Feathered Dragon - Douglas Niles [100]
again so soon after the climactic battle with the ants?
A shout from one of his men pulled his attention back again to that original threat. Here came more of the ants now, finally emerging from the chaos around the fringes of the destruction. They were but a pitiful remnant of the army, to be sure-the former thousands numbered but a few hundred-but still they came implacably onward. Desperately Gultec swung around to study the army approaching from below.
The Itza warriors raised their weapons against this new threat, and the approaching force slowed. The small warriors did not lift their axes and their bows; indeed, they did not look as if they intended to attack.
Then the final, stunning event told him his mind was certainly gone. There, in the lead of these newcomers, was Halloran! And there, upon the horse that trailed them, was Erixitl.
In the next moment, the group separated, the diminutive humans breaking to the right and the dwarves to the left. Immediately Gultec’s warriors perceived that these were allies, here to combat the remaining ants,
“My friends! You have found us!” Gultec shouted at Halloran as the soldier approached, and the two men took a brief moment to clasp hands. “Thank you,” the warrior said quietly.
Behind Hal and his warriors, Erix followed, riding Storm at an easy walk. The surviving ants crept toward them, but now the defenders far outnumbered their monstrous foes.
“Let’s finish this thing,” said the Jaguar Knight. Halloran merely nodded as the halflings and dwarves rushed past, weapons ready. With whoops, shouts, and whistles, the Itza warriors turned and joined the attack.
Out of the dust of the shattered mountain, giant red ants straggled forward, to be met by the plumastone weapons of me desert dwarves or paralyzed by the kurari-tipped arrows of the Little People. And when the men of Tulom-Itzi swarmed around the shapes of their enemy, hated and ‘eared for so long but now finally vanquished, not a one of the monsters was left alive.
Darien watched the slaughter from the high vantage to which she had teleported, trying to see what could be salvaged from the disaster.
Nothing. Not today, in any event. The ant army was gone, wiped out by the cataclysm, the few survivors falling to the humans and their fortuitous reinforcements.
The drider considered, for a moment, a vengeful idea. She
could teleport herself into the midst of the humans and
launch spells of great destruction-fireballs, lightning bolts,
even clouds of poison gas. She wouldn’t be able to slay them
all, but she could make them know her wrath.
Something held her lips as she began to mouth the spell. A. spot of color appeared among the onrushing army-behind them, actually. A brightness struck the drider’s eyes with painful intensity.
It was a familiar pain.
Suddenly Darien hissed her rage, for she knew that brightness. It was the woman who had thwarted her in the Highcave, the one who was responsible for the disaster!
For the first time, the drider backed from her crest, crouching to make certain she avoided detection. Now her rage was tinged with another emotion, a stranger to the vicious drider.
Darien was afraid. She remembered the power borne by I that woman.
In the face of that fear, she paused. There would be no vengeance today. This was no longer an attack against an anonymous human population, motivated by only the fundamental need to slake her hatred with blood.
Now she had an enemy with a face and a name. A potent enemy-one who could be overcome only with a careful and meticulous plan, but indeed a foe who would be overcome.
Darien shook herself angrily, her torso flexing like a dogs when it dries its soaking fur. The power of Lolth had twisted her shape, corrupted her soul, and given her an army. But now that army was gone, and the enemy of her life was a
woman of pluma, feathermagic. Hatred and rage seethed within her, and since she was a creature of Maztica, these emotions fused into her own power, into might that could challenge the feathermagic