Feathered Dragon - Douglas Niles [6]
Yet within that powerful, plumed body, a man’s mind wondered at the changes in the land below. Poshtli saw the new greenery, oases of water surrounded by mayz and berries, where once the brown sands of the House of Tezca ruled supreme.
The sands still existed-indeed, they dominated the landscape-but the precious islands of vitality dotted the True World to the far northern and southern horizons like a series of cosmic footsteps leading away from the devastation that had once been mighty Nexal.
With a human sob, Poshtli remembered his grand city, now reduced to ashes, rubble, and mud. The volcano, Zatal, had finally ceased its convulsions more than a month after its initial eruption. By then, little remained of the once beautiful, vibrantly fertile valley except the wasteland.
And the creatures! Hideous monsters, born in the cataclysmic forces when the god of war claimed his faithful and
made them in his image. Humans branded by the Viperhand, marked as Zaltec’s servants, became beasts the like of which the eagle had never seen before and man’s mind could not have imagined. Never before had these monsters roamed the True World, though Poshtli’s friend Halloran had told him of their existence in other parts of the Realms.
Now they laid claim to all of Nexal. Even more frightening, Poshtli’s aerial observations had showed him that these monsters had formed legions, and now they began to march.
The eagle had soared over the muddy encampments of refugees, many scores of thousands of humans fleeing Nexal, following the verdant islands southward into the desert. The monsters pursued, and the humans fled. Each oasis. with its surrounding food, fed the people for several days, but then, its bounty exhausted, compelled the population to flee farther to the south, away from the press of bestial fangs and talons.
Poshtli observed the struggle from his position of sublime detachment, for he no longer belonged to that earthbound world. Yet he could not totally remove himself, for too long had he been a noble leader of the Nexala.
So now he flew to the south, to see where the path of fertility drew his people. Always his eyes, far keener than any man’s, searched the horizon before him.
And finally he reached the end of his trail.
It appeared as a small mound on the horizon, growing swiftly as the eagle soared closer. It did not lie along the path of greenery, but rather some distance to the east. Soon he recognized it for the shape it was, though how it had come to the desert he could not explain. Higher and higher it towered, seeming to rear upward as he closed.
The structure rose from a flat expanse of barren sand, but around this area the eagle saw other ruins: a low building, partially covered with sand, revealing a few dark, half-obstructed doors and a courtyard consisting of many rows of parallel columns. A smaller pyramid stood nearby, mostly eroded, and he saw square outlines that showed where
other structures had stood.
Over it all loomed the towering pyramid, clean and bright and pristine in its regal beauty As he neared it, Poshtli saw that it was greater than any other such thing in the land, easily reaching twice as high as the now-ruined Great Pyramid in Nexal had stood.
Finally he circled the bright, steep-sided pyramid. Many terraces scored its sides, and steep stairways, of many hundreds of steps, ascended each of the four sides. Bright mosaics marked all of its faces, in colors more brilliant than any he had ever seen before. Sharply outlined, freshly colored, it showed no sign of ruin nor abandonment.
He swooped closer, past the dark, gaping door to the temple consecrated to whichever god the pyramid glorified. Atop the structure itself, the building stood windswept and empty.
It seemed he had found the greatest pyramid in the land, yet it was a temple that still awaited its god.
The Night of Wailing was viewed by the inhabitants of the True World as a monstrous calamity, a disaster visited upon them by vengeful gods. Those humans who had been corrupted by the storm of arcane power-the