Feathered Dragon - Douglas Niles [103]
“I think so. The problem, of course, is getting them to sail down there and get them. I know Don Vaez will never do it simply because I ask him. We’re going to have to be very persuasive indeed.”
The Eagle Warrior smiled grimly. He suspected that his companion didn’t speak of the kind of persuasion performed with words.
“Still, we are too few to carry the fort by storm,” Chical pointed out.
Cordell turned away from the sight, his bearded face creased in a heavy scowl. In silence, he crawled back through the low brush, followed by Chical. They worked their way back into the jungle for some distance before standing. Then, certain they had remained unobserved, they hurried back to the rest of their companions. Quickly they briefed them on the situation at Helmsport as they had been able to observe it.
“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.