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.
