Lotil, the featherworker, and I greet the passing of the monsters from Palul like the birth of a new day. The village lies in ruins below us, the inhabitants slain or fled. Only a few buildings, such as Lotil’s house, still stand, passed by the horde in random whimsy,
In this mercy, I sense the destiny of this old blind man and the necessity of my aid to him. We are bound together now,
not just by the danger we have endured, but also by the road that beckons before us.
The horse of the strangers stands ready to carry us, and on this new day we prepare to embark. Both of us have dreamed vividly of the great pyramid in the desert, with its vibrant colors and the secret wonders, concealed beneath the surrounding sand.
The vision of pluma tells us where we must go.
And Qotal! The Plumed One will soon be here, and we understand that die great pyramid will be the place of his arrival. The horse, when we have mounted, carries us toward the south, toward the altar of the Feathered God’s advent.
Both of us sense the rightness of the horse’s course.
7
THE CITY OF THE GODS
The nearest troll lunged upward, and Halloran slashed it away in a shower of black blood. Daggrande fired the last of his quarrels, then grimly unslung his axe, ready to fight to the last. The two fighters stood before the rest of the companions as dizzying cliffs plummeted into sheer gorges beside and behind them.
Halloran growled inarticulately, slashing at a troll, but then a strange dizziness whirled in his mind. Stumbling, he stepped backward and planted his feet firmly.
A cocoon of color swirled around them. Startled, Halloran looked at Erixitl and saw that she was equally amazed. Her cloak puffed outward and began to spin in a brilliant kaleidoscope of color. Slowly the brilliance reached out to encircle the desperate party on the ridge.
The trolls gaped dumbly. The companions saw the desert through the filter of pluma, everything painted in bright greens, deep blues, and vibrant reds. The colors grew to blazing brightness, and the monsters cowered involuntarily backward.
“What’s happening?” gasped Jhatli, gazing wide-eyed at the rainbow dervish.
Then, with a sudden blink, the world around the companions shifted. The ground fell away, and everything became a blurry maze of motion. In another second, they stood together, still, but in a different place. The ridgetop below their feet was wider, firmer. Most importantly, there was no sign of the trollsBelow them lay the same bleak chasms and barren rocks that had blocked their passage this day. Yet now that landscape lay to the west, behind them!
“Here, where we stand! This is the ridge we saw this morning,” Erix said. She pointed to the west. “We were over
there!” “How-what happened?” demanded Jhatli, sitting heavily on the rocks.
“Teleportation,” Daggrande said gruffly. “And a mighty timely bit of it, too. We moved somehow across all that stuff down there.” The dwarf gestured at the chaotic land. “It would have taken us days to walk this far!”
Slowly Halloran adjusted to the shock of the teleportation. He and Daggrande gazed westward, relieved that all sign of the trolls had now disappeared in the distance. Jhatli sat on the ground, an expression of blank astonishment on his face.
“Poshtli’s coming!.” Erixitl pointed to the sky. The eagle winged toward them in a shallow dive, accelerating out of the western sky. It soared forward, then flashed over their heads, continuing its dive into the valley to the east.
“And look,” Erix said softly as her eyes followed the eagle’s flight to the land beyond the high ridge on which they stood. “This is the place where he leads us.”
“What in Helm’s name is fhat?” gasped Halloran. Jhatli and the dwarf, equally surprised, could only stare in astonishment.
The valley to the east was surrounded by steep ridges, its floor an expanse of dry, sandy flats broken by massive clumps of jagged boulders. It was a place of wilderness, uninhabitable and uninhabited.
Vet that was the most astonishing thing about it, for in the center of the valley rose a structure so magnificent, so immaculate in its crisp lines, so fresh-looking in its brightly painted colors, that it could have been completed yesterday.
It was a pyramid, certainly. Yet it was a pyramid three times or more the height of the great pyramid in Nexal. It rose like a mountain into the sky, a series of tiers encircling it at regular intervals. The walls above these tiers were painted in bright colors, depicting abstract images of parrots, jaguars, and snakes in an eternal chase around the pyramid. A steep stairway ascended the side facing them.
Erixitl recognized the place, for her knowledge of the True World was the most complete of the four. More to the point, the place triggered a deep sense of reverence in her soul, and she felt that the object of their quest lay before them.
“This is Tewahca,” she said- “The City of the Gods.”
Zaltec lumbered southward. The monstrous stone figure covered twenty human paces with each step. Yet some profound sense of urgency caused the god to increase his pace until the earth thundered under each crushing footstep.
The god of war marched inexorably across the desert, taking no note of the parched land, the complete lack of life, The mountainous form stood out like some jagged, natural bluff, worn by wind and water into the crude resemblance of monstrous features. Yet in its motion, it belied the explanation, for it became a menacing, monstrous object of impossible scale.
Zaltec moved in a straight line, not veering for mountain or canyon. His eyes always remained fixed before him, as if he searched for a place he remembered from a long time ago.
A place where, finally, his destiny compelled him to return.
The companions approached the pyramid of Tewahca with an unconquerable sense of awe. Though it had seemed to loom, huge and near, from the ridgetop, its very size made that proximity an illusion. Each step they took toward it made it grow even larger, until they could only believe that the thing had been made by the gods themselves.
It had been midday as they recovered from the shock of the teleportation. Yet the sun had neared the crest of the western ridge by the time they had descended and crossed the valley floor before the pyramid. The structure stood in
pristine beauty, shining over the wasteland of the valley
On top of the mountainous edifice stood a tall stone temple. Unlike the sides of the pyramid, which were decorated w detailed mosaics and murals etched in vivid color, the temple walls were barren of symbology. Its door, huge and open, gaped like a black mouth awaiting nourishment.
As the companions walked, they noticed other shapes around them. Here was a square framework of stone, visible at the base of a dune. There stood a series of stone arches, surrounded by waste now, but once they must have supported a grand structure. A much smaller pyramid, now broken and eroded, with sand dunes drifting around its base, squatted off to the side. Gradually they realized that they walked among the skeletal remains of a once massive city
“Tewahca,” Erixitl breathed softly so that her voice did not break the thrall of awe that bound them. “Built by humans as a battleground for the gods.”
Always the great edifice loomed above them, but now they identified a second, smaller pyramid off to the side. As they neared the base of the huge structure, they saw that they walked down what had once been a wide
