Feathered Dragon - Douglas Niles [83]
“Go here,” commanded the warrior who led them.
As the ring opened to allow them to pass, Halloran saw a circular pit, perhaps twenty feet across, in the center of the circle. He couldn’t see the bottom until he and Erix were prodded to its edge. Then he saw that it was about twelve feet deep.
Opposite their position, at the base of the pit, he saw a door made of heavy wooden bars. Something dark and shadowy moved beyond those bars, and his fear grew to sick horror.
“Go in now,” ordered the warrior. His voice carried a trace of reluctance, but he displayed no hesitation as he raised his weapon menacingly
No ladder or other means of descent presented itself. Halloran knew that a twelve-fool leap might very well prove deadly to Erixitl or the baby.
“Wait!” he objected. “Leave her out-let her alone! I’ll go in there by myself!”
The warrior looked at him, and Hal thought he saw sympathy through the garishly painted lines on his face. But then another of the Little People came up, with a peremptory air that made Halloran suspect that he was some sort of chief. This one had the same war paint as the others, though his was drawn in vertical lines and he had long feathers tied to his ears and his wrists.
The stocky leader raised a hand and gestured toward the pit. A group of archers behind him raised their weapons, and Halloran looked at the bristling row of arrowheads.
Suddenly the chief pushed Erixitl in the small of her back. With a startled scream, she tumbled forward off the edge of the pit as she twisted to face Halloran. His heart froze at the look of terror on her face.
But his body remained mobile.
“My hand!” Hal shouted. Erix spun in the air as he tumbled to the side, seizing one of her hands in both of his. He fell prone at the lip of the pit as she dropped and grunted in pain. But he held firm, arresting her fall halfway down. J
“I’m okay,” she gasped. “Let me down.”
Halloran gasped as another warrior kicked him in the ribs, pushing him toward the edge. He felt Erix slip from his grasp and drop the rest of the way to the floor of the pit. Then he rolled off the edge, twisting in the air to land on his feet beside her.
Erix threw her arms around him, trying to choke back her terrified sobs. “Are you hurt?” he asked her, and she shook her head, sniffling.
Then they heard, from the darkness across the pit, a deep and very menacing growl.
The surviving Itza warriors pressed through the dense tangle of the valley bottom, pushing their way toward the heights above. Gultec, at the rear of his army, saw that the ants did not pursue after the bloody skirmish.
That, at least, was something. He hadn’t had time to count their losses, but he knew that more than a hundred of the
Itza warriors had fallen in the short, violent engagement. But they had accomplished their objective. The man-bugs had apparently paused to regroup. If the rest of the people had the opportunity to gain the pass because of the sacrifice of some, the warriors had not died in vain.
He remembered, with a cold chill, the pale white monster who had lashed out with magic against them. Once again he thought of the battle against the foreigners at Ulatos and how the magic of the albino sorcerer had broken his army.
Could there be a connection between the two powerful spell-casters? He didn’t see how, and yet the distinction of their whiteness seemed too obvious for coincidence. One had been a humanlike elf, the other was a grotesque and unnatural beast. Yet something about the beast’s face seemed similar, in its alluring femininity, to the elf.
He pushed his speculation aside, focusing instead on the rigors of the climb. The warriors straggled across a swampy valley bottom, a flat depression that marked another barrier in their long march up the pass.
From here he could look before him into the black dome of the star-speckled sky and faintly see the outline of the narrow pass above. It looked