Viperhand - Douglas Niles [61]
Shadows mixed with smoke everywhere Erix looked, but the combined darkness couldn't block out the sight of blood and death. Her nightmare seemed forgotten, a pale image of true horror.
It seemed to Erix fitting, as she collapsed on the paving stones and gasped for air, that the village should burn.
The terraced pyramid of Zaltec stood, perhaps fifty feet high, near the middle of Palul's plaza in the midst of the feast and, subsequently, the battle. A steep stairway ascended each of the four sides, leading to a square platform on top. In the center of this platform, a small stone building enclosed the sacrificial altar and a statue of the war god, Zaltec.
Brave warriors had gathered below the pyramid at the outbreak of battle, instinctively seeking to protect the sacred image of their god. Equally instinctively, the soldiers of the legion pressed from all sides, attempting to gain the top of the pyramid and shatter the barbarous idol.
The warriors conducted their defense with savage fanaticism, but the tightly packed legionnaires concentrated their attacks. Slowly the defenders fell back, giving up a step at a time, and each with a high price in blood. But the inexorable tide of attack grew ever closer to the bloodstained platform on top.
"Sorcery!" wailed Zilti from before the altar, looking at the massacre below. "How else could they have learned of the trap?"
Shatil, standing beside his high priest, looked around numbly. Accustomed to bloodshed and death-indeed, he had performed over a hundred sacrifices himself-the destruction below nonetheless horrified the young priest.
The legionnaires seemed invincible. The horsemen rode back and forth through the plaza, and only the thinning numbers of Mazticans prevented them from slaying hundreds with each charge. The deadly swords rose and fell, slicing heads from bodies or leaving deep, gashing cuts that sent the blood of the victim pouring in a fatal stream onto the stone pavement of the square.
First they had bottled up the north exit from the plaza, while the sudden horde of insects had closed egress to the west. The cloaked figure with the tiny stick had sealed the eastern side of the square, now marked by hundreds of stiff, frozen corpses. Only to the south could the villagers find escape, and it was from this side that the refugees poured out of the courtyard.
Finally the horses began to slip and stumble on the blood-slicked pavement, and the riders dismounted. There were no more living victims around them, in any event.
Shatil raised his eyes to the surrounding ridges, knowing that thousands of Nexalan warriors were concealed there. From the height of the pyramid, he could see over the houses and trees of the village, gaining a clear view of the surrounding heights. Surely those warriors had seen this treachery.
They had, but the priest saw that the Kultakan allies of the legionnaires had been just as prepared as the strangers themselves. Now the Kultakans fell on these hapless am-bushers, and before Shatil's disbelieving eyes, the Nexalan^
S› companies were driven away from Palul. The feathered, warriors of both sides fought bravely, and showers of spears, arrows, and darts flew back and forth.
The Nexalans tried a desperate charge that was quickly broken and routed by the steady macas of the Kultakans. Inexorably, one after another, the attacks separated the thousandmen regiments of Nexal from each other. Each surrounded block of feathered warriors fought desperately as the battle on the ridges degenerated into numerous melees.
But each Nexalan thousandmen fought alone, in isolation and without coordination. The Kultakans, Shatь saw, concentrated their forces against first one, than another block of enemy troops. One by one, the Nexalan regiments broke, pressed from the battlefield by the overwhelming, savage force of the Kultakan ranks.
Around the square, the companies of legionnaire swordsmen attacked the buildings that sheltered the warriors who had been