superior numbers of the foe and crushing strength of the attack soon doomed them to a man.
Gasping and sobbing, Jhatli slowed his pace. He realized that he was too late to fight, for already the killing was complete.
“Monsters!” he cried, shaking a fist. Several of the beasts, a few hundred paces away, looked up and growled.
“I will avenge my people! You will all be slain!” Furiously he nocked an arrow to his bow and let fly, though the missile carried barely half the distance. Now, he saw with grim satisfaction, several of the smaller man-beasts started toward him. The creatures’ pig eyes were narrow in their bestial faces, above beastlike muzzles that gaped to display long, curved teeth. Yet their hands and arms were manlike and clutched the macas and shields of Maztican warriors.
Jhatli nocked another arrow, drew back his bow, and waited, using the first shot as his range mark. Squinting, he released the missile and watched it soar true toward its target. It struck the beast in the chest with a solid thunk, and the creature cried out as the force of the shot knocked it to up from the gory trophies around them.
Jhatli sensed the futility of further combat and quickly turned away. He paced himself slightly faster than the lumbering beasts pursuing him, and as he had expected, they soon broke off the chase.
The young man jogged southward as night fell across the House of Tezca. He felt a dull pain for the deaths he had witnessed this day. But too much of his recent life had been spent in sorrow and mourning. Now, Jhatli decided, it was time to think of revenge.
A dense thicket of jungle growth masked the mouth of the cave, indistinguishable on the outside from the rest of the bramble-covered slope. From within, however, the verdancy merely proved that the surface world lay beyond.
Darien, leading the column, paused and listened. The white drider sensed the sunlight before her, and her old sense of revulsion returned. But she was a dark elf no longer, and the light of day was not a thing that could master her.
“Incendrius!” she cried, pointing a pale finger at the obstructing foliage. The power of fiery magic blasted the lush barrier, and the leaves and branches crackled into smoke. Without a pause, she pressed forward, creeping for the first time in months into the surface world.
Behind her followed the rest of the driders, their black longbows held ready. The spider-beasts walked with mechanical, insectlike motions of their eight legs. Their weapons, however, they wielded with the familiar fluid movements of drow veterans.
Following the driders came the army of giant ants. The red insects lurched awkwardly but quickly from the cavern. Antennae tested the air before them while their huge, blank eyes looked about the jungle. The creatures of Lolth emerged from the darkness into a world that lay vulnerable and unsuspecting before them. Immediately the ants began to eat. and as the file emerged from the cave, a steadily expanding area of devastation grew around the entrance.
The ants turned to trees, bushes, even grass, tearing and chewing, reducing all to a wasteland. They pulled the bark from the trees, killing centuries-old forest giants in a matter of moments. Hard, knife-edged mandibles ripped and splintered the wood of the forest, while more and more of the monstrous insects poured from the cave.
Darien and the other driders began to move, compelling the ants to follow their new masters. Still more of the creatures emerged from the cave, expanding into a column twenty paces wide, steadily growing in length, pressing through the jungle.
And everywhere the ants destroyed.
“Do you know where he’s leading us? Or why he comes in the body of an eagle?” Halloran wondered aloud about the majestic bird wheeling gracefully above them.
“No… of course not.” Erixitl, too, followed Poshtli with her eyes. “I saw something in his eyes, though, when he perched on that rock. A message, or a plea of some kind. It seemed to promise hope.”
“We could use a little of that,” Hal agreed.
They looked backward from the low rise where they rested, along with a hundred others who had collapsed to the ground in exhaustion. The file of refugees filled the valley behind them, stretching to the dusty horizon in the north. Before them, the column continued unbroken to another rise, perhaps a mile away. A further elevation, even higher, beckoned beyond the next ridge.
“How is your strength, today, sister?” The voice, behind them, signified the approach of Xatli.
Erixitl looked at the priest, a wan smile across her dustand sweat-streaked face. “I’ll make it the rest of the afternoon, but I think I’ll sleep well tonight.”
The priest chuckled and lowered himself to the ground beside the couple. “You will have earned your sleep, for certain,” he agreed. “May Qotal see that you are untroubled by dreams of ill.”
Erix looked upward, quickly spotting the eagle as Poshtli soared over the winding trail that led steadily, endlessly southward. “Once I would have argued with you, you know,” she told the priest. “But now 1 can only hope that the blessings of Qotal are real, that he will return to us.”
She sighed, then asked no one in particular, “Without that hope, what do we have?” She met the eyes of an old woman who walked slowly along the trail, clutching the arm of a young man. The woman smiled, and then the steady march carried her away. But her face was replaced by others-a pair of young children holding hands; a man carrying a child; a husband and wife. All of them looked at Erix, and each sought some measure of comfort and hope from her face. She tried desperately to communicate her own sense of hope.
“ Faith can only lighten your burdens,” declared the priest. “The signs have been fulfilled; his return is imminent! Accept his help, and you will gain his everlasting strength!”
“But it must be soon” the woman said, sitting up and staring into the priest’s dark eyes. Slowly Xatli nodded. He understood.
“My friends!” A voice pulled their attention toward the front of the column and they saw the broad-shouldered form of Gultec approach. The Jaguar Knight wore his tunic of spotted jaguar skin, with the helmet that framed his face through the open jaws.
“Gultec!” Erix cried, brightening immediately. The lanky Jaguar Knight crossed the ground in long strides, coming back toward them beside the file of Nexalans who marched steadily southward. In moments, he reached them and squatted, resting easily on his haunches. “What did you find?” she asked, seeing the look of promise in the warrior’s thin smile.
“Water. A day and a half away. A large lake, with marshes-and even fish!” The warrior’s eyes flashed as he conveyed the news. “To the southwest… this trail leads directly there.”
“That’s splendid.” Erixitl looked skyward. The great eagle wheeled overhead, as if patiently waiting for them.
“Perhaps we can remain there for a while,” said Halloran. “Let everyone rest and restore their strength.”
“Yes,” said Erixitl absently as she cast another look skyward. Hal knew that she would only be content to rest as long as the eagle did not urge them on.
There was also the matter of her father. When the two of them had journeyed to Nexal before the Night of Wailing, he had seemed safe in his house, high on the ridge above the town of Palul. Now, with chaos spreading across the land, the blind old man’s life could not help but be endangered. Erix spoke of him only rarely, but Halloran knew that Lotil was much on her mind. He, too, worried and wondered about the old man. Yet he accepted the fact that they could not go to him-not with the horde of the Viperhand looming between them.
With the growing life of their child, the man knew that his wife needed a quiet, secure place to live, to go through her pregnancy and to make a home. Yet for now they could have none of that, and this knowledge tore deeply at his soul.
“I hope that we may have that time,” Gultec added, “but I fear it will not be so. I myself may have to leave you.”
“Leave us? Why?” Erixitl looked at the Jaguar Knight with genuine fondness.
“I owe a debt to one who is my master in all ways, in a place very far from here. He granted me freedom to
