Escalla went suddenly stiff, and her antennae lifted high, quivering with alarm. She froze, as if listening, then said, “Jus, he’s back there. Recca. Coming fast.”
“He heard the fight with the scorpions.” Jus shook out scorched pieces of troll hide. “Stun scroll?”
“Oh, I don’t think it works on undead.” Enid frowned. “Sorry.”
“No matter. Get moving. Polk, go with them.” Moving through the smoke, the Justicar trailed scraps of troll hide in his hand. The room was filled with vile smoke. “Get to your places. Move!”
* * *
The door hung open, burn marks fanning out across the path. A charred troll’s head lay upside down and forlorn. The Demonweb seemed alone with its fog, ghosts, and eerie winds.
Until a movement flickered on the path.
He came fast, running with a tireless stride—feral and horrible. A rusted eagle helm kept its beak open in an eternal scream. Dead eyes searched ceaselessly for hints of prey.
The scent of burned flesh made the creature slow. Recca’s sword swept out. The black blood inside his blade gleamed and seethed. Sidestepping the dead scorpions, Recca crept to the junction, his skull turning to look carefully up and down the way.
A shattered door into nothingness hung open before him. Burn marks, charred troll bodies, smoke, and stink leaked onto the path. Sphinx footprints and a single set of boot marks led off along the path. Recca sniffed the air and looked at the room behind the door.
He dived through the door in a somersault, arcing high into the air, blade blurring as he spun. He landed with his blade on guard but shifted rapidly. He ran his blade through three troll corpses, viciously twisting the blade. No blood spurted. The Justicar was not hiding beneath a cunning shroud of charred dead flesh. The monster turned, dead eyes gleaming. Moving with supreme caution, Recca walked back through the open door.
The blow, when it came, almost cut him in two. Recca twisted with serpentine speed, blocking with his sword, and the white blade only managed to hack halfway through his waist. Recca tore free, spilling onto the path, his flesh burning and smoking where Benelux had cut.
The Justicar stood beside the door. He had hung beneath the pavement, suspended above the howling fog, his hands hidden by a scrap of troll hide as Recca passed overhead. Now he strode toward the staggering monster, his blade snapping back, ready to thrust. Recca’s wound smoldered, and this time the Justicar saw what happened. Green blood pumped into the open wound, flashed, and sealed the dead flesh shut. An instant later, the wound was gone.
The Justicar assessed Recca’s tools. He shifted fighting stance, saw the move countered, shifted his weight, and saw the responding twitch of stance. Recca was active, responsive. Alive. The Justicar watched him over the point of his own blade.
“You’re in there, Recca….”
Escalla and the others were still waiting for Recca to reach the perfect position. The Justicar changed fighting stance, choosing movements learned in a hundred fights, skills picked up far, far away from Recca and his schooling. He watched the animated corpse respond. The Justicar remembered being awed, shamed, and in worship of this man, remembered the scorn the elf had poured over his human student.
If he were jealous, why had Recca taught him if he knew the student would someday equal the master? Perhaps because the student was never expected to match Recca in skill? Had Recca seen him as a threat rather than a triumph?
The Justicar moved slowly and carefully, circling the undead master. Recca moved away slowly, always keeping just out of range. He danced with the same old skill and speed, using the moves he had been so unspeakably proud of.
They were too close for Escalla to risk a spell, and Henry and Enid knew better than to try to fight Recca hand-to-hand. Coaxing Recca into position, the Justicar adjusted his blade.
“The tanar’ri tore your heart out, but I killed it.” The big ranger was dark with anger. “Jealousy, Recca?”
The corpse hissed like a cobra, fangs wide. The Justicar could feel the hate. It was a weakness. Recca fought for pride. Pride was a weakness. Justice was balanced and controlled. The Justicar could beat this thing, this swordmaster. He felt the certainty of it as if it were cast in bronze.
The Justicar let his point drift a mere tenth of an inch and growled at his enemy. “You lost, Recca. You lost because you never had a code.”
He had given Recca an opening. Recca screamed and cut. The corpse’s attack came exactly as Jus knew it would—timed and planned. This time Jus took the blow on the flat of his blade, doubling Benelux like a quarterstaff. The blades met, and the Justicar punched with his hilt, the blow shattering Recca’s jaw and sending the cadaver sprawling back along the path.
The broken jaw clicked and healed as Recca flipped onto his feet and came at the Justicar behind a whirling web of steel.
They fought hard and fast, the swords smashing sparks from one another in a maddened dance. An instant after the swords met and crashed, Recca tumbled and leaped over the Justicar to attack from behind. He landed, sword poised, the Justicar only half way through a turn, and then a blast of frost crashed into him from the side. The magic dissipated, blocked by the aura of his magic sword.
“Hey, boney!” The troll’s head stood on two shapely little legs, and a frost wand waved from one ear. “Hey! Remember me?”
Recca wiped frost from his face. From around the corner, Henry appeared, taking aim with his crossbow. Recca flicked up his sword, caught the first two crossbow bolts on his blade, and had three more smash into his chest. The impact knocked Recca over the edge of the path, and he fell into the howling mist. Rushing to the brink, Escalla and Jus looked out to see Recca carried up into the fog storm before smashing into a pathway overhead and disappearing from view.
Escalla shed her hollowed-out troll’s head and cursed. “Damn it! You were doing it! You were getting on top of him! That was our best shot at snuffing him!”
“He’ll find us again.” The Justicar flicked his blade clean. He felt heavy, tired, and burdened. “Next time.”
“Hey, Jus?” Escalla clung to his knee and looked up in concern. “Hey, come on! It’s just a monster with a sword. We can outdo him!”
The Justicar sheathed Benelux. Recca was alive and revealing the hatred Jus had always pretended wasn’t there. Escalla held Jus’ hand and looked into his face.
“We did better this time.”
“He’s brilliant.” The Justicar felt Recca’s hate still lingering in the air. “He’s as good as he always was.”
“Yeah, but you’re better.”
Suddenly Jus could see it. He could feel the change between himself and Recca.
“Recca is too proud to change.” The big ranger turned to look up into the mist. “Yes. For three hundred years, he was swordmaster and a chief of the Grass Runners. He wants his victory to prove his perfection.”
Jus glanced at the pathway overhead, then turned away, his hand gripping the hilt of his sword. His other hand took Escalla’s, and they walked back to their friends.
Henry spared a hard glance for the overhead fog, then peered briefly into the troll-littered room as he passed. He gave a sudden frown and held up one hand.
“Justicar, sir? Look at this!”
A neat white folder lay in the middle of the ash. The group stared at it in puzzlement. Cinders gave a sniff, paused, sniffed again, then his grin brightened.
Girlie girl smell!
“Girl?” Escalla sniffed, almost choking on smoke and carbonized troll. “What? Like a little girl?”
Big girl. Nice skin!
“There speaks the connoisseur.” Escalla crept toward the folder then stroked her lich staff. It grew to the size of a broomstick. “All right, people! Let a professional handle this! Heads down!”
Enid hid outside the door. “Escalla? Do you really think you should touch it?”
“Sure we should! Hey! This is my professional opinion!” The faerie displayed her tiny skirt. “So just duck and
let me do my job!”
Everyone dived for cover as Escalla flipped the folder open with her staff. No spells discharged. No poisoned needles shot out. No trap doors opened or monsters appeared. Emerging cautiously from cover, the party gathered to find Escalla holding the folder and shaking it in disappointment, as though hoping some gold and jewels might fall out.
“Hey! I think it’s a map!” She tossed the folder at Jus. “All right! I solved the dungeon. Here! Find me Lolth, or I’ll let Cinders lick you!”
Yuck.
Escalla leaned on the hell hound and whispered, “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.” She leaped onto Jus’ back. “Well, am I hot or am I hot?”
“You’re hot.” The Justicar looked at the open folder. It showed a maze of interlocking lines that seemed to be the pathways in the fog. Someone had even thoughtfully penciled in neat marks to show their initial point of entry, a dot to mark the trolls’ room, and a big red X at a far point of the maze. Other places were marked with discrete red numbers—two “ones,” two “twos,” and two “threes.” Each one was marked with a “travel” rune. Traps? Ladders? Stairs?
The map was a godsend. Too much of a godsend. It had appeared as if by magic. It all smacked of an elaborate trap. The Justicar weighed the implications in his mind then cast a careful search over the room.
The ash had been disturbed. Marks lay in long strokes—diagonally parallel. The Justicar rubbed ash between his finger and thumb.
Henry squatted at his side. “Drag marks, sir?”
“Snake. A big snake.” Jus showed his student how to tell the marks by shape and distance. The ash had been compacted quite hard, which meant the snake weighed at least as much as a man. “Lolth’s handmaiden.”
Demons could teleport. That would explain how she entered the room even while the party fought outside its door. A layer of airborne ash had not yet settled on the folder’s cover. She must have left the folder only seconds before Henry peered into the room.
Henry scratched the thin stubble of his newly sprouting beard and asked, “Why would Lolth’s handmaiden give us a map?”
“If Lolth knew we were here, I would expect crueler traps than these.” The Justicar breathed slow and hard. He took a piece of charred troll and passed it up to Cinders, who ate it with noisy glee. “We’ll use the map, but we’ll be careful.” The big man put a finger on Henry’s shoulder. “Very, very careful.”
* * *
“Morag! We have rats! Nasty, furry little rats!”
Recharging her magic, Lolth lolled with her feet in a bath filled with the blood of a few hapless sacrifices. She had been idly planning her conquests, making slaves plant pins on her maps of the Flanaess when Morag arrived in the throne room.
Her long lashes tilting in elegant surprise, Morag poised in the door. “Magnificence?”
“Intruders, Morag. In the Demonweb. I sense something different in my home.”
Morag bowed gravely. “Escapees from the prison levels, Magnificence?”
“Perhaps.” Lolth carefully watched her secretary. “Morag. I do hope we have had no little break-ins from outside.”
Morag spoke carefully, knowing that she played for very, very high stakes. One slip, and Lolth would command her to pull her own intestines out—slowly—yard by yard.
“Magnificence, the guards at the gates have reported no trouble.”
“Have they not?”
Lolth’s voice, sly and acidic, dripped with irony. She shot a sidewise glance at Morag.
“Morag, how long have you been with me?”
“One hundred and one years, three months, three days, six hours, and twenty-seven minutes, Magnificence.”
“Ah. Leaving eight hundred and ninety-eight years, nine months, twenty-seven-odd days, seventeen hours and thirty-three minutes until our little arrangement comes into review.” Lolth paddled her feet, lounging back in her throne. “I do so hope it is a good review, Morag.”
Morag rippled her long tail. “I’m sure everything will be properly dealt with, Magnificence.” Her swords clattered as she shifted her weight. “Our reentry to the pits has been normal. All guard posts were changed immediately after we docked. I have unleashed a hundred extra spiders into the Demonweb.” Morag flourished an order for Lolth to sign. “Here are the hatchery reports from the spider pits. Here is the oath of allegiance from the Ixitxachltl of the Flanaess’ inland sea. And here is an execution order for that priestess you thought had bigger breasts than you.”
“Oh, just polymorph her into something nasty for an afternoon.” Lolth signed, already bored with the procedures.
“Yes, Magnificence.”
“I shall be refreshed in about ten hours, Morag, so have the stokers raise a head of steam, and get my dinner. Oh, and nothing living, this time! Not if it can speak. I don’t want my appetite spoiled by another idiot trying to give me three wishes if I let him go free.”
Morag bowed, her six arms spreading in obeisance, then she slithered back out of the room. Lolth sniffed a vague scent of soot upon the air, scowled, and then went back to her plans for conquest and slaughter.
The adventurers squatted at a bend in the path as Jus, Polk, and Henry puzzled over the new map. Letting the boys pretend to navigate, Escalla amused herself with a spider leg, tossing it off the path.
“Hey, Cinders! Fetch!”
The leg bounced. Cinders lay beside her, thump-thump-thumping his tail. Escalla gave an unhappy sigh and collected the spider leg for later.
“Are you really trying, or what?”
Cinders trying. Stick moves too fast.
“Oh, all right! I’ll try to roll it slower or something. Maybe we should make it smell of coal?” Escalla looked over at her friends. “Have you guys figured out what that map means yet?”
“I think these paths are all different levels. The levels never seem to link. No one level is entirely below or above any other—all except for this top level here, where the red X is marked.” The Justicar looked down a pathway and scowled. “So there’s no way to communicate between levels, unless that’s what’s been marked here in pencil. The paired numbers on the map might be link points.”
Henry scratched underneath his helmet. “Can we be sure?”
“They’re the only things marked on the map at all.” The Justicar looked down at the tortured tangle of lines marked on the map. “The first number marked is over that way. Past another door and to the left.”
Enid came and settled on her haunches beside Escalla. The big sphinx folded up her paws and lowered her voice so that only the faerie could hear her. “That undead ranger is unpleasant. I hope the Justicar can find him soon.”
“Yeah. Well, we’ll get him. Jus just has a little problem with him.”
“You mean he’s holding back?”
“No. But he’s pretty miffed.”
“Oh.” Enid thoughtfully kneaded the path with her big claws. “I wonder where your sister is? She’s been remarkably quiet.”
“Oh, she’s a lady. She won’t work unless she has to.” Escalla snorted and threw Cinders’ spider leg once more. “If I know her, she’ll sit there glued to her crystal ball, waiting for my scrying shield to fade.”
“She won’t come hunting for us here?”
“You don’t get as plush as that girl by walking the wilderness and camping under trees. Nah. She’ll use magic to look for us. She’s probably still back in her cave.”
Cinders was wagging his tail more happily. Jus returned and picked the hell hound up, smiling fondly as he dusted the dog’s pelt clean of ash and troll. He swept Cinders back into place across his back, then lifted Escalla onto Enid’s back, where the faerie could ride comfortably upon her friend.
A distant glimpse of a path far below showed a horrible pack of giant spiders skittering along the roadway. The adventurers kept back from the edges and speeded their pace, passing by doors and side paths as they followed the map for turn after turn, path after path. Finally the Justicar held u
p his hand as the road led up to another floating door.
Escalla slithered down from Enid’s back and peeled off her long gloves. She kept her voice a whisper as she handed her wand and staff to her friends. “Stay here. Henry, turn around! Mama’s going natural again!”
Henry blushed and turned around. The faerie shucked her fine black mail, tossed it to the Justicar, and changed herself into a flatworm. She slithered her front portion carefully under the bottom of the door, remained half in and half out of the room for a long, silent minute, then stealthily withdrew. She converted back into her usual form and motioned her friends to gather a few yards away from the door. When she spoke, she spoke in a careful whisper.
“All right. There’s four demons in there. Big vulture guys!” The girl scanned carefully, staying quiet and unhurried. “The floor’s covered in broken skeletons—all busted up, legs broken and stuff. The demons are in the corners on pillars about a hundred feet high, all facing the center of the room and just sitting there. They must be guarding something!”
“Four demons?” The Justicar kept careful watch on the paths and mist. “Real demons are important. Lolth and Iuz use them to control whole regiments. If there’s four demons there, then it’s an important room.”
“Should we try to take them?”
“Yes.”
It seemed easier said than done. Escalla picked her teeth and tried to come up with an idea. Henry looked nervously about his circle of friends.
“Vulture shaped?” Henry was all at sea. “Are they dangerous?”
The Justicar said nothing. Escalla took it on herself to answer.
“You bet your pearly white buns!” She kept her voice in a careful whisper. “Tanar’ri are about as bad as it can get. Pretty much immune to magic, tough as iron, dirty as a roach, and just plain nasty. All sorts of powers. You know—teleporting, making darkness, telekinesis… If we take them out, it has to be fast! Real fast. We can’t let them teleport out and raise the alarm.”
Enid brightened. “I could try to coax them out with a riddle!”
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