confer the respectful title upon Lok.
'I ache for Maztica, brother,' whispered the Eagle Warrior softly. 'Even as we live, she dies.'
'How can you say this?' chided Gultec. 'The battle is undecided. Can you not feel the surge of our strength around us?'
The bubble of peace threatened to burst, but Gultec willed it to remain. He tried to focus on the Eagle Warrior and saw that Lok regarded him with something akin to pity.
'Can you not feel the end approaching, my brother?' asked Lok. 'Can you not see it coming?' Lok's eyes wandered slowly away. The Eagle Warrior slowly slumped to the ground.
And then Gultec saw the substance of Lok's vision.
The monsters came rushing through the dust of the battlefield. They were huge beasts, big and brown, with snorting nostrils. Their feet crushed the ground to dust below them, and the sound of their approach was like thunder.
The monsters advanced in a line, as if the creatures had the minds of soldiers. Indeed, as they closed, Gultec saw that the beasts had the upper torsos of men, complete with arms and heads and weapons. But their lower bodies were grotesque, bearing a resemblance to deer, only much more massive, a thousand times more terrifying. Deer were passive and timid creatures, but these beasts bellowed and snorted and chomped. Flecks of foam covered their mouths, and lather spattered from their flanks.
Behind these giant things came smaller monsters, with wide, drooling jaws and long pointed teeth. Their tongues dangled, spattering foam. Heavy collars, bristling with spikes, protected their necks. They looked like huge coyotes, impossibly savage and fierce.
The monsters crashed into the Payit, into those warriors who had not turned and fled at their first appearance. Gultec saw the head sail from a spearmen. He saw one of the monsters drive a long spear through the body of another Payit. Still a third went down screaming and kicking beneath the plunging feet of one of the creatures.
Gultec stood and watched, his euphoria a distant memory. The sight of the beasts was so horrid, so shocking, that he could not raise a weapon to defend himself, nor turn away to run. He could only watch as his destiny, the triumph of his life, fell to shambles around him.
Somehow the monsters did not destroy him, passing instead around him and killing most of the warriors in their path. The Jaguar Knight watched the monsters wheel, even at considerable speed maneuvering like disciplined warriors. He saw one who seemed to be their leader, lumbering forward with black streamers trailing from his helmet. The face of this monster, a humanlike face, was contorted into a grimace of truly hellish cruelty.
The beasts rode forward and cut down a fresh band of warriors, plowing into a full thousand with crushing force. The warriors swarmed around, some of them attacking bravely, but the monsters kicked and leaped and whirled, soon breaking free to continue their rampage.
Gultec saw other bands of the monsters. The beasts roamed the battlefield at will, the thunder of their feet beating the death knell of the Payit. Back and forth they charged, and none could stand before them. The entire army began to melt away, warriors fleeing toward their homes or kneeling to tend wounded comrades, their weapons forgotten.
But the monstrous attackers did not forget. Gultec saw them riding to the far fringes of the field, still slaying, even though there was no semblance of resistance anymore. The members of the Payit army simply wanted to escape.
Gultec did not think that any of them would succeed.
Erix stood with the old people near the fringe of the delta. All morning the battle had been a scene of immense confusion, noise, and color in various patterns of chaos. The bystanders had been unable to tell how matters progressed.
Erix sensed the approach of disaster before most of the others. She felt a vague premonition, like a primeval warning, and moved back several hundred feet until she was close to the mangaroo tangle of the delta.
Then the monsters had come.
Erix moaned with horror and fell to the ground, paralyzed by fear, as were many of the other observers. This paralysis meant death in most cases, as the beasts with their humanlike cunning and cruelty, their supernatural speed and power, raced among the Payit and butchered the warriors and the helpless watchers alike.
The sight of the massacre sickened and numbed her. She saw a small child torn from its mother's arms, killed on lance point before the woman was trampled under, the flashing hooves of the monster. She watched an old man standing valiantly before his gray-headed wife, and saw the creatures thunder past, clubbing the husband to earth and laughing as the old woman knelt to hold her dying mate.
She watched spellbound from her knees as the monsters swept closer. Their leader, a great, red-bearded manlike form with wild, flaming eyes and black streamers trailing from his helmet, saw her crouching. The light flared in his eyes, and his lance tip lowered. The monster lumbered toward her, and she saw her death approaching. At its heels raced a smaller, shaggier creature, slavering and yowling.
Erixitl faced the charging rider, wishing she could slay him with her eyes. She could not, so instead she calmly climbed to her feet before his charge. Around her lay the battered and bleeding wreckage of Maztica. She sensed her world ending, saw it writhing in torment everywhere.
It seemed a good day to die.
FROM THE CHRONICLE OF COTON:
There came a time of war, and the brothers Zaltec and Qotal each made ready with sacrifice. The masses of men gathered eagerly, relinquishing their hearts and bodies and minds to the will of their gods.
And Zaltec claimed ten thousand warriors as his sacrifice. Eagerly, in song and verse, they ascended the pyramids in the time when pyramids reached the sky. Laughing and singing on the top, they offered their hearts to Zaltec, and the god was pleased.
But Qotal made his sacrifice of thirteen butterflies, each a different color, each brighter and bolder than the last. And his sacrifice was not the death of the butterflies, but their freedom. Each, in turn, he raised to the heavens and released.
Then came the war. Zaltec strived to gain dominance over the gods, but Qotal would not yield. In the end, Zaltec tumbled from the pyramid and crawled away. He left behind him the supreme form of the elder god, Qotal, reigning at the height of his glory.
But ever after, in the dark of the night and the privacy of his treacherous thoughts, did Zaltec know Qotal as the Butterfly God.
ENEMIES AND FRIENDS
Alvarro soared with the momentum of the charge, the invincible feeling of power that surged through him as he led the lancers through the tattered ranks of the enemy. He had killed many of these natives already, more than he could count.
The horses rumbled on, unstoppable, the sleek, fierce greyhounds running beside them. Alvarro delighted in the effect of the war dogs, for the natives seemed to fear the hounds nearly as much as the lancers.
But still targets abounded for his lance, victims awaited the cut of his sword. The killing became a ritual for him, a process he could continue indefinitely.
