Feathered Dragon - Douglas Niles [130]
Shouting a dark curse, Halloran whirled on the killer, driving Helmstooth with the power of his pluma and his rage. The drider’s eyes widened in terror, and it raised its weapon, only to have the blade shatter like glass when it met Hal’s blow. The gleaming scythe that was Helmstooth continued its driving force, slicing through the skull and the neck and half the chest of the creature.
But he had no time to tend to his friend nor grieve for him. He saw the white shape of a drider, a pale freak among the black creatures, and deep in his gullet, he recognized her. Then her creatures swarmed toward him, and he stood before his wife and the priest and the blind featherworker, raising his sword, the only barrier between the helpless trio and certain, horrifying death.
Halloran fought the fight of his life. He charged the driders, feeling the pluma cuffs at his wrists driving his blade forward with a power he had never imagined. He sprang to
his right, leaped to his left, darted forward and back again as the driders closed in. Helmstooth struck an arm from a drow torso and a leg from an arachnoid body. The blade carved deep into a dark elf trunk and shattered another sword of black steel.
A quick drider scuttled sideways past Halloran, while two more lunged in frontal attacks. Helmstooth found the heart of one as Hal’s entire being cried out from the threat of the flank attack-not for him, but for the suddenly silent Erixitl behind him.
Flexing every muscle in his body, he tore the blade from the first victim, slicing the head from the second drider in front of him without slowing the momentum of his spin. His momentum carried him through a sideways tumble, and as he rolled, he cut two of the drider’s left feet out from under it.
The creature hissed its frustration, slipping backward and raising its sword. With a snarl of pure rage, Halloran sprang at the drider, driving it backward with two hammering blows. The second knocked the creature’s sword from its hand, and without hesitation, Hal swept Helmstooth through a vicious arc, severing the upper portion of the drider from its monstrous, eight-legged body Both halves twitched grotesquely as the drow hands seized the body, as if to pull itself together once more. It died while Halloran turned back to the threats before him.
Now more of the creatures rushed forward, and he realized his vengeance had cost him a second of time he could not afford. He deflected the first blow, losing his balance and stumbling. The second he avoided by twisting away as he fell. But then he was on the ground, and the driders were swarming around him, some of them straight past him!
“Erixitl!” He thought of her name but did not realize that he called it out loud-He saw a black sword raised over him, and then he saw only darkness.
Her first plan had been to obliterate the man with a blast of magic, so that she could linger over the death of the woman beyond. But then Darien had remembered: too often in the past she had wasted powerful magic at Halloran and his woman, only to have the spells thwarted by the woman’s magical protection.
Instead, Darien had crept carefully down the steep steps of the pyramid, letting her driders fight the battle for her. She had only one goal: the sweet flower of light that beckoned her with irresistible temptation-She saw the woman now, curled on the ground in the agonizing prelude to childbirth. She sneered at Erixitl, caught as she was in such a moment of weakness, a weakness that would prove fatal.
The white drider crept around the periphery of the fight watching her creatures attack and die at the hands of Halloran. In a cold, aloof sense, she admired the human for the savagery of his battle. Indeed, she found the sight of his sweat- and blood-streaked form exciting in