“There’s got to be someway! Who are his men? Where did Don Vaez get an army like that?” Cordell asked the questions aloud as his mind whirled.
“The Golden Legion?” guessed Grimes. “The fellows we couldn’t take along with us? There aren’t a lot of mercenaries to be raised in Amn, save the ones you left behind.”
“Good possibility” Cordell admitted. His legion had numbered more than a thousand men on several occasions. Many loyal soldiers had been left in Amn when the expedition departed, limited by the capacity of Cordell’s ships.
“The bulk of them have to be mercenaries-men hired for coin, loyal only to profit,” continued the horseman. “They’d probably be as willing to serve you to as to serve Don Vaez.”
Indeed, that captain’s reputation as a womanizer and dandy had earned him scorn from more than one honest fighting man, a fact known to any mercenary who had ever worked on the Sword Coast. Cordell, on the contrary, was widely known to be a fair-minded, well-paying officer. Too, there was the fact that his missions had been almost universally successful.
Until now, he reminded himself, disturbed by the sudden memory of the Night of Wailing.
“Still, he’ll have his loyal crew of officers,” Cordell said. “We’d have to work fast and take them all out of circulation. Then it would be up to the men.”
As he thought further, plans and possibilities began to form in Cordell’s mind. Grimes and Chical helped him to shape those opportunities into a course of action.
None of them took note of Kardann sitting nearby, his eyes narrowed to thin slits as if he dozed. But, in fact, the assessor of Amn was very much awake.
A mysterious compulsion drove the driders as they left the mountain valley where their army had perished. Darien, cursing and abusing the others, pushed the band forward. They scuttled northward, along the jungled mountains, pressing their bloated bodies through the tangles, using their black-bladed swords to chop the underbrush from their path. Their fur-covered spider legs propelled them swiftly, and only the terrain held them from a full gallop.
Darien didn’t understand why she drove herself and the others so relentlessly. Her army gone, obliterated beneath
the collapsing tonnage of the mountains themselves, she, had nothing left but her hatred. Now she could at last revile her fiendish goddess Lolth and curse and-ultimately- ignore her. With the destruction of the ant army, she sensed that her old powers had deserted her. Now she had only instinct and rage to direct her on a course of vengeance. But that rage had focus, in the person of the woman of pluma, the wife of Halloran. Darien’s mind seethed with images of her earlier encounters with Erixitl-of the Maztican woman’s feathermagic protecting her from the elf’s sorcery during the massacre at Palul; of the encounter in Nexal, on the Night of Wailing, when the woman had pursued Darien and her drow allies throughout the palace complex, thwarting their every plan of attack.
This hatred drove her now even more relentlessly than before. The driders pushed through the jungle, slaying the few humans they met, killing and eating as they needed, sleeping for a few hours each day whenever exhaustion claimed them.
It was during a period of brief, fitful sleep that Darien’s hatred began to reform into vengeance.
She twisted and groaned, spitting and clawing reflexively, at a picture that formed in her mind. Dim memories awakened within her, memories from another life, another body. She recalled images of the Golden Legion, of its first landing on the shores of Maztica… of two great faces, carved in stone, which stared out to sea as if they awaited her arrival. She saw the image of a place by the coast where a great battle would rage, with hatred and killing aplenty.
She saw the image of Erixitl, her beauty a taunt, a spiteful affront to the bloated form of the drider. And as she thought, as her mind created vivid pictures, the black essence of foulness crept through her being. Power collected in her bloated abdomen, and the might of her malevolence began to take form in the world.
Around the vivid picture of the human woman, Darien saw a dancing, swaying framework of images that melted indistinctly together. Then slowly this framework took on a more solid definition.
Now she recognized the bobbing, swaying head of a snake, its mouth gaping slightly to reveal curved, venomous fangs. She saw the sinuous form of a crocodile twisting around the other images, and then she sensed long, hooked talons reaching toward the picture of the woman Erixitl.
Darien could not know it, but a new god was working his power within the female form of the drider. The power of that warlike deity rose and spread through the corrupted body. More and more images bombarded her, images of hishna, the magic of talon and fang and venom. Soon this power would explode. The precise time she could not know.
But of the place, she could be certain: the low pyramid, high on the coastal bluff; the great faces carved into the face of that bluff; even the sheltered lagoon within its encircling wreath of coral. She knew, and they would go there.
Darien would lead her driders to Twin Visages.
They pressed ahead with renewed determination and drive, pausing to rest even less than before. Darien thrilled to the quarry before her, often throwing back her head to laugh out loud, a shrill screech of horrible triumph that put the jungle birds to flight and sent monkeys whooping away through the trees.
She stopped occasionally, when the images assaulted her mind, and slowly the power of hishna grew within her. Then she would scramble through the brush, seeking, and after a few moments of search, she would emerge with a snake, or a lizard, or, once, even a jaguar cub. With relish, she put the creatures to death, and each of them nourished her growing power of talonmagic.
Ever northward they went, toward the headlands of the Payit country, east of the city of Ulatos, Darien moved straight toward the great sculpted cliff, not out of any sense of immortal destiny but simply because this was where her hunger directed her. And all the while, black and murky, the power of hishna swelled within her. Fertilized by the fuel of her hatred, the seed of talonmagic coalesced, gathered from the talismans she collected in the forest. Slowly, gradually, the power became a driving source of energy, a self sustaining explosion that could not be contained.
When the driders paused, near collapse from exhaustion Darien sat in a meditative trance. She took no sleep, instead picturing the fire of light before her. Her mind reeled with enchantments, fragments of forgotten spells, supplications to dark deities.
Sweat poured from her pale face, across her breasts and stomach to trickle onto the hard shell of her spider body. Her eyes tightly closed, she imagined the light she saw. Powers coalesced within her.
Finally the seed of hatred bore fruit. A black fog of festering evil gathered in Darien’s soul, clamoring for release. Hishna seethed upward and away, breaking free of the bonds of her body. Slowly, inexorably, the power grew within her and began to escape.
As she started to move again, the effluence of her might drifted ahead of her through the jungle, like an invisible toxin carried by the wind itself. Swirling about with the eddies of the breeze, it crept through the forest as if it were a living creature that sought a destination.
“First we meet the desert dwarves and the Little People. Now Gultec rejoins us with a force of warriors. It has to be a plan, part of some great design!” Halloran felt a tingling anticipation of success as they moved steadily northward. They neared their goal, finally, after a transcontinental march of some five months’ duration.
Erixitl rode beside him as he walked. Her time of child- birth loomed near, and the last weeks-now perhaps the interval could be measured in days-of the journey to Payit wore heavily upon her.
“A thing concerns me, though,” she admitted. “If this is destiny, why are we provided with an army? Does this mean we’ll have to fight when we reach Twin Visages?”
“We’re ready if we have to,” declared Jhatli, brandishing his bow and arrows, “I will be a great warrior when I have the chancel”
Halloran chuckled, feeling like an older brother listening to the enthusiastic ravings of his younger sibling. “Jhatli, you are already a warrior of such stature as to make your people proud. I don’t think you have to worry about that anymore.”
