rampart served its function as the ores and ogres and trolls roared up the steeply sloping outer wall. At the top, they met an array of defenders, tightly packed together and holding the high ground. The horde was too big to bring all of its strength to bear against this limited front, and Cordell took advantage of the fact. Now his men fought shoulder to shoulder, spurred on by the knowledge that there could be no further retreat.
In Helmsport, they would hold or they would die.
The massive monolith that was Zaltec had neared the clearing at Twin Visages early that terribly dark night. The god of war had sensed the powers there, powers of both pluma and hishna. Also, it had sensed that its moment of confrontation with Qotal had not yet arrived.
So the mountainous figure of the war god had waited standing impassively as Halloran fought for his life, as the driders threatened the woman, and as the pluma whirlwind carried the creatures of Lolth to their deaths.
Zaltec sensed the nearness of the childbirth, and this tiny spark of life, insignificant in scope when viewed by one who had overlooked armies, gleamed like a tempting morsel be-fore the blood-hungry god.
And so Zaltec stood silently, watching and waiting. Soon the moment would come, and he would gain his greatest victory.
Colon raised his hand from Halloran’s forehead as the swordsman sat up with a groan. The cleric immediately went back to Erixitl, who gasped for breath in the throes of another volley of pain. Hal climbed to his feet, his head throbbing, and quickly went to kneel beside his wife. He noticed, with vague detachment, that the driders and Lotil were gone.
The woman moaned again and threw back her head. Her legs spread limply on the ground, and she clenched her teeth, striving to push her baby into the world.
The priest held a hand before her and gently shook his head. Grimly, as the pain slowly lessened, she nodded in understanding.
“1 know,” she whispered. “Up there.”
Painfully, awkwardly, she rose to her feet. Halloran supported her, while Coton went to pick up the blanket of pluma that Lotil had dropped over Jhatli. The youth lay still and cold below it, and his blood had soaked into a portion of the feathered surface.
Slowly and agonizingly they made their way up the steps of the pyramid, stopping each time Erixitl was seized by another pain. It took them countless minutes of ever-increasing daylight to reach the top, and by the time they did, the sky was light blue and the moments between Erix’s contractions had shortened dramatically.
Coton spread the cloak on the platform on top of the pyramid some distance away from the grim altar. Immediately Halloran lowered Erixitl, and once again she gasped.
Then she screamed and wept. She threw back her head and cried out loud. She hissed through her teeth and pushed with all of her strength. Again and again she strained.
Pain became her constant emotion, a way of life that seemed as if it could bring only death. But she fought against that pain with all of her strength, striving and pushing to overwhelm and defeat it. With a groaning curse, at last she felt herself collapse. The pain was still there, but now it was a fading sensation, unimportant any longer.
Halloran, in one stunning second, found himself looking
at, and then gathering up, his son. The baby squirmed; kicked on the blanket of pluma, wrinkling his face and then uttering a sharp, demanding cry.
“A boy,” he said reverently. He handed the child to his wife and she clutched it to herself.
Colon surprised them by tugging insistently at the blanket of pluma. He pulled it free and Erix gasped in surprise. “The Cloak-of-One-Plume!”
Indeed, the cloak woven from countless tiny feathers by her father Lotil now looked exactly like the one she had worn, the one that had marked her as the chosen daughter of Qotal.
Slowly, devoutly, Coton rose to his feet in the pale blue of the dawn. He carried the billowing cloak in his arms, and then he gently spread it across the altar.
At that moment, the sun crested the eastern horizon, and the first rays of the day fell upon the altar. The cloak fleeted these, sending up a dazzling rainbow of light.
The twisted violently, plummeting into a steep dive. For the first time, Poshtli felt the tug of gravity below him, and then he saw the ocean, pale blue in the dawn and spreading to the far limits of his vision to each side.
But not before him. There, a thin green line of land emerged from the distance, quickly growing into the bluff at Twin Visages. Now he saw the two faces he had seen before, still staring out to sea, waiting… waiting for him!
Or more precisely, for Qotal.
“She has given a life that I may return!” the exulted aloud.
“A sacrifice?” Poshtli demanded.
“No-not yet,” replied the god ominously. But now the Plumed Serpent had no time for mortals.
The great dragon soared toward the small pyramid, settling slowly to earth. He landed, bracing one massive foot on each of the four corners of the pyramid’s top.
Poshtli slid from the wide, plumed neck for the first time in countless weeks. His feet landed solidly on the top of the pyramid, and at the same time, he heard a great splintering of wood. He looked up to see a colossal stone figure, vaguely manlike but with grotesquely etched facial features and massive, clawlike fingers, lumber toward them from the forest. The monstrous thing crushed trees beneath each powerful footfall.
“Poshtli!” Th
e warrior heard his name and turned, startled.
“Halloran!” he cried in delight and surprise.
Then the dragon once again took wing.
The surging horde of monsters crashed against the summit of the rampart again and again, to be met by arrows and swords and the explosions of the harquebuses. With increasing fury, Hoxitl commanded his beasts to attack, to press up and over the embankment.
Dawn grew to full daylight, and yet each attack fell back, repulsed with bloody losses. Many defenders paid with their lives, but the sloping outer wall of the fort was littered with hundreds upon hundreds of bodies, each marked with the serpents-head brand of the Viperhand. Finally, under the increasingly blue sky, the beasts (ell back to rest. For (he first time in many hours, silence blessed the field.
As the sun crested the horizon, it gleamed off the clear blue waters of the lagoon. The vast ocean stretched to the horizon, rich, blue, apparently endless. Pure light and pure clarity marked the view of the sweeping sea.
But not so the land. The slopes of the fortress and all the earth around it had been churned to a sticky brown mess by the passage of heavy feet. Smoke drifted across the savannah from the ashes of the two burned villages, and the volleys from the harquebusiers had sent a new cloud rolling down from the walls of the fort.
Now the Beasts of the Viperhand gathered in their great regiments, camping and resting across the savannah.
Though none of the formations had been obliterated, nine or ten had suffered catastrophic casualties and now numbered a mere fraction of their original thousand-orc complement.
Hoxitl knew, however, that the humans were trapped The long night of battle had taken its toll on attackers and defenders alike. Now it served his purposes to allow his beasts to recover their strength in anticipation of the next attack.
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