Feathered Dragon mt-3 Read online

  Months had passed since the eruption of the great volcano, Zatal, yet still the waters in the valley seethed with heat, and gouts of foul gas exploded upward with unpredictable violence.

  The island that had once sheltered the humans and their great city of Nexal now suffered the anger of the gods. Great cracks scored the land, filled with black water or bubbling, steaming muck. The fabulous wealth of its gold had sunk into darkness, buried beneath stone and dirt and flesh, while its art, its pluma feathermagic, its brilliant mosaics and magnificent architecture, all vanished in the violence of the destruction.

  Around the shore, the other towns and cities of the valley lay wracked and abandoned. Once fertile fields had been flooded by the ancient clear waters of the lakes and now stood as vast swamps, steaming and fetid, or even poisoned by the foul spume from the still-smoldering mountain.

  Dark creatures moved about here, shadowy beasts of tusk and fang, leering hatefully through the murk at the world that had cursed them to their fate. AH humans who had not fled had long since perished by the tusk and claw of the city’s current masters.

  The greatest of these monsters dwelled in the ruins of the pyramid itself. Hoxitl, once high priest of Bloody Zaltec, now became his master’s ultimate tool. His grotesque body towering to a height of twenty feet, Hoxitl’s face bore no resemblance to its formerly human nature.

  Instead, a great protruding muzzle snapped savagely, revealing row upon row of sharp, wickedly curving fangs. His arms and legs, long and sinewy, ended in hooked talons, while a long tail, tipped with venomous barbs, lashed behind him. A thick mane surrounded his head, a mane of blood-caked, thick fur that bristled when he vented his rage. And now Hoxitl knew naught but rage.

  Often did the beast curse his master-Zaltec, god of war- who had condemned him to this fate. Yet at the same time and despite his most venomous curses, Zaltec ruled him yet. On those rare occasions when a human was found hiding among the rubble of Nexal, the captive was always dragged, shrieking in terror, to Hoxitl. Leering over the pathetic victim, Hoxitl would tear out his heart and then cower, offering the gory sacrifice upward in craven obeisance to his ruling god. Always Haiti prayed for the guidance of Zaltec, for the beast could form no ideas of his own.

  One of these victims, an old man who accepted his faith with the stoicism of a true believer, finally seemed to provoke a response. Haiti tossed the heart into the maw of the shattered statue that had once represented the god Zaltec. As he did so, he felt a rumbling, centered deep within the earth, far below his feet.

  The cleric-beast moaned in terror, remembering the wrack visited upon him during the Night of waiting. All around him, the craven creatures of his cult howled in fright and cowered in any niche they could find, fearing the further wrath of their master.

  A great shaking and crashing shook the ruins of the temple, and Hoxitl prudently backed away as large boulders rumbled from the pile. A form rose from the wreckage, stonelike of visage and mountainous in size, driving back the rubble as it slowly emerged from the ground.

  At last it stood like a monolith, high over the head of even the towering Hoxitl. Around him his creatures cringed, begging for mercy, but the cleric-beast stepped boldly forward and knelt before the form.

  For the stone pillar before him, he knew, was none other than Zaltec himself, the god of war. For long centuries, he had lain at the center of the pyramid, buried beneath the layers of construction added by successive Revered Counselors of Nexal. But now, unconstrained by the city and the faiths above, he emerged as a mighty colossus, and he made his will known to Hoxitl.

  And Hoxitl knew that Zaltec still favored him. Despite his misshapen form, despite the wracking of his people and his world, Hoxitl howled his gratitude.

  “My Master! You speak to me! I am your slave!”

  An image jolted Hoxitl to his full height, an image of blood and death and fire.

  “War!” Hoxitl gloated. “Master, I shall make war in your honor! I shall lay waste to all who do not hail your name!

  “My creatures!” He summoned his followers to him with a vibrant command. Despite their fear of the colossus, they heard Hoxitl and they obeyed. “We go forth to make war in the holy name of Zaltec!”

  He howled and cursed his creatures, ordering them into ranks and legions. Cuffing and battering the ogres, he sent them to do the same to the ores. He took his fleet, savage trolls and formed companies of death-dealing hate.

  The great mass assembled in the ruined center of Nexal. Black and green trolls stood sentinel around the army, their dark, sunken eyes peering suspiciously. They raised great sinewy limbs, clasping their talons at the sky. Some of them carried clubs, or crude stone macas, while others held tattered shields or bore some torn relic of human garb. Others stood naked. But all of them came.

  The brute ogres clubbed and whipped the masses of ores, and the smaller creatures scurried to obey their monstrous leaders. The ores gathered in companies with spears and bows and clubs, the weapons they had borne as warriors of the Viperhand.

  And the whole rank formed a snakelike column behind their master. Hoxitl raised his voice and stood to his full height so that he towered over even the trolls. He led them across the ruined causeway, past the festering mire of the smoking lakes, and then took them southward, toward the desert beyond Mount Zatal.

  They would find the humans who had fled their city. They would find them, and Bloody Zaltec would feast once more.

  The eagle entered a billowing mass of cloud, diving lazily. The bird’s vast wings caught each gentle updraft, speeding its flight and holding its altitude at the same time. For long minutes, the black and white form slid easily through the encloaking vapor, finally bursting free into the sunny expanse of the southern sky.

  Never had Poshtli flown this far south before. The eagle’s body relished the freedom granted by his total mastery of the skies, as hawks, vultures, and lesser eagles-and all other eagles were lesser eagles-dove away from the great bird’s flight.

  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 t
he 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 members of the Cult of the Viperhand, now in the form of ores, ogres, and trolls-cursed and reviled their fate. Those who had survived the violence of that portentous night and had not suffered such a transformation fled in terror, thinking of little more than safety.

  How different was the perspective of that night when viewed from the realms of the gods themselves!

  Zaltec had grown tremendously, and the power of the convulsion had allowed him to insert his physical presence into the prime plane. This presence manifested itself in the stone statue that now towered over ruined Nexal. His most faithful followers, those who had taken the vow of the Viperhand, he had bound to him forever by transforming their very bodies into creatures of death and war.

  Qotal, the, was a powerful deity who had been driven from Maztica by the growth of his brother Zaltec’s power. Serene and aloof, he remained distant from the world of humans, worshiped by some few of them, forgotten or ignored by most. But the Night of Wailing had created a crack in the barrier formed by Zaltec’s faithful. Now Qotal moved toward the world, and people terrified by the specter of Zaltec’s destruction cried and pleaded for his return.

  Helm, the god of the legionnaires, had been all but driven from Maztica by the brute power of his foe. Though he had worshipers in Maztica among the legionnaires who survived, no cleric of that vigilant god remained to guide them. So they blundered blindly, while Helm’s power retreated across the sea, to the palaces and temples along the Sword Coast, at the heart of his faith. But the god viewed his withdrawal as a minor setback; someday soon, borne by the hearts and will of his followers, he would return.

  Yet a fourth deity, a dark goddess of venomous evil, poured her power into the convulsion. She was Lolth, and her vengeance exploded first toward her servants, the drow elves.

  But she did not slay the elves. Instead, she perverted their clean forms into beasts of chaos and corruption and allowed them to live and to suffer. Her vengeance would not end there-she would set her creatures, her driders, free upon the world, where they would wreak further havoc.

  To do so, they would need tools. This need brought Lolth’s power once again to the world as she sought the proper materials to make tools for her driders. She probed the dark spaces, the smoldering caverns beneath the surface of the earth, in search of her goal.

  Far from Nexal she found that which she needed, in the forms of insects-thousands of small, red ants. Her power entered the nest where the creatures huddled, dismayed by the chaos stirring the world above. The might of Lolth surrounded them and took them in her smoky grip.

  The nest area expanded, growing quickly from a small den into a vast subterranean cavern. Rock melted away and dirt flowed like water, until a huge cavern gaped in the earth.

  The ants, however, in their thousands, look no notice of the change. For they had grown along with the nest. They stared at each other, their multifaceted eyes glittering in the dim light. They huddled and twitched, all unknowing.

  But now, each was more than six feet long.

  From the chronicles of Coton:

  Now the Waning is past, and I commence the tale of the Reawakening.

  I depart Nexal on the Might of Wailing, as do so many others-all, in fact, who would live and remain human. But the force of the convulsion tears me from my people. While the mass of the Nexala flee southward, my own path compels me to the north and east.

  My vow of silence, symbol of my pledge as patriarch of Qotal, entraps me, prevents me from speaking with those I see. At the same time, my white robe protects me. Now that Zaltec has shown himself, through the wracking of the True World, as the monster that he truly is. the worship of Qotal, the Plumed Father, flowers among the people again.

  It is beyond the city where I receive the first sign of the Plumed Father’s blessing, in the form of a black, snorting beast.

  This is not a beast of the Viperhand, transformed by the gods’ vengeance on this night of horror. Instead, it is a beast of the strangers, come with them to Maztica and now escaped and panicked. A beast such as the strangers call “horse.”

  This one comes to me, in supplication it seems, and allows me to mount it. Thus borne, I ride, far faster than human feet could carry, toward the east.

  2

  THE FERTILE DESERT

  “We’d better get back to the camp. It’s dark already.” Erixitl slowly rose to her feet as Hal followed. They had only to turn, to look down the other side of the ridge, to see the scene they had escaped for these few precious moments.

  The vast, straggling camp lay like a muddy blotch on the land, barely visible in the light of its thousand campfires. Still, that mud was a sign of good fortune-the blessings of gods, or of providential nature. A year earlier, there could have been no mud, for there would have been no water.

  Now water was reasonably plentiful in the desert, and the humans who churned its neighborhood to mud lived where they would have died. The nature of the life, it must be said, gave these miserable folk little thought of thanksgiving.

  Halloran and Erix did not know how many people fled in this great procession, moving gradually southward, away from ruined Nexal and the beasts that now claimed the city as their home. Like a swarm of locusts, the humans scoured each water hole, quickly baring the surrounding fields of mayz and berries. No single location provided a long rest; in a matter of days, the great march southward would commence again, for this was the only way the people could eat.

  For now, this new water hole promised a brief respite. Even in the darkness, women moved through the fields, gathering mayz, while children splashed around the fringes of the once-blue pool, washing away the dust and weariness from the long day of marching. The water occupied the center of a shallow, bowl-shaped valley. The desert stretched for miles beyond the rim of the vale, an expanse of brown, windswept dunes and even harsher patches of rocky plain.

  Within the bowl, a miraculous transformation had shown itself. Green fields of sweet, waving mayz formed a belt around the valley, below the crest of the hill but some ways above the water. Around the water’s edge grew a
lush circle of wild rice, while plump berries sprang from bushes that ringed the marshy fringe.

  The spaces in the valley that had not grown food, or where such food had already been harvested, now served as living space for the population of a massive city. Nexalans, the citizens of vanished Nexal, formed most of this group, but a small fraction of the humans showed different origins. The latter were bushy of face and wore breastplates and carried weapons of steel. The Mazticans, of course, carried obsidian-edged clubs, called macas, as well as arrows and spears and knives of stone, and they wore armor of padded cotton.

  Now these folk lived in uneasy truce, bonded by a mutual fear of the greater, and common, enemy lurking in the nightmare of Nexal. The truce did not approach camaraderie, but it was eased by the fact that the spokesmen for the deep religious schisms between these two diverse peoples were no longer with them.

  Indeed, the fleeing Mazticans had even abandoned their practices of human sacrifice. The priests of Zaltec, universally transformed into trolls on the Night of Wailing, no longer hounded them for victims. The devastation, commencing at the height of a sacrificial orgy, had caused many to question doctrine they had always accepted at face value. Who were they to question the hunger of the gods?

  But now, in the face of the potential starvation of their children, the hunger of the gods did not seem so tragic a thing to the people of Maztica.

  Erixitl and Halloran slowly descended from the ridgetop, through a fringe of the camp in a clean-plucked field that had yesterday grown lush with mayz.

  “Sister! Sister of the Plume!” A voice called out, and more of them joined in as several women recognized Erixitl. They quickly gathered around her, eagerly thrusting their children forward so that Erix could touch them. Gently she brushed her hands across their tousled, black-haired heads.