The girl handed Henry the end of the string and said, “Heave ho. Company’s coming!”
“Company?” The young soldier blinked. “What sort of company, ma’am?”
“Irritating company!” Escalla dived back down the shaft. “There’s a blabber-mouthed sword on the end of the string. Bring it up when I give you two tugs. Lower the line again once you’re done. There’s scrolls or something down there, too.”
The transfer took about ten long minutes—time that Benelux spent lecturing empty air on the shortcomings of the new generation of adventurers. With the swords voice dwindling above her, Escalla took stock of the spells written on a newfound scroll, gave a happy smile as she saw some useful new magic, then sped up the shaft in pursuit of Benelux.
Up at the head of the shaft, Henry sat with the sword in his lap, looking chastened and bemused. Benelux was in full flow, informing the boy of the shortcomings of his uniform, when Escalla appeared and slapped the weapon on its overly ornate, enameled sheath.
“Hey, Spiky! Meet Private Henry of the Keoland border guard.”
Indeed. The sword was indignant. Surely you do not plan to put me in the hands of this child?
“Nope. Henry has enough troubles of his own.”
The beholder lay paralyzed at the rear of the cave, looking angry but incapable of doing much about it. Escalla summoned her old trusty Tensor’s Floating Disk spell beneath the beholder. The spell bore the monster on a bobbing plate of magic force. Escalla had Henry toss the sword behind the beholder, and the faerie happily sat astride the monster and rode the whole contraption down the passageways.
“The grand plan! Step one: Catch a beholder. Step two: Get a sword.” Pumping her fist like a cavalry general signaling the charge, Escalla sent her ponderous cargo floating off down the corridor. “All right, Henry, let’s do a quick stage three, then get this show on the road!”
Stepping confidently behind her and looking the part of a conqueror, Private Henry checked his crossbow, drew himself straight, and followed Escalla as the disk drifted off to who-knew-where. The caverns lay empty, the dead ghouls decomposed, and Escalla’s voice argued with the magic sword as she drifted off into the dark halls.
In a dark universe of fear, all manner of hideous creatures had set their minds to inventing tortures to inflict on living souls.
There were tests.
There were punishments.
There were foul torments so horrific that even their creators screamed at the very thought of them.
There were mind-wrenching terrors so foul that even the lords of the Abyss dared not speak their names…
… And then there was being tied back to back with Polk the Teamster.
Two hours, and Polk was still talking.
“…see, a real hero anticipates trouble, son, has a sixth sense—warnings from the gods, uncanny awareness, a taste for subtle hints… ! That’s your problem, son. No sense for danger. No ability to know when death is imminent!”
Polk leaned his head back against the stalagmite at his back. Behind him, Jus tried to heave on his own ropes and use the pressure to strangle Polk to death, but the bugbears had used too many knots and turns. Jerking at his ropes in fury, Jus flung his head about to try and catch sight of Polk behind him.
“Polk, shut up.”
“See? Now I knew you were going to say that. That’s anticipation, son! That’s what you have to learn.” Polk sighed sorrowfully and contemplated the sad state of the world. “Guess I still have to train you. Guess the fault’s all mine. I see errors, son, and I’m too forgiving, too quiet! I just let ’em slide. I don’t comment—too polite, that’s always been my failing. Never say an unkind word. Try to let fellers figure things out for themselves. A doctrine of non-interference, son! That’s my way. I’m too quiet!”
Jerking back and forth to try and break his ropes, Jus breathed heavily, his eyes bloodshot with an utterly volcanic rage.
“Polk, enough.”
“Well, that’s nice of you to say, son. I see what you’re getting at. The way I teach you is good enough for normal folks, but you’re just a bit slow on the uptake, thick as a plank…” Polk gave a concerned shake of his head. “Ain’t your fault, son! All great heroes have a few failings. It’s just up to people like me to make allowances. It’s my own mistake. I didn’t take you properly in hand. ‘Let the young feller learn from his own mistakes’, I said. ‘Experience is the best teacher’, I said.” The teamster gave a tragic sigh. “I should have been more forthright, guided you better. Now we’re just gonna be fed to a demonic demigod, and that’s that.”
His hands tied behind his back, Jus flexed his fingers with the need to crush and rend.
“What?”
“Fed to demons, son. These drow are agents of evil. Stands to reason they have demonic overlords. Stands to reason overlords have to be fed.” Clucking his tongue, Polk leaned around the pillar to look back at the Justicar. “Son, that’s what I mean. You ain’t got a logical mind.”
They both sat roped back to back, tied to a huge, solid stalagmite. Bruised, cut, and gouged, the Justicar was still smothered with blood. Savage and dangerous, the Justicar watched events in the lich’s caverns with predatory interest.
They were tied beside a slave caravan. A line of dispirited bugbears, goblins, and troglodytes—apparently failed tribe members—were chained in a line beside a reeking pack lizard. Drow merchants and guards lounged nearby, breathing perfumes, drinking wines, and idling away their time. The merchant leader walked languidly behind his men, seeming utterly unconcerned. Jus took stock of each drow, the position of their weapons, and the location of intervening cover.
The lich’s cave, a dark cavern opening from which hundreds of soft voices were murmuring, stood only thirty feet away to the north. Beyond that, the main cavern was relatively empty. Four bugbears stood guard at the southern entrance—the one through which Escalla would come when she started her rescue. The rest of the cave sloped away eastward where it became warrens for the mutually hostile tribes of bugbears and troglodytes. The two species were ferociously antagonistic. Raw terror kept the stupid creatures in line—terror and a greed for the rewards brought by service to the drow.
There were signs that another previous caravan had left only hours before. Tracks and less wholesome spoor betrayed that Sour Patch’s lost population had been brought here and then moved on. Conceivably this second, smaller slave train was heading in the same direction.
A hooting noise began to grow and swell. Around the cavern, colors shifted as troglodytes dropped their protective coloring. The chameleons emerged from their guard posts on the walls and leaped clumsily to the floor, expanding throat pouches to give off deep, ear-splitting booms.
A huge troglodyte chieftain paced out from the warren caves. Twenty warriors came with him—all huge lizards draped with belts made from badly flayed goblin skins, some with the wet red skulls of victims still hanging in their hands. They dragged prisoners along with them—six gnolls and a hobgoblin, all gouged, bleeding, and nearly dead.
Scores of angry bugbears flowed out from the other warren caves, following the troglodytes. Surly and snarling with jealousy, they eyed the bleeding prisoners. Leaving the slave caravan, the drow merchants walked over to meet the troglodyte leader and began talking in a braying, barking tongue.
Troglodytes offered their captives to the drow, pointing at the slave caravan. The prisoners were clearly too badly injured to march to the caravan’s destination. The drow used gestures to reject the goods. Roaring in anger, the troglodyte chieftain turned and bellowed to his followers, who instantly gripped the captives and tore the creatures apart with their bare hands. Screams echoed through the tunnels, and the troglodytes closed in like piranha to feed on screaming, shrieking flesh.
Polk shrank back against his stalagmite in horror as he watched the captives being eaten alive. “Ah, son? Have you an escape plan of your own? Because mine still needs a little bit of work.”
“Polk, quiet.” The Justicar tensed, leaning forward to gaze at the southern tunnel entrance. “Do what I damned well tell you the moment it starts.”
Polk blinked and looked around at the Justicar. “It?”
* * *
Lurching up the southern passageway came a large pack lizard—a big thing covered in mildewed scales and occasional fungus growths. The creature was led by a solitary drow—a thin, somewhat tall creature armed with a heavy crossbow and with an unusually long sword slung over its back. Watching the drow come closer to their cave, four bugbears at the cavern entrance came to their feet.
As the solitary drow trader approached, a bugbear halted him with an upraised hand and spoke in its guttural, snarling tongue. The drow looked at the floor stiffly and gave a grunt, shrugging his shoulders. The bugbear nodded as if in agreement, then presented its hand toward the drow, palm upward.
The drow hesitated, looked confused, and then put a platinum coin into the bugbear’s hand. The gigantic goblinoid blinked at the coin, looked pleased, pocketed the trinket, then presented its hand once again.
The creature jiggled its hand and snarled out a few words, then pointed to the drow’s cloak pin. Alarmed, the drow began to pat its pockets in confusion. It turned to face the pack lizard, careful not to touch the thing, since it was only a flimsy illusion spell case over a floating, misshapen string of shapes tied up in an old tarpaulin. Pretending to search its own robes, the drow hissed a whisper into empty air.
“Why does it want to look at my cloak pin?”
“Cloak pin?” Invisible and sitting astride the floating canvas sausage, Escalla felt a flash of inspiration. “Oh! I think he wants your identification!”
“Identification?” Transformed into drow shape by one of Escalla’s spells, Private Henry quailed. “I don’t have any identification!”
“Lessee… we found some weird stuff.” Escalla remembered the gold hairpin filched from the drow sorceress who had turned into a manta ray. The faerie extracted the pin and slipped it into Henry’s hands. “There you go! Give this a try.”
His ashen pallor making his black skin gray, Henry turned and placed the golden pin in the hands of the bugbear. The huge goblinoid took one look at the spider symbol upon the pin and instantly fell to its knees. Its companions clumsily followed suit, holding their bloodstained clubs against their chests in salute. Henry accepted the pin back from the guard, raised his hand in a vague attempt at benediction, then towed his rather awkward pack lizard past the guard-post and into the caves.
“There we are—simple!” Escalla, utterly invisible and therefore not sweating in fear, waved to drow guards and merchants. “You see Jus over there?”
Carefully ignoring the pack lizard and Henry, Jus sat tied to a stalagmite near the lich’s cave. Polk had been tied to the opposite side of the same stone pillar, and the little man’s mouth was moving as he showered an unwanted soliloquy on empty air. Pulling his long, stark white locks from his face, the dark elf that was Private Henry peered over at his friends.
“Are they all right?”
“Pretty much. Polk just has to hope Jus doesn’t get one hand free.” Escalla nudged the boy with her battle wand. “All the trogs and bugbears seem to be gathering at the warrens. Let’s get baby over there as innocently as possible.”
The long canvas sausage, lumped and ugly, was covered by one of Escalla’s better illusion spells. Even so, the bobbing train of floating shapes were a poor simulation of a giant pack lizard’s gait. Private Henry towed the ungainly mass along through the air behind him.
Perhaps forty troglodytes snarled and fought over a vile, blood-filthy feast. Other troglodytes had gathered behind by the score, booming huge calls that shuddered through the air. Swarms of bugbears clustered nearby, glaring in naked hunger and envy at the feast.
Henry brought his lizard close to the flesh eating, blood spattered mob. Pale with fright, the boy fumbled, then tied the leash of his lizard to a stalactite only a few feet behind the snarling, jeering mobs of monsters. He breathed raggedly, his eyes bright with fright, and then felt an invisible kiss on his cheek.
“You all right, Hen?”
“Just fine.”
“Alrighty!” Escalla’s wings whirred like a dragonfly. “Just stroll over to Jus and wait for the fun!”
Henry tried to hold his loaded crossbow as innocently as possible. Wearing somewhat un-elven garments, he had already attracted side-wise glances from the drow. The magic sword Benelux gleamed gaudy and golden as it hung over his shoulder. The boy, trying to look nonchalant, began to make the long walk toward Jus and Polk.
A drow straightened his belt and began to make a determined course toward Henry. The deception could only last a few more seconds. Slapping her hands together, Escalla flew through the belly of her illusory lizard and began unplucking knots of hairy string. She whistled as she worked, the noise unheard over the roar and snarl of feeding troglodytes and the insults hurled by bugbear hordes.
The last knot untied, the tarpaulin jerked away and fell. As the paralyzed beholder thudded to the ground, Escalla tossed a magic floating disc beneath it and sent it scooting off to the north. Behind it, the canvas sausage suddenly disintegrated. Escalla turned and fled faster than any faerie had ever gone before.
The illusory pack lizard stretched, then came apart. In the packed central mob of feeders, food, audience, and jeering crowds, some heads turned—and then screamed in terror. Spreading up from the bursting body of the pack lizard came great bobbing, floating spheres—fleshy globes crowned with eyes on stalks and with fanged, snarling mouths.
The spheres began to scoot in all directions, propelled by internal gasses. The jammed hordes of bugbears and lizards froze in shock until a little voice pealed out across the cave.
“Hey, boys!” Thirty yards away, Escalla posed with a swarm of golden bees circling one fingertip. “Wanna see my party trick?”
Magic missiles flew out from Escalla’s fingertips and thudded into all eight floating gas spheres. The universe seemed to take a breath of shock. The troglodyte chieftain had time to swell his throat in the beginnings of a scream, and then one end of the cavern disappeared in a thunderous blast of light.
The gas spores detonated in an instant, each one exploding in a titanic fireball. Bugbears and lizards nearest to the spheres were atomized, while others flew backward as the flesh was blasted from their bones. The explosions rocked the cavern, shattering the ceiling of the warrens and bringing rock falls avalanching down. The ground shuddered. Ceilings collapsed. A few surviving monsters staggered, burned and screaming through the dust, to be crushed by rock falls cascading from above. The distant tribal warren dissolved as thousands of tons of rock collapsed in a massive cloud of debris.
Escalla gave a victory scream. With dust choking the air around her, she sat atop the paralyzed beholder, riding it like a juggernaut as it sped along on its floating disk. The girl fired a spell past Private Henry, turning cavern stone to bubbling mud and sinking drow to their deaths. Wide-eyed, the boy pelted toward the Justicar.
Drowning dark elves fired wild shots from their crossbows. Henry skidded to a halt beside Jus and Polk just as a crossbow bolt whizzed overhead to strike sparks from the cave wall. The boy dragged out a knife and hacked at the ropes binding Jus and Polk. Strands fell, and then suddenly Henry jerked in pain, a poisoned drow dart grazing the skin of his thigh. Escalla’s stoneskin spell had failed. Jus tore free and snatched the boy’s dagger from his grasp, hurling the knife straight into the archer’s groin.
Henry fell, alive but paralyzed. Jus reached for the sword at the boy’s belt, only to have a nasal female voice bellow at him from midair.
Not that one, fool!
The sword across Henry’s shoulders shot half out of its sheath. The handle was gaudy with jeweled unicorns, but the blade itself shone a brilliant white as though the blade were made from living light. Jus gripped the weapon and slid it free, feeling its pure, pleasurable weight sin
ging in his hands.
Drow merchants leaped over their pack lizards, screaming in battle rage. Jus turned. In one split second he cut the legs from a drow in midair, decapitated another as it landed, and cut a swath in another that sprayed a fountain of blood. The last drow fired a crossbow. Jus angled the sword to send the crossbow bolt flickering off into the dark, saw the drow’s eyes wince as the sword’s light flashed in its eyes, then an instant later plunged the blade right through the creature’s guts. The drow folded, screaming out a spell. Its wound closed, the drow staggered back, only to be sheared in two by one massive, roaring swing of the pure white blade.
Body parts were still hitting the ground as Jus whirled and looked for targets. Echoing in his mind, the sword’s voice seemed a tad stunned.
You’ll be the Justicar. I, ah, I’m pleased to meet you.
Bugbears and troglodytes were staggering from the rubble. More drow guards were racing to the spot. Jus saw Escalla atop her strange floating mount, then the girl pointed behind him to the lich’s cave.
“Jus!”
A blast of ice-cold air swept forth, and the lich strode out of its lair. In one chilling glance the entity took in the disaster and destruction, then saw the Justicar standing in a ring of butchered drow. The monster gave a feral hiss, body crouching like a beast as it opened hands that streamed with magic spells.
From behind it, a raucous little voice screamed out across the cave. “Hey, handsome!”
The lich whirled. Two dozen yards away, a faerie in a ragged black silk dress sat astride a beholder. With a nasty laugh, Escalla wrenched open the lid of the beholder’s huge central eye, unveiling the monster’s angry glare.
A spell was already formed in the lich’s rotting mouth. It screamed the symbols of a death spell only to have the magic disappear. The beholder’s gaze shot out its ray of force, nullifying the lich’s magic and stripping it of its powers.
Descent into the Depths of the Earth Page 20