Gultec was gone now, and Zochimaloc sensed the importance of his student’s mission. Soon, however, it would be necessary to call him home.
The old Maztican finally entered the observatory. The building, with its domed roof of carefully cut stone, stood in the center of Tulom-Itzi, a place of sacred peace and wisdom. Now Zochimaloc went to the center of the round chamber and looked at the apertures in the roof. The stars lined up with those openings at precise moments, he knew.
But today it was not the stars he sought. Zochimaloc needed deeper, more practical knowledge, and so he produced a small bit of plumage from his belt. He kindled a small fire in the floor, and then dropped the tufts of feathers in a ring about the bright blaze.
The feathers caught the light and dazzled with colors. On the encircling wall of the building, the feather-shadows appeared as black pictures, marching around the observatory, around Tulom-Itzi.
They marched as a file of giant ants.
For a long time, Zochimaloc touched the earth beneath his body He touched it, and he sensed its distress. Waves of pain radiated outward from the ground. He sensed a scourge upon the land, and it was a threat that he now understood to be near.
Hours later, though still well before dawn, the moon rose. The sliver in the east cast its pale beam through a slit in the building’s ceiling, and soon the moonlight washed over Zochimaloc.
He sat, immobile, until the moonlight faded. Even then he waited, until finally the cool blue of dawn lightened the eastern sky. Then his eyes closed and his lips moved.
“Gultec, we need you,” he whispered.
Hoxitl thrilled to the extent of the slaughter, howling gloriously as his minions grunted across the battlefield, ripping and tearing the corpses until the victims no longer resembled humans.
“Let that be their lesson,” chortled the great beast that had once been patriarch of Zaltec. “They will be even less human than us! And the might of Zaltec will prevail!”
For a long night, the beastly army remained on the bloody field. More and more of the monsters joined them, for the attacking group had only been a small advance guard. It pleased Hoxitl to see how effectively they had slain a group of the enemy that had outnumbered them substantially.
Of course, most of the humans had been helpless, but that mattered not to the manned figure. Indeed, he identified the fact as his greatest advantage: His forces could travel quickly and strike hard, unencumbered by non-combatants. The refugees, on the other hand, moved slowly and tried to protect the great majority of their number, the ill, the sick, the aged, a majority that could offer no aid in battle.
Dimly Hoxitl remembered the great sacrifices with which he had celebrated victories as a priest. What a waste, he realized now, to capture and hold captives for ritual execution when it was so much more gratifying and appropriate to slay them on the field.
The idea settled into the beastly, but still shrewd, mind of the monster. Hoxitl began to see some of the reasons that the armies of Maztica had suffered so horribly in combat with the foreign invaders. The strangers had no such compulsion to take their opponents alive.
“Feast, my children! Feast and exult!” he howled in the language that had become his own. The ores and ogres and trolls understood their master, for they, too, spoke in the bastardized tongue that had come to them during the Night of Wailing.
“Feast and give thanks to Zaltec for his mercy!” cried the priest-monster, startling the vast assemblage of gore-soaked humanoids.
“Yes, you hear me true-thanks to Zaltec!” Hoxitl’s voice rumbled through the shallow valley as he surprised even himself with the power he felt thrumming through him at the name of his god. He thought of the great stone monolith, the statue back in Nexal that had come to embody all the might and terror of this bloodthirsty god.
“We will wage war in your name across the width and breadth of the True World!” gloated the beast, tearing a heart from the cold corpse of an old man and holding it upward.
And Zaltec heard, and rumbled his pleasure.
From the chronicles of Coton:
7n the nearness of Qotal, now the True World knows its hope.
I sit with the blind featherworker, Lotil, and we hear the beasts snuffling outside the house. The horse of the legionnaire remains in the building with us, while the monsters of the Viperhand prowl without.
They plunder each home on the ridge above Palul, smashing and burning and looting. Great cries of glee explode from monstrous maws when a golden treasure or piece of salted meat is discovered.
I fear not so much for myself, but for the old man. The blessing of the Plumed One surrounds me, and if his pleasure brings me to my end amid this sea of chaos, so be it. The pluma worker, however, must be spared this fate. He is needed for something greater. What this is, I cannot know, hut I shall stay with him and try to help him fulfill his destiny.
For some reason, they pass the house of Lotil, these panting monsters, and do not enter. And so we wait out the scourge, alone and helpless, yet somehow alive.
Again I sense die imminence of the One Plumed God.
5
Sea-birds wheeled above the great white sails, cawing and diving at the foaming wake. Don Vaez left Murann at the head of a proud fleet of twenty-five heavy carracks and more than fifteen hundred armed men, all of them thirsting for gold.
The young captain, his silver-blond locks flowing freely in the wind, stood in the bow of the lead ship. Scribes, sorcerers, and clerics had briefed him well on Cordell’s voyage, and though he sailed toward a land of mystery, he at least knew that land lay before him.
“And by Helm, it will be mine!”
Like many men of action, Don Vaez had little use for gods, except as they could help him in his endeavors. As such, he had casually adopted Helm as his patron deity, for a god of eternal vigilance is of obvious worth to a soldier.
Don Vaez struck a determined pose, well aware that his men watched him. A great believer in leadership by appearance, he constantly took pains to see that his troops saw him in the best possible light. To this end, he had no less than four wardrobe trunks stored in his cabin, so that he could insure a fashionable and well-groomed presence at all times.
The captain allowed himself to reminisce as the sea wind tugged at his hair. He had followed a long and convoluted road to reach this point, but now every audacious step of that dangerous path would be made worthwhile.
The fleet progressed steadily, under the guidance of a veteran navigator named Rodolfo. Indeed, the man had been hailed as one of the most fearless sailors on the Trackless Sea. Years before, he had served Cordell when the captaingeneral had needed a fleet. Since then, the navigator had returned to land, though he had been willing enough to accept the fee offered by the princes to induce him to join this expedition.
“A fresh wind moves us. We make good time,” remarked Rodolfo, coming to join Don Vaez at the rail. The commander nodded disinterestedly, content to leave such details to his navigator. With a thin grimace, Rodolfo stalked away, but Don Vaez was still lost in his own thoughts.
He chuckled wryly as he thought of his earliest training, at the Academy of Stealth in Calimshan. What a terrible thief he had made! Why sneak through the night to snatch something surreptitiously, he had wondered, when he could walk up to the owner, bash him over the head with his sword, and take it in broad daylight?
The masters of the academy had reached the same conclusion, and Don Vaez and Calimshan had parted ways — for the most part amicably, since the masters had not taken a thorough inventory until their ex-student was a good distance away Aided by the disguises of a guileless servant girl, he had escaped from the city and journeyed north along the coast. The girl, he assumed, had paid for her complicity with her life, though he had never bothered to find out for sure.