The captain-general finally returned to the blanket where he had been feasting. The knights and Erix stood up at his approach, and for a moment, they all stood there, as if reluctant to sit back down.
"Any moment now," said Zilti, barely able to contain his excitement, "Kalnak will give the signal. Then the battle will begin!"
"You referred to the Kultakans as old women," charged Cordell. This time his elven mage translated before Erix could begin to speak. Darien placed all the accusatory inflection that had been in the captain's voice in her own version of the words.
"They are our lifelong enemies!" insisted Kalnak, taken aback by the guest's sudden aggressiveness.
"I say that the old women are those who fight their battles disguised behind women and children, behind feasts and presents!"
As Kalnak stared in shock, Cordell whisked his sword from its scabbard and raised the blade high. "This is the reward for treachery!" he cried.
The blade dropped, arcing through a silvery circle in the sun. Its passage caused a whistle of air, so quickly did the captain-general strike. The keen edge met Kalnak's neck as the Jaguar Knight still stared, and the steel didn't lose momentum. Instead, it passed cleanly through the neck and emerged in a shower of blood from the other side of his body.
The head of Kalnak, still wearing its jaguar-skull helmet, toppled to the side. Red blood spurted from the stump of his neck, and the headless body staggered forward for a step or two, almost as if it would mindlessly attack its killer. But then the corpse sprawled forward and pumped the rest of its life onto the paving stones of the plaza.
Erix saw the blade as a streak of thick blackness through the gray shadows that masked her eyes. She stood frozen in shock, stunned by the monstrous evil of their guest. The entire square fell silent for a moment.
Suddenly a flash of blue-white light cut through the air, penetrating even the heavy shadows across Erix's vision. She saw the wizard Darien standing off to the side. In her hand was a small stick, and it seemed that the stick was the source of the flash. Erix remembered Hal telling her of something like this — what had he called it?
Screams of pain and shock erupted from the plaza. Erix saw that, where the pale light had flashed, all those who had been feasting and talking and laughing were suddenly still. Some of them had toppled over, while others remained frozen in the positions of sitting, eating, even standing.
Frozen in position? Icetongue. She remembered the tale of that stick now. Hal had called it a wand of frost and explained that it slayed quickly and magically, killing many at a time.
There was no doubt in Erixitl's mind that most of these victims had perished — a hundred or more Mazticans, slain in one silent attack! Only around the edges of the afflicted area did she see the wriggling, crawling figures of wounded. These miserable souls desperately crawled away from the stiff corpses behind them, and Erix saw that many
of them dragged useless legs or showed ugly patches of scarred, frostbitten flesh.
Later Erix would realize that the pause had only lasted seconds, but at the time, it seemed as though many minutes ticked by while they all stood motionless in the plaza. The attack of Icetongue finally broke the paralysis. Again the wand flashed its chilling blast, and the pale white light illuminated, and killed, another group of villagers.
Chical howled in rage, raising his maca to leap at Cordell. The captain-general slashed at the Eagle Knight. Chical ducked the stroke of Cordell's sword, but the commander reversed his attack quickly and brought the hilt crashing down on the Eagle Knight's skull. Chical collapsed like a stone statue, kicking once and then lying still on the feathered blanket.
Panic compelled Erixitl's reaction, and she darted away from the man, disappearing into the throngs of weeping, screaming Mazticans. Even as she disappeared, Cordell had turned away, stabbing a charging Jaguar Knight through the heart.
The pale flash of light washed the plaza once more, this time flooding around Erix herself. She stared, stunned, as villagers died on all sides of her. Only after the effect had passed did she realize that she herself and several youngsters who had been right beside her had been unaffected by the blast. She sensed her pluma token puffing lightly out from her dress, and she realized that somehow her father's magic had saved her from the wizard's spell.
Darien regarded her coldly from the impenetrable depths of that cowled hood. Erix's eyes couldn't penetrate the shadows there, but she saw the elfwoman's eyes, glittering like hard diamonds.
Breaking from her thrall and spinning in panic, Erixitl ran from the wizard. Nearby she heard the stomping and snorting of horses and saw legionnaires swinging into their saddles. The youth with the feathered headband looked up in astonishment as the red-bearded captain of the riders loomed above him. With a cruel sneer, the man slashed savagely with his sword, splitting the youth's body from his forehead to his belly.
A woman carrying a baby screamed in front of Erix, falling to the ground, writhing and spitting blood. Erixitl saw one of the deadly steel darts fired by the legionnaires' crossbows. This one had pinned the woman's baby to her own body, and Erix turned away, horrified, as the mother and child perished before her.
More and more of the lethal, steel-tipped arrows flashed past, slaying indiscriminately. The dull chunk of the weapons' triggers created a grim cadence of death. The cross-bowmen stood in a circle, loading and reloading their weapons, driving their missiles at point-blank range into a solid mass of targets, puncturing bodies of male and female, old and young, with constant, gory slaughter.
Erixitl slipped on blood that washed across the paving stones. Like most of the other Mazticans in the plaza, she thought only of escape. The warriors among them seized their weapons and sprang to battle, desperate to give the women and children time to flee. At the time, it didn't seem odd to Erix that so many spears and macas should be available to warriors who had entered the plaza unarmed.
Erix tried to run north, toward her father's house, but the surging crowd carried her west in the stampede to escape the massacre.
She saw the riders charge into the mob. The horse that, moments before, had been contentedly eating and resting, the picture of animal contentment, now became the snorting, stamping creatures of war that had so terrorized the Payit at Ulatos. They had the same effect on the Mazticans at Palul.
The huge war hounds that had once flopped peacefully on the ground now snarled and slavered. They savagely attacked the villagers unfortunate enough to fall before them, tearing with their great fangs and, with their growls, adding to the nightmarish din.
The cavalrymen used their swords to chop about, apparently since the quarters were too confined for their lances. They thundered through a line of warriors that tried to stand before them, breaking the bodies of many brave men. Bodies fell by the dozen, writhing, bleeding, dying.
In moments, the horsemen plowed into the mass of women and children beyond the warriors. These victims scattered in every direction, but not before the cruel blades and stamping hooves had slain dozens of them.
Above the whirling mass of chaos, Erix saw the black helm, with its trailing streamers, of the captain of the horsemen. He guided his charger with cruel abandon, his face split into a gap-toothed grin. For a moment, once again, his eyes met Erixitl's. She was surprised at the lack of life there — he looked to her every bit as dead as the corpses sprawled around him. She felt certain this time that he recognized her. Then the crowd closed around Erix, sweeping her along with its tidelike rush.
"By the power of almighty Helm, a plague beset you!"
The booming voice of the Bishou thundered over the volume of shrieks and cries, sending powerful tendrils of panic into Erix's heart. She knew, from Hal's descriptions, that the cleric wielded supernatural powers in much the same way as the wizard.