Feathered Dragon - Douglas Niles [20]
For a moment, the general’s mind drifted as he thought of other men-Captain Garrant, Bishou Domincus, many faithful soldiers-who had met their ends in the dying city. He
thought of the mountainous trove of gold there, now buried beneath tons of rubble and guarded by tusked and taloned beasts. Once the loss of that gold had seemed the end of the world to him. Now it seemed but one more thread in the doom that still threatened him and his men.
Still, there remained the gold buried within the walls of Helmsport. This, the trove he had claimed from the conquest of Ulatos, had been left behind when the legion marched to Nexal. All of the men who knew the exact location of the treasure had accompanied him to Nexal; among the small garrison left at the port were none who knew where the gold was buried.
The general dismounted and walked over to Daggrande as the dwarven veteran looked up from his discussion of weaponry. Cordell winced inwardly at the look of guarded suspicion in his old comrade’s eyes. Even Daggrande loses faith in me!
“How can you speak that Helm-cursed tongue?” the commander asked, joking.
Daggrande ignored the humorous intent. “It only makes sense, since it seems as though we might have to spend the rest of our lives here.”
“Nonsense! We’ve got good men left. As soon as we get out of this desert, I see no reason why we won’t be able to reach the coast and make ourselves some ships.”
Daggrande grunted, and Cordell sensed blame in the sound. His own conscience growled at him daily. If only I had been satisfied with the gold we had already gained! Why did I march on Nexal? Now an expedition that had, at one point, owned a tenfold profit was reduced to struggling for escape for the fortunate survivors.
“We’re leaving today,” Daggrande said. He gestured across the camp, and Cordell saw that many of the Mazticans had already begun to trudge wearily from the valley heading southward in search of more food and water.
“So I heard. I don’t know why though. There’s still enough provisions here for a few days.”
“We march to follow a bird. That’s what these warriors tell me, anyway” Daggrande added. “It seems some eagle came to camp, and Halloran’s woman decided we all should follow it south.” His tone as he spoke of “Halloran’s woman” remained carefully neutral.
Cordell turned away, suddenly irritated with the dwarf. Daggrande started to pack up his weapons, preparing to march.
Among the warriors, Cordell saw Chical, proud chief of the Eagle Knights. Chical wore his cloak of black and white feathers and his wooden helmet with its curved-beak visor extending over his rugged face. The man had been a stalwart enemy, leading the attacks against Cordell’s legion during the struggle to escape Nexal, but then quickly realizing the greater threat when the world had come to pieces around them all.
Now Chical had become the accepted war chief of all the Nexalans, though there had never been any formal acknowledgment of such status. Cordell had found him to be a proud, brave warrior who understood perhaps better than any of his people that his world was never again going to be the same.
He looked across the valley, spotting Erixitl easily by the brightness of her cloak. She stood beside the trail as a wide column of Mazticans marched past. Beside her, tiny in the distance, he recognized Halloran.
How had that man reached inside these people the way he had? How, indeed, had Daggrande been able to understand and converse with them? The general felt a sharp jolt of envy for these soldiers, both of his legion but now his no longer. They might even be able to make a home here-
To Cordell, Maztica remained a great, faceless void. But where once it had been a space beckoning to adventure, promising reward, now it was a nightmare, threatening extinction, promising only constant flight and terror.
His reverie of self-pity suddenly broke as he sensed someone approaching behind him and saw the pudgy figure of Kardann,