The faerie had just changed back into her normal form and was contemplating the charred ruins of her underwear. She caught the Justicar’s look and instantly went on the defensive.
“Like it was my fault!” The faerie tossed the blue bugbear gem into the portable hole. “Who killed all the bugbears anyway? Me!”
The Justicar simply looked at her, and Escalla squirmed.
“Fine. It was my suggestion to go into the room in the first place, but that does not make me actually responsible!”
No answer came, and Escalla wriggled on the hook.
“Oh, man! I thought love meant never having to say you’re sorry!” Jerking her clothing on, Escalla fussed with her straps and skirt. “All right. Sorry! But I’m saying it in a sense of regret for mutual misadventure—not in responsibility! What do you want me to say?”
The Justicar retied his helmet’s chin strap. “‘Sorry everyone for blowing you up.’”
“Nnnng!” Escalla took it all with extreme ill grace. “Sorry everyone for blowing you up!”
“‘I promise not to blow up my friends for at least another week.’”
“All right already! Don’t rub it in!” The girl kicked at a smoking chunk of bugbear. “Damn it! I promise not to blow you all up for another week. Two weeks! There! Are you happy?”
Enid was looking between her hind legs in shock. “What happened to my tail?”
“Nothing!” Escalla busily dusted the sphinx’s new-grown fur. “Get your spare clothes out of the portable hole, honey. You’re suffering from fallout here. Hey, guys? Great new plan! We open only the doors Jus tells us to—and leave the other ones alone!”
Henry rubbed the lump on his skull and said, “Good plan.”
Escalla’s underwear and accessories gave up the ghost, falling to earth in a dust of ashes. “Damn it! That was my best silk!”
Cinders grinned in glee. Funny!
“Yeah, hilarious.” Escalla fed charred underwear to the hell hound. “There! Live it up!” Angry, scorched, and with her clothes smelling of soot, Escalla stamped off along the path. “Lolth had better have some decent treasure! This adventure is playing havoc with my wardrobe.” The girl left sooty clouds behind her as she walked “Come on! Let’s get into the palace while we still have a sense of style!”
* * *
The paths twisted back on themselves for another half mile. With one eye peering down the long, empty pathway around the next corner, the Justicar checked for marks and signs. The pathway seemed clean and untouched. The only sign of life was a blundering pack of giant spiders that moved steadily away along another road. The Justicar let the spiders go, then waved his friends to follow as he moved out into the path.
Henry stood quietly beside the Justicar, examining the door that hung in space up ahead. It was the next point marked upon the mysterious map.
“No sign of Recca, sir?”
“None.” The Justicar nodded to the door ahead. “But these doors are probably guarded. There’s no way past the guards without leaving signs of a fight.”
“He can’t have keys, sir. Not the way we do.”
“He knows we’re heading for the spider palace. He might find a different route.”
Leading the way, the Justicar crept up to the door and inspected it carefully for traps. Escalla cracked her knuckles noisily, approached the door, then changed into a sea slug with eyes upon long stalks. She inserted her eyes through the crack of the door and carefully looked about. Her voice spoke through a breathing tube behind the slug’s red mantle.
“All righty! We’ve got water. Big room, about a hundred feet square. Flooded. Looks like a raised path leads from the door over to some kind of island. And”—the slug snorted—“there are some really bad illusions of two tanar’ri standing on the island. Eww! Those are awful! Is that someone’s idea of a decoy? Get real!” Coming from a home where illusion was often preferred over the real, Escalla had high standards for fake reality. “There’s nothing on the ceiling. Might be something hiding in the water. No way to tell. Uch, it stinks! Something in here reeks like a lycanthrope’s laundry!”
The slug withdrew, slid backward, and changed back into faerie form.
“Sorry. That’s all I can see. I don’t know what sort of guards it has.”
“No. No, that’s good.” The Justicar squatted on his haunches, drawing a map of the sealed room with a piece of charred bugbear. “The last teleport room was guarded by tanar’ri. If the rooms marked on the map all get you closer to the palace, then they probably all have tanar’ri guards. Tougher and tougher guards as we get closer to Lolth.”
Cloaked by her long blonde hair, Escalla sighed in frustration. “Frot! The last ones almost killed us, and I’m out of decent spells! I need to restock on heavy stuff!”
Trying to reason out the problem, Henry scratched his brow. “What spells have you got?”
“Lessee. Well, I loaded up with combat stuff. Missiles, webs, fireballs… got me a vampire touch spell that’s a doozy!” The faerie counted off the spells on her fingers. “I had my black tentacles, plus I’ve got a lesser sphere of invulnerability. Oh! And I’ve got my grease spell ready!”
“Grease?” Henry blinked. “Why grease?”
“It’s a comedy natural. Trust me, I’m a faerie!”
“O-o-oh!” Enid crowded close, suitably impressed. “What’s ‘vampire touch’?”
“It’s totally hoopy! Sucks your enemy’s life energy and gives it to you! I found it in an old book.”
“That big black one that warned us not to open it?”
“Yeah! That’s the one!”
Ignoring the girls, Polk worked at copying the Justicar’s map into his notebooks, showing the route they traveled by the means of badly drawn stick figures boldly led by badger. “Son, why water? What sort of guard wants to stand knee deep in water all day?”
Scowling, the Justicar regarded the door. “Aquatic ones, Polk. Tanar’ri.”
The Justicar looked meaningfully at Henry, who frowned, trying to see a deeper point, then suddenly got the idea. The boy turned to Polk and tried to explain.
“Yes! You see? It’s another telekinesis trap! You charge the island along the path, then hidden tanar’ri use their power to drag you off the path and drown you in the water.”
Standing, the Justicar stood facing the door and said, “Simple. Well done.”
And hard to counter. He breathed slowly, thinking, when suddenly Henry gave a sound of joy and opened up the portable hole.
“Oh, yes! Escalla has something to fix it!”
He dived into the hole.
Instantly curious, Escalla raced over to the rim. “What? The frost wand? We freeze the water to ice?”
“No!”
“Spare underwear? We leave a trail of it to tempt them out here into the open!”
“No-no! Wait! I’ve got it!” Henry erupted over the lip of the hole, dragging a bag of clinking bottles. “Look! Potions of giant growth!”
Escalla gave a possessive yelp and clutched the bag. “No! Not the giant growth potions! No! No! No-no-no-no-no! No!”
“Why not?” Henry shrugged. “Don’t we have tons of them?”
Using fingers and toes to clutch the bag shut, Escalla flapped her wings in panic. “No! We only have one left! And that’s… for emergencies!”
“But I counted them! Only one’s gone! We still have seven potions.” Henry pointed at the bag. “Right. We all grow to giant size—me, the Justicar, and Enid. Then no tanar’ri can telekinesify us! We’ll be too heavy! And at giant size—swords, armor, everything—we can kill the tanar’ri just like that!”
Wringing her hands, Escalla whined, “But that’s three whole potions gone!”
“That leaves four! We can do the same trick again at the other rooms marked on the map!”
Turning pale, Escalla gripped her precious potions in her arms and screamed, “No-no-no-no! That’s all the potions gone!”
Henry was confused. “So wh
y do we need so many growth potions?”
“Be-be-because it’s… it’s… medicine! Yeah! Medicine!” The faerie hid a potion behind her back. “My medicine! Yes! I need it for a, uh, female complaint. You know! A girl thing!”
“Do you get it often?”
“Well, I’m sure planning to!” Escalla shoved the potion bag behind her back. “Go on! Scram! You can have three! Three, and that’s all!”
The party portioned out bottles, ignoring Escalla entirely. She danced about trying to get attention.
“Hey! Giant size doesn’t solve the problem! We still need tactics and stuff. Hello? Is anyone listening to me?”
“We’re listening.” The Justicar held up a potion bottle, peering through the glass thoughtfully. “We need to stop them from teleporting out. That means killing them by surprise or enraging them so they want to fight.”
Irritated, Escalla said, “All right! The faerie has it under control! I’ll get Jus and me in there first, then you two guys come in a minute later. We’ll do a tanar’ri sandwich.”
Henry looked surprised. “How?”
“Mist spell. Jus and I slip into the water and make like sharks, then you two guys charge. J-man and I hit them from behind after you two guys engage.” The faerie shrugged. “Best I can do.”
“Oh?” Henry looked suspicious. “No fireballs?”
“Oh, for the love of… ! You blow a bunch of people up just once, and do they let you forget it?” The faerie lost her temper and headed for the door. “Just keep hold of the potions and let me worry about the magic!”
The faerie waited by the door, clicked her fingers imperiously, and the handle was turned by the Justicar. As the door opened just a teeny crack, Escalla leaked her mist spell into the room. She waved to Jus, crept silently forward, and the whole plan went straight to hell.
Thick fog spread over the water. The Justicar edged into the room behind Escalla. In one blinding moment, he whirled and hammered his brilliant white blade into the water. In the murk, the sword struck something that screamed and roared. Jus dived, his sword cleaving the water before him and crashing into a huge toadlike tanar’ri. The monster screamed and slashed at the Justicar with its claws.
On the surface, mist covered the front half of the room. Escalla coughed and waved the mist aside with her hands as splashes and roars filled the air.
“Jus? Jus!”
Enid and Henry chugged down their potions and charged into the room. They thundered along the bridge, shimmering as the magic took hold and enlarged them to four times their normal size. Twenty-three feet high and waving a twenty-foot-long sword, Henry plunged into the water and grappled with a toad demon. He took a grip on the monsters head and wrenched, using the huge strength of a giant to tear the tanar’ri to bits. Behind him a titanic sphinx smashed her paws into the water, bucking and plunging until she ran another tanar’ri down.
Above them, Escalla waved her hands and tried to shout order into the chaos. “Guys? Guys!” The faerie fired a stream of her magic bees at a tanar’ri and watched the magic ricochet away. “Guys! A little discipline here!”
A demon sped through the water like a hungry crocodile—a bloated, fang-slathered demon angling straight for Henry’s back. With a curse, Escalla unshipped her lich staff and sped into a maddened run along the bridge. She leaped into the air, landing on the tanar’ri’s back and smacking it across the skull. Power flashed and detonated, blowing chunks of toad-monster across the water. The demon screamed, reared, then plunged deep into the water while Escalla clung like grim death. The faerie turned into a lamprey, attached her sucker jaws, and began burrowing madly into the demons stinking flesh.
Henrys victim blinked out of existence, reappearing behind him and raking him with its claws. Henry staggered, then whipped about with a swordblow learned hour after painful hour from the Justicar. Driven by gigantic strength, the blow cut the tanar’ri in two, scattering the demon into the pond.
Jus reared from the water, twenty-five feet high, one hand holding a tanar’ri’s head. He pulped the creature against the wall, crushing it like an ant. Enid worried her own monster to death, shaking her head to fling bits of it about the room.
The sounds of combat died out—all except for the screams of a single tanar’ri. The toad monster bucked and heaved, smashing its back against the walls—each blow being accompanied by a muffled squawk. A vile spray of fluids jetted from the tanar’ri’s back, where a lamprey’s tail could be seen slowly disappearing into the tanar’ri’s guts. The monster was blind with rage and agony, trying to reach behind itself and blinking out of existence to reappear a few feet to one side. The lamprey was always with it, burrowing into its flesh in a frenzy and cursing all the while.
Henry slipped, surfaced, then ploughed to Escalla’s aid.
“It’s going to teleport!” Henry blundered forward, a behemoth in the water. “Justicar! Your silence spell.”
Magic silence might stop the demon from speaking the syllables to cast its spell.
Instead, the scarred titan that was the Justicar rose, poised, and threw Benelux like a javelin. Twenty feet long, the huge blade whooped with glee as she flew and pierced the tanar’ri’s shoulders. Heart and spine were severed, and Benelux thudded point first into the wall. The toad demon hung stone dead, its body twitching like a broken puppet. The gigantic Justicar waded through the chest-deep water, wrenched the bottom of the demon from its top, and retrieved his sword.
A lamprey head emerged from the guts of the demon, grew Escalla’s face, and retched in agony.
“You almost killed me! That only missed me by an inch!”
“It missed you.” The Justicar’s bass rumble sounded larger than mountains, deeper than the Abyss. “You’re fine.”
“Oh, eeeew! That was the most disgusting, stupid thing I’ve ever done!” Escalla was violently sick, disgorging the bits of tanar’ri she’d packed into her lamprey gut.
“Are you all right?”
“Oh, ick! That thing did not taste like chicken! Well, except for some spiced chicken I once left lying in the sun all afternoon and ate for dinner. But this is not funny!” Escalla emerged from stinking demon guts and turned to her normal form. Jus obligingly held her in his palm and shook her rapidly back and forth in the water to clean her. Rattled like a dice in a cup, Escalla lost her temper.
“Enough! You guys are even worse gigantic than when you’re all just huge!” The faerie fought her way out of Jus’ palm and retrieved her staff and wand. “Cinders? Cinders, where are you?”
Here!
Left lying on the bridge when the Justicar dived into the water, the hell hound watched with his big grin. Polk was using the hell hound as a seat, intently writing down a blow-by-blow account of the fight, clucking his tongue and shaking his head.
A high-pitched whine came from the portable hole on Jus’ belt. A little silver sphere—another one of Lolth’s keys—rose up out of the hole and began to glow in the air over their heads. Escalla, still naked, looked at it and instantly leaped to her feet.
“No! My clothes! That mail was specially crafted!” Her black chain mail now lay somewhere on the bottom of the pool. “Those are my last clean clothes! Wait! Wait!”
Escalla shot into the water and turned into an angler fish, a light dangling from a rod atop her head. She had no sooner disappeared than a hum came from the little sphere. There was a blinding flash, and suddenly the giant sphinx, two titanic humans, a badger, a sentient hell hound pelt, and an enraged angler fish were all in a new, dry section of corridor. Escalla cursed and raved, while huge streams of water cascaded from her gigantic friends.
“How the hell is a girl supposed to adventure if she doesn’t even own clean leather?” The faerie was drenched and furious. “Jus! Open the damned portable hole!”
Snarling and cursing, she disappeared within the hole. There was the sound of tearing cloth. Escalla reappeared wearing a strip of white fabric printed with big red dots.
“My clo
thes are wet and my wardrobe is full of demon guts and water!” She realized she was the center of a ring of derisive glances, and she straightened her new dress. “Oh, you can laugh! This was ripped out of a pair of Jus’ shorts!”
Funny funny!
“Laugh it up, pooch. Next bath you have, I’m gonna tizz you up like a duchess’ pet!”
There was nothing to wash out the taste of tanar’ri from her mouth—only a flask of river water. As she fussed and bothered, Henry rose, so high that his head stuck into the howling mists. His voice boomed into the air like a god.
“Um, how long do these potions keep us this way?”
Escalla was sorely put out. “Not long enough to do it twice.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing.”The girl kicked at a puddle of water on the ground. “All right, big guys, which way down the path—left or right?”
“Left.” The gigantic Justicar opened the wet map—now sadly smudged. “It’s only a little way away.”
“Great. Well, if we run, maybe we can save on potions.” There was a flash, and everyone suddenly returned to normal size. “O-o-of course not!” With a sigh, the faerie led the way. “Come on, you bold spirits. Get moving!”
Back in place over Jus’ back, Cinders sniggered at Escalla from behind. Hee hee. Love funny faerie!
Escalla looked sideways at the hell hound, managing to look lofty despite her attire, and said, “Keep laughing, pooch. Just keep laughing.”
* * *
Converted once again into a slug, Escalla moved her tail slowly back and forth. Her eyestalks were peeking under a door—the next teleport room marked upon the map. Her mouth whispered back to her friends as she carefully surveyed the room beyond the door.
“Eh. Looks like more of the same—long path, big fires beside the path, then the rest of the room seems normal. Guess they want to do the same ol’ plan. Hide, then use their power to try and tug us into the flames.” The worm thrashed in contempt. “Real smart boys. They get one good idea in their entire lives and just have to keep using it again and again.”
Queen of the Demonweb Pits Page 20